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| Paul S. Coakley, Archbishop of Oklahoma City |
All the usual suspects are upset, which means the election of Archbishop Coakley as president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops was a great result for Catholic orthodoxy.
And His Eminence, the Nuncio to the United States, is stuck in a Francis loop that seems unending. As our contributor Matthew Hazell mentioned on X, it is absolutely astonishing that anyone would claim that, "we now inhabit the world that the Council foresaw."
It is actually the absolute opposite: a great part of the problems of the modern Church is related to the fact that the Conciliar Fathers met in a surge of optimism in the years following World War II, when everything seemed to point to a glorious future for the Church and the world -- only for the crises of the 1960s (a good part of which may have been caused by the upset structure of the foundational institution of the West, the Catholic Church herself) to rapidly destroy all illusions.
Vatican II was already in 1966 an outdated relic, and, by 1968-1969, a ruin from an ancient past.
On the other hand, one may reasonably claim that the most rejected document of Paul VI, Humanae Vitae, precisely by adhering to a Traditional teaching of the Church, had a truly prophetic outlook. The melancholic side of Paul VI was usually right -- the revolutionary and optimistic side of Paul VI was always completely mistaken.
