The Second Vatican Council ended 60 years ago today, on December 7, 1965. You may read the still optimistic closing address by Paul VI here.
Seven years later, we can see through Paul VI's own eyes the devastation that followed the assembly: in his famous homily on the Feast of Saints Peter and Paul (June 29), 1972, Paul VI was not so optimistic anymore -- main excerpt:
We think at this moment, and believe us, dear children and brothers, we think with immense charity of all our brothers who leave us, of so many who are fugitives, and are fleeing, and are forgotten, and so many who perhaps have not even come to have an awareness of the Christian vocation, even though they have received baptism. How, how we would really like to reach out to them and say that our hearts are always open, and the door is easy, and the threshold is not difficult, and we would like to make them share in the great and ineffable fortune of our happiness, that of being truly in ineffable communication with God, which I would say does not take away anything from us, not even our temporal vision, our positive realism, our external world. Perhaps it will force us to make sacrifices, but it multiplies its gifts while taking something away from us, and deprives us of something of the dryness of this world, it imposes sacrifices on us, but it makes us overflow with other riches. We are not poor, we are rich because we have the riches of the Lord.
Well, we would like to say to these brethren, whom we feel almost tearing at the very inside of our priestly soul, how much they are present to us, and how much we still and increasingly love them, and how much we pray for them, and how much we try to make up for, with this effort that pursues and surrounds them, the interruption that they themselves put to our communion with Christ.
And then there is another category, and we are all a little bit in it, and I would say that this category characterizes the Church today. It would seem that from some mysterious...- no, it is not mysterious - from some fissure, the smoke of Satan has entered the temple of God. There is doubt, there is uncertainty, there is trouble, there is restlessness, there is dissatisfaction, there is confrontation; we no longer trust the Church, we trust the first profane prophet who comes to speak to us from some newspaper or some social movement, we go after him, to ask him if he has the formula for true life, and we do not think that we are already the masters and teachers of it. Doubt has entered our conscience, I repeat, and it has entered through windows that were meant to be open to the light.
Science! But science is truly meant to give us truths that do not detach us from God, but make us seek Him even more, and celebrate Him with greater intensity. Instead, science has brought about criticism of everything, doubt about everything, that is, about everything we know. Scientists are the ones who furrow their brows most thoughtfully and painfully and end up teaching: "I don't know. We don't know. We can't know." It is true that science tells us the limits of our knowledge, but everything positive it gives us should be light, should be certainty, should be impulse, should be richness, should increase our capacity for prayer and praise to the Lord.
Instead, instead, school becomes a training ground for confusion, for plurality that no longer gets along, for contradictions that are sometimes absurd: progress is celebrated in order to demolish it with the strangest and most radical revolutions, to deny what has been achieved, to return to primitivism after having been such celebrants of the achievements and progress of the modern world. We are in this state, I repeat, of uncertainty.
We too, we too, children, we too in the Church. We believed that after the Council there would be a sunny day for the history of the Church. Instead, there it has been a day of clouds, and storms, and darkness, and searching, and uncertainty, and it is difficult to share the joy of communion. [Rorate translation]
