A Catholic from New Zealand sent a letter to the bishops of his country some time ago, hoping for a response. Having received nothing, not so much as a polite acknowledgment, he sent the letter to me and asked if I might publish it. I am pleased to do so, as this humble layman speaks for a million others who could have written the same thing. Until the bishops choose to unstop their ears and listen to the cry of the poor, the Church’s decline will be credited to them as unrighteousness on the day of judgment, when the Lord judges the quick and the dead.—Dr. Kwasniewski
Your Excellency:
I know you can’t tell us how the works of the Holy Spirit will unfold, but I write to you in a constructive and synodal spirit as a faithful yet confused Catholic, wondering what to think of the crisis in the Church of today, sixty years after the Second Vatican Council closed.
My appeal has become much lengthier than I intended, as one thing has lead to another, so I apologise for that in advance. I hope it doesn’t appear solely as the sour grapes of someone who hasn’t lived as holy a life as he had hoped as a young man.
I was that young man when Pope St John XXIII announced the council, and I am sure I was like most Catholics in the pew when I marvelled, and marvelled all the way through to 1990, how such a perfect institution as the Church Our Lord Jesus founded could actually be improved! It would obviously be almost heavenly if a Church that was bursting forwards and outwards to convert the world at that point could actually be improved.
In the years from 1965 to 1968 I was involved as a lay missionary in a remote part of the world, so I may have missed much of the immediate post-conciliar goings-on. There was near-absolute trust in Church leadership in those days, of course.
Perhaps we had a faulty compass at the start of the post-Vatican II era, because it seems that for every step of improvement we got ten steps of dissolution and disintegration. Today we have a Church that is a pale shadow of what it was before the Council, in terms of practising Catholics, and in terms of satisfaction within and respect from without. It is hard to see that the highly-touted improvements in Church life are a worthy recompense for what we have lost, and hard to understand why the post-conciliar Church ignored Catholic data that would have prevented the misapplication of much of what the council set out to do. And I suspect life is not any easier for bishops or any members of the faithful who believe that the care and salvation of Catholic souls is a duty prior to that of dialoguing with outsiders, or any other duty.
Pope Francis recalled that it can take a hundred years for the effects of an ecumenical council to settle. The thought of another forty years of passivity, confusion and false starts is actually very unsettling. You have to ask if we are even on the right trajectory—my fears at the moment are that those hundred years may well become a hundred wasted years, through the ham-fisted and unvirtuous way Vatican II was implemented. It was as though we told Christ we no longer wanted to stay on the cross with Him, and hoped He would be satisfied if we just preached His word instead.
We’ve all got masses of lapsed Catholics in our wider families (probably 90%), an enormously greater percentage than pre-Vatican II, and that in itself is reason enough for Catholics to yearn for a “State of the Church” address. Pew Research tell us that for every 100 who join today’s Catholic Church in the West, 840 Catholics leave. Nobody seems to be talking about the salvation of souls, the Church’s sole raison d’être, and the seeming dereliction of the Church in that area in favour of what looks like an apologetic ‘fitting in’ with and ‘fixing’ the temporal world (where there is considerable overlap between Modernists, Marxists, and Mohammedans) while not fully satisfying our thirst for the spiritual. Maybe half a billion Catholics have died outside the practice of the faith since the Council, and a similar number today seem to be living in a way that will amplify that same statistic. Not your fault, of course, but I believe that’s what today’s bishops have inherited.
If that’s true, we can hardly say we’ve got a healthy Church. The trusting souls who don’t make it to heaven would use a stronger term. I know six bishops among six thousand can’t do much, but the Catholic faith tells us it’s not right to keep on saying that we must trust in God’s mercy without doing something realistic.
Isn’t it typical of the Modernist shame and embarrassment about the mysteries of our faith for current leadership to announce that certain titles of Mary are always inappropriate as they require frequent explanation? Surely they require a good explanation just once to each person enquiring, just like each of our beliefs. You could get the feeling that our sixty-year sop to Protestantism has now descended to rearranging deck chairs on a barque that doesn’t see where the danger lies. We don’t drop titles of the Persons in the Holy Trinity, even though they would require much more explanation in, for example, dialogue with a Muslim. Obsession with little things suggests, by accident or by wishful thinking, that the big questions arising from Vatican II are settled.
To my mind, the most disastrous false start was the introduction of the Novus Ordo of the Mass, as changes to the Church’s prayer life, the heart of the Church, and many of them unauthorised by the Council, were bound to affect every other aspect of the Church. Perhaps that was the intention---latter-day dicastery leaders tell us we now have a new Church, a new theology, and a modern faith that sooner or later will accommodate the Deposit of Faith, or a modified version of it. Such words from such a source make you wonder whether that leadership is Catholic at heart, and whether a schism will develop before orthodoxy is reaffirmed. Isn’t it the old story of offering just a little pinch of incense to false gods, and letting other Catholics suffer the martyrdom?
Post-Vatican II Catholics were to go out into the world and ‘be Catholic’, but they soon found they were standing on shifting ground. The Mass was largely gutted of the mystery of our faith, and Catholics found they were preaching optimism rather than faith. The ground shifted even more when the Oath against Modernism and guardrails against Freemasonry were removed. We weren’t preaching dogma out loud, so apart from the hidden mysteries of our faith, we found that we didn’t seem to be so different from Protestants, and, like Protestants, half of us stopped going to church, demoralised. Our efforts at outreach had been massively reversed. The smoke of Satan that had startled Paul VI could hardly have effected a better outcome for the Enemy.
Almost anyone reading Sacrosanctum Concilium will know that it has not been implemented according to Tradition, that essential pillar of the Church. And the acknowledged deceit involved in the very conception and gestation of the new Mass, along with the dishonesty surrounding Traditionis Custodes, gives pause to wonder if the Deceiver is less displeased when a Novus Ordo Mass is said than when a traditional Latin Mass is said. We, poor souls in the pew, could only agree that making the Mass more understandable was a good idea in principle, but we didnt understand that the Mass itself as we knew it and its accompanying spirituality were to be destroyed in the process.
And while Scripture, that other pillar of the Church, was treated more generously, “offensive” parts are still treated as deletable. At a recent Sunday Mass the priest edited out verses dealing with fornication. Surely, the Mass-attending parents and loved ones of fornicators and aborting mothers are not well served by this false politeness, and it has not stopped the slippage in Mass attendance. The virtual requirement of ‘sola scriptura’ in our homilies has left large areas of Catholic life unguided and unguarded.
The same could be said of the other sins that have plagued the Church in post-Vatican II years. Laxity towards homosexual activity among some members of the clergy, and even promotion of it at times in some seminaries, (see Michael Rose’s book, Goodbye, Good Men) was a moral weakness that has to be seen as a stepping stone to the abuse of minors, the bankrupting of dioceses and the ruination of the Church’s reputation and standing in the wider community. On top of that, such cynical ‘semi-celibacy’ made the chastity requirement less onerous for those who entered the ranks of the clergy during the well-documented infiltration of the Church by Marxist agents.
The Enemy led us into all of this, and we were fools to fall for his deceptive promises. But we are worse than fools if we go along with the programme once it has been exposed, once its bad fruits are apparent.
We all agree that true vocations are not a call to the easy and the evil, but a call to the hard and the holy. No wonder we have a vocations crisis - isn’t it because Modernist doctrines have been calling us to a non-supernatural understanding of holiness, and a ‘lite’ understanding of the faith? Is it possible to jump from the old Mass to the new Mass and expect vocations to remain attractive to the priestly heart, a heart that doesn’t want attention upon itself, but upon Jesus?
85% of the apostles deserted Jesus at Calvary, and 85% of their successors deserted Him during the Arian crisis. As a worldwide Church, it seems that we have been idling since Vatican II, and the true faith has slipped and slipped. You sometimes wonder what percentage of the college of bishops have the fullness of that faith. The crisis in the Church and the world at the moment seems every bit as dangerous as those earlier crises, and we are yearning for a similar good resolution. But another forty years?
As Swiss Bishop Marian Eleganti said recently: “How can the post-conciliar
reform still be viewed so uncritically and narrow-mindedly at this point in time, measured by its fruits? Why is an honest examination of tradition and our own (Church) history still not possible? Why do people not want to see that we are at a crossroads and should take stock, especially liturgically?”
A strange and alarming phenomenon in recent years is the invocation by some Church leaders, especially around the Synod, of “the spirit” rather than the Holy Spirit, reminiscent of the way “the spirit of Vatican II” was used after the council to lead people away from the intentions of the Council Fathers. The dominance of that spirit in the Church after the Council is what green-lighted the extent of the sexual revolution in the secular world three years later, according to reputable scholars.
It seems so ironic that traditional Catholics are being penalised because a few are seen to be rejecting that council (whatever “rejecting” actually means here), when, by a measure of millions to one, those in a more “acceptable” part of the Church who are caught up in the heresy of Modernism have been repudiating the traditional teaching found in that same Council’s documents from day one in favour of the secular spirit of the age.
Their attempts to naturalise our supernatural faith may seem clumsy in hindsight, but they sucked many of us in, as they were enthusiastic, and they were ‘the Church’, and they were leading us into a new liturgy that promised to have all things falling into place. Many a lay person, priest, bishop, cardinal and even pope have spent, and sometimes wasted, their life’s energies struggling through that negativity, inasmuch as they somehow believed the post-conciliar experiment seemed to require the suppressing or at least the ignoring of pre-conciliar theology and history.
That same Modernist spirit itself now seems to be starting to be exposed and repudiated, and thanks to your efforts and the struggles of your forebears in office, the supernatural is once more starting to deepen and rejuvenate the faith of Catholics. But for decades the Church, as it reached the average Catholic on Sundays, stopped teaching, and if personal advice were sought from spiritual leaders, the advice given was often experimental rather than flowing from Catholic doctrine,—more “be like everyone else” than “seek to enter by the narrow gate.”
The grouping of leadership into conferences can sometimes give the laity the impression that they are being led more by managers than successors of the apostles, but it does permit me to write to you as a group, inasmuch as we no longer have another national forum. Perhaps passivity in leadership since the Council has been unavoidable, given the contradictions, vagueness and what now looks like studied ambiguity in its documents.
The way I currently see it (and I get the impression that a significant and growing part of our Church are stirred by and expressing these misgivings) carefully prepared drafts were somewhat questionably rejected, and Council Fathers had to vote within the confines of hastily prepared non-traditional drafts. For the Council Fathers it was a case of ‘legislate and trust the executors’, and I believe the executive of the day proved to be untrustworthy. There seems to have been a great shallowness of virtue here - the moral, the cardinal, and even the theological virtues.
But that passivity has blighted the Church for decades, decades during which the world desperately needed specifically Catholic grunt (and also specifically Catholic liturgy). At an extremely critical time in history, we seem to have been in the grip of policies and methods that are the polar opposite of what would have been most useful in blocking the works of the devil, who clearly has a much bigger playground today than he had before Vatican II. The Church let the world down in its moment of great need, incidentally squandering its immense temporal capital, and consequently, as some bright person has said, our once-proud Church has been reduced to playing chaplain within the evil secular culture that developed, rather than being, as in our tradition, the one and only clear-calling counter to it.
We don’t want to be part of a one-world spiritual organisation of all faiths, even if we were to be the leading group, if doing so means losing any part of our Catholic faith and character, as it has, and as it surely must. We don’t want to reach for God via that tower of Babel, even though we have already traded the one language of Latin-rite worship for the languages of every race. At the cost of His life, Our Lord Jesus said His kingdom is not of this world, indicating that the unadulterated Catholic faith and Church are strong enough to stand alone, and eventually convert all the others. For some reason we didn’t want that. The prophetic voice of the Church seems to have been sucked inwards, its energy used to fashion, disguise and promote hoped-for and often misguided changes in the Church itself.
And there is a very powerful and muscular world religion just waiting to soak up the leakage from the relatively undemanding, horizontal and unmasculine spirituality we have slipped into via our new liturgy. I believe it has already filled the vacuum created when we stopped being a public voice. Their numbers are growing rapidly in the traditional centres of our faith, as their sense of mission is the equal of the one we abandoned after the Council, and they don’t practise or excuse the sins of contraception and abortion to the extent that we do, and they laugh behind our backs at our naive and faux-Christian promotion of their organised illegal immigration.
Do we have theological and practical plans for the conversion of Muslims worldwide, and more especially those who are colonising our Christian nations? If you do, I would love to be privy to it. If you don’t, I think we should set up a chair in the seminary and theological college to that end, not merely to show that we understand them and their patent errors, but to present our truth to them in public and in private. In this area as in all other areas, surely the time for truth to trump diplomacy is now. After all, according to Hillaire Belloc Islam is best understood as a heretical breakoff from Christianity, giving us the right to evangelise them and indicating the manner in which this may best be done.
I am currently in a mostly reverent Novus Ordo parish, with a diocesan traditional Latin Mass on Sundays just a one-hour round-trip away. But it was 1990, thirty-five years ago and in another diocese, after twenty-five years of faithfully but ignorantly participating in the subsiding faith, hope, charity and morality among Catholics, that my Catholic faith was re-authenticated when I became a member of a diocesan traditional Latin Mass community, where the priest said daily Mass morning and evening, and four times on Sundays, and constantly preached the Church’s doctrines.
But I am still trying to overcome unconscious scars left by years of habituation in Reformed, Enlightened and Modernised reasoning, especially with regard to discerning personal sin. Without condoning the fact in any way, one can understand why Modern Church Communion lines are 50 times longer than Reconciliation lines. In the Modernist utopia we are all fundamentally good, at least all believers are, and if we take the somewhat fundamental option for the good, very little of what we do or say can be sinful.
Once again, our mission to the Protestants has become inverted, and seventy percent of us now have a Protestant approach to Church and Sacraments, where they are nothing other than occasions for showing my personal faith in and acceptance of Jesus, who has already saved me. And I hope I am not merely projecting what could be my own condition, but sometimes it seems to me that the whole Church as a unit, as distinct from the various dioceses, is in a deep state of group spiritual sloth, that deadliest of sins, or at least in some state of torpor.
Whether I am right or wrong about spiritual sloth, recent remarks by Pope Leo on illegal immigration and other matters, along with lots of remarks by Pope Francis, seem to reflect a kind of mental sloth, bred of the half- century of teachings that have passed for Catholic Education at most of our primary, secondary and tertiary schools. Islamic morality permits dissimulation for the advance of Islam, but ours doesn’t. And yet, for the benefit of diplomatic goods, our schools have effectively been dissembling for all those years by not presenting the fullness of our faith in important areas. Optimism rather than faith again, as Pope Benedict explained.
We are all guilty, to one degree or another, of dissembling in regard to the documents of Vatican II. Pope Leo has asked the cardinals to read or reread those documents in preparation for their consistory in July. Let us pray that this may be a major step in purging the Church of all vestiges of the false spirit of Vatican II, even though many would think that such a massive exercise is too much to contemplate. But it is nowhere near as massive as the destruction still being caused by that false spirit. Or will the July consistory just present one more exercise in poorly-founded optimism, one more avoidance of reality, one more tranche of obstacles to be waded through before, some time down the track, we have the will and the ability to revisit Vatican II in light of, and in pursuit of, reclaiming continuity with Sacred Tradition?
People who were young adults at the time of Vatican II will soon no longer be here to offer you their comparisons, so while I have time left, I would like to offer the above words to you, along with my belief that, while our newly-fashioned Mass can be beautiful and instructive, especially for outsiders and newcomers (after all, Scott Hahn tells us in Rome Sweet Home that it was a Novus Ordo Mass that sparked his conversion, although later he came to prefer the Latin Mass), we are fighting a losing battle unless we recognise that the traditional rite of the Mass as celebrated in our time is in many ways much closer to the vision and the requirements of Sacrosanctum Concilium than the Novus Ordo rite.
As more and more Catholics and non-Catholics are looking for publicly visible Catholic leadership, would you ask Pope Leo, as we pray for him, that he leads us to implement Vatican II with a more serious Catholic spirit than the one we inherited from the 1960s and 1970s, so that it doesn’t become one more of history’s numerous failed councils? And please ask him specifically to rescind or otherwise modify Traditionis Custodes and its throbbing anger, so that traditional Catholics are not excluded from parish communities, don’t have their orders broken up, ordinations forbidden, transparent justice denied, etc. It wouldn’t be hard to imagine that there is a fear that the Mass of the Ages could become more popular than our 1969 version—but surely it would be odd to fear the sensus fidelium, as odd as not fearing the influence of the Deceiver.
We all want the spiritually robust version of Vatican II, if it can be had, and Summorum Pontificum was a peaceful and fearless way of achieving that, a way of working forward from where we are now—the Catholic way, in patience and trust, a way of letting the Holy Spirit lead us. Surely it would be better to take that step now than forty years from now when we are still further reduced and scattered. Pope Benedict knew that the old Mass could never be commanded out of existence, and probably intuited that a transparently honest re-assessment of the whole rather anomalous episode surrounding Vatican II as soon as possible would save us greater embarrassment later on. I think it is essential and urgent that we live and preach authentic tradition, so that, among other reasons, we have something in the tank for the showdown with Islam, whatever form that takes. Let us stop rolling over for them, and for the cultural Marxists.
It is understandable that there is anger at the state of the Church, but this anger should be directed at a much deeper level than at traditional Catholics. In The New Jerusalem G. K. Chesterton remarked that the sacrifice of the permanent to the temporary is the supreme stamp of the barbarian, and yet we are struggling with that problem not only in the liturgy but also throughout the wider Church. There are sexual and doctrinal barbarians still clinging to some form of control in our Church, and I assume that that can make it difficult for Pope Leo and yourselves to do everything you would like to do. The pre-Vatican II Church knew all about spiritual warfare against the Enemy, and how to marshal the faithful to the best effect. They knew the value of the disciplines of our faith, and yet we are still content to see our disciplines jettisoned so that Catholics can have an easier life, as though we were not in a battlefield but in a kind of religious utopia.
We have shown the Protestants that we can be adult just like them, but as they decline due to their indulgence of “adult” doctrines, we have the magisterial resources to halt and reverse our decline. What an odd way we have followed if our goal is to help them into the fullness of our faith.
In my opinion, what the world needs now, and has never stopped needing, is the richness of hard Catholic doctrine roundly proclaimed. The pastoral will follow, in fact the whole fruits of a pastoral council could then follow. The supremacy of the “pastoral” over true doctrine and true worship is not Catholic leadership. We have had decades of insulting our youth with “youthful” presentations at Mass. What they need at Mass is a whole-Church experience, which includes the riches of tradition.
At this point a question comes to mind: why did we spend so much of our time and treasure courting the more passing phenomenon of Protestantism when a liturgy document could instead have exposed us to the rich liturgies of our separated Orthodox brothers? What a trajectory that might have been—inspiring liturgies of depth and transcendence, and no input from the religious indifferentism of the lodges.
As I said at the beginning, I am confused, confused about what steps the hierarchy and the faithful have taken, or have failed to take, or should now take, to right the ship. We may yet be blessed with the promised “new Pentecost” or Gideon-like victories, but surely they will come through the tradition of calling the world to the fullness of the Deposit of Faith, and through those Catholics most truly capable of relating the last Council to the heritage of a Magisterium that stretches back 2,000 years.
The world we wake up to tomorrow may be agonisingly different from that which lets us sleep soundly tonight. Our Lord may want us back up on His cross, suffering in agony with Him. Is it likely that we’ll get what we probably deserve—another forty years of wandering in an even more desperate wilderness—or do you think we have “done our time,” so to speak?
The liturgy imbroglio is holding the Church back and wasting our energies, and home-grown candidates for the priesthood are scarce. Do you think we may be approaching a tipping point where the Church may respond to Bishop Eleganti’s plea? Tipping points seem to be approaching in the world, in politics, in culture. In the light of the last sixty years it is valid to ask if the Church as a whole is doing enough today to fight the influence of the devil. Should we consider whether we took a wrong turn in the 1960s, and, if we did, should we not do our utmost to go in the right direction now?
Coming after two world wars, Vatican II was susceptible to a certain ‘one world’ spirit, perhaps optimistically speaking to the world in the language of the world rather than the language of salvation, and trusting the world to return the favour. Its documents, while careful not to sell us out, seem to invite the world to achieve oneness in an unCatholic way. And in order to give ‘change’ a fair chance, we’ve seen sixty years of suppressing the robust Catholic spirit that comes with the traditional liturgy. Do we really expect the spirit of Vatican II to suddenly blossom into something Catholic that can’t coexist with the Catholic spirit of two thousand years? Aren’t we trying to square the circle?
Do we continue with sequestering and limitation, or do we show compassion, forgiveness and inclusion to all those who can see that the Church is much the poorer for not holding the traditional Mass in honour? It’s odd that a Council can have us promoting secular unity, the brotherhood of mankind, while being ultimately responsible for disunity in the Church itself, which is its true area of concern.
Of course it is the lives and prayers of holy individuals that once again will tip the balance, and that is something that individual dioceses and small conferences can specifically exhort—prayers for the unity of the Church in holiness. Perhaps a more embracing and reassuring approach to the SSPX bishops and faithful by the Vatican would help. It is becoming clearer and clearer that unity is impossible until the old Mass is as welcome in every parish as the new Mass. A Sunday traditional Latin Mass in every parish at a popular time and location, alongside the new Mass would give the faithful the opportunity to chop and change, just as personal circumstances and the Holy Spirit move them. An extremely interesting essay on the ‘Polar Unity of the Two Forms of the Roman Rite’ appeared on the website of The Catholic Thing (21 March 2026), referencing the theology of Hans Ur von Balthasar. What a glorious release into peace, unity and outward mission such a move could usher in, harnessing and expressing both the Marian and Petrine dimensions of the Church.
I know you are properly absorbed in running your dioceses, and I sincerely appreciate the apostolic work you do for us there. At a more universal level, my thanks for listening to words you have probably heard before. Clearly, people who were adults at the time of the Council will not be around to express themselves to you for much longer, so I am grateful that I have been able to share my lament.
Wishing and praying for the choicest blessings of the Holy Spirit upon you, upon the Catholics of New Zealand, and upon our wounded church.
A Lifelong Catholic (name redacted)
“Come Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of Thy faithful, and enkindle in them the fire of Thy love. Send forth Thy Spirit , and they shall be created, and Thou shalt renew the face of the earth.”
