"It all goes back to VII and the New Mass"

"They still do not understand the root of the problem. They are tilting at windmills, aiming their lances at the symptom, not the cause. It all goes back to VII and the New Mass."

How often have we heard or spoken these words! It has become axiomatic among many orthodox Catholics to draw the above conclusion, as they glance over a landscape littered with what once was the beauty and majesty of Roman Catholicism, seemingly reduced overnight to an unrecognizable and foreign landscape.

But is this axiom factual, based in reality, the product of a thorough analysis of our present crisis? A valid argument can equally be made that it started decades before VII and the New Mass.

Every single bishop and cardinal at VII was ordained and elevated in the first half of the century, under the Tridentine Rite, by pre VII bishops, cardinals and Popes. Most of the worst child molesting priests were ordained prior to 1960. Catholics were using the pill when it was introduced in 1958 (my own parents were contracepting in 1962.) John F. Kennedy stated in his presidential campaign that his faith would not affect his politics, and he would ignore Rome, with the approval of Cardinal Cushing.

The auto-destruction of the Church was already well under way in the 1950s and 1960s, but because the facade still appeared serene, people think the trouble began with VII.

The facade indeed still stood erect, but the termites had already completely destroyed the foundations. That is why the faith crumbled so instantly following VII and the promulgation of the Novus Ordo: the foundation had been wrecked well before 1960. There is simply no other way it would or could have crumbled so instantaneously and completely within the span of a single decade.

This agenda didn't just appear out of thin air in 1960. It was NOT nascent. It was fully blown long before VII. This is obvious to any objective observer.

Pope St. Leo XIII saw its footprint in the Church already in 1884, long before VII, and eloquently described the growing menace in Humanum Genus. See how his warnings correlate with the reality of our present malaise:

“They speak of their zeal for a more cultured refinement, and of their love for the poor; and they declare their one wish to be the amelioration of the condition of the masses, and to share with the largest possible number all the benefits of civil life.

“…that which is their ultimate purpose forces itself into view -- namely, the utter overthrow of that whole religious and political order of the world which the Christian teaching has produced, and the substitution of a new state of things in accordance with their ideas, of which the foundations and laws shall be drawn from mere naturalism…

“…That God is the Creator of the world and its provident Ruler; that the eternal law commands the natural order to be maintained …

“If these be taken away, as the naturalists and Freemasons desire, there will immediately be no knowledge as to what constitutes justice and injustice, or upon what principle morality is founded. And, in truth, the teaching of morality which alone finds favor with the sect of Freemasons, and in which they contend that youth should be instructed, is that which they call "civil," and "independent," and "free," namely, that which does not contain any religious belief. …

“Moreover, human nature was stained by original sin, and is therefore more disposed to vice than to virtue. For a virtuous life it is absolutely necessary to restrain the disorderly movements of the soul, and to make the passions obedient to reason … On the contrary, exaggerating rather the power and the excellence of nature, and placing therein alone the principle and rule of justice, they cannot even imagine that there is any need at all of a constant struggle and a perfect steadfastness to overcome the violence and rule of our passions…

“… For, since generally no one is accustomed to obey crafty and clever men so submissively as those whose soul is weakened and broken down by the domination of the passions, there have been in the sect of the Freemasons some who have plainly determined and proposed that, artfully and of set purpose, the multitude should be satiated with a boundless license of vice, as, when this had been done, it would easily come under their power and authority for any acts of daring.”

Obviously, Pope Leo XII saw the dangers of Naturalism, and may have foreseen its growing danger to and within the Church. The St. Michael prayer may be intimately bound with his perception that these traits of Freemasonry were already and would continue to corrupt the Church from both outside and with

Furthermore, Pope Pius X clearly identified the growing crisis as early as 1907. His Motu Proprio Sacrorum Antistitum, one of the main anti-Modernist pronouncements issued by the Holy See during the reign of Pius X, paints a picture of serious betrayal already deeply rooted and rapidly spreading:

“We believe that no bishop is ignorant of the fact that the wily Modernists have not abandoned their plans for disturbing the peace of the Church since they were unmasked by the encyclical Pascendi dominici gregis. For they have not ceased to seek out new recruits and to gather them into a secret alliance. Nor have they ceased, along with their new associates, to inject the poison of their own teachings into the veins of the Christian body-politic by turning out anonymous or pseudonymous books and articles. If, after a re-reading of the above-mentioned encyclical Pascendi, this audacity, which has caused Us so much grief, be considered very carefully, it will become quite apparent that these men are just as the encyclical describes them: enemies who are all the more to be feared by reason of their very nearness to us. They are men who pervert their ministry in such a way as to bait their hooks with poisoned meat in order to catch the unwary. They carry with them a form of doctrine in which the summary of all errors is contained.”

VII and the New Mass were simply the foregone conclusion to -and capstone upon- the loss of faith and morals that began long before Pope John XXIII called the Council. They were clearly identified by Pope Leo XII and Pope Pius X. They were punctuated most dramatically with the protestant apostacy on birth control in 1930 at the Lambeth Conference, and by the early 1950s, the Catholic embrace of the protestant contraceptive lifestyle. The almost universal dissent on Humanae Vitae gave concrete form and face to this general malaise and loss of faith and moral decline.

The ease with which practical Catholic orthopraxis fell in the face of the contraceptive mentality is the quintessential illustration of the extent to which the foundations had already been weakened prior to VII.

Those who surmise that the autodestruction began with VII and the Novus Ordo fail to grasp history. With VII and the New Mass we “got what we deserved” due to the sins and loss of faith, naturalism, modernism, and Americanism, of the preceding decades.

The Novus Ordo could thus be viewed as a chastisement following the sins of the preceding generations, not a signal event that precipitated the current crisis. Though its sacraments are valid, and it is often said in a licit manner following the rubrics, it consists of imprudent vernacular translations of a Latin Rite that itself fails to properly catechize and is easily abused and perverted. In its English translation especially it utterly fails in expressing the eternal truths surrounding the Sacrifice of the Mass and the role of the priesthood.

Until we regain what we lost long before VII and the New Mass, we will NOT be blessed with a return to traditional liturgy, orthodoxy and orthopraxis. This is the number one reason that many “conservative” Catholics refuse to align themselves with a traditionalist movement that simply cannot see these real origins.

“It all goes back to VII and the New Mass" is too simplistic and myopic. Those who maintain this “axiom” seem too obsessed with the Liturgical wars to be effective in the real culture wars and the war for the soul of the Church in general, a war that began and was lost long before they believe the problems originated. (Of course, it literally began with Adam and Eve.)

The homeschooling movement, the re emergence of traditional and orthodox candidates for seminary, the graying and infecund nature of the liberal movement itself, and the patient suffering of those orthodox Catholics who attend the Indult, attend the SSPX chapels out of necessity (but without imbibing the schismatic spirit of the SSPX) -or suffer patiently through the hiddenness of Christ's Real Presence in the valid but sorely lacking and banal Novus Ordo- these will be the catalyst for the reformation so desperately needed.

Failing that, we will see the Second Coming. It is hard to see any other options, but with God all things are possible, and we must always hope.

Brian J. Kopp, DPM, is vice president of the Catholic Family Association of America, officer of the board of the Polycarp Research Institute, a member of the Catholic Media Coalition, and freelance Catholic writer.