Vatican II: The Church's Watergate?

I’ve been reading an article by a Swiss bishop, Marian Eleganti. I’m sure he had no intention of drawing such direct parallels, but some of his wording irresistibly reminded me of American politics. Think of Watergate as, essentially, a Leftist coup that was made into the new defining myth of the American polity and constitutional order. It has taken America, what? Fifty years to kinda get over that? But the political gerontocracy that still rules America has never gotten over their defining myth. Meanwhile, the younger generation is, increasingly, moving on. The Progs have found new myths—climate change and so forth—while conservatives and uncommitteds are open to entirely new ways of understanding America. New, that is, in the sense that they know littlee about Watergate and could care less. Or, are open to revisionist history.

So here’s that article:

Swiss Bishop Eleganti: Vatican II contains ‘ambiguity,’ young Catholics love the Latin Mass

‘Today's young believers, as I was able to see very well as a young bishop, know nothing about the Council and are not interested in it. They have hardly read any of the texts, but feel attracted to the old liturgy,’ Bishop Marian Eleganti said.

See what you think of these excerpts. I don’t necessarily endorse what I think Eleganti is saying, or not in its entirety, but some of the parallels to secular politics (which he invites) seem striking to me:

(LifeSiteNews) — Personally, I do make a distinction between Vatican I, which presented an infallible dogmatization, and Vatican II, which avowedly wanted to be (only) a pastoral council. It is understandable that it wanted to incorporate the top statements of Vatican I into the collegiality of the bishops in order to achieve a certain balance in the relationship between the pope and bishops. This does not mean that one could or can cut back on the content of the First Vatican Council.

However, even in my youth I noticed that many passages of Vatican II are open to interpretation and have a very strong character of compromise or a certain ambiguity, which bothered me even then. I was a 20-year-old novice. As an altar boy, I experienced how brutally and excessively a liturgical reform was enforced that was neither intended by the Council Fathers nor can be inferred from the texts.

OK, think here of the Watergate and post-Watergate SCOTUS rulings—the “Warren Court”—and social legislation and regulation. Same goes for the next paragraph:

As an altar boy, I was retrained from the old to the new rite. It was the commissions (Bugnini) rather than the Council Fathers who were at work. Certainly, some went home from the Council in order to interpret the leeway offered by the Council texts as broadly as possible. Over time, Ratzinger and Wojtyla also took a more critical view of this. Today, unfortunately, many people are turning away from the texts themselves, even where they should adhere to the Council.

The next paragraph is the one in which Eleganti openly invites comparison to the coup within the Church to what was going on in secular politics. In point of fact, most of the modernist churchmen were also infatuated with secular, leftist politics. We were going to remake the world in our image—a perfect image. But they have lost the younger generation. And Trump, too, is attracting younger voters in numbers that astonish and dismay the gerontocracy—neither the secular nor the clerical gerontocracy know how to deal with this:

I think that back then (the 1960s), as in the secular sphere (progressivism), there was an exaggerated enthusiasm and confidence in ecumenism. We can no longer move forward with this generation. Today’s young believers, as I was able to see very well as a young bishop, know nothing about the Council and are not interested in it. They have hardly read any of the texts, but feel attracted to the old liturgy [the Traditional Latin Mass] without being ideological. There is also a clear conservative turn in the young clergy as a reaction to the last 50 years of “church reform.”

I believe that Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI were still far too strongly biographically interwoven with Vatican II to be able to face the generation of tomorrow with a greater inner freedom. I am quite critical of some things in the pontificate of John Paul II and Benedict XVI. However, with his call for a hermeneutic of continuity instead of that of rupture, the latter has clearly grasped the problem since Vatican II. Cardinal [Leo Jozef] Suenens spoke of a revolution similar to the French Revolution, which destroyed the Catholic social order of the “Ancien régime.”

When it comes to ecumenism, I have long since ceased to share the Council’s optimism. The efforts have only improved the atmosphere but have not brought unity. We have also dismantled much of our Catholic substance everywhere and put it up for discussion without any real church unity emerging.

To me, and it may simply be that I was entering law school at the time, the Watergate parallel cries out to me.