My friend Bill died, hours after we talked, that is, I talked, he listened. How it all went down . . .

We met each other in 3rd grade in St. Catherine of Siena school in Oak Park IL in 1939, stayed in touch over the years, more recently via telephone, Chicago to his house in California.

His son called the other day, suggested I might talk to him. Not that he was talking any more but he was listening, which I verified with the help of the son’s wife, who had put her phone next to his ear and later told me he was reacting to my voice.

Hearing is the last thing to go, she said, and I can testify three other death beds over the years, when mourners-to-be addressed the soon-to-die, one of whom, another from our youth, bed-ridden on a coma, pressed my hand, showing he’d heard.

As I told our #1 daughter, I talked to Bill a lot over the last several years, hearing what he had to say about lots of thinks, toward the end doing a lot of listening, let me tell you, but from now on doing all the talking, to him in the next life.

I love that part. Already have my sister Mary Clare Penney, who much appreciated Bill by the way, from conversations at our house and told her children about him. Bill told me he appreciated seeing siblings relate to each other, having had none himself.

Bill and I in days gone by played baseball on Sam’s Lot, as we called a vacant stretch on a corner near us. He considered himself a pitcher and made an art creation of it. Very serious about it.

On another of our locations, Columbus Park, on the Chicago side of Austin from the el and metro tracks station on the south to tennis courts on the north. We played on the southern-end open space with diamonds on either end. Commuters would stop to watch on their way home from work.

One of our games had a score in the twenties, leading a religious-order priest assigned to St. Catherine’s, who played touch ball with us on after-school hours, observed it had been a pitcher’s duel.

Let’s leave it for now. Praying that Bill rests in peace, of course . . .

Praying for peace with Pope Leo, few months ago. Plus noteworthy survey of priests young and not so young, showing considerable differences about church matters . . .

Brothers and sisters,

This evening, we gather in prayer with Mary, the Mother of Jesus, just as the early Church in Jerusalem did (cf. Acts 1:14).

Let us all together, persevere tirelessly in praying for peace, a God-given gift that we must strive to receive and to which we must make a strong commitment.

Indeed!

And while we’re at it, a good word for Donald Trump, who has done so much for world peace?

Even if you are a Democrat, Your Holiness. Go ahead. You’ll be glad you did.

Meanwhile,

Younger American priests more conservative, traditional, survey shows

An extensive new survey of American Catholic priests has found major differences between older and young priests, strong confidence in Pope Leo, but less confidence in the American Catholic hierarchy.

Well!

A report from the National Study of Catholic Priests, reflecting the results of a survey of over 1,000 priests, was released on October 14 (2025).

The study—conducted by the Gallup Poll and commissioned by Catholic University—found that younger priests were markedly more likely than their older counterparts to describe themselves as theologically and politically conservative, to favor broader access to the Traditional Latin Mass, and to have reservations about the concept of synodality.

The latter being in laymen’s language, a process of group discussions about church matters that brings bishops and lay people into decision-making]

Specifically, the study found that:

Among priests ordained before 1975, 70% described themselves as “progressive.” Among those ordained since 2000, only 8% accept that description. In the younger group, 70% describe themselves as conservative/orthodox.
Similarly, while 61% of the older priests say they are “somewhat” or “very” liberal in their political beliefs, only 10% of the younger priests do, and 51% of the younger cohort is “somewhat” or “very” conservative.
When asked to list pastoral priorities, younger priests emphasize Eucharistic devotion. Older priests were more likely to cite climate change, immigration, and social-justice issues in general.
Among those ordained before 1980, 77% said listed “synodality” as a priority, as against 29% of the younger priests.
86% of all priests expressed “a great deal” (43%) or “quite a lot” (43%) of confidence in Pope Leo XIV, while only 1% reported “very little” confidence.
Only a bare majority (52%) of priests said they trust their own bishop—down from 63% in 2001, before the explosion of the sex-abuse crisis. The best predictor of whether a priest trusted his bishop was that priest’s answer to a question about whether he felt the bishop “cares about me.”
Priests’ confidence in the US hierarchy as a whole was even lower, with only 27% reporting a feeling of trust.
Younger priests were more likely to report feeling lonely, and to say that they were “expected to do many things that go beyond my calling as a priest.”
An overwhelming majority (79%) expected substantial improvement in the relationship between the Catholic Church in the US and the Vatican, with only 3% thinking that relationship would deteriorate.

Well again. Fairly old news, but nice to hear nonetheless.

The tackling of Vatican 2 #3, book in works by prolific commentator on what’s wrong with holy mother church as it stands in these days as a shadow of itself . . . #3 #3 #3 #3

The last of writer’s introduction to his coming book . . .

We left off with this about the book as work in progress:

Part 5 of his coming book. . .

. . . traces the aftermath from Paul VI through the present pontificate, asking how the conciliar vocabulary ripened into the theology and pastoral practice of our own time.

It’s been at work, he says, in Council documents and encyclicals and explanations inspired by them, and official catechisms and codes that attempted to “domesticate” their language.

Getting us used to them, the better to have us take them for granted.

The book’s goal [will be] not to build a psychological portrait of “the spirit of the Council,” but to show, line by line, how certain sentences and choices of vocabulary made the present collapse possible and, in many cases, almost inevitable.

One long fait accompli.

He sees a grim picture, of “disoriented faithful — empty seminaries, closed parishes, profaned liturgies, catechisms that no longer catechize — the lived outcome of decisions made in aula and ratified in ink. In theology, words are deeds.”

Oh?

An adjective can shift the burden of a sentence. An adverb can hollow out a command. A cautious footnote can sabotage a dogmatic paragraph.

Catholics who kneel in half deserted churches, or who have had to seek refuge in marginal chapels and improvised altars, are living in the echo of those [phrases].

We don’t have to assume that “the true Church has perished or Christ has abandoned His promises.”

We do have to “face the possibility that . . . the official continuation of that Church has . . . become a counter witness to her own past, a counter church that survives by parasitism on the language and structures it inherited.”

Confusion.

And “recent claimants to the papal throne”? They either “lack authority” or “have abused it to the point of moral unusability.”

Yes, Virginia, there is such a word. Point being, morality be damned, full speed ahead to a new world out there, my friends, where the livin’ is easy . . .

“We must look honestly at what they have done with the Council they celebrate as their charter.”

Namely?

Calling a council in the first place “in an age that no longer believed in councils or in truth itself.”

The age itself being nothing to match up with., or accommodate. Lost cause, Newman would have said.

Look to the last years of Pius XII leading up to the John XXIII election, and “the strange confidence with which the Church opened her windows to a storm she could not control.”

“Only by returning to that moment,” says our man, “can we see the scale of what followed.”

Nothing beats hindsight, of course. It’s why people write books.

In his book our man raises the curtain “on the last years of a world that still believed the Church could not change because God did not change.

“Pius XII reigned over a hierarchy that seemed unshakable.” he says. But “the soil beneath it was already loosening.”

As a Jesuit trainee in the mid-’50s in a three-year stint as a philosophy student, there were distinctions between new and old thinkers.

Our man about these days:

Theologians who once whispered their theories in seminaries had begun to speak them aloud. Bishops who had sworn to defend tradition learned to speak of adaptation.

Surrender was in the air.

John XXIII called for a council which was greeted by most “as a curiosity.”

Nothing to get excited about, a “tidying” of things Catholic, “not a revolution,” begun quietly, ‘in offices and corridors.”

It’s what this book is about.

— That’s all for now. Next comes the book . . .

The tackling of Vatican 2 #2, book in works by prolific commentator on what’s wrong with holy mother church as it stands in these days as a shadow of itself . . . #2 #2 #2 #2 More of writer’s introduction. His argument outlined . . .

We left off with this about the book as work in progress:

Vatican II marked a moment when the Church began to describe herself in categories drawn from the modern mind rather than from revelation and metaphysics.

The Council replaced the vertical grammar of grace and sin with a horizontal grammar of experience and dialogue. The supernatural order was not . . . denied [but] was absorbed into the language of psychology, history, and sociology, where it could be reinterpreted at leisure. The faith still wore the old vestments, but it spoke a new dialect, one that made obedience sound like conversation and salvation sound like personal fulfillment.

The transformation . . .

. . . did not occur in a single decree or . . . year [but] unfolded through a sequence of texts that looked harmless when skimmed and dangerous when read slowly. . . .

. . . creating “a new ecclesiology in which the Church of Christ ‘subsists’ in the Church while extending, somehow, beyond her visible boundaries.”

Specifically . . .

The declaration on religious liberty, Dignitatis Humanae, borrowed the vocabulary of natural rights to restate an old truth about conscience, then quietly detached it from the ancient obligation to seek, embrace, and hold the one true faith.

And . . .

The pastoral constitution Gaudium et Spes treated the modern world not as Babylon to be converted but as a dialogue partner to be affirmed and understood on its own terms.

Each text seemed only to adjust a hinge. Taken together, they turned the door.

Oh.

The book will examine those hinges one by one. . . . by placing conciliar texts alongside the magisterium that preceded them.

Making a series of comparisons:

The method is almost embarrassingly simple. One sets the Council’s own words beside the words of earlier popes and councils and asks whether they can be reconciled without violence to reason or to faith.

See how that plays out.

For instance . . .

When Leo XIII wrote that the Church “is one, in doctrine, in government, and in communion,” he spoke the language of identity.

When Lumen Gentium chose instead to present the Church in terms of “degrees of communion,” it adopted the language of approximation.

No comparison.

It’s not “a matter of style,” our man writes, but the difference “between a theology that thinks in clear borders” and one that’s like it. Close but no cigar.

Approximations, the better to match users’ zeal in the matter.

The usual defense tells us the Council should be understood “in continuity” with the past.

The writer pledges “as much sympathy as the facts allow.”

But continuity can’t mean that “a thing and its opposite are both true at the same time.

Either the Council expressed an accepted faith in “a new register” or it introduced a new one in the old phrases.

I think I captured the reader’s gist.

In any case, you have to read the documents as they stand, “not in consoling paraphrases” supplied when the difference had become clear.

I’m wrestling with this concept, looking forward to the book to be sure I have it right.

Meanwhile, there’s another “pious story” that must also be abandoned. “It is to say that the Council fathers were personally sound and merely wrote ambiguous texts that were later abused by unscrupulous interpreters.”

Which the writer doesn’t swallow.

“No doubt,” he says, there were many bishops who signed out of confusion, fear, habit, or misplaced trust. Yet there were also men who consciously wanted a break with the doctrine and discipline of the past, and who used pastoral language as a crowbar to pry the door open.

Say it isn’t so!

The record is “not one of pure intentions tragically misunderstood.”

Nope, it’s “a mixture of naivety and calculation, of sincere but misguided optimism and deliberate subversion. The crisis is therefore not only metaphysical or semantic. It is also moral.”

And thus the iron is dropped. Rats were in the pantry.

Vatican II must be studied, then, not as a random series of unfortunate interpretations, but as a chosen redirection of language and emphasis that many of its leading actors knew would have concrete consequences.

The bad guys, no doubt about it.

For some, that redirection was the whole point. They wanted liberty where the Church had once spoken of duty, dialogue where she had spoken of conversion, and “openness” where she had once insisted on guarding the flock.

Revolution, no doubt about it.

When eternal things are translated into modern idioms, they do not remain untouched in the process.

Language matters.

A mystery that is made “relevant” ceases to be mysterious.

Who needs mystery? Who’s in charge here, anyhow? Stick with the here and now, people. Something we know about.

A Church that begs to be understood begins to sound like a body asking the world’s permission to exist.

Has to prove itself, you know.

This book . . .

. . . follows the logic of the revolution it describes. Part One reconstructs the historical setting of the Council: the twilight of Pius XII, the election of John XXIII, preconciliar theological currents, machinery of the preparatory commissions, political maneuvers that sank their work.

Looking ahead to read about that.

Part Two . . .four constitutions. . . on the Church . . . liturgy . . . revelation . . . the Church in the modern world.

The decrees . . .

. . . where theory begins to govern the life of priests, religious, missionaries, and laity.

The declarations . . .

. . . in which the revolution speaks most openly . . . of religious liberty, ecumenism, and non-Christian religions.

More to come, one more item actually . . . Patience! . . .

The tackling of Vatican 2, book in works by prolific commentator on what’s wrong with holy mother church as it stands in these days as a shadow of itself . . .

Vatican II: The Anatomy of a Revolution Chris Jackson Dec 08, 2025

“If the trumpet give an uncertain sound, who shall prepare himself for the battle?” — 1 Corinthians 14:8

It begins.

When the Second Vatican Council opened on an autumn morning in 1962, the Church still looked like a fortress that time had forgotten.

Latin rose from the altars like incense from a thousand years of continuity.

The same catechism that instructed peasants in Poland trained seminarians in Rome.

Priests spoke with the confidence of men who believed Heaven backed their every word.

The papal tiara still glimmered under the dome of Saint Peter’s, and Catholics still thought of it as a crown, not a costume piece.

But something new was in the works.

A few years later, the same Church seemed to wake up in a funhouse mirror. The tiara disappeared into a museum case; the language of sacrifice became the language of community; priests turned to face the people and discovered, too late, that the people had turned their backs.

The tree had not fallen, but the trunk had cracked, and the draft of a new religion . . . . insisted it was the old one.

Pastoral, they said.

The Council called itself such, promising to update without altering, reform without revolt. But claiming to be pastoral while leaving doctrine untouched invited the question, why did everything change?

Vatican II “did not invent heresy. but . . . loosened definitions so that almost anything could fit.

. . . . dogma became dialogue; what had been salvation became accompaniment. The Church began to explain herself to the world and, in the process, forgot to explain the world’s need for conversion.

Was aiming to please. Pity that.

None of this holier than thou stuff, this claiming to have the last word.

Here is a book that . . .

. . . examines . . . texts as a surgeon studies the tissue of a failed transplant, probing where the graft took, where the body rejected it, and where infection set in.

Author has no time for whether the Council “meant well.”

“Revolutions always mean well, at least for those who lead them.

Instead, he asks

whether the faith handed down from the Apostles could survive being rewritten in the grammar of modern man administered by men who increasingly preferred that grammar to the language of tradition.

I like that. They would hold the traditional to a test.

Woe.

The book is “not an elegy but an autopsy,” written for people who “consider the corpse worth examining, if only to understand how it died, who “suspect that somewhere under the rubble, the heart of the true Church still beats, awaiting resurrection”!

The church is dead, long live the church. Ouch.

Tricky business here, author is making the case for it with this book.

The Council introduced itself as an act of mercy. It would not condemn but invite; not define but dialogue — offer topics for discussion.

Its fathers “promised renewal without rupture, the Church speaking at last to the modern world in a language it could understand.”

Bold men.

Sixty years later, even many of its defenders concede that the result was bewildering.

We were promised a fresh spring; we received a long thaw in which the old forms remained on paper while the substance drained away.

The writer has put in years of picking apart what’s been said and done. Here he draws conclusions, for the reader to buy or dismiss.

“The trumpet sounded,” he tells us, “but the note was uncertain . . . ”

“This book begins from a simple proposition,” he writes. “Every Catholic generation receives a deposit, not a draft.

“Doctrine grows as a living thing grows, from the same root and in the same species.”

He gets mysterious here.

“It may branch, flower, and bear fruit, but it does not change into another plant.”

The council is when “the Church began to describe herself in categories drawn from the modern mind rather than from revelation and metaphysics.”

Its documents “replaced the vertical grammar of grace and sin with a horizontal grammar of experience and dialogue.”

Palpably so.

“The supernatural order was not flatly denied, but was absorbed into the language of psychology, history, and sociology, where it could be reinterpreted . . .”

This was to mess with Mister In Between, the opposite of accentuating the positive, too much too soon ascribing a hurtful, if not damnable, rethinking’ in which the faith “still wore the old vestments, but spoke a new dialect, one that made obedience sound like conversation and salvation sound like personal fulfillment.”

Go light on the hard stuff, my friend, let smooth be the tone.

Salvation? Says so much, as if something were so radically wrong that needed fixing. Fulfillment is better. We can live with that.

— More to come, of course —

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Younger American priests more conservative, traditional, survey shows

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The last of writer’s introduction to his coming book . . .

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