Francis Was a Faithful Son of the Vatican II Revolution

[Stone]

Francis Was a Faithful Son of the Vatican II Revolution

Robert Morrison, Remnant Columnist | April 23, 2025

Francis was a faithful son of the Vatican II revolution. If he managed to save his soul, then surely he will pray for us to learn the most important lesson of his hostile occupation of the papacy: that all the harm he caused was directly related to the changes set in motion at the Council.

Jorge Bergoglio was ordained to the priesthood on December 19, 1969, four years after the close of Vatican II. His immediate predecessors — John Paul II and Benedict XVI — had been influential experts at the Council, but Francis was the first claimant to the papacy to have been formed in the priesthood during the period of revolutionary change propelled by Vatican II. While this does not absolve him of responsibility for his actions, it should help form our assessment of Francis’s role in Church history and learn the lessons that God wants us to learn from the harms he caused.

In his 1968 book about the Council’s aftermath, Is It the Same Church?, Frank Sheed introduced his topic by describing the way in which the Catholic world changed after the Council:

“My own feeling is that all the changes ushered in by Pope John XXIII were made possible by the forty years which preceded him. But how fast and furiously they have come. Consider how things would strike a Catholic wrecked in 1957 on a desert island and only just now brought home. His Catholic friends have him in their houses. In all of them he finds the conversation beyond him. It circles, sometimes heatedly, around two words which mean nothing to him — Ecumenism and the Pill.” (p. xi)

Sheed was of course referring to debates among Catholics about contraception (which would become the subject of Paul VI’s Humanae Vitae) and the false ecumenism that animated Vatican II. Sheed continued:

“The weeks that follow are full of shocks. The priest facing the congregation takes some getting used to. And Mass in English even more. He remembers arguments with Protestants in which his trump card had been the use of Latin as proof of the Church’s Catholicity — ‘one language everywhere in the world.’ . . . Whichever way he looks, the Catholic world he knew seems to have turned upside down — and so quickly: after all, he was only away ten years. He hears of priests getting married, with other priests performing the ceremony. He hears of nuns in picket-lines, nuns marching with Negroes and communists in Alabama; of seminarians picketing Cardinals, refusing daily Mass, declaring the Pope unfitted for his primacy.’ (pp. xi-xii)

This is what Jorge Bergoglio would have known during his priestly formation. It was not simply a matter of new beliefs, practices, and disciplines — all around him the Catholic world was unstable, with the only certainty being a radical departure from what had been standard in the eyes of most Catholics prior to the Council.

Elsewhere in Is It the Same Church?, Sheed listed ten matters he would consider changing if he was Pope:

“(1) The election of the Pope by the Cardinals; . . .
(2) The appointment of all Bishops by Rome;
(3) Clerical celibacy;
(4) The obligation of Sunday Mass;
(5) Diocesan seminaries;
(6) Communion in one kind only;
(7) Reservation of the Blessed Sacrament;
(8) Marriage in the presence of the priest;
(9) Vestments, special clerical dress, various titles and insignia;
(10) Censorship, the Index, Imprimaturs, etc.” (p. 9)

Sheed is still well-respected in Traditional Catholic circles today, with his books remaining in Traditional Catholic bookstores and online catalogs. As we can see, though, the list he compiled while Bergoglio was still a seminarian includes a few items most Traditional Catholics would consider to be impermissible changes. It should thus come as no surprise that a priest formed during this time would wholeheartedly embrace the revolutionary spirit that Sheed clearly adopted after the Council.

As another frame of reference, we can consider Yves Congar, one of the most important experts at Vatican II. In his farewell address to the clergy of Rome, Benedict XVI listed Congar among the “great figures” from Vatican II:

“And this continued throughout the Council: small-scale meetings with peers from other countries. Thus I came to know great figures like Father de Lubac, Daniélou, Congar, and so on.”

So Benedict XVI spoke well of Congar, who had been made a Cardinal by John Paul II. But Congar understood the revolutionary spirit of Vatican II quite well because he had helped kindle it:

“By the frankness and openness of its debates, the Council has put an end to what may be described as the inflexibility of the system. We take ‘system’ to mean a coherent set of codified teachings, casuistically-specified rules of procedure, a detailed and very hierarchic organization, means of control and surveillance, rubrics regulating worship — all this is the legacy of scholasticism, the Counter-reformation and the Catholic Restoration of the nineteenth century, subjected to an effective Roman discipline. It will be recalled that Pius XII is supposed to have said: ‘I will be the last Pope to keep all this going.’” (Congar, Challenge to the Church: The Case of Archbishop Lefebvre, pp. 51-52)

In other words, Vatican II not only yielded certain identifiable changes in belief and practice but also fostered an environment in which almost everything else was subject to change. It should come as no surprise, then, that Francis cited Congar as an inspiration for the most revolutionary project of his occupation of the papacy, the Synod on Synodality:

The Holy Spirit guides us where God wants us to be, not to where our own ideas and personal tastes would lead us. Father Congar, of blessed memory, once said: ‘There is no need to create another Church, but to create a different Church’ (True and False Reform in the Church). That is the challenge.  For a ‘different Church,’ a Church open to the newness that God wants to suggest, let us with greater fervour and frequency invoke the Holy Spirit and humbly listen to him, journeying together as he, the source of communion and mission, desires: with docility and courage.”

Congar had been suspected of heresy during the pontificate of Pope Pius XII and should never have been allowed to play a pivotal role at Vatican II. It was an insult to the Holy Ghost for John XXIII to appoint Congar (like Rahner, Kung, etc.) as an expert at the Council. Ideas have consequences: once you break with Tradition and endorse radical change in the Church, there are few boundaries to the amount of destruction that can occur.

Who was supposed to convince Francis that Congar and the other Vatican II revolutionaries were wrong? The primary opponent of the Vatican II revolution, Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, had been censured by Paul VI and excommunicated by John Paul II, two men canonized by Francis. And the conservative Catholics who ought to have opposed the Vatican II revolution have instead directed their energy toward supporting the Council’s innovations against anyone who has sided with Archbishop Lefebvre.

Francis was a faithful son of the Vatican II revolution. If he managed to save his soul, then surely he will pray for us to learn the most important lesson of his hostile occupation of the papacy: that all the harm he caused was directly related to the changes set in motion at the Council. Regardless of whether Francis saved his soul, though, it seems evident that God wants us to abandon the anti-Catholic ideas that have plagued the Church since the Council. If we refuse to do this, then we deserve for the next claimant to the papacy to be even more anti-Catholic than Francis. May God have mercy on him and us.

Immaculate Heart of Mary, pray for us.