You have to read Malachi Martin before you really get started. Some of these people clearly did not have good intentions. Windswept House would be a good start.
The Devastated Vineyard and Trojan Horse in the City of God by Von Hildebrand is highly recommended.
I'm looking forward to your project. I find it odd that John XXIII would defy the Mother of God and refuse to reveal the third secret at the ordered time. What could make him do something like that, to risk his immortal soul? Even more, how could the modern church make him a saint?
Paul VI changed the mass, completely ignoring the Council of Trent, which was a dogmatic council with anathema for disregarding. Have you ever looked at his audience hall? It says a lot. How did the modern church make him a saint?
I guess I should have made it more clear that by "good intentions" I mean that I think many of them believed they had good intentions but were so naive and twisted in their understanding by the enemy that they self-justified the revolution and a lot of their own behavior. To take a modern example, James Martin probably believes himself to be a hero.
Thank you for the book recommendations.
My view on John XXIII and Paul VI are that in order for Popes with that revolutionary of an outlook to have been elected, the problems were already there under the surface in the Vatican, perhaps beginning with the Lateran Treaty of 1929 under Pius XI. But obviously there were many other particular negative influences on both of them, all of these causes together created a self-reenforcing downward spiral.
I recommend Frank Wright's history of liberalism as a context.
While/instead of assuming universal goodwill, it should not be forgotten that after the resurrection of Lazarus by Christ "From that day therefore they devised to put him to death" (Jn 11,53). Politics is always the knowing and willful denial of faith.
The assumption of universal goodwill is itself politics and not faith. Be careful!
I agree. My point of goodwill is that everyone perceives themselves to be the hero of the story. Sin begins in perceiving wrongly, perceiving lower goods to be more worthwhile than the higher. Pride is the key cause of such self-deception, and even the devil thinks himself the hero of the story he's telling himself.
In Vatican II, yes, there is a significant dark spiritual component, where the devil is twisting the perception in those he tempted with liberalism about the good and about God.
Teilhard de Chardin's (a modernist who influenced Vatican II but died before it) encounters with "entities" who gave him some of his ideas are an example of this dark spiritual side. Perhaps in his pride, he trusted these demons and thought of himself as having goodwill in his modernist theology, yet, of course, also did so while having been corrupted: https://kolbecenter.org/teilhard-de-chardin-false-prophet-of-a-new-christianity/ quoting from Fr. Seraphim Rose's "Genesis, Creation, and Early Man"
This is a pretty homeric project you propose to undertake! I know it's going to be a lot, and we may never comprehend it entirely, but it would be oh-so-wonderful to have a resource that at least tries to take all the details in. I very much look forward to seeing where you will end up once you have read through all of the resources. I agree with another one of the persons who commented that said you should read Malachi Martin. I read "Windswept House" last year, and even though it is a work of what Fr. Martin called "faction," I think it gives great and clear insight into what some of the people of the day were thinking. One of the reasons I think he is so important in grasping this narrative is that he is not speculating, like many later writers may be, but rather writing from first-hand experience. That helps a lot in helping one see what things were really like. Anyway, may God help you as you undertake this huge task!
It’s pretty far off as I keep finding new layers to it, like today how a half-attempted 1961 CIA coup in France probably turned the country, and many of the Jesuits and Franciscans in particular towards the left, laying the groundwork for them to join the barricades of 1968 youth revolution, giving the Church's moral authority toward the left. We'll see how long it takes but I might put out some smaller crumbs of the larger story out earlier like the wild John Courtney Murray/CIA/LSD story.
I was unaware of the Burroughs book so thanks for that. Chaos is indeed similar but starts with Charles Manson, and the CIA involvement interviews/stats are extensive.
Cult City was one of the most important books I had ever read up to that time. Mainly because I was young and living in SF during November 1978, but the city murders and the not-unconnected Jonestown massacre were a clear Satanic freak-out. Daniel Flynn called it perfectly. I left the city without looking back soon after.
I think what happened in San Francisco as with the events that Flynn characterizes in his book is a lens into the entire cultural revolution of the 60s: Jim Jones and Harvey Milk pushed the worst epitome of it, the sexual revolution to near equally dark degrees even as they receive entirely different treatments by posterity.
San Francisco, was, and still is on the leading edge of (often CIA encouraged) revolution, which frequently turns into cults, as with the many frequently profiled on the podcast run by some friends of mine: https://www.youtube.com/@TheAlternativelyShow but I would also again recommend the Burrough's book.
The revolution in the Church, while removing the moral backstop in society against revolution and therefore contributing to the revolution in culture, was also simultaneously a (relatively mild) version of what was going in in the cults, revolutionary movements, and crime syndicates of the era.
Thanks for the sources. I have read Martin and listened to Kengor's "The Devil and Bella Dodd". What is the best book about Pope Francis? I think the Church really screwed up during Covid when they listened to the State and closed Easter. Glad church is open but where I live, many of the old churches have been closed. Many aren't going anymore....If I saw a woman prancing around the altar, I would leave and come back at the Consecration.
There's a lot here! As someone who was raised in mainline protestant churches (on army bases, mostly) Catholicism is a (slightly) exotic world for me.
I'm writing a review of the M. Houellebecq novel 'Submission' (about a bored and atheistic middle-aged French professor in a near-future France which is rapidly Islamizing). One of the characters (a kind of paternalistic Belgian academic who converted to Islam and now has several teenage wives and a great deal of status) says:
“All intellectual debate of the twentieth century can be summed up as a battle between communism - that is, 'hard' humanism - and liberal democracy, the soft version. But what a reductive debate. Since I was fifteen, I've known that what they now call the return of religion was unavoidable.”
“Fascism always struck me as a ghastly, nightmarish, false attempt to breathe life into dead nations. Without Christianity, the European nations had become bodies without souls - zombies. The question was, could Christianity be revived? I thought so. I thought so for several years - with growing doubts. As time went on, I subscribed more. and more to Toynbee’s idea that civilizations die not by murder but by suicide.”
It's not really related to your topic here but your essay made me wonder: you're committed to the rejuvenation of Catholicism, because you're a Catholic, but do you think the project is possible? You support the faith because you share it but all ideas pass away eventually, one way or another. It's not that Catholicism would DISAPPEAR, but the center of gravity might shift so far away that culturally and intellectually it becomes something very different.
Houellebecq is a genius, but his own personal sins keep him from converting. So his genius is ultimately limited by his sins. I prayed a lot for his conversion.
All forms of Christianity split off from the original church, which is the Traditional Catholic Church that goes back to St Peter and Christ.
I'm a Traditional Catholic, but I believe any Christian who loves and follows Jesus is pleasing to Him. If you love Him, you obey His commandments.
Of course Catholicism will be revived, because it is only the post Vatican 2 popes suppressing it that keeps it from growing in leaps and bounds. It's just a matter of time before the mistakes after Vatican 2 are corrected.
The main difference between Catholics and Protestants is that Catholics believe in the intercession of the Saints and the Blessed Mother to pray for them. It is powerful help.
We also believe in the indefectibility of the Church and its visibility as the kingdom of Heaven in a way that they don't.
I share your hopes of course, although I'm not sure what to make of ecumenism in this manner. I'm tempted by it. I'm tempted to believe that there's nothing wrong with the Orthodox besides politics and that many Protestants are closer to the Faith than they think.
But I also temper my ecumenical tendencies with the realization that false ecumenism is at the root of many of the problems with Vatican II and the revolution in the Church that followed. Ecumenism, taken too far, makes the Church meaningless if membership in Christ's body and in His kingdom doesn't mean something.
I don't like the Church pushing Ecumenicalism, because they want to water down Catholicism to make it more acceptable to protestants. That's not the right way.
While I don't think you have to be Catholic to make it to Heaven, I believe it is much easier because of the Saints. If the Church was strong and clear instead of the way it has been since Vatican 2, it would be attractive to those outside the faith. Even many of today's Catholics do not believe in the Real Presence, and why would they? When I was young the thought of a lay person handling the Host was a sacrilege.
Then again, there are those, especially former Catholics, who want the easy way out. They want to be able to sin and then tell God they are sorry, or just brush it away as not really a sin, instead of going to confession.
You can be a bad Catholic and still be a very good Protestant because it's much easier.
Catholicism has to be more than a collection of philosophical axioms. These are temporarily concomitant to the Faith, some in opposition to it, and some, temporarily, to explain it to us, but they are human-made systems.
If the faith becomes per se something different, it's not the faith or if it can be destroyed entirely by men, it's also not the Faith, which is something in itself Incarnational, of God, but manifest in the world, spiritual in origin and unity, and yet material and of men in day-to-day administration. This is why I'm skeptical of sedevacantism, the belief amongst many traditionalists that the institutional Church is completely a false Church and the real Church is hidden and opposed to the visible form of Catholicism: https://grainofwheat.substack.com/p/thoughts-on-sedevacantism
I know more negative things about Catholicism than most atheists, but I adhere to the Faith not for what men have done but for what God has achieved through men despite their best efforts to destroy the thing.
Since we've been chatting, I'd love to talk further about this as well as about your religious background, as well as on your basic model of the 20th century. I find it interesting that leftists call the U.S./CIA empire fascist, and conservatives call it a socialist one. Was the ideology always the same, the soft version of humanism, "liberal democracy"? Or did fascism somehow continue for a while and get integrated in part into the operating system of the U.S. empire, along with the parts of liberalism that worked for the ideological empires' ends of breaking down, processing, and vertically integrating the rest of the world into the "New World Order"?
In my opinion, liberalism is used to promote behavior that is sinful. It gives approval by making it seem that society is so advanced now that God doesn't care anymore.
Obviously, it's a cop out, but you will get plenty of earthly approval. It's full of virtue signaling, especially about using other peoples money for what you consider charity. More extreme behavior concerning sexual promiscuity I won't go into.
Fascism, a word throw around ubiquitously, actually means the corporations working together with the government to control everything. Mussolini described Italian Fascism as "Corporatism".
I agree, and I've got some pieces on this, especially on how Nazism and Communism are closer together than they appear, on James Lindsay, liberalism, and the supposed "woke right" as well as a new one that should be coming soon on how the National Socialists would have been for mass immigration.
Liberalism at its core, as so many of the Popes decried it, is the belief that there shouldn't be universal moral values and that religion ought to be separated from politics. Yes, the mixing of religion and politics sometimes creates problems, but Faith not being "allowed" to influence our entire lives is far worse.
You have to read Malachi Martin before you really get started. Some of these people clearly did not have good intentions. Windswept House would be a good start.
The Devastated Vineyard and Trojan Horse in the City of God by Von Hildebrand is highly recommended.
I'm looking forward to your project. I find it odd that John XXIII would defy the Mother of God and refuse to reveal the third secret at the ordered time. What could make him do something like that, to risk his immortal soul? Even more, how could the modern church make him a saint?
Paul VI changed the mass, completely ignoring the Council of Trent, which was a dogmatic council with anathema for disregarding. Have you ever looked at his audience hall? It says a lot. How did the modern church make him a saint?
Good luck and keep us informed of your progress.
I guess I should have made it more clear that by "good intentions" I mean that I think many of them believed they had good intentions but were so naive and twisted in their understanding by the enemy that they self-justified the revolution and a lot of their own behavior. To take a modern example, James Martin probably believes himself to be a hero.
Thank you for the book recommendations.
My view on John XXIII and Paul VI are that in order for Popes with that revolutionary of an outlook to have been elected, the problems were already there under the surface in the Vatican, perhaps beginning with the Lateran Treaty of 1929 under Pius XI. But obviously there were many other particular negative influences on both of them, all of these causes together created a self-reenforcing downward spiral.
Amy Welborn and Kale Zelden are also doing some important work on this front here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KV3kcxoUJpM
I recommend Frank Wright's history of liberalism as a context.
While/instead of assuming universal goodwill, it should not be forgotten that after the resurrection of Lazarus by Christ "From that day therefore they devised to put him to death" (Jn 11,53). Politics is always the knowing and willful denial of faith.
The assumption of universal goodwill is itself politics and not faith. Be careful!
I agree. My point of goodwill is that everyone perceives themselves to be the hero of the story. Sin begins in perceiving wrongly, perceiving lower goods to be more worthwhile than the higher. Pride is the key cause of such self-deception, and even the devil thinks himself the hero of the story he's telling himself.
In Vatican II, yes, there is a significant dark spiritual component, where the devil is twisting the perception in those he tempted with liberalism about the good and about God.
Teilhard de Chardin's (a modernist who influenced Vatican II but died before it) encounters with "entities" who gave him some of his ideas are an example of this dark spiritual side. Perhaps in his pride, he trusted these demons and thought of himself as having goodwill in his modernist theology, yet, of course, also did so while having been corrupted: https://kolbecenter.org/teilhard-de-chardin-false-prophet-of-a-new-christianity/ quoting from Fr. Seraphim Rose's "Genesis, Creation, and Early Man"
This is a pretty homeric project you propose to undertake! I know it's going to be a lot, and we may never comprehend it entirely, but it would be oh-so-wonderful to have a resource that at least tries to take all the details in. I very much look forward to seeing where you will end up once you have read through all of the resources. I agree with another one of the persons who commented that said you should read Malachi Martin. I read "Windswept House" last year, and even though it is a work of what Fr. Martin called "faction," I think it gives great and clear insight into what some of the people of the day were thinking. One of the reasons I think he is so important in grasping this narrative is that he is not speculating, like many later writers may be, but rather writing from first-hand experience. That helps a lot in helping one see what things were really like. Anyway, may God help you as you undertake this huge task!
It’s pretty far off as I keep finding new layers to it, like today how a half-attempted 1961 CIA coup in France probably turned the country, and many of the Jesuits and Franciscans in particular towards the left, laying the groundwork for them to join the barricades of 1968 youth revolution, giving the Church's moral authority toward the left. We'll see how long it takes but I might put out some smaller crumbs of the larger story out earlier like the wild John Courtney Murray/CIA/LSD story.
Okay. But have you read Chaos by Tom O’Neill?
And where does Daniel Flynn’s Cult City book fit in?
Cult City shows how wild the 70s culture was, especially in liberal cities and churches.
I’ll read Chaos soon, but I imagine it’s similar in scope to Days of Rage by Bryan Burrough.
I was unaware of the Burroughs book so thanks for that. Chaos is indeed similar but starts with Charles Manson, and the CIA involvement interviews/stats are extensive.
Cult City was one of the most important books I had ever read up to that time. Mainly because I was young and living in SF during November 1978, but the city murders and the not-unconnected Jonestown massacre were a clear Satanic freak-out. Daniel Flynn called it perfectly. I left the city without looking back soon after.
Have you listened to Darryl Cooper's podcast series on Jim Jones as a lens into the cultural revolutionaries of the 60s?: https://www.martyrmade.com/featured-podcasts/gods-socialist-the-rise-and-fall-of-peoples-temple He quotes from the Burroughs' book frequently in that series.
I think what happened in San Francisco as with the events that Flynn characterizes in his book is a lens into the entire cultural revolution of the 60s: Jim Jones and Harvey Milk pushed the worst epitome of it, the sexual revolution to near equally dark degrees even as they receive entirely different treatments by posterity.
San Francisco, was, and still is on the leading edge of (often CIA encouraged) revolution, which frequently turns into cults, as with the many frequently profiled on the podcast run by some friends of mine: https://www.youtube.com/@TheAlternativelyShow but I would also again recommend the Burrough's book.
The revolution in the Church, while removing the moral backstop in society against revolution and therefore contributing to the revolution in culture, was also simultaneously a (relatively mild) version of what was going in in the cults, revolutionary movements, and crime syndicates of the era.
Thanks for the sources. I have read Martin and listened to Kengor's "The Devil and Bella Dodd". What is the best book about Pope Francis? I think the Church really screwed up during Covid when they listened to the State and closed Easter. Glad church is open but where I live, many of the old churches have been closed. Many aren't going anymore....If I saw a woman prancing around the altar, I would leave and come back at the Consecration.
Henry Sire's "The Dictator Pope" seems to be the most comprehensive I've found so far.
Thanks.
There's a lot here! As someone who was raised in mainline protestant churches (on army bases, mostly) Catholicism is a (slightly) exotic world for me.
I'm writing a review of the M. Houellebecq novel 'Submission' (about a bored and atheistic middle-aged French professor in a near-future France which is rapidly Islamizing). One of the characters (a kind of paternalistic Belgian academic who converted to Islam and now has several teenage wives and a great deal of status) says:
“All intellectual debate of the twentieth century can be summed up as a battle between communism - that is, 'hard' humanism - and liberal democracy, the soft version. But what a reductive debate. Since I was fifteen, I've known that what they now call the return of religion was unavoidable.”
“Fascism always struck me as a ghastly, nightmarish, false attempt to breathe life into dead nations. Without Christianity, the European nations had become bodies without souls - zombies. The question was, could Christianity be revived? I thought so. I thought so for several years - with growing doubts. As time went on, I subscribed more. and more to Toynbee’s idea that civilizations die not by murder but by suicide.”
It's not really related to your topic here but your essay made me wonder: you're committed to the rejuvenation of Catholicism, because you're a Catholic, but do you think the project is possible? You support the faith because you share it but all ideas pass away eventually, one way or another. It's not that Catholicism would DISAPPEAR, but the center of gravity might shift so far away that culturally and intellectually it becomes something very different.
I hope that's not a too-dismal question.
Nice one
Houellebecq is a genius, but his own personal sins keep him from converting. So his genius is ultimately limited by his sins. I prayed a lot for his conversion.
All forms of Christianity split off from the original church, which is the Traditional Catholic Church that goes back to St Peter and Christ.
I'm a Traditional Catholic, but I believe any Christian who loves and follows Jesus is pleasing to Him. If you love Him, you obey His commandments.
Of course Catholicism will be revived, because it is only the post Vatican 2 popes suppressing it that keeps it from growing in leaps and bounds. It's just a matter of time before the mistakes after Vatican 2 are corrected.
The main difference between Catholics and Protestants is that Catholics believe in the intercession of the Saints and the Blessed Mother to pray for them. It is powerful help.
We also believe in the indefectibility of the Church and its visibility as the kingdom of Heaven in a way that they don't.
I share your hopes of course, although I'm not sure what to make of ecumenism in this manner. I'm tempted by it. I'm tempted to believe that there's nothing wrong with the Orthodox besides politics and that many Protestants are closer to the Faith than they think.
But I also temper my ecumenical tendencies with the realization that false ecumenism is at the root of many of the problems with Vatican II and the revolution in the Church that followed. Ecumenism, taken too far, makes the Church meaningless if membership in Christ's body and in His kingdom doesn't mean something.
I don't like the Church pushing Ecumenicalism, because they want to water down Catholicism to make it more acceptable to protestants. That's not the right way.
While I don't think you have to be Catholic to make it to Heaven, I believe it is much easier because of the Saints. If the Church was strong and clear instead of the way it has been since Vatican 2, it would be attractive to those outside the faith. Even many of today's Catholics do not believe in the Real Presence, and why would they? When I was young the thought of a lay person handling the Host was a sacrilege.
Then again, there are those, especially former Catholics, who want the easy way out. They want to be able to sin and then tell God they are sorry, or just brush it away as not really a sin, instead of going to confession.
You can be a bad Catholic and still be a very good Protestant because it's much easier.
Catholicism has to be more than a collection of philosophical axioms. These are temporarily concomitant to the Faith, some in opposition to it, and some, temporarily, to explain it to us, but they are human-made systems.
If the faith becomes per se something different, it's not the faith or if it can be destroyed entirely by men, it's also not the Faith, which is something in itself Incarnational, of God, but manifest in the world, spiritual in origin and unity, and yet material and of men in day-to-day administration. This is why I'm skeptical of sedevacantism, the belief amongst many traditionalists that the institutional Church is completely a false Church and the real Church is hidden and opposed to the visible form of Catholicism: https://grainofwheat.substack.com/p/thoughts-on-sedevacantism
I know more negative things about Catholicism than most atheists, but I adhere to the Faith not for what men have done but for what God has achieved through men despite their best efforts to destroy the thing.
Since we've been chatting, I'd love to talk further about this as well as about your religious background, as well as on your basic model of the 20th century. I find it interesting that leftists call the U.S./CIA empire fascist, and conservatives call it a socialist one. Was the ideology always the same, the soft version of humanism, "liberal democracy"? Or did fascism somehow continue for a while and get integrated in part into the operating system of the U.S. empire, along with the parts of liberalism that worked for the ideological empires' ends of breaking down, processing, and vertically integrating the rest of the world into the "New World Order"?
In my opinion, liberalism is used to promote behavior that is sinful. It gives approval by making it seem that society is so advanced now that God doesn't care anymore.
Obviously, it's a cop out, but you will get plenty of earthly approval. It's full of virtue signaling, especially about using other peoples money for what you consider charity. More extreme behavior concerning sexual promiscuity I won't go into.
Fascism, a word throw around ubiquitously, actually means the corporations working together with the government to control everything. Mussolini described Italian Fascism as "Corporatism".
I agree, and I've got some pieces on this, especially on how Nazism and Communism are closer together than they appear, on James Lindsay, liberalism, and the supposed "woke right" as well as a new one that should be coming soon on how the National Socialists would have been for mass immigration.
https://grainofwheat.substack.com/p/the-nazis-were-left-wing-and-the
https://grainofwheat.substack.com/p/dont-be-woke-about-the-woke-right-7f4
Liberalism at its core, as so many of the Popes decried it, is the belief that there shouldn't be universal moral values and that religion ought to be separated from politics. Yes, the mixing of religion and politics sometimes creates problems, but Faith not being "allowed" to influence our entire lives is far worse.