Look at Vatican II from the beginning. The Loving Programmer wrote and downloaded The Creation Program so that sheep would separate themselves from goats and wheat from weeds. Souls He wanted would remove themselves from the rest.
Each human program is lovingly downloaded, like actors in a huge, long-running 3-D movie with a set that looks so big, old, and complicated we can’t prove where it came from. We each have free will.
A few people discover that only one thing can be known. For over a thousand years, they know that prophets wrote down words they said came from God. Members of one religious group wrote them down, copied them, and sent them abroad. Some of the prophecies predicted, in some detail, the coming of a man.
The man arrived at the predicted place. Hundreds of prophecies told of things He would say and do. Many of the people who’d preserved the prophecies of His arrival didn’t like what He had to say, and turned Him over to civil authorities to be killed. He was killed. as prophesied and rose from the dead, also as prophesied. The sheer oddness of hundreds of documented prophecies and what they predicted lets some of us understand something more than Conventional Reality.
Those who recognize that higher reality are separated from those who do not.
Then, there is another separation. Some are given the grace and faith to obey Jesus’ most bizarre instruction: “If you do not eat My Body and drink My Blood you do not have life in you.” Those words of His in John 6: 53, drove the less-faithful believers away. It always does.
These “semi-Christians” now gather in over 40,000 separate schisms. Each person in each schism believes, “Yes, there are too many schisms. Christ’s will cannot be easily determined or implemented. But, I am staying in my schism because I don’t want to hurt the feelings of my friends and family.”
Those who believe more fully know the only place to obtain His Body and Blood is in Catholic Communion. The more fully obedient Christians do what is necessary to receive it.
In 1960, the beginnings of Vatican II, a Big Church Conference, went into motion. In what seemed an endless self-congratulatory hullabaloo, lots of “inclusive, sensitive Catholics” agreed that “The Church was too dogmatic about who did and didn’t get into Heaven.” But, The Council they called quietly decided that it would not “define” anything. That way, they were able to let every hyper-sensitive blowhard go on and on and on and on about how important it was not to hurt people’s feelings and be “more inclusive”.
The Council did not produce or announce any real definition of any definitive change in Catholic Teaching or Doctrine. But, it let lots of people feel better about themselves. It did cause some confusion that led to some to leave The Church, thereby bringing punishment on those who enjoyed the confusion they caused.
Vatican II’s great, and only success: It drove two types of self-righteous people from The Church. Lots of them! Those who didn’t think that Vatican II went far enough left in droves. They were accompanied by throngs of those who thought “Vatican II went too far.” In both cases, self-righteous people wandered off, or marched grimly, into the 40,000 schisms and beyond.
The rest of us shrugged our shoulders and thanked God for the grace to remain as faithful recipients of the Sacraments. We stayed in The Only Church Jesus Founded, as described by Matthew 16: 18-20, and went on about our business.
The Garden is self-weeding. Vatican II. Weeding the Garden? That seems to be what it was all about.
