Larry Chapp tells it like is:
... the best scholarship on the council makes it clear... that the documents are the product of a combination of Thomism and its retrieval through the lens of the fathers and scripture. The “winners” were not the neo-scholastics nor the progressives, that much is clear, and it took the post-conciliar co-optation of the council by the progressives in the theological guild to eclipse and outmaneuver the ressourcement theologians.
And how did the progressives achieve this “end-run” around the ressourcement thinkers and outflank them in the post-conciliar era? By claiming that the actual documents of Vatican II ...were outdated as soon as they were promulgated since the processes of “change” that they initiated transcended the actual texts in the very act of their promulgation. In other words, it did not matter what the texts really intended. What mattered was the council as a dynamical “event” that set in motion a new “process” for radical change. This “council as dynamical event” approach led to an open affirmation that the council represented a deep rupture with all that came before and that it had ushered in a radically new era where the Church had a unique opportunity to hit the “reset” button. This was then wedded to vague notions of the conciliar “people of God” motif now transposed into the sociological language of modern egalitarian democratic impulses and ascribed this action as the very movement of the Holy Spirit who is constantly “surprising” us with “new things”. Thus, to oppose this dynamical process set in motion by the council is to read the documents like a Catholic fundamentalist and to thus stand in “rigid” pharisaical opposition to the wonderful revolution being ushered in by the Holy Spirit.
And of course, the reason why the progressives were successful in this project of co-optation and distortion was that they had the cultural revolution of the sixties and seventies on their side and the full weight of the emerging colossus that was television culture and its great universalizing of the values of secular, bourgeois modernity. The post-conciliar progressives had The Pill and Norman Lear on their side, as well as the vast majority of folks in the theological guild who seemed to have collectively lost their minds and their faith in the greatest dereliction of vocational duty in the history of the Church.
And please do not tell me that this is just a nice “spin” buy a ressourcement theologian (me) intent on saving the council at all costs and of whitewashing ressourcement thinkers of all responsibility for what came after. Because within a very few short years after the council you see Catholic intellectuals...ringing the alarm that what was going on in the post-conciliar chaos was absolutely not what the council had supported. ... My claim is that the council was deliberately and maliciously co-opted – I would say even demonically so – and that it is not hard to see that this is true if one will but look. In other words, the council was really not that confusing as to its project and it now only seems so because of deliberate acts of hermeneutical sabotage.
...the fact is that the issues that framed the council are still with us, only now on steroids, and the post-conciliar turmoil caused by the proponents of dynamical rupture have returned with a vengeance through their re-empowerment by Pope Francis. The supporters of the “synodality” who are now peddling the “listening sessions” as great movements of the Holy Spirit are explicitly invoking once again the image of the council as an “event” that created a new dynamical process that is creatively free to reinvent all of Catholicism in the image and likeness of Western Liberal values. In this regard it is instructive to see papal sycophants...speak of Vatican II as only now being implemented properly. You have all seen this narrative right? The narrative of the “interrupted” council. That the council created an event-horizon dynamic that was squashed by the authoritarian papacies of John Paul and Benedict, with their retrograde focus on the actual documents and on doctrines, but which is now (finally!) being implemented as a democratic, grassroots, Spirit-led, process of revolutionary change by Pope Francis.
Therefore, like it or not, the best way to counteract this apostasy is to double-down on the council as a theological project with texts that mean something specific and which stand in direct contradiction to the trajectory of the current papacy. Only in so doing can we bust the myth that this pope is finally the pope of the council and that he is finally implementing its deepest wishes. We might be exhausted by this debate (I know I am), but I am sure Athanasius too was “exhausted” with the topic of Nicaea and yet pressed-on nevertheless because he understood what was at stake...So why not make this a multi-front assault on the progressives? Why not use all of the pre-conciliar theology, and the council documents themselves, and the massive body of teachings left by JPII, to form a new intellectual matrix that is vastly superior to anything in the progressive arsenal? This is not a zero sum game and we have the advantage since our theological resources vastly outstrip those of our adversaries. Let’s use them.
Updated and pared-down version of these thoughts posted at the Register: https://www.ncregister.com/commentaries/revisiting-the-spirit-of-vatican-ii
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