There has been a lot of talk on social media lately about whether Vatican II created a new religion.
The Counter-Revolutionary Roman Catholic movement welcomes this development.
The Dispatch
Among other things, it serves as an opportunity to explain what actually transpired at the Council and to show how its documents, together with their official clarifications and subsequent implementation by the conciliar authorities, broke with the Church’s perennial magisterium.
It also serves as a chance to expose Trad Inc. and the untenable position its leaders have put themselves in. They’ve painted themselves into a corner and cannot get out of it, which is probably why they are resorting to name calling right now.
Instead of engaging in good faith, Dr. Taylor Marshall and others are publishing X posts denouncing “sedevacantists.”
“Their claim is absurd when you think rationally about it,” Marshall alleged Tuesday.
This is pretty rich given that his book Infiltration: The Plot to Destroy the Church from Within plainly asserts that Marxists and Modernists “hatched a plan” to “change Her doctrine, Her liturgy, and Her mission.”
Marshall also said that Padre Pio, Cardinal Giuseppe Siri, Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani, and Fulton Sheen did not think a new religion had been established at the Council.
Presumably, Taylor thinks this is a slam dunk strategy.
Catholics respond on social media
Fr. Carlos Zepeda, host of The Catholic Wire podcast, immediately saw through the charade.
“This is not an argument. It’s an appeal to sentimentalism,” he said on X.
Stephen Heiner of Roman Catholic Media also issued a Tweet.
“According to Taylor Marshall, this man belongs to the same religion as Padre Pio,” he remarked while sharing a video of a dancing Novus Ordo priest.
Mario Derkson likewise reminded Dr. Marshall that in April 2022 he published a video with the title, “God of Surprises? Pope Francis pushes New Religion.”
Walking back the past 14 years?
Trad Inc. has created a monster, one that in all likelihood is going to be the cause of its own destruction, which is why so many of its biggest influencers are pushing back right now.
For over a decade, conservative Catholics like Marshall accused Francis of heresy and of attacking the foundations of the faith. They also spoke of how the Church was “infiltrated” and subverted from within. They were right to do this.
But now the chickens have come home to roost. Despite Leo continuing not only the Bergolgian agenda but the Vatican II revolution as well, the commentariat class is slowly backing away from the implications of their previous arguments.
Perhaps recognizing the logical consequences of their many podcasts and books, they are starting to subtly retreat from their on-again, off-again praise of Archbishop Lefebvre while chalking the crisis up to poor implementation, ambiguous phrases, and non-binding remarks.
Anticipating that they would do this, I published the following on X Wednesday:
“It’s not a new religion! It’s just six decades of non-infallible statements, disciplinary changes, public actions, catechetical norms, sacramental ‘updates,’ and encyclical letters that when taken together just so happen to blatantly contradict not just the magisterium of the Church prior to Vatican II but radically change how the faith is understood, taught, and lived for the faithful and clergy across the world. Got it.”
S.D. Wright of The WM Review appeared on the Integrity Magazine podcast earlier this week. He explained beyond all doubt how Vatican II was a wholesale rupture in doctrine, discipline, and liturgy with the Church before the Council. He also showed how the Conciliar/Synodal Church does not possess any of the four marks of the true Church.
Riaan Van Zyl has likewise published an essay at Integrity meticulously detailing how the Council embraced all of the condemned doctrinal and theological errors of the 19th and 20th centuries. I hope you will read it.
Fulton Sheen against Vatican II?
One of the clergy mentioned in Marshall’s X post was Bishop Fulton Sheen. Later this week, Integrity will publish an article challenging the appropriateness of Sheen’s upcoming beatification. Many may be surprised to learn that he was not the archenemy of Liberalism and Modernism he is so often depicted as.
Regardless, before the Council Sheen said some good things. Several Catholics I know attribute their conversion to his writings and sermons pre-Vatican II.
In the introduction of the popular Radio Replies, Volume I book published in 1938, Sheen reminded his readers of how to locate the true Church of Christ.
“If I were not a Catholic, and were looking for the true Church in the world today, I would look for the one Church which did not get along well with the world,” he said. Sheen then urged them to look for “the Church that is hated by the world as Christ was hated by the world. Look for the Church which is accused of being behind the times.”
Yet what was the dominant message coming from the conciliar hierarchy post-Vatican II? Not a message of rebuke to the modern world but one of shaking hands with it.
“If we do not take steps to do more about achieving rapprochement between the Church and the modern world, we are in danger of finding ourselves considered unrealistic and irrelevant,” Cardinal Paul-Émile Léger, Archbishop of Montreal, said in the 1963 book Twelve Council Fathers.
When Paul VI addressed the United Nations in 1965, he did not stand in opposition to it. Rather, he groveled before its Masonic members.
“We have nothing to ask, no question to raise; at most a desire to formulate, a permission to seek: that of being allowed to serve you in the area of our competence,” he sheepishly announced.
In Radio Replies, Volume III, published in 1942, Sheen preemptively denounced false ecumenism.
“Modern religion has enunciated one great and fundamental dogma that is at the basis of all other dogmas, and that is, that religion must be freed from dogmas. Creeds and confessions of faith are no longer the fashion; religious leaders have agreed not to disagree over those beliefs for which some of our ancestors would have died,” he said.
Is this not one of the core doctrines of the conciliar faith? Of course it is.
“Why exacerbate other believers in Christ by insisting upon their removal from us? Why not try and to find ground in which we could share a common identity and … to some form of common brotherhood?” council attendee Bishop G. Emmett Carter of London, Ontario, asked in Twelve Council Fathers.
The post-conciliar popes have put this into effect with glee. Their heretical Assisi meetings and many statements about being united with Lutherans, Anglicans, and the Orthodox serve as ample proof of their heterodoxy.
“We are one! We already are!” Leo blasphemously declared during an inter-religious prayer service in Rome this year.
“We must therefore leave behind theological controversies that have lost their raison d’être in order to develop a common understanding and even more, a common prayer to the Holy Spirit, so that he may gather us all together in one,” Leo’s likewise asserted in his 2025 document In Unitate Fidei.
‘The end of the Catholic religion’
American priest Fr. Clifford Fenton attended Vatican II as an assistant to Cardinal Ottaviani. Like many others, he kept a diary about his experience.
In an entry dated November 5, 1960, Fenton wrote that the Church is “being run by men who have no concern whatsoever for the purity or the integrity of the Catholic doctrine.”
Two years later, just days after the Council opened in October 1962, Fenton said: “I had always thought that this council was dangerous. It was started for no sufficient reason … I never thought that the episcopate was so liberal. This is going to mark the end of the Catholic religion as we have known it.”
Ottaviani said something similar in his own diary in 1965: “I pray God to allow me to die before the end of this Council. Thus. at least I shall die a Catholic.”
Cardinal Ottaviani and Fr. Fenton were more right than they could have ever imagined. What the Conciliar Church passes off as the Catholic religion is not the Catholic religion. I pray more Catholics will come to understand this sooner rather than later.
