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Ruminations on Archbishop Viganó’s Recent Letter: Vatican II Is Not the Problem

On June 9, 2020, Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganó wrote a public letter giving what he believes is the correct course of action for faithful Catholics in light of the crisis in the Catholic Church. As I read the letter, I agreed with about 90% of it, since I, like many other Catholics, have seen with our own eyes over the last few decades the astounding degradation of our Catholic doctrines and practices. 

Still, there was about 10
% of the letter—the part that contained what the Archbishop believes to be the correct course of action to reverse and remedy our desperate situation— that seemed to me to be very desperate itself. In brief, the remedy is that we should blame Vatican Council II for the evils that beset us and treat it accordingly, essentially rejecting it since it is the root of the problem. As such, the Archbishop wishes to reject the “hermeneutic of continuity” since in his estimation it has proven to be an utter failure and consequently it should be abandoned as a remedy for some of the more controversial statements in Vatican II’s documents (e.g., those in Nostra aetate, Dignitatis humanae, Gaudium et spes, etc.).

Simply put, as much as I admire the Archbishop for all the good he has done for us in the past couple of years in exposing the corruptions that high-placed Catholic clerics have forced into the Church, his present remedy is, as characterized by some popular clichés, a case of throwing the baby out with the bathwater, or better, a case in which the medicine is worse than the disease. Reaction and remedy against the evils that face us is unarguably correct, but overreaction and desperation are not good and will only hurt us more in the end.

I am going to go through the Archbishop’s letter to point out where he has crossed the line, as it were, in giving the Catholic faithful his recommendations for a remedy to the crisis.

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