Vatican II has always been seriously misunderstood

People no longer moan about most of the things that bothered them during my childhood. You don’t hear old folk at bus stops ridiculing the ‘new pence’ of decimal currency. Students no longer care about Vietnam. Retired wing commanders have finally stopped writing to the newspapers about the misuse of that fine old English word ‘gay’. But there is one topic that still attracts world-class windbags. It’s worthy of inclusion in the fictional world boring championships described by the Daily Telegraph’s Peter Simple column, right up there with ‘A history of plywood’ and ‘Parking problems in Wolverhampton’. We’re talking about the Second Vatican Council, whose first session was held 60 years ago last month.

To mark the occasion, George Weigel, one of America’s most distinguished Catholic thinkers, has written an analysis of the Council entitled To Sanctify the World. It isn’t dull. Rather, it’s a magisterial response to the bores and fanatics who are still fighting over the meaning of the Council documents – more venomously than ever, now that they can score points on social media.

At one extreme we have a tiny faction of liberals, styling themselves ‘the People of God’, who invoke Vatican II in their attempts to secularise the Catholic Church. They won’t be satisfied until every church has been forced to install a transgender lavatory for guests attending same-sex weddings. Granted, the subject didn’t crop up in the disquisitions of the Council fathers, but it’s in the ‘spirit of Vatican II’.

At the other extreme we have several small factions of traditionalists who dislike the Council with different degrees of vehemence. The craziest of these, who inhabit the border between the official Church and quasi-Catholic sects, are inspired by the conspiracy thinking of the American Right.