An article at Rorate Cæli is titled Francis confirms his hatred for the Latin Mass and it quotes him as saying:  “I certainly know that the Council is still being applied. It takes a century for a Council to be assimilated, they say.  And I know the resistance to its decrees is terrible.  There is incredible support for restorationism, what I call indietrismo (backwardness).”

I too used to say things like, “It takes a hundred years for a Council to be implemented correctly.”  But now I see this doesn’t apply to Vatican II.  It only applies to dogmatic councils that were established to dissipate confusion, not seminate it.  We have had 20 dogmatic ecumenical councils that included infallible anathema statements.  Most of these ended up ultimately growing the numbers of the Catholic Church, whereas Vatican II tanked it… and continues to do so. Such rejection of the Holy Spirit’s protection was declared quite clearly by those who initiated it:

-“There will be no infallible definitions. All that was done by former Councils. That is enough.”—Pope John XXIII, Gaudet Mater Ecclesia, October 11, 1962.

-“The magisterium of the Church did not wish to pronounce itself under the form of extraordinary dogmatic pronouncements…. ”—Pope Paul VI, discourse closing Vatican II, December 7, 1965

-“Differing from other Councils, this one [Vatican II] was not directly dogmatic, but disciplinary and pastoral.”—Pope Paul VI, August 6, 1975, General Audience.

About 50 million Catholics have left Catholicism in the Western Hemisphere since Vatican II.  I prove here the numbers have also tanked in the Eastern Hemisphere, contrary to all the rumors of how successful “The Council” has been in Africa over the past 50 years.  In other words, “the changes” have statistically been a total failure in both hemispheres.  To insist “we just need to implement it the right way” has finally become as preposterous as “We just need to implement Communism the right way. It has never been tried the right way!” But what the latter has executed against bodies, the former has done to souls:  Total destruction.

When are we going to admit that destruction of traditional Catholicism is not “progress” anyway we project an ideal upon the future?  In Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis wrote:

We all want progress. But progress means getting nearer to the place you want to be and if you have taken a wrong turning, then to go forward does not get you any nearer. 

So also, we Catholics must realize that trashing Apostolic Catholicism has been the wrong road, any way you slice-and-dice the crumbling statistics.  This is why traditional Catholicism is the future. It’s a Church founded on Divine Revelation, not new enlightenment principles. are ironically the most progressive ones.  The quote from CS Lewis continues:

If you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; and in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man.

InfoVaticana also counters the very notion of his backwardsism:  “The key is in the fetish word of the last council: aggiornamento, updating, updating. The Church, an institution that is not of this world but is in this world, is called to maintain its perennial doctrine, the eternal message of Christ, valid for all times, while studying the spirit of each age to adapt the form of the message so that it reaches the world effectively.”

So enough of attempting the impossible hermeneutic of continuity.  It has utterly failed.  Traditional Catholicism is not just the past of the Catholic Church.  It’s also the future.

CS Lewis’ quote continues to explain why we traditional Catholics want to return to the original Apostolic Catholicism after 65 years of tanked numbers:

We have all seen this when we do arithmetic. When I have started a sum the wrong way, the sooner I admit this and go back and start over again, the faster I shall get on. There is nothing progressive about being pigheaded and refusing to admit a mistake. And I think if you look at the present state of the world, it is pretty plain that humanity has been making some big mistakes. We are on the wrong road. And if that is so, we must go back. Going back is the quickest way on.