Can you name five problems with the Second Vatican Council?
A viewer asks Robert to name five things he considers problems with the Second Vatican Council.
Answer
First, understand that Vatican II is a legitimate, valid council of the Roman Catholic Church; it is not something of the devil, and some of its sixteen documents contain some of the most God-glorifying writing I have ever read. A few documents are more difficult in what they said, but none of them is in error, and they were all signed by Pope Paul VI with his authority, so they are not open to question; if we could not safely say that, we would not have a Catholic Church. So the problem is not the documents themselves. The problem is that liberal Catholics who wanted to do away with tradition, change doctrine, and embrace evolution took the documents and interpreted them as they pleased. The clearest example is Dei Verbum 11, where the phrase 'for the sake of our salvation' was twisted to claim that Scripture is inspired only where it speaks of salvation, and that these same men would then decide which passages those are. That is one of the biggest lies ever perpetrated on the Church, and it came from liberal Catholic scholars like Raymond Brown and Joseph Fitzmyer. If Scripture is no longer the word of God, then roughly ninety percent of the Bible is treated as merely human and unreliable, which is why the seminaries and universities are in chaos, why only about a fifth of Catholics believe in the Eucharist, and why so many accept abortion. So there is nothing wrong with the Council of Vatican II itself; the harm lies in what has been done with its words, which were looser than the canons of Trent, giving these men their opening.