Description:
Barthe places the Second Vatican Council within a much longer history, tracing the currents of Catholic thought from the nineteenth century to the modernist crisis and its aftermath.
Brief description: ABBÉ CLAUDE BARTHE (b. 1947) is the author of numerous works on the current crisis of the Church and of articles in various journals commenting on religious affairs. He has devoted particular attention to defending and elucidating the "genius" of the traditional Roman liturgy.
Review Quotes:
"Fr. Claude Barthe has long been known in France for his level-headed, sagacious evaluation of the state of the contemporary Catholic Church and for his pellucid and persuasive defense of liturgical tradition. In this feisty work, now thankfully available in English, he shows how historical forces born in an age of revolutions culminated in abject surrender to the Zeitgeist, and how true reform is possible only through acknowledging and overcoming the many-sided rupture between Catholicism's past and present. If you're tired of cant and sugarcoating, this electrifying tonic is for you."-PETER KWASNIEWSKI, author of Bound by Truth
"Abbé Claude Barthe here examines what he provocatively calls 'a council that abdicated its responsibilities, ' and argues that the Church's pragmatic accommodations to the modern world, culminating in the conciliar aggiornamento, have had corrosive and seriously damaging effects on her theology and faith. Exercising the parrhesia that Pope Francis often called for, he persuasively makes the historical and theological case that the 'pastoral' nature of Vatican II sowed seeds of ambiguity, division, and rupture-not just in its implementation through religious pluralism, ecumenism, and the liturgy of the Novus Ordo, but at a fundamental level in its texts. As the Second Vatican Council increasingly recedes into history, Abbé Barthe's book points to a way out from the failures of the modern Church and to a way of resolving the current crisis-MATTHEW HAZELL, author of Index Lectionum
"With boldness, clarity, and precision, Barthe exposes the nature and origin of today's crisis in the Catholic Church. Writing from a traditionalist perspective, he identifies Vatican II as the turning point at which modernism and ecumenism triumphed. He guides the reader through the history of ideological conflict from the nineteenth century onward, including a behind-the-scenes account of the political struggles that led to the unprecedented doctrinal and liturgical reforms of Vatican II, and argues persuasively that the result was nothing less than the introduction of new theology-and the greatest detriment to the very mission of the Church."-EDWARD NAUMANN, editor and translator of Nicholas of Lyra, Literal Commentary on Galatians