A Church That Wants to Please the World

For those who might believe that such an awareness is reserved for ecclesiastics, experts in theology and specialists in canon law, here is the testimony Vaticanist Aldo Maria Valli published this summer on his blog, in which he intends to speak as a simple baptized person: “Now that I am approaching old age and feel the need to go into the essentials of the faith, it seems to me that I can say, in all humility and as a simple baptized person, that the Council was driven by a fatal error: the desire to please the world.”

He is careful to clarify: “I realize that my statement may seem hasty, and I apologize to specialists on the subject, but the more I study the years of the Council, the more I am convinced that some sort of inferiority complex existed in large sectors of the Church [here by metonymy the “Church,” refers to the men of the Church], starting with Pope John XXIII, in relation to the world.” And to draw this logical conclusion: “At the moment when, in a more or less conscious manner, the Church desires to please the world, she inevitably begins to betray herself and her mission. Because Jesus never wanted to please the world, nor to make concessions in order to appear sympathetic and to dialogue.”

Lucid, Aldo Maria Valli adds: “With the Council, the windows were certainly opened and the air entered. But at the same time as a pleasant feeling of freshness, the ideas of the world, marked by sin, also entered, and the Church was contaminated by them. What does it mean to be marked by sin? Briefly, it means to be marked by the will to put man in the place of God, because deep down that is what they are doing today as they did yesterday and in all other times.”

This is what the faith of his baptism allows this faithful Catholic to understand. In other words, men of the Church are anxious to please the contemporary world and eager not to displease it. Men of the Church in tow of old fashioned ecumenical fashions and biodegradable ecological opinions. Men of the Church who are worried about climate change and pray for the protection of Creation, without evoking either original sin, or grace, or Christ who "is the same yesterday, today and forever” (Hb.13:8).

Bossuet replies: “God laughs at the prayers we make to him to avert public misfortunes, when we are not opposed to what is being done to attract them. What am I saying? when we approve and subscribe to it, albeit with reluctance” (History of the Variations of Protestant Churches, 1688).