Vatican II at 50

Essay by Robert Royal in the Claremont Review of Books, Fall 2012

The direction that this spirit [of Vatican II] blew was uniformly to the left. Unorthodox Catholics started to speak of human beings in rather Rousseauian terms. Except for evil capitalists and their political enablers, human beings seemed to be mostly victims. How this squared with the fundamental point of Christianity—that the whole human race was fallen and that it took God to come down and die on a cross to save people from themselves—seemed to all but disappear in some quarters. Perhaps part of the problem was that in none of the Conciliar documents did Hell ever appear by name—though Jesus himself talks about it more than any Biblical figure.