MARY BALL MARTINEZ’S fascinating book, The Undermining of the Catholic Church, first published in 1991, describes the internal destruction that began well before Vatican II and then burst into the open with the Council, causing even leading non-Catholic intellectuals and artists — figures such as Robert Graves, Vladimir Askanazy and Iris Murdoch — to object.

Martinez was a Vatican news reporter for many years. An excerpt from the 2007 edition by the Christian Book Club of America:

In Rome the hours before dawn are never really warm, even in summer. It was the vigil of Pentecost and virtually summer (the great movable feasts came late in the year 1971) when some four thousand men and women from many parts of the world knelt through the night on chill flagstones below the steps of St. Peter’s Basilica. In the immense circle of the piazza, only dimly lit by an uncertain moon and a few electric bulbs hidden high among the all-embracing Bernini columns, they would have looked from above, even in such numbers, like small huddled shadows.

Ahead, as if it were the object of their prayers, the great facade, secure atop its thirty-eight steps, immutable now for four hundred years, its magnificent stones successors to lesser stones, said to cover the bones of the Galilean fisherman, Simon called Peter. Here was the core of Christendom, the Rock and the tangible sign of Christian permanence. For the kneeling pilgrims the darkness itself added dimension and wonder to the wall the Basilica made, a wall to hold back not just the dawn that would soon come out of the East, but a wall to hold back all the false doctrines on earth. Hardly a handful among the crowd would have known that already behind the brave facade a hollowing-out process, an eating away of strength and substance, had been going on for more than half a century, that the Catholic Church had been undermined. [10]

All of them knew that something was wrong; otherwise they would not have joined the pilgrimage. In France, in Germany, England, Argentina, the United States, Australia, each in his own parish, had been stricken by sudden change, by orders to worship in a strange new way. Nearly half of the pilgrims were French, having arrived on chartered trains from Paris and all had come to plead with the Holy Father to give them back the Mass, the Sacraments and a Catechism for their children.

Had any of them looked beyond the pillars and high over to the right, they could have made out the shuttered windows of the papal apartments. Was the Pope asleep? Could he sleep, knowing they were there? From where he lay, the murmured Aves and Paters of the fifteen decades of the rosary cannot have sounded much louder than the play of water on the ancient fountain in the piazza.

In Latin a French priest led one decade, a lawyer from Canada the second, a farmer from Bavaria the third. At midnight everyone rose to make “the way of the Cross”. Holding lighted candles, they cast long shadows as they moved in slow procession between the enormous columns. With no painting to remind them of the suffering of Christ they listened as a young man from one, then another, of the main language groups, read a description of each “station”.

When the air grew more chilly, kettles of hot coffee were provided. Someone carried cups to the carabinieri sitting in their Fiat at a discreet distance. It was noted that the shutters behind which Paul VI slept, or did not sleep, remained tightly shut.

Months later it became known that the bishop who would give resounding voice to the entreaty of these pilgrims, had slept soundly through that June night in a modest convent cell somewhere in the labyrinth of medieval streets on the 11 other side of the Tiber. In the summer of 1971 Msgr. Marcel Lefebvre, missionary bishop to French Africa, already dissident clerically, was not ready to declare himself publicly.

There was no such hesitancy on the part of Pope Paul VI. His adamant refusal to receive the “traditionalist” pilgrims, while making himself available as usual that week in a series of private audiences, was a declaration no one could mistake.

It had been five or six years earlier that the seven hundred million or so Roman Catholics scattered over the world had experienced the first shock of change. On a certain Sunday in the late 1960’s (the date varied from country to country) they had gone to church to find that altar, liturgy, language and ritual had undergone total metamorphosis. Rumors had been reaching them, and virtually every Catholic from Long Island parishioners to worshippers in grass-roofed chapels in the Congo, knew that high-level meetings were going on in Rome. However, none of the information they had picked up from hearsay or even anything they had seen in print, had prepared them for what they found in church that Sunday morning.

In the months that followed, bewilderment would fade into resignation, very occasionally into satisfaction. Now and then, however, there was a sharp outcry, as when the Italian novelist, Tito Casini, denounced his bishop, Cardinal Lercaro of Bologna, who happened also to head the Pontifical Commission for the Liturgy: “You have done what Roman soldiers at the foot of the Cross never dared to do. You have torn the seamless tunic, the bond of unity among believers in Christ, past, present and future, to leave it in shreds.” The Casini open-letter went around the world in a dozen translations. 12

In Germany, historian Reinhardt Raffalt was writing: “Those of other faiths are looking on in horror as the Catholic Church casts away those ancient rites that have clothed the mysteries of Christianity in timeless beauty.”

From England came a passionate, nearly resentful, plea to Pope Paul to “bring back the Mass as it was so magnificently expressed in Latin, the Mass that inspired innumerable works of mysticism, of art, poetry, sculpture and music, the Mass that belongs, not only to the Catholic Church and its faithful, but to the culture of the entire world.” The petition was signed by several score London based writers, artists, philosophers and musicians, including Yehudi Menuhin, Agatha Christie, Andres Segovia, Robert Graves, Jorge Luis Borges, Robert Lowell, Iris Murdoch, Vladimir Askanazy.

Among the faithful dissent began, expectedly, in the intellectual circles of France. Jean Madiran, publishing an effective little review, Itineraires, was already picking up deviation from orthodoxy during the early Council sessions. Writing in Madiran’s paper, the political economist, Louis Salleron asked if the Church was turning Arian, a reference to the great wave of heresy of the fourth century. He had noticed a persistent downgrading of Christ implicit in the just-published French translation of the Council’s version of the Creed. Whereupon the philosophers, Etienne Gilson and Gustav Thibon, joined novelist François Mauriac to take up the question in an open letter to the bishops of France.

Thus even before Vatican II came to a close a sizeable public in France had become aware of the extent of the transformation.

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