Editor’s Note: The following essay is cross-posted on the Catholic Esquire Substack page. Going forward, most of my smaller, personal pieces will be posted there. It provides more opportunities for engagement and networking. There is a solid traditional Catholic community of independent influencers building on that platform, who are willing to speak the Truth without compromise and outside influence. A link to my essays will also be provided on the home page menu of this website.
In politics and economics, a Potemkin village refers to a façade—real or symbolic—designed to make a situation appear better than it is. The term originates from tales of Grigory Potemkin building fake villages to impress Empress Catherine II during her 1787 visit to Crimea.
I thought about this as soon as I read the following posts on X. I redacted the names of the posters since it is not important.
Let’s flesh this out a bit. Does charisma and crowds signify that the Church is in good hands? Is it good that a Catholic faith not grounded in Truth will have a profound impact on lives?
The last 60 years in the Catholic Church have been one of overall decline. Our common sense and intuition were recently confirmed by the National Bureau of Economic Research, which conducted a study showing that Vatican II itself was a significant component to this decline.
If you care about the Church, if you care about the faith, then a complete unwind of Vatican II is simply mandatory.
The absolute last thing that you should want to do is return to the days when the bad fruit of Vatican II was nourished by slowly sucking the life out of the Church. And yet, that’s exactly what so many are now pining for upon the election of Leo XIV.
This leads me back to the X posts above. What in the world have Catholics been doing since Vatican II if not exposing its revolutionary nature and poisonous fruit? Was there any resistance?
At the end of the day, a Potemkin village was created out of Rome’s solid buildings and some continue to remain perfectly content with living the fantasy. Let’s examine.
The quiet (but not silent) implementation of the Vatican II agenda pressed forward immediately after the Council, but at the same time, purposefully under the cover of John Paul II’s cult of personality.
John Paul II taught us how to save the world, but not our souls. His teachings were geared towards exalting mankind to reflect its infinite dignity as “the only creature on earth which God willed for itself” as the Vatican II document Gaudium et spes teaches.
Any resistance to the Vatican II revolution was simply overwhelmed, ignored, and shoved into the dark corners of house basements. Very few were actually pushing back against the agenda, and those who did were marginalized to the outermost wastelands of the New Pentecost and New Evangelization.
By canonizing the Woodstock phenomenon, World Youth Days supposedly proved the vitality of the Church and the promise of future hope in the millions of youths who attended. All of this despite the lack of catechesis, people making out during Mass, and women portraying Our Lord at WYD events.
In the first 40 years after Vatican II, small but significant changes were gradually implemented as the revolution took hold. Of course, these smaller changes were grounded in a few major changes, including a new Mass, a new Catechism, and a new Code of Canon Law.
The less obvious mutations crept in parish by parish: indults allowing previously condemned practices became permanent, laypeople began taking on clerical roles, and women assumed positions of leadership and authority. Throughout this period, the social and moral teachings of the Church were slowly adapted to align with modern secular humanist culture, under the cover of doctrinal “development.”
· The death penalty is condemned
· “Natural” regulation of birth control promoted
· Religious liberty/inter-faith prayer services promoted
· Abortion/euthanasia condemned as against man’s dignity (not God’s)
· Annulment explosion substitutes for Catholic “divorce”
Thanks to the cult of John Paul II’s personality, the gradual implementation of Vatican II proceeded incrementally but with a sense of urgency, while most Catholics who did not leave the Church largely overlooked it. With a few notable exceptions in the hierarchy, such as Archbishop Lefebvre, those entrusted with defending the faith and teaching its timeless principles abandoned their duties and allowed attacks on the faith to go unchecked. Vatican II’s agenda was systematically put into action as the crowds cheered.
Everything was cool. For those Catholics whose enthusiasm for the faith did not peter out and completely disappear a few years after the excitement rush of a World Youth Day, they continued to relish what they perceived to be a Catholic heritage that they shared with their ancestors, even though they did not believe the same things as their Catholic ancestors, did not attend the same Mass as their ancestors, and rejected their ancestors’ moral values.
Should anyone dare to question this disconnect, the local priest or lay catechist could always fall back on Vatican II as an excuse to quickly dismiss and then sweep under the rug any concerns someone might have.
After 40 years of deferred doctrinal and spiritual maintenance under Paul VI and John Paul II, the poison of the world managed slowly to eat away at the edifice, and Catholics were left with the shell of a once-great institution that seemingly shared roots with the Catholic Church, kept a few trappings of the past, but lacked any real substance, heart, or meaning. Rome became a Potemkin village.
Thanks to the rise of the internet, defenders of Tradition who lived through such degeneration, such as Dietrich and Alice von Hildebrand, Michael Davies, and Archbishop Lefebvre, gained significant new levels of exposure. This prompted people to question what occurred around the time of the Council to cause such drastic changes. As a result, the current traditional movement gained momentum after the death of John Paul II.
And yet, despite this positive movement towards seeking truth and discovering our Catholic heritage that others seemed to want to rob the world of, there remain some who insist that the Potemkin village of the John Paul II era truly was the golden age.
Many people who long for the days of John Paul II often identify as Traditionists but are content with a return to the state of the Church in 1993. They view Leo XIV as the leader who can revive the glory days when young people were enthusiastic about their faith and eager to spread the Gospel, despite not fully understanding the teachings of the Church and often rejecting them.
The disconnect, of course, is doctrinal—and always has been. The Truth is getting in the way of the fun.
And so, we come back again to the crux of the problem. What does revitalizing the Church and the Catholic faith look like to you? Is it millions in a crowd cheering on a charismatic Pope who refuses to teach and defend apostolic Catholicism? Is it getting back to the hollowed-out excitement that John Paul II’s World Youth Day inspired?
The time for choosing is now. Do you want Rome or Potemkin Rome?