“The Myth of Post-Conciliar Decentralization” - A New Video from Unam Sanctam Catholicam

Our friend Phillip Campbell, author of the blog Unam Sanctam Catholicam, has just put up a new video on his YouTube channel, titled “The Myth of Post-Conciliar Decentralization,” which is very much worth your time. His point is that the common telling that the Church was decentralized by the reforms enacted after the most recent ecumenical council is just that, a myth - not in the sense made famous by JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis, but in the more vulgar sense of a flat-out falsehood. The reality is that the Church has never been more centralized and authoritarian. And, as he rightly notes, one of the most significant areas in which we see this is the liturgy and the post-Conciliar reform. What could be more thoroughly authoritarian than to impose a rapidly created and pastorally untested new rite on the whole of the Latin Church, while (in the words of Pope Benedict XVI) “simultaneously declar(ing) that what until now was its holiest and highest possession is strictly forbidden, and mak(ing) the longing for it seem downright indecent” ?

In this sense, the only pope who actually decentralized anything in the Church in recent decades was the very same Pope Benedict, who wisely allowed both the laity and the clergy to choose which form of the liturgy they wanted, without requiring any special permission from authority. And it is, frankly, not a coincidence that the same pope who tried to take that choice away from them also invented a new way of pretending to further decentralize the Church, while doing the opposite. As the Church now tries to figure out what to do with that legacy, the results will certainly have an impact not just on the future liberty of the traditional Roman Rite, but efforts to reform the post-Conciliar Rite as well, and it is important to have a clear-headed assessment of this before trying to move forward. Our thanks to Mr Campbell for another worthy contribution to that assessment; do our man a favor and subscribe to his channel!