I received a complimentary issue of a magazine called "The Latin Mass" (I think that was the title). Inside was an article praising the Baltimore Catechism, which I thought interesting and somewhat persuasive. But there was also a long article explaining how bad Vatican II was for the Church and the evidence given was a long litany of familiar statistics: priestly and religious vocations down, down, down, Mass attendance down, etc...
And while I'm sympathetic to the traditionalists, the problem is that you cannot assign a cause and effect. Since we don't have access to a parallel universe, we can't see how things would've had turned out without Vatican II. Perhaps things would be worse. Flannery O'Connor argued that a tenuous connection to the Church is better than no connection and it's possible that if the Church had been "stricter" we'd have only a remnant left. An Amish-like church.
The '60s culture affected nearly every institution and every person. There was and is no way to prevent the Zeitgeist from impacting you, either positively or negatively, which should provide additional motivation to want to change the Zeitgeist. Every Protestant denomination suffered likewise from the ravages of the 60s; it wasn't uniquely a Catholic problem. Once the elites in a society acquire bad ideas - i.e. lose their faith - their misconceptions tend to have a trickle-down effect.
God intended that men and women should impact and influence other men and women. There is no such thing as a "splendid isolation". One can no more hoard spiritual riches as one should material. The great spiritual poverty of the 60s affected nearly everyone, including the Church, but it strikes me that blaming Vatican II for our spiritual poverty just doesn't work.
Update: Just after writing about the possibility of a remnant church by too strict an approach, I see this from Wry on Amy's blog:
The priest I treasure most highly, the one who brought me into the church, was a "hard" man disliked by some parishioners. And he did have crusty qualities, like brushing you off if he was busy. But he told me after all my dithering about whether I believed everything and whether to join or not that I *shouldn't* join! "We already have enough bad Catholics," he said. "We don't need any more. Good night."
And he put his black hat on and walked into the night.
It was the beginning of my true conversion. Placed before that real choice: Yes, No - I realized how much I wanted to say Yes. Another thing he said: "You learn your faith on your knees." I had been spending hours pouring over books trying to find the answers and solve the debates in my head, but I began doing the stations of the cross instead. I took some private lessons from this priest to make up for the RCIA I had missed. I joined the church on my birthday, and it was the feast of Sts. Peter and Paul.
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