Malachi Martin Forward to 'In the Murky Waters of Vatican II'

Book Reviews

Special Foreward

Fr. Malachi Martin
Book-review on In the Murky Waters of Vatican IIby Atila Sinke Guimarães
(Metairie, LA: MAETA, 1997), 453 pp.

Click to purchase

This first volume of The Collection: Eli, Eli, Lamma Sabacthani? establishes the author Atila Sinke Guimarães as one of the best informed latter-day students of that epochal event, the Second Vatican Council. Up to this moment, the most encyclopedic and detailedly informed examination of the Council was provided by Professor Amerio in his Iota Unum. Guimarães’ Collection bids fair to replace Iota Unum as the best all-purpose source-book about the Council; and it is not hazardous or rash to predict that this work of Guimarâes will be a standard reference work on the subject and well into the 21st century.

The title of this first volume, The Murky Waters of Vatican II, tells exactly what the contents are. All of us who lived through the years of Vatican Two (1962-1965) and have had to deal with the con-sequences can recognize immediately the pinpoint accuracy of this first volume: the ambiguity, cultivated and, as it were, perfected in the composition of the sixteen main documents of the Council, is now seen as the most skillful means devised to undo the essential Roman-ness and Catholicism of the Roman Catholic Church, and to deliver that entire one-billion member institutional organization into the ready and eager hands of those for whom the existence of the traditional papacy and hierarchical organization has long been anathema. One reads in this volume with a certain sickening feeling the unified way in which the Church’s own theologians and prelates conspired willingly to bring about the present trend to the de-Romanization and de-Catholicizing of the once monolithic institution.

Share

Follow us

September 25, 1997