Historicizing Vatican II by Roberto Pertici

One cannot focus just on those proximate years right before Vatican II, if one is going to examine the historical causes of Vatican II. One must look at how the papacy developed in the second millenium and how it reoriented itself after it loss the papal states, and how it dealt with European polities after the loss of Western Christendom. The weakness of the patriarchate of Rome, as witnessed in the life of its churches and its failures in directing secular European polities, must be understood in lack of proper ordering, for which we can find evidence in Church history, Latin theology or dogma, and Roman canon law. The crisis of the patriarchate of Rome was not a sudden development that happened after Vatican II, and it has a longer history that goes back to before Pope Pius X.

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