If all Vatican II did was order a translation of the services there wouldn't have been a problem.

Traditionalism isn't mainly about Latin. (A smear from the liberals in charge now - that it's only about 'those nuts who want to force everybody to speak Latin'.)

Use Google to find pictures and texts of the Mass, for example, pre- and post-Vatican II. Compare the texts side by side and you'll see what the fuss is about.

Basically the council did three things.

1. Changed policy (not doctrine) on religious liberty, saying that governments granting it is a relative good.

2. Ecumenism (talks between Christians) and interfaith dialogue: it changed policy (not doctrine) on dealing with non-Roman Catholics, explicitly saying they had parts of the truth (not new really) and for the first time allowing official talks with different churches and different religions.

3. Issued an ambiguous, contradictory document that could be read as allowing some moderate changes in the services, such as using more of the vernacular, but usually was read as an order to gut and rewrite them altogether, incidentally getting rid of Latin as well. (Typically in the document, one paragraph upholds an old practice and then a few paragraphs down undermines that same practice.)

[And, beyond the scope of this discussion, it actually got something right:

4. It told Eastern Catholics, who are supposed to use the services and follow the traditions of the Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox and Assyrian churches, to return to their own traditions and stop mutilating them to copy RC practices, and, related to 2., encouraged friendly relations with the Eastern Orthodox. This has been understood and implemented about as badly as everything else related to the council.]

Popularly among RCs, 1. and 2. were (mis)presented and (mis)understood as abandoning the one-true-church claim (which would defy logic) and an endorsement of indifferentism (relativism: all religions are equally good and true), and 3. in practice paved the way to trash the Mass.

The RCC had the clout among its own and in the world to ride out the 1960s but instead in practice caved into the spirit of the times.

The result: Christendom in the West reduced to, at least in the States, a kind of mainline Protestantism by and for non-Anglo-Saxons.

... the Vatican II document Gaudium et Spes, which in paragraph 12 says that "all things on earth should be ordained to man as to their centre and summit." "We do not agree ...The centre and summit must be God."

• The view from the man in the pew. A look at the numbers.

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