Why Ambiguity Was the Most Lethal Weapon of Vatican II’s Architects

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Why Ambiguity Was the Most Lethal Weapon of Vatican II’s Architects

Robert Morrison | June 20, 2025


Every single ambiguity of Vatican II tended to undermine Catholic teaching in precisely the way against which the pre-Vatican II popes emphatically warned. This is not mere coincidence. Moreover, the presence of so much ambiguity fundamentally undermines the Catholic Church’s role as truth-teller. The Church obviously knew how to speak clearly and unambiguously on all of the matters that have become so contentious after the Council.

In his 2024 book Flee From Heresy: A Catholic Guide to Ancient and Modern Errors, Bishop Athanasius Schneider provided the following question and answer regarding how Vatican II differs from previous ecumenical councils:

“What was the key difference between Vatican II and all previous ecumenical councils? The previous ecumenical councils formulated the doctrine of faith and morals in articles with the clearest possible assertions, and in concise canons with anathemas, to guarantee an unambiguous understanding of the true doctrine and protect the faithful from heretical influences within or outside the Church. Vatican II, however, chose not to do this.”

... While it is still too early to know whether Pope Leo XIV would cooperate with God’s grace to make the necessary corrections to rectify Vatican II’s ambiguities, it is worth considering why ambiguity was the most lethal weapon of Vatican II’s architects.

In his One Hundred Years of Modernism, Fr. Dominique Bourmaud discussed the evidence we have that the architects of Vatican II employed ambiguity deliberately:

“We could cite a hundred cases of such ambiguity, which was in fact premeditated, as Fr. Laurentin explained: “Here and there, ambiguity was cultivated as an escape from inextricable oppositions. One could lengthen the list of such wordings encompassing opposing tendencies, because they could be looked at from both sides just like those photographic tricks whereby you see two different people in the same picture depending on the angle you look at it. For this reason, Vatican II already has given, and will continue to give rise to many controversies.’”

Fr. Laurentin’s image of the photographic trick is quite revealing because he and others were truly attempting to trick the well-meaning Council Fathers into accepting passages that could be read with an anti-Catholic meaning. The liberals could do this only by persuading these Council Fathers that the passages could also be read with a seemingly orthodox meaning.

Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre opposed this effort with his November 27, 1962 intervention at Vatican II, in which he encouraged his fellow Council Fathers to express the Council’s teaching in a “dogmatic and scholastic” form that would help promote precision of thought and expression:

“It is of the highest importance that ‘the whole of traditional Christian doctrine be received in that exact manner, both in thought and form, which is above all resplendent in the Acts of the Council of Trent and of Vatican I,’ according to the very words of the Sovereign Pontiff. So for these very important reasons, it is absolutely essential to maintain these two objectives: to express doctrine in a dogmatic and scholastic form for the training of the learned; and to present the truth in a more pastoral way, for the instruction of other men.” (I Accuse the Council!, p. 5)

Archbishop Lefebvre proceeded to suggest two sets of documents: “one more dogmatic, for the use of theologians; the other more pastoral in tone, for the use of others, whether Catholic, non-catholic or non-Christian.” As Archbishop Lefebvre recounted, the proposal was not well-received:

“The proposal met, however, with violent opposition: ‘The Council is not a dogmatic but a pastoral one; we are not seeking to define new dogmas but to put forward the truth in a pastoral way.” (I Accuse the Council!, p. 4)

All throughout the history of the Catholic Church, theologians have worked to make Catholic teaching more and more clear, accurate, and complete. At Vatican II, this clarity was sacrificed in the name of a “pastoral” approach. In hindsight, we now know that this pastoral aspect of the Council has only yielded confusion and apostasy. Unfortunately, though, the pastoral aspect of the Council persuaded the Council Fathers to allow for ambiguous expressions.

Although Archbishop Lefebvre lost the battle of trying to have the Council express its teaching in a “dogmatic and scholastic” form that would have prevented ambiguities, he did not surrender in his attempts to counteract heterodoxy. One of the most illuminating passages written about Vatican II is from Archbishop Lefebvre’s They Have Uncrowned Him, in which he describes his work to oppose the liberal theologians:

“It is certain that with the 250 conciliar fathers of the Coetus we tried with all the means put at our disposal to keep the liberal errors from being expressed in the texts of the Council. This meant that we were able all the same to limit the damage, to change these inexact or tendentious assertions, to add that sentence to rectify a tendentious proposition, an ambiguous expression. But I have to admit that we did not succeed in purifying the Council of the liberal and modernist spirit impregnating most of the schemas. Their drafters indeed were precisely the experts and the Fathers tainted with this spirit.” (p. 167)

We cannot think properly about the Council if we do not grasp these crucial insights from Archbishop Lefebvre. The initial drafts of the Council’s documents were more liberal than those that were ultimately accepted. Going back to the image from Fr. Laurentin, it was much easier to the see the liberal picture in the initial documents. But the final documents did not efface the liberal pictures; rather, they added to the orthodox pictures that could be seen within the same passages.

Archbishop Lefebvre continued:

“What we were able to do was, by the modi that we introduced, to have interpolated clauses added to the schemas; and this is quite obvious: it suffices to compare the first schema on religious liberty with the fifth one the was written — for this document was five times rejected and five times brought back for discussion — in order to see that succeeded just the same in reducing the subjectivism that tainted the first drafts. . . . [In this declaration,] Dignitatis humanae, of which the last schema was rejected by numerous Fathers, Paul VI himself had a paragraph added which said in substance: ‘This declaration contains nothing that is contrary to tradition.’ But everything that is inside is contrary to tradition! Thus someone will say, ‘Just read it! It is written, There is nothing contrary to tradition’ — well, yes, it is written. But that does not stop everything from being contrary to tradition! And that sentence was added at the last minute by the Pope in order to force the hand of those — in particular the Spanish bishops — who were opposed to this schema. . . Well, let us be logical! They changed nothing in the text!” (pp. 167-169)

So all of these efforts to make the documents more orthodox ultimately served the purpose of allowing the Council Fathers to grow comfortable enough to approve the ambiguous documents that could still be read in a heterodox manner. And, indeed, the statement added at the direction of Paul VI did not change the reality that the authors of the document intended to interpret it in a heterodox manner.

Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger corroborated all of this in his Theological Highlights of Vatican II, in which he described the same last-minute addition to Dignitatis Humanae:

“Most controversial was the third newly emphasized aspect. The text attempts to emphasize continuity in the statements of the official Church on this issue. It also says that it ‘leaves intact the traditional Catholic doctrine on the moral duty of men and communities toward the true religion and the only Church of Christ’ (n. 1). The term ‘duty’ here has doubtful application to communities in their relation to the Church. Later on in the Declaration, the text itself corrects and modifies these earlier statements, offering something new, something that is quite different from what is found, for example, in the statements of Pius XI and Pius XII. It would have been better to omit these compromising formulas or to reformulate them in line with the later text. Thus the introduction changes nothing in the text's content; therefore, we need not regard it as anything more than a minor flaw.”

As Michael Davies explained in his The Second Vatican Council and Religious Liberty (p. 205), Ratzinger was mistaken about the chronology of text added by Paul VI. However, the future Benedict XVI was entirely correct about that fact that the body of the Declaration actually contradicts the teaching of Pius XI and Pius XII.

Benedict XVI would later encourage faithful Catholics to read Vatican II documents in light of Tradition (i.e., the hermeneutic of continuity), and we can assume he was entirely honorable in his intentions. However, such an exercise could only be effective if it fully accounts for the most salient reality: namely, that the Council’s texts were tainted with ambiguities that leave open the possibility to see the liberal meanings that were actually intended by the men who drafted the documents. Without this recognition, the hermeneutic of continuity can only “succeed” by persuading Catholics to abandon reason.

But there is more that could be said against the ambiguities of Vatican II. Whereas it was theoretically possible that every ambiguity could have gone in a more rigorous direction that offended liberal sensibilities, the indisputable reality is that every single ambiguity tended to undermine Catholic teaching in precisely the way against which the pre-Vatican II popes emphatically warned. This is not mere coincidence.

Moreover, the presence of so much ambiguity fundamentally undermines the Catholic Church’s role as truth-teller. The Church obviously knew how to speak clearly and unambiguously on all of the matters that have become so contentious after the Council. The Council Fathers were perfectly capable of speaking even more clearly about the same issues. And yet, in the eyes of all rational readers, they abandoned the clarity and certainty of past statements. In so doing, the Council compromised the Church’s authority in the eyes of Catholic and non-Catholics alike.

Finally, we can see that it avails little for certain scholars to be able to hold the interpretive keys that allow them to read the documents in a quasi-orthodox manner when the vast majority of Catholics have no such knowledge. Countless souls have apostatized over the past sixty years because they see the picture of the Council as Fr. Laurentin explained: they either see a picture that is entirely heterodox, or one that is ambiguous (nobody sees anything that is unambiguously orthodox). And so they either think the Church has changed its teaching or else forfeited its doctrinal authority.

The only solution is to ... affirm the Church’s true teaching. May God grant Pope Leo XIV the grace to do this.

Immaculate Heart of Mary, pray for us!