By Bishop Joseph E. Strickland, Bishop Emeritus, Pillars of Faith, Nov. 3, 2025
Bishop Joseph Edward Strickland, founder of Pillars of Faith, is a successor of the Apostles whose life and ministry are marked by a profound fidelity to Jesus Christ.
I. The Heritage and the Hour
The years since the Second Vatican Council have tested the faith of pastors and the patience of the faithful. A bishop today inherits not a tranquil vineyard but one shaken by storms that began when the world’s optimism of the early 1960’s met the Church’s guarded peace.
When Pope John XXIII opened the Council on 11 October 1962, he announced that “the Spouse of Christ prefers to make use of the medicine of mercy rather than of severity.” The sentiment sounded generous, yet it revealed a shift: correction would give way to dialogue, severity to leniency, warning to optimism. In that same address he talked about the “prophets of doom who are always forecasting disaster, as though the end of the world were at hand,” whereas he saw “a new order of human relations” emerging. The naïve trust that the modern world could be persuaded by gentleness rather than converted by truth became the keynote of his pontificate.
To understand Vatican II rightly, we must see that the Council arose from a mixture of holy intention, human frailty and calculated infiltration. Alongside sincere pastors who desired renewal stood others with the frailty of hope that mercy without definition could heal disbelief. However, there were also those who entered the Council with a plan to redirect the Church. What some viewed as renewal, others used as revolution. The enemy who could not destroy the Church from without sought to weaken her from within, and the Council became the battlefield on which that hidden war was waged. This was more than mere human frailty; it was rather a deliberate strategy – one that bore the fingerprints of the Evil One, who always strives to confuse mercy with compromise and light with shadow. Yet Christ entrusted His Church to shepherds who must “hold the form of sound words” (2 Tim 1:13). When that form is blurred, charity itself becomes unmoored. ….
