Practically speaking, the Church was OK before Vatican II and was not OK after it.

Well, Bishop Williamson would disagree; he traces the rot back to the Renaissance.  I know you qualified it with "practically speaking" ... as in you had the Tridentine Mass, but we surely must know by now that the Crisis is about the faith and not just the Mass.

I know you qualified it with "practically speaking" ... as in you had the Tridentine Mass, but we surely must know by now that the Crisis is about the faith and not just the Mass.

Actually, there was no coherent, competing "new religion" or "newfaith" before Vatican II either. The Faith was intact. Perhaps some bad ideas here and there were brewing, but overall Catholic priests and bishops had the Faith before Vatican II. Ergo, the Crisis didn't start until Vatican II.

You're talking about universal purity of doctrine, but I say: you will have a hard time finding purity of anything where human beings are involved. There are always rebels, idiots, poor students, heretics, and bad ideas even in the best of organizations and the best of times.

We've always had bad priests, even priests so bad they taught heresy, whether formal or material.

However, it wasn't until Vatican II that heresy was institutionalized -- to the point that you were more likely than not to encounter heresy in its priests. The actual organization, the actual fundamentals of the post-Conciliar Church actually favored heresy. See my recent post about "isolated" problems vs. fundamental ones:

https://www.cathinfo.com/general-discussion/a-real-problem-vs-no-specific-problem/

My post in the above link basically lays out the difference between an occasional sodomite in the Trad movement, vs. a sodomite who came out of a modern Catholic seminary. One of them happened DESPITE the milieu and practices of the group, while the other happened BECAUSE OF it.

The modern seminaries are all about accord with the Modern World, they hold up Freud (the pervert) as a respectable teacher of psychology, the New Age and other errors are brought in, and the whole Faith is cloaked in a feminine, sentimental, emotional wrapper.

I get what you're saying, but in reality, the crisis in the Church started in the 1800s, reached a peak when Pope Pius IX was imprisoned by the masons, then orthodoxy returned with Pope St Pius X.  After St Pius X, liberalism resurfaced gradually, gradually, gradually, until V2 systematically opened the floodgates for practical change.

So, yes, you can argue that until V2, the Faith taught to the laity was "orthodox" strictly speaking.  But there were rumblings of modernism beginning to form like black clouds even in the 30s.  Ideas always come before action.  The change in ideas happened LONG before V2.

These black clouds were the modernist theologians, bishops and cardinals who had been teaching in the seminaries and in charge of the dioceses, since the 30s.  They corrupted the priests/bishops/seminarians first, in anticipation of V2, since they knew that they would need the clergy to "sell" the laity on the changes.  There's plenty of pictures i've seen from the 40s and 50s of liturgical "experimentation" going on (a lot in Germany and France) but these were not isolated events.  Just as the freemasons "test the waters" for political reasons, so they did so with the changes in the Church.

However the Church has had to grapple with heretics "both foreign and domestic" so to speak for all of its history. In the 30s things were certainly starting to get bad, like a small virus had infected the Church and was slowly infecting it - but we were still far better off than at many points before in Church history where the Church was facing heresies, schisms, anti-Popes, etc. It was only with Vatican II that the modernist virus brewing for a long time finally took over its "host cell"(the Catholic Church) so to speak. Before Vatican 2 we were dealing with a brewing crisis, but still a very much precedented one and a lot better off than at other times in Church history - it was only with John XXIII and Vatican 2 that the modernists took over and caused this unprecedented crisis that we've been grappling with these last 60 odd years. 

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There are a lot of good points here by everyone. It's nice to see so much agreement for a change!   :farmer:
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Nobody has mentioned the liberalizers by name, though. What about Pierre Teilhard de Chardin?
He circulated his one-page screeds of liberalism bilgewater-theology among seminarians and got away with it.
He was like a termite chewing or a cancer growing and nobody was the wiser.
He even faked archaeological discoveries to support evolution with his lies! He got away with that too!
His offense against the Faith had become so great and recognized as such before he died he was refused Christian burial.
But his worldly buddies found a way of getting that "rectified" before long -- maybe now Francis can canonize him.
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Or Annibale Bugnini?  Remember, he was the guy that Freemasons convinced Pope Pius XII to put into an office of power.
He survived the Pope, even though he started his dirty work during Pius XII's lifetime.
But after 1958, Bugnini really went into high gear.
Perhaps if Siri had been elected in 1962 he could have sent Bugnini packing but John XXIII wouldn't hear of it.
No, Bugnini went full bore after Fr. Feeney was marginalized, making great strides toward Vat.II.
Bugnini was buried behind a Freemason's grave stone.
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And don't forget:
Ives Congar, Karl Rahner, Edward Schillebeeckx, John Courtney Murray, and the infamous J. Ratzinger!
Fr. Feeney was 100% aware of their rotten ideology and did whatever he could to fight it, but he had been neutralized.
Thanks to Archbishop Cushing who was awarded the Red Hat for his accomplishment! Big happy times were ahead.
For the Liberals that is.
Every single one of these creeps were enemies of the thrice-defined dogma of the Faith.
And I'm not talking about BoD or BoB. THE dogma is EENS. 
Fr. Feeney had been trained as a Jesuit, and had personally known these creeps.
They were his contemporaries. 
Knowing them is why he left the Jesuits behind and founded the MICM -- Slaves of the Immaculate Heart of Mary.
(So often when told what MICM means, Newchurch nuns spout instinctively, "Oh, we don't like that!")
(Could that be what irritates the busybodies who sneer their lips when they say "Feeneyism" and "Feeneyites?")
(Or, is it the tried-and-true, knee-jerk erroneous presumption that BoD and BoB is what defines it/them?)
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We need to keep reminding ourselves of that fact, that BoB and BoD were never issues of contention for Fr. Feeney.
He was all about EENS and the missionary spirit in America.
Bad teaching and irrational misinterpretation of BoD and BoB were destroying both THE dogma and the spirit.
So they became something like an also-ran issue that got rare mention.
But rare mention is all enemies like Fr. Martin Stepanich or mealy-mouthed Michael Matt needed to get their dukes up.
(Let's all gang up on a great priest who defends the TLM like we PRETEND to do, and get some free publicity out of it!)
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It took a special genius in Fr. Feeney to point out the key problem with Liberals/Modernists.
He recognized that EENS was THE ISSUE that was being attacked, and because he did so he was virtually crucified.
By foes and would-be friends alike.
And what you see today is part of that. It's still happening.
Every time you denounce "Feeneyism" and "Feeneyites" as if those are foul words, you're contributing to the problem!
You make yourself part of the problem.
You make yourself into a dimwit like SeanJohnson -- the inane screw-loose twit, accomplishing nothing and proud of it.
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Fr. Feeney's genius will endure for all time, and perhaps some day it will be recognized.
If it is, the blindness, willful and/or otherwise, of the majority of the mainstream Church will be recognized too.
Their failure to see that he was right from the start is what is keeping the CRISIS IN THE CHURCH chugging along.
He was right from the start, seeing that the attack on EENS was the cornerstone of the Modernist agenda.
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In 1985 I picked up an old paperback of Walter M. Abbott's Vatican II docuмents and paged through it.
There were a few pencil notes written in the margins on a few pages here and there.
Most of them were one word or some cryptic combination of letters.
But there was one page with one note that really made a lot of sense.
It said, "salvation outside the church!" Including the exclamation point.
It was written in the margin, next to the underlined word, "subsists," found in LG 8 (Lumen Gentium 8 ).
The complete quote says,

At the risk of redundancy, let me repeat myself.
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I found a 20-year old copy of Vat.II Docuмents (paperback book) in the St. Charles Boromeo Catholic Church Book Store for 50 cents (Roger Cardinal Mahony is currently in retirement on the premises), in which some previous owner, perhaps taking notes at a lecture or sermon or class on Vat.II, had written, "Salvation Outside the Church" (in open denial of EENS, THE dogma of the Faith: NO Salvation Outside the Church), where the book's text had these words:

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When I saw that in that book, I got woke.
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I started looking for answers, and found Catholic Treasures in Monrovia, where Phyllis Shabow introduced me to their wonderful stock of otherwise forgotten publications. Among which was Pascendi Domenici Gregis and Fr. Lemius' A Catechism on Moderism.
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You actually need both books or you won't know which end is up.
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It was thorough CT that I also discovered many other things, including the St. Benedict Center in Richmond, NH.
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I had heard of Fr. Feeney but I had never met people who knew him personally and worked with him.
So this has been a 33-year journey for me.
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I had known there were tremendous problems in the Church but I had to STUDY Modernism (not just read about it).
And I finally found in Fr. Feeney someone who had seen the storm brewing before the thunder cracked open Vat.II.
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Pope St. Pius X and his saintly Secretary of State, Cardinal Merry Del Val were highly helpful as well.
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Just as Adolf Hitler had been building up his war chest since 1932, so too Modernists prepared for Vat.II 20 years ahead of it.
Sure, war didn't "break out" until Hitler invaded Poland, but without 8 years of preparation, it would have flopped.
So too the Crisis in the Church "broke out" with Vat.II, but the groundwork had been meticulously prepared.
They didn't even purchase the bleachers inside St. Peters, but rented them instead.
That way it would appear clear that Vat.II would not take very long. Or so they would lead you to believe.
(It was going to take just as long as it had to take to get Dignitatis Humanae passed --- errr, rammed through.)
It ended up taking 5 years, and they paid in rent enough to buy the stupid bleachers 3 times over.
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Whatever it takes -- no expense was spared!  The auto-demolition of the Church had to happen at all costs!

There are a lot of good points here by everyone. It's nice to see so much agreement for a change!   :farmer:

This, and thanks Neil and the others. It is refreshing.

Excellent thread gentlemen ! At times I despair that we can give our thoughts on differing matters without descending into polemics and personal pontificating. This post, as well as the Matthew Interview, has refreshed me. Thank you to the contributors so far.