For almost two decades this caused continuous tension between clergy and some laity, as many of the latter resisted changes which they found at best unnecessary, often outright objectionable. Clergy pushed those changes — in liturgy, in catechetics, in pastoral practice, and many other things — by using their priestly authority. The greatest irony of the post-conciliar period was the way in which traditional ideas of authority were used to undermine traditional ideas of authority.

The greatest crisis of the post-conciliar Church, and the root of all the other crises, was that of the priestly vocation, a crisis which began before the Council was scarcely over. It was the root crisis because priests were the leaders of the Church at the local level, so that their crisis became everyone’s crisis, and because the priestly crisis was public and dramatic, so that it became a concentrated paradigm for the crisis of the whole Church. Lay people in a way began to imitate their priests in crises of faith (and of vocation, especially marriage) analogous to those of the clergy. Put another way, the faith began to seem less and less credible to lay people as it seemed to have lost credibility among their anointed spiritual leaders.

Of all the destruction which has occurred in the post-conciliar Church none has been so crucial as the massive defection of priests from the priestly life. Many of those departures were deliberately public and dramatic, the defecting priest hurling accusations at Holy Mother Church. But quiet departures were often even more disconcerting for the laity, among whom it became commonplace to say, "He was the last one I would have expected." In their more paranoid moments lay people might wonder if priests in general had received some confidential information that the teachings of the Church were false and were merely going through the motions while deciding whether to resign their offices.

Nor were those priests who chose to remain necessarily pillars of loyalty. Many used their offices to undermine cherished traditional beliefs, even to mount a continuing attack on ecclesiastical authority. If the sight of priests abandoning their vocations wholesale was disconcerting, it was perhaps even more disconcerting to see priests in good standing appearing to function as determined adversaries of the Church’s teachings.

There are numerous theories as to why this happened, most of which posit that, despite appearances, priestly life before the Council must already have been deeply flawed, hence rapidly fell apart. But that theory is erroneous.

A gloomy fact about clerical life is that, with the possible exception of the very early centuries, there was no time in the Church’s history when such life was idyllic. The Middle Ages had their share of misbehaving priests, and the ordinary parish clergy were uneducated and part of a peasant culture which was in some ways still pagan. The Counter-Reformation made strenuous efforts to improve the state of the clergy, not least through the establishment of that institution which ought to have been obvious but for some reason had not been — the seminary. Even despite these efforts, clerical scandals and various kinds of clerical incompetence long continued, amidst occasional saintly priests and many others of solid piety and zeal.

In the United States the period c. 1900-1960 can be considered a golden age of the priesthood, not merely in modern times but throughout all the Catholic centuries. (This golden age was not confined to America but existed in other countries as well.) While priests of that era certainly had their faults, by all measurable standards there was less ignorance, less immorality, less neglect of duty, and less disobedience than at almost any time in the history of the Church. More positively, priests of that era were generally pious and zealous, and those who were not at least had to pretend to be.

A seventeenth-century Anglican spiritual writer said, "Good priests are like torches — a light to others, waste and destruction to themselves," and therein lies the explanation of the mystery of the clerical crisis.

In the pre-conciliar period the priestly vocation was always presented as sacrificial, albeit as a sacrifice which brought deeper and more satisfying rewards. Even though there was no rhetoric about being "a man for others," vocation appeals always emphasized the spirit of self-denial expected of the priest, and many communities, such as cloistered monks and foreign missionaries, attracted vocations by offering almost nothing but a life of self-sacrifice.

Towards the end of the Council this emphasis suddenly changed. Nothing in the conciliar documents themselves supported this change, but through a variety of means Catholics were persuaded that the real message of the Council was one of release — Catholics were now being allowed to do things they were formerly not allowed to do (eat meat on Friday). Struggling to make sense of subtle and difficult theological ideas emanating from Rome, it was easy to subsume all of them under the notion that the Church was now in effect telling its people to cease being sacrificial and to concentrate instead on fulfilling themselves.

This sudden and profound reversal especially affected those in the Church who were the most devout and sacrificial, the most deeply committed to traditional ways. Thus nuns were affected even more acutely than priests, to the point where traditional religious life for women all but disappeared, and many nuns seemed to be on fire not with zeal but with uncontrollable rage against the Church which had nourished them. Priests were affected only somewhat less.

Although the full story is complex, the processes by which it occurred are fairly clear. At the end of the Council a few strategically placed individuals — certified "experts" of various kinds — already had in mind a program for the transformation of clerical and religious life, based on certain theories of psychological well-being and wholly opposed to the traditional ideal of self-sacrifice. These authorities were quickly commissioned by dioceses and religious orders to explain the meaning of renewal, and often their agenda and its catastrophic affects were not recognized until it was too late.

Priests went almost overnight from being moral authorities to being exemplars and apostles of moral confusion, possessed of no more wisdom than anyone else. Rather than the priest as someone who guided the faithful along the narrow path, he became someone who merely supported the laity in the laity’s own confused and morally weak condition. Priests came to be praised above all for their "pastoral" and "compassionate" spirits, which in practice usually meant being willing to tolerate, even to promote, almost any amount of deviation from Catholic teaching, all for the sake of an elusive "freedom" which was said to be the individual’s highest good.

Ironically, such perverted freedom, as Christianity has always taught, never brings happiness but always the reverse. The frightening rage which now affects some priests and nuns is explicable in terms of the "god that failed." They yearned for authoritative guidance even as they proclaimed otherwise, and they bitterly resent a Church which no longer provides the moral support they once took for granted.

Thus in a sense priests and nuns after the Council were victims of a process they did not really understand, but they were not purely passive victims. The apostles of self-fulfillment understood very well how fragile the spirit of self-sacrifice usually is, how easy it is to persuade people that by their sacrifices they have merely allowed themselves to be used by others, that they have been naive fools. Once such feelings were aroused, they became almost uncontrollable, virtual prairie fires of the spirit which still burn decades after they were first ignited.

Thus did it happen that one of the best generations of clergy and religious in the entire history of the Church was subverted.

For two decades after the Council the tension in the Church was essentially between conservative, or at least cautious, lay people on one side and innovative clergy on the other, the two in conflict not only over particular issues but approaching life itself from two almost diametrically opposite visions of reality, on the one side a sense of the obligation to submit to the transcendent divine will, on the other a belief that religion is merely an enterprise of personal searching.

But the Church is still highly clerical, as it must be, and eventually most lay resistance was worn down and exists today only in somewhat marginalized pockets. The average parish is now permeated by a largely unthinking religious liberalism which is all the more entrenched for not even being perceived as controversial, a condition brought about almost entirely by clergy and religious.

Sometime in the 1980’s observers began to notice that a more conservative type of priest was beginning to emerge from the seminaries, a trend which seems to get steadily stronger. The reasons for this are rather obvious. Given the culture’s animus against chastity, heterosexual young men are likely to embrace the priestly life only if they accept the ideal of redemptive sacrifice, only if their vision of the priesthood is not that of a therapist or a social reformer but of a witness to the King dom which is yet to come.

In addition, the younger generation of priests has had the experience of seeing at first hand the destruction wrought by the crisis of the priesthood which followed the Council. While many older priests continue to insist that everything which has happened since 1965 is true renewal, as they continue to rail against the forces of orthodoxy, younger men can see with a clear eye the destruction done in renewal’s name and that the path to a healthy and vibrant Church lies in a quite different direction.

Nothing in the contemporary Church is sadder, and at the same time more frightening, than the sight of priest and nuns in their fifties and sixties, some even in their seventies and eighties, for whom the Church is an evil stepmother whom they blame for blighting their lives. Leftists of thirty years ago used to talk about a "generation gap" between conservative older people and radical younger people. But in the priestly ranks this alignment is now occurring along the opposite lines.

The sadness caused by the spectacle of permanently estranged older clergy is the realization of how false their memories are. They did not feel, as they now recall that they did, demoralized and oppressed in the 1950’s. On the contrary many of them were filled with genuine idealism. The Church which they now hate was the Church which nourished them and offered them a vocation which they found compelling.

The clergy whose lives now seem blighted, and who kick back almost compulsively against all signs of renewed orthodoxy, were mostly victims of a process they did not begin to understand, swept along by cultural forces they had in no way anticipated. Had both the Church and the larger culture not experienced "the Sixties", most of these priests and religious would still be leading productive lives as representatives of a spiritual reality much larger than themselves.

But this is the generation of priests which now controls many dioceses and most religious orders, and they are often ruthless. Having successfully rebelled thirty years ago, having destroyed the traditional system of authority, they now often employ tactics of control and intimidation which pre-conciliar religious superiors, carefully following the rules, would never have dreamed of using. In all but a few blessed places, orthodox younger clergy now have to endure varying degrees of suffering until the day comes, if it does, when they are finally in a position to shape the direction of their communities.

So also orthodox young priests now beginning to live their vocations encounter a laity which has largely succumbed to the ideal of self-fulfillment and is in no mood to listen to hard sayings. Hence the zealous young priest must be prepared to suffer yet again if he is determined to do his duty.

In certain ways this is similar to the conditions of the Counter-Reformation, when authentic reform was not achieved through older religious orders but through the founding of new ones, not through older clergy whose memories stretched back before the emergence of Protestantism, many of whom were confused, passive, and locked into patterns of immoral living. Often reform was effected by religious orders in the face of the indifference or even hostility of the local bishop. It fell to an entirely new generation of priests to bring about genuine reform.

Perhaps only now, more than three decades after the Council, is the conciliar promise of priestly renewal finally beginning.