This premise - that 'modern man' had somehow attained a stature or condition that required an aggiornamento or 'updating' of the Church's methods of communicating that which God has revealed to man - is demonstrably false.
Two assumptions are provided by the document styled Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World (Gaudium et spes) that betray this false premise. The first rejects the stability and essences of nature, requiring a new way of reasoning (philosophy) about the natural order:
Thus, the human race has passed from a rather static concept of reality to a more dynamic, evolutionary one. In consequence there has arisen a new series of problems, a series as numerous as can be, calling for efforts of analysis and synthesis. (GS #5)This is in effect, a concession to Darwin and Marx. It needs to be mentioned that the Church lacks competence to make such an observation as well - but aside from that, the premise is a rejection of the preconciliar philosophical system required by Pope St. Pius X to combat the super-error of Modernism.
The second assumption is based on the council's preoccupation with man:
According to the almost unanimous opinion of believers and unbelievers alike, all things on earth should be related to man as their center and crown. (GS #12)This anthropocentric focus is likewise a concession to modern philosophy which rejects external authority and objective reality. For the Church, only God can be the center and crown of reality. The concord with unbelieving man in this passage should immediately startle the Catholic; what can we have in common with unbelieving man but only the essences and accidents of nature, which for the unbeliever comprise the Marxist dialectical system?
Which brings us to the Council's most glaring failure of all: it refused to confront 'modern man's' most intimidating foe: global communism. Younger readers may not recall the world before 1990 when the USSR dominated half the planet in a bi-polar security environment. This communist world - erected on the false philosophies of materialism, evolution, and socialism - was deliberately avoided by Pope John XXIII as a subject for the council, even though it menaced the entire human race with its aims of global empire as it ruthlessly persecuted the Church.
In the little known clandestine agreement referred to as the Metz Pact, the Pope's envoy met in August 1962 with delegates from the Russian Orthodox Church to ensure the council would not condemn communism as a condition for the Russians to send observers. Although a petition was circulated by nearly 500 council Fathers to draft a statement condemning the scourge of communism, the petition was 'lost' and never reached the point of a vote.
Ostensibly this pact was struck to support the conciliar aim of ecumenical relations with the Eastern Churches; however, it appears to have set aside the supernatural method required by the Fatima apparitions in preference for mere human means of political rapprochement. And what better opportunity could there have been to consecrate Russia to Our Lady's Immaculate Heart in a public act of religion in concert with all the bishops in the world than at the Second Vatican Council? This general tendency of muting or denuding the supernatural order permeates the Council's sixteen constitutions, decrees, and declarations.
And that is why the Second Vatican Council failed. It was convened by men and for men; it jettisoned the perennial philosphical framework of St. Thomas Aquinas in favor personalist, subjectivist philosophy; and it refused to confront 'modern man's most pressing concern: communism. The very premise of the council was false; there is no 'modern man' dissociated from the man created by almighty God in the Garden of Eden; the truth of revelation is still external to man and must come to him from without, by the vehicle of preaching (Romans 10,13-15).
From Dietrich Von Hildebrand's Trojan Horse in the City of God:
