The John-Henry Westen Show - Reverence Became Taboo’ — Fr. Perricone Reveals How Everything Changed After Vatican II

00:00:00.000 And already in 68, we were battling John Henry because we knew as the mass goes, so the church goes.

00:00:09.680 Hello, my friends. We're very blessed today to have a guest who is a priest of 50 years this year.

00:00:15.780 And that means that he has lived through all of those years as a priest that really most of us

00:00:23.020 wonder what in the world happened to the church. And he's a priest who's lived that on the side

00:00:29.160 of tradition. He's a promoter of the traditional Latin Mass. He is a well-known author and

00:00:35.540 philosopher, and he has been there, done that, to most of the things, with most of the things

00:00:42.140 that we all question and wonder about today. Please welcome Fr. John Paragon. Fr. Paragon,

00:00:47.480 so good to be with you. Thank you for joining us.

00:00:48.940 Very good to be with you too, John Henry. I admire your work greatly.

00:00:53.440 Praise God. Let's begin as we always do with the sign of the cross, if you would lead us, Father.

00:00:59.160 spirit to sanctity. Amen. Amen. So if we could start, Father, this is the 50th anniversary of

00:01:07.420 your priesthood. You entered seminary, I believe I got my notes right, in 1968 of all tumultuous

00:01:14.560 years. And you were ordained in 1976. And so that's literally the period that Catholics of

00:01:25.960 my age and younger, it's sort of generation, Gen X and Gen Z, they're all going, what in the world

00:01:31.440 happened in those years? Tell us about that, if you would. And what do you think is the greatest

00:01:36.880 wound? What happened? Tell us what happened. Because this has been a big question of ours

00:01:40.780 now for many years as we've watched things unravel. Well, it was a double revolution that

00:01:46.640 was ignited. It was a civilizational revolution, as well as an ecclesiastical revolution.

00:01:55.960 And I guess the two were somewhat connected.

00:01:59.520 68 were the great rebellions in the United States,

00:02:03.420 or cultural rebellions, against literally the natural law,

00:02:06.920 against all that America represented,

00:02:09.240 riots in cities, in universities,

00:02:12.020 the overthrow of traditional education to a Catholic education.

00:02:17.980 And in the church as well.

00:02:19.800 The church had just completed the Second Vatican Council in 65,

00:02:23.320 But within a mere three years, we began to see a meltdown in the Roman Catholic Church itself.

00:02:34.340 It seemed as though Rome could not handle it.

00:02:38.120 And even though they tried to put some kind of stoppage on the various leaks that were occurring, the cracks, they were unsuccessful.

00:02:49.580 And that's what I was living through.

00:02:52.340 I could remember being on the campus of Seton Hall University where I entered in 68 and what was then called the Divinity School, which would have been the college seminary program where we would have taken intensive Latin and Greek.

00:03:07.440 And there was a campus revolution by radicals and they took over the president's building and various classrooms.

00:03:16.080 And I was horrified by this.

00:03:17.980 I could not believe that our culture was coming to this kind of a precipice.

00:03:26.240 On the other hand, I was entering classrooms where my class consisted of at least 50, 52 candidates for the priesthood in 68, all born in America, by the way.

00:03:40.140 And I already saw then that there was a split in half.

00:03:46.420 those Catholic seminarians who truly wanted to embrace the church as she had been for

00:03:52.580 1,500 years, and the others who thought they were on a cusp of a whole new idea of the Catholic

00:03:59.260 church. And that was principally understood through the mass. That became the weapon.

00:04:09.180 my side as it were recognized that we needed the traditional mass in 68 it had not completely

00:04:17.260 changed yet and uh but already experimentation was going awry throughout the entire church

00:04:26.740 especially in america and the other half of my class wanted to go out on that new territory

00:04:32.760 and already in 68 we were battling John Henry because we knew as the mass goes so the church

00:04:40.880 goes wait father did they look different did they could you distinguish who they were like

00:04:50.220 were they of different ages were they you said they're all Americans so they're not different

00:04:54.600 cultures per se so was there any distinguishing feature that you could tell did they come from

00:04:59.140 small families or amongst not amongst seminarians john henry amongst priests yes uh priests

00:05:05.580 recognized at least the ones who were then in charge of the seminary that symbols were an

00:05:10.880 extremely powerful force in indicating rebellion and so if you looked at the priests on the campus

00:05:19.200 of seton hall especially the ones who were in charge of our formation uh the ones who had

00:05:24.520 thrown away their cassocks, were making a profound statement, and they knew they were.

00:05:32.440 Because the garment of the cassock represented the sacrificial priesthood, the sacramental

00:05:37.900 priesthood, the priesthood that had been understood by the church for 2,000 years.

00:05:46.500 The abandonment of that garment of the cassock represented a cleavage, and they knew that.

00:05:52.620 And so you could find the priests who were not wearing the cassock, and they were wearing this new invention called the tab collar, which, like the culture, was easily removed, very disposable, almost part-time.

00:06:08.540 All those things were being communicated, and there was the division.

00:06:13.540 So that's how we could see it. We could see it in the manner in which priests were celebrating Mass, even though the changes had not gone full circle in 1970. There was the deliberate insertion of a casualness, of hoping that what would be communicated was a conversational, be comfortable style.

00:06:37.160 um reverence became taboo reverence at at the holy sacrifice of the best became something that

00:06:46.940 had to be at all costs avoided again because the the the the left of the church recognized the

00:06:56.120 potency of symbols all of a sudden the traditional masses the traditional vestments were discarded

00:07:02.460 and we all wondered why cloth of gold and bejeweled chalices were no longer to be seen

00:07:10.880 well this is part of a carefully constructed program because these symbols are the tip of

00:07:18.340 the spear john henry and and so we recognized that if we were to stand for the true faith

00:07:25.540 the faith of 2000 years and half my class was uh there were going to be many fronts upon we

00:07:31.640 which we were fighting. There was, of course, the intellectual, theological, philosophical front.

00:07:38.380 But nothing would be more important to Roman Catholics in the pews than the front of the

00:07:43.960 holy sacrifice of the mass, because this is truly where the whole faith, the whole creed,

00:07:51.040 2,000 years of the church's revealed message meets the eyes and the mind of ordinary Catholics.

00:07:59.280 We recognize that this is where the war would take place.

00:08:03.080 So that's what I found in 68.

00:08:06.140 And I vowed that I would fight till my last breath for the church that I loved.

00:08:14.720 And I did that joyfully.

00:08:16.040 And I would gather up seminarians and doing that with me.

00:08:19.440 And there was great acrimony and great division.

00:08:23.540 By the time we had entered the major seminary, and that would have been in 1970,

00:08:29.280 The whole new paradigm that the modernists wanted to establish was firmly entrenched.

00:08:39.040 What we found in the major seminary was what most of the professors who really no longer

00:08:46.080 believed in the millennial message of Mother Church, and they were accepting and embracing

00:08:54.660 a whole new open-ended paradigm which to them john the genius of it would be that it would

00:09:02.500 always be changing because man's nature was always changing because man had to constantly be

00:09:09.080 adapted to the times in which he found himself now that kind of thinking had been condemned

00:09:15.220 by St. Pope Pius X in Paschendi,

00:09:19.900 before him by Blessed Pius IX

00:09:24.380 in the syllabus of errors,

00:09:26.580 before him many times.

00:09:28.820 Leo XIII had condemned that attitude.

00:09:32.300 But here we saw it right before us,

00:09:35.700 again in the classroom,

00:09:37.200 but most sharply and most potently

00:09:41.000 in the chapel, the seminarian's chapel.

00:09:45.220 where it became literally no longer the sanctuary,

00:09:49.300 the place where the thrice-holy God lived.

00:09:52.200 It became a stage for theatrics.

00:09:56.340 And along with that were many of the distortions

00:10:02.480 that in many different levels of the church's life

00:10:07.280 and the life of a seminarian that were deplorable.

00:10:11.340 and we had to endure that and we did and many of us fought it and were disciplined for fighting it

00:10:24.480 as i mentioned in other interviews it almost seemed as though those who are in charge of

00:10:31.860 the formation of seminarians and on the cusp of this new modernist revolution wanted to borrow

00:10:38.340 much from communism and what i think they borrowed war if you are at odds with the authority figures

00:10:48.820 number one it must mean that you are mentally unbalanced and so therefore that has to be

00:10:56.180 treated by doctors and secondly that you have and this would of course be directed at traditional

00:11:04.720 seminaries you have a problem with authority but don't you boys love authority

00:11:09.700 so you see the turning of the tables constantly so for six years we lived in that kind of chaos

00:11:20.360 but i and many of my classmates decided we would fight on no matter how hard they wanted us to

00:11:30.840 stop. But by the time we were ordained in 76, the revolution had widened so much that we were in a

00:11:42.340 distinct minority fighting for our spiritual lives. And it did seem in 76 to be the church's

00:11:51.460 darkest time in this post-conciliate period. And you had such enormities, such crazy experiments

00:11:59.060 his call to action and what did the great cardinal i say that comically the great cardinal

00:12:06.620 the seamless garment and there was a suppression of a catholic doctrine and moral doctrine every

00:12:13.940 single level um and and they almost reached a great amount of success except for the few

00:12:22.320 seminarians being ordained uh who recognized what the true faith was and no matter what

00:12:29.720 they had to maintain this even though they were situated in parishes which had gone off

00:12:36.880 the tracks literally um but they were as i was vowed to to resist this no matter what the

00:12:46.720 suffering would be so it was truly a 1917 communist revolution and they wanted to discard

00:12:57.120 everything i when i went into my uh as a deacon we were assigned to go into parishes for a year

00:13:04.560 so theological education would end because they thought that praxis you see this is the

00:13:10.360 communism praxis was more important and for those who were intransigent such as myself

00:13:15.820 We were sent to very avant-garde parishes, where they imagined they would rework us, if possible, or jettison us.

00:13:27.140 And I came to that parish on my first day.

00:13:30.660 I walked down to the dinner table, where it just so happened that three professors from the seminary were assigned for Sunday Mass.

00:13:39.060 That's how professors would do it, through regular curates.

00:13:43.580 and i walked down to the dining room in my cassock a silence a dead silence came over the room

00:13:52.000 and they stared at me and it was very unsettling for the entire meal very uncomfortable and then

00:13:59.860 i was pulled aside by the uh priest at the parish who would be in charge of my reformation

00:14:06.740 and he said uh you wore that that the cassock and we don't wear cassocks anymore certainly not in

00:14:15.280 this place i said well i intend to continue to wear it he said well then you'll get into a certain

00:14:20.540 amount of trouble he said because that's not the direction the church is going and i said no i

00:14:27.160 shall wear the cassock every single day well it was my declaration of war and i recognized there

00:14:34.600 would be consequences for it i never thought one of the consequences would be that they would try

00:14:40.580 to stop me from being ordained they did try and with god's help it did not succeed it was an ugly

00:14:49.860 time living in a seminary was like living in the stalin's gulags and certain parishes were like 0.52

00:14:56.780 that as well by 1976 the revolution was in full gallop everywhere we looked and again 1976 would

00:15:10.520 be a year that much of your audience uh does not remember because they were not even born

00:15:17.300 but that's how deep deep of the roots go of course the roots of what we are now seeing today

00:15:23.620 john henry go back even farther i mentioned saint pope pius x one of my great patrons

00:15:28.820 this is already percolating in the late 19th century what we're seeing today with synodal

00:15:36.400 listening and the the passage into the subjective and the hatred of objective truth all of that was

00:15:44.640 set down very clearly

00:15:45.880 in the writing of the modernists

00:15:49.080 Lavoisie, Sullivan

00:15:50.800 and

00:15:53.020 you see it in their writings

00:15:56.180 their writings were cited in

00:15:58.440 Pashendi, Tyrell

00:16:00.720 Tyrell and Lavoisie

00:16:02.740 excommunicated

00:16:03.840 but this became the Magna Carta now

00:16:06.720 of the left

00:16:08.880 Hello

00:16:09.800 I'm Frank Wright

00:16:11.780 I recently suffered

00:16:13.580 The distinct shock of being viewed by over 50 million people when Elon Musk and others shared my warning on the direction society is heading.

00:16:22.960 My work at LifeSide News is only possible because good people like you support our efforts to restore all things in Christ and thereby work for the salvation of as many souls as possible.

00:16:35.220 please consider sending your support at give.lifesitenews.com today so we can reach even

00:16:43.340 more souls with the truth. Thank you. God bless you all. The incredible speed, Father. You had

00:16:50.840 mentioned that in 68 it was sort of starting, but by 70 it was already entrenched. That's pretty

00:17:00.380 darn quick like to to revolutionize the church like overnight the speed is remarkable to this

00:17:06.200 day john henry speaking to you uh the the speed still astonishes me well that had been one thing 0.97

00:17:14.120 john henry that it was very well organized for many many decades before the beginning of of the

00:17:23.900 convocation of the council in 62. And it was. If we do the research, we'll see that it was

00:17:30.400 percolating in modernism in the late 19th century. It was full-blown on the pontificate of St. Pope

00:17:37.040 Pius. He suppressed it. But you see, these were very, very clever people, including many European

00:17:43.420 bishops, and they quietly went underground. If you read the history of the period, John,

00:17:49.360 And you'll realize that they saw they could not publish books openly anymore under the title of modernism, because they wanted to continue to remain active.

00:17:58.400 And so they exchanged notes to each other by going to universities and seminaries.

00:18:05.000 And this is what we should be doing.

00:18:06.300 And so Louvain, which was a citadel of St. Thomas Aquinas in the first years of the 20th century, by 1920 was infested with modernism and a hatred of St. Thomas Aquinas.

00:18:26.880 1920, John Henry. 1920.

00:18:30.320 and once we remove the fortress which is the thinking of saint thomas aquinas the common doctor

00:18:37.400 then the enemies can rush in and that was uppermost in their mind i've written several articles on

00:18:44.100 this and they knew they had to topple saint thomas aquinas and they indeed did by 1970 when i entered

00:18:54.440 major seminary, St. Thomas Aquinas was not taught at all, except as an occasional footnote,

00:19:01.200 because they recognized he was the fortress that maintained the solidity of the Catholic faith. They

00:19:06.300 had to get rid of that. And even though the Second Vatican Council in the document on priesthood

00:19:14.600 gave a passing nod to St. Thomas Aquinas, the common doctor, it was simply window decoration.

00:19:24.440 One of the things that you talked about in your book, Torches Against the Abyss, was the spiritual collapse of our times. If you look at it today, what do you see as the central abyss we're sort of facing right now?

00:19:42.660 I mean what comes to mind for me and what's really incredible to me also started in the 60s 1.00

00:19:48.080 there was hints of it there but the church seems to be moving in the direction of homosexuality 0.88

00:19:55.060 in the biggest way it's astounding there seems to be like noises oh the German bishops have 0.70

00:20:01.240 gone too far and then the church seems to sort of catch up to them they seem to be the spear

00:20:05.740 the the tip of the spear and then it's followed even though there's some light criticism of them

00:20:11.120 But then, so, something I see, but I'd love to hear your take.

00:20:15.740 Well, the secret being laid in the seminary in 1970 already, that was rampant.

00:20:23.880 And we see someone like Father Enrique Rueda in 1983, John Henry, wrote a book, you might

00:20:31.240 know it, and read it, The Homosexual Network, 1983.

00:20:36.480 Well, anyone who had been in the seminary recognized that what Fr. Reda was talking about was aptly so. 0.99

00:20:44.160 The book was about 900 pages, filled with statistics and tables.

00:20:49.680 It was not merely an emotional harangue.

00:20:53.540 We saw this, and it was inevitable.

00:20:58.140 Because in the moral theology classrooms and in Roman self, the Gorgorionum,

00:21:03.200 they were teaching that the church's morality for 2,000 years was pretty much a straitjacket. 0.73

00:21:09.820 And if man were to follow the Ranaean scheme, that man must simply be himself, he must be

00:21:17.980 self-realized. This is the glory of God, a self-realized man who is not restricted by

00:21:23.640 anything. Well, you just follow that sequentially. What is it going to lead to? It's going to lead

00:21:30.780 to anyone simply doing whatever it is they want to do. And by being fully alive, then I'm close

00:21:38.700 to God. It really is a deification of man. So that does not surprise me. Now, my goodness,

00:21:48.080 we have Joseph Bernardine at his funeral. And when did he die? I'm going to get this wrong,

00:21:54.900 1989 or so, you can correct me. Catholics were a little bit surprised then, 0.99

00:22:00.400 because this had not reached a full pitch yet, that he had designated in his will that at his

00:22:07.920 funeral service, the evening before his funeral mass, he wanted the Chicago Gay Men's Choir to

00:22:15.620 do the singing. Now, I don't know if anyone thought that strange. I did. Well, strange in

00:22:22.220 the sense, oh my goodness, it's really coming to the surface much more quickly than I ever thought.

00:22:27.280 But it was still sequestered because I think those who ought to have known better recognize that introducing this so quickly might alarm Catholics who weren't prepared for it and their plans might be somehow disturbed or thwarted.

00:22:46.780 They waited and waited, but already the seeds were there. 0.57

00:22:53.200 And so anyone as old as I are not surprised by this ubiquitousness of that problem.

00:23:05.480 It just follows the lines that were being written in moral theology already in the late 50s.

00:23:13.740 Look at someone like Father Charles Curran, John Henry, who was teaching at the University of America.

00:23:18.900 who in 1968 led the rebellion against the church's teaching on artificial contraception,

00:23:25.420 restated by Omane Vitae.

00:23:27.960 And he had written in 1961 a book called

00:23:32.600 Absolutes in Moral Theology?

00:23:38.240 And what did that mean, John Henry,

00:23:40.720 that the church's idea of the Ten Commandments was now discredited?

00:23:47.220 We had a man come of age, and he could no longer be suppressed by something as fascistic as a

00:23:56.760 decalogue. And we see there are prominent European cardinals who are making that case today, John

00:24:04.560 Henry, regarding the gay agenda, that we have to relook at this. We are living in a different time,

00:24:13.820 And these particular biblical passages have not been properly interpreted by contemporary Biblical exegesis, and we go on and on and on.

00:24:25.080 It's not surprising.

00:24:27.560 But moreover, I think deeply, John Henry, there is this notion that when one turns against God and revealed religion, one makes oneself God.

00:24:39.560 And we no longer believe in a God.

00:24:45.860 We no longer believe in God's design, do we?

00:24:49.700 And all creation is the design of Almighty God.

00:24:53.340 But if I am now the designer, then there is no design to which I have to be conformed,

00:25:01.840 whether it be the design of male and female or the design of the immoral law.

00:25:08.440 That no longer binds me. All that binds me is this freewheeling spirit of truly being myself. That's the abyss, John Henry. That's the abyss all of civilization is on the precipice of. And it is not going to end well.

00:25:31.000 You know, Father, when you raised the thing about Cardinal Bernard, and I've obviously forgotten lots more than...

00:25:40.820 You're too young to remember it, John.

00:25:42.680 Well, no, it was only 1996. And in fact, it was the year before...

00:25:46.180 I'm way off on the date.

00:25:48.140 Yeah, but it was interesting. I just looked it up here.

00:25:51.620 November 14th, 1996. So we're actually coming upon the 20th anniversary of his passing.

00:25:58.820 And what's interesting to me about that is that I recall, so Pope Leo, while Cardinal, praised Cardinal Bernardin in, especially the seamless garment philosophy.

00:26:19.080 uh and i that totally escaped me that this bernardine was so apart even from the the

00:26:29.520 seamless garment stuff which was horrific particularly for those of us in the pro-life

00:26:33.500 movement but uh just having that vision that he had asked and in 1996 it's not cool yet

00:26:44.500 for Catholic Cardinals

00:26:46.720 to ask for the gay men's choir 0.97

00:26:48.340 to sing at their funeral. 0.89

00:26:51.200 No, no.

00:26:52.580 It's disappointing to hear that Pope Leo

00:26:54.940 prays in that way.

00:26:57.580 But life is full of disappointments, isn't it?

00:26:59.880 Stunning.

00:27:00.720 Absolutely stunning.

00:27:05.140 Friends, on September 24th

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The John-Henry Westen Show - June 12, 2026

Reverence Became Taboo’ — Fr. Perricone Reveals How Everything Changed After Vatican II

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