(LifeSiteNews) — Judge Andrew Napolitano delighted the audience gathered to celebrate Fr. John Anthony Perricone’s 50 years as a priest when he called Vatican II “dangerous and pernicious” and “nonsense” while extolling the Traditional Latin Mass.
Napolitano also unapologetically referred to Pope Leo XIV as “Pope Francis II.”
The former judge and Fox News personality began by recounting the time that he addressed a massive gathering of New Jersey Right to Life at which the late Archbishop John Myers was also a speaker.
“In the early days of the papacy of Benedict XVI, he was literally on his way to New York on his papal visit. I said, ‘There’s a man in white flying over the ocean, and he’s coming here to begin the dismantling of the most dangerous and pernicious gathering in the second half of the 20th century,” said Napolitano.
Archbishop John Myers asked, ‘Are you talking about the Democratic National Convention?’”
“No Archbishop, I’m talking about Vatican II,” thundered the judge.
“That place went crazy!” he enthusiastically recounted. “People stood on their chairs and yelled and screamed and rushed the stage.”
“When I finished I sat down next to the archbishop and he said, “Well Andrew, there goes my red hat!’” said Napolitano, buckling over with laughter.
Napolitano later explained, “I’m still upset with Vatican II, even though I was only 12 years old when this nonsense happened.”
He asserted that the Council represented a paradigm shift in human thinking and understanding. “It stands for the proposition that the traditional understanding of truth should shift with the times, that moral clarity comes from experience rather than from reason and revelation.”
“Truth isn’t unique to the individual. Truth is universal,” he declared. “You wouldn’t know that in today’s Church unless you go to a Mass by Father John Perricone.”
Napolitano said that the Traditional Latin Mass that he attends is like “another religion” compared to the “American watered-down Protestantized Mass.”
“Contrary to Vatican II contemporary accolades, it is reason and revelation and not human experience that animates us. You wouldn’t know that if you listen to Cardinal Fernández as recently as last week. In Cardinal Fernández’s world, anything goes! Any sexual activity goes! Forget about ‘all sex must be within marriage and open to the transmission of life.’”
“Pope Francis II hasn’t said a word about it,” said the judge.
“He calls himself Leo XIV but he’s really Francis II,” he reemphasized. “We all know that.”
“Where would we be without the Traditional Latin Mass?” he asked. “All of the truths that were held sacred by every canonized saint in the past 400 years were manifested in the liturgy of the same Mass that Fr. John Anthony Perricone so magnificently said earlier today and says every day of the week.”
“You know, these characters from Vatican II even refuted Nulla Salus Extra Ecclesiam [‘outside the Church there is no salvation’] and they wrote a monstrosity called Nostra Aetate, a monstrosity that teaches that religions are equal. What are they, crazy?” Napolitano asked.
“Is Leo XIV going to wipe out his hero, Augustine, the essence of whose teaching was ‘there is no salvation outside the Church’?” he wondered. “This is what we confront today, but for the heroes wearing cassocks in this room, foremost among whom is our honoree tonight.”
“The wind will blow. The rains will fall. The sands will shift. Holy Mother Church will bend to suit the times, but Fr. John Anthony Perricone will stand like a rock,” he added.
“As Chesterton told us, there are an infinity of angles at which one falls, but only one at which one stands. That is Fr. John Anthony Perricone, standing athwart the rain and the wind and the sand and the bending of the Church. He is the bravest, the most articulate, and he teaches us all,” Napolitano said.