Philip Trower's books are concerned mostly with what Bishop Erik Varden calls generation 1 in Vatican II history. Trower himself, like John O'Malley SJ and indeed the bulk of the Vatican II periti and Fathers, was born in the early part of the 20th century and was an adult spectator of the event.
His basic thesis is that the Enlightenment presented an alternate religion -- with Humanity as the new deity -- by which we are all somewhat affected. He notes that it has many features in common with Christianity, that it purports to rival Christianity though in a secular vein, and so it can be typed to some extent as a Christian heresy. This theory has a lot of explanatory value to me.
Nevertheless, the title ‘religion’ can, I believe, be justified in so far as the teachings we are considering provide their own particular explanation of the meaning and purpose of human life and our final destiny as a race; in so far as they present those teachings as the sole path to happiness for everybody; and in so far as they are spread by a high proportion of their followers with missionary zeal. .....
All this was recognised by Blessed Paul VI in his closing speech at the Second Vatican Council. “At the Council, he said, the religion of God made man had encountered the religion of man aspiring to be God. ... He was referring to the fact that much of the Council’s work was directed towards showing how far the doctrines of the enlightenment are or are not compatible with Catholic belief.
But in the Council, some theologians saw a chance to merge the Church with the prevailing secular "religion", which they thought of as more sophisticated and ultimately more true than the philosophical, theological, and liturgical traditions of the Church. The attempt had been going on in different forms all throughout the long 19th century (and perhaps before that, perhaps back to the Fall) but the Council opened up an opportunity for previously stymied religious currents to obtain a kind of media-based magisterium.
The hermeneutical "types" that Eduardo Echeverria mentions derive from this first generation -- basically Concilium, Communio, and SSPX back then, though the SSPX had a shadow status after 1975 when it was suppressed.
But now almost all those original post-conciliar actors and observers are gone. (A surprising number of them lived close to their centenary year -- going to their final repose well past the turn of the millenium). The bulk of them were priests and religious. So the first generation had a thorough pre-conciliar formation as well as worldwide communication lines already set up.
In the second generation, trying to carry on the agenda, were a surprising number of the laity. This is a complex phenomenon -- Catholic theological studies opened up to the laity (and are now often taught by lay Catholics); also, laity became employees of Catholic school and diocesan bureaucracies, and there were a lot of grassroots Catholic projects to transmit and preserve orthodoxy in the tumultuous first couple of decades. Periodicals and coalitions were founded. The progressive side tended to control the institutional arms of the Church -- at least here in the US -- I don't know how it played out in other countries. The "communio" type lay Catholics, not theoretically opposed to the Council or its documents but horrified by its aftereffects, tended to have a very few clerical allies but little to no institutional support except from Rome, which was at more of a distance in pre-internet days.
This is where Andrew Likoudis's more journalistic "types" come in. His classification is descriptive of the current situation where the first generation is gone, the second generation is still around and active, but there is also an adult third generation. A lot of internet heat seems to come from the rival members of this generation, though older "conservatives" as they are called with mixed applicability still have a voice.
Most academic theologians could probably still be classified by "communio" and "concilium" influences (though Thomism is a factor as well) and when cardinals speak out you can usually identify them by one of these camps, but the general active laity, confronted with the space junk in Tracy Rowland's metaphor, often is more interested in picking it up and seeing how it can be used here and now, than inquiring which ship it came from.
In this sorting endeavor (again talking mostly about non-professional-academic laity) a traditionalist side and a neo-progressive side have both become fairly vibrant. "Neo-progressive" isn't quite the right word here -- sometimes they are called Pope Francis Catholics. Maybe "social justice Catholics"? Michael Hanby calls them Sodalitium Franciscanum, but I don't think he is talking about all the members of this category in his portrayal, just the more vituperative ones.
This third generation has inherited the post-conciliar rupture but as Bishop Varden says, it signifies different things to them than it did to earlier generations. It will be interesting to see where it goes, especially since at the same time, Enlightenment secularism seems to have taken off its mask and become divided between managerial global centralism and polemical, radical identity politics. These oddly seem to intertwine and even connect to radical Islam.
In the meantime the Church is still the Barque, stormy as its current passage may be.
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