The objective of the modernist has always been to force ‘God’ into a relative obscurity in order to make more room for the autonomy of man. In order to do so it is necessary for the modernist to utterly reject the traditional understanding of the Incarnation, whereby God consummated His love and revelation of Himself when He “became flesh,” and suffered “even to the death of the Cross.” (Jn. 1:14; Phil. 2:8)

Such an unspeakable intimacy on the part of God requires nothing less than the most sublime adoration, thanksgiving and sacrifice on the part of the sinner; and this does not amount to “good news” for those who prefer to worship only the self. But the modernist / progressive does not feel himself to be a sinner in the biblical sense. The only real guilt he will allow is political guilt and the guilt which he imposes on all who refuse the globalist modernist agenda in all its incalculable manifestations. Thus the “Progressive” prefers not to speak of “sinners” at all. He would rather speak of human frailty in all its unmatchable creativity.

It only stands to reason, then, that the modernist must reject not only the mystery of the Incarnation, but also the progressive revelation of the Old Testament which led up to it, wherein God had already showed Himself to be the One Who made heaven and earth. (Ps. 95:5)

From the very first pages of Genesis, the God of the Old Testament, in truth, demythologized the ancient world, destroying the ancient “gods” who were “lies” and “vanity” (Jer. 16:19-20) and, indeed, nothing (Acts 14:14; 17:23); He put an end to the horrors related in pagan mythology which daily translated into the most cruel barbarism and even human sacrifice.

For the modernist, however, this God must be rejected, reinterpreted, relegated to the level of a mere curiosity in the history of religions precisely because He has indeed spoken, declaring what is good and what is evil, for the sake of His elect.

It is this latter prerogative of the One true God which particularly galls the modernist. A God Who would tell mankind what is right and what is wrong impinges on the autonomy of man to determine himself and to create his own values. The modernist prefers a more utilitarian approach to ethics.

In the 1960’s the ethicist and philosopher of eugenics, Joseph Fletcher, made a large splash by advocating what he referred to as “Situation Ethics,” in which the situation, and not any particular act in itself, would determine its ethical quality. Adultery, according to Fletcher, may be wrong in some situations but not necessarily in all.

The late “Catholic” theologian Charles Curran then rehashed Fletcher’s Situation Ethics for a Catholic audience. It would be fair to say that Fletcher’s assault on moral absolutes, in which he showed himself to be the devotee of both Kant and Hegel, won the day and that the repercussions have ever since reverberated throughout the entire western world and indeed beyond. As the late professor Alan Bloom stated in an insightful and penetrating analysis of the mediocrity which reigns in modem academia:

“There is only one thing a professor can be absolutely certain of: almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative. If this belief is put to the test, one can count on the students’ reaction: they will be uncomprehending. That anyone should regard the proposition as not self-evident astonishes them, as though he were calling into question 2 + 2 = 4…. They are unified only in their relativism and in their allegiance to equality. And the two are related in a moral intention…. The danger they have been taught to fear is not error but intolerance.” *

For Protestant theologians, the task of rejecting the Truth of Holy Scripture and applying their scissors and paste to revelation was a somewhat easier task than for Catholics. Having cut themselves off from Tradition, Protestants, armed with the dubious and doomed-from-the-start doctrine of Sola Scriptura, were able to carry the revolution toward autonomy to new heights based on these same revolutionary principles. Having liberated the Bible from the Church, the stage was now set to liberate the Christ from the Scriptures. And the task was completed with relative ease.

No longer burdened and saddled with the teachings of the Fathers, the Councils and the Popes, Protestants were now “free,” in true revolutionary style, to begin from ground zero and build a new world. This revolutionary principle is so all-consuming that, today, new “paradigms” are announced to replace “obsolete” ones and the restless revolutionary spirit is constantly mutating to spawn and destroy new worlds almost simultaneously.

Catholic modernists (an oxymoron to be sure), however, didn’t have it so easy. They could not simply attack the Tradition. That would only make them appear out-and-out Protestants (which they essentially were) and easier targets for disciplinary measures. If they were to succeed, they would have to go about it more carefully and with greater patience. Somehow they would have to appear friendly to the past, even as they plotted to subvert it and come out from under its controlling influence.

And by the time Vatican I commenced in the previous century, it had already become quite clear what their modus operandi would be in this regard. They would strive to overcome Tradition in the name of Tradition. By very selectively extracting certain passages from the Fathers, taking them completely out of context (e.g., “The seeds of truth can be found in all religions,” as one of the Fathers said), they would disingenuously extrapolate from these texts to support their particular goals. They would not so much attack Tradition as attempt, in typical Hegelian fashion, to transcend it. And by perverting and distorting to their own ends what Cardinal John Henry Newman wrote about the “development of dogma” in the last century, for example, they would seek to develop a new “process” theology, wherein dogma could change as man’s understanding and grasp of dogma would allegedly grow ever deeper!

This method of subversion was hardly noticed by many, so skillfully was it executed, and so Catholic was it made to sound. The Fathers of the First Vatican Council, however, were quick to condemn this theological rascality in unequivocal words:

“The doctrine of the Faith which God has revealed is not proposed like a theory of philosophy which is to be elaborated by the human understanding, but as a divine deposit delivered to the spouse of Christ to be faithfully guarded and infallibly declared…. That sense of the sacred dogmas is to be faithfully kept which Holy Mother Church has once declared, and is not to be departed from under the specious pretext of a more profound understanding.
— (Const. De Fid. Cath. C. iv.)

This was a smashing blow to modernism, for it went directly to its theological jugular:

“…the specious pretext of a deeper understanding….”

It is incredible when one considers, then, that despite the perspicuity of the First Vatican Council’s words, this very ploy — that of advocating a “deeper understanding” of dogma — was to become the virtual foundation-stone of the Conciliar Church which began with Vatican II. The modernists were eventually able to import these condemned notions wholesale, because 1.) the world called for it, 2.) because the Cardinals and Bishops were afraid of the disapprobation of the world’s press, and 3.) because too many others were sound asleep at their posts, having been lulled by deceitful reassurances and condescending referrals to the theological “experts” under whose special competence all would be looked after.

With John XXIII, the anti-modernist oath,
which explicitly stated that the defined sense and meanings of dogma could never change, was eliminated. Priests were no longer required to take an oath against modernism, which was, according to Pope St. Pius X, “the synthesis of all heresies” which ever attacked the Church. This alone speaks volumes and should have rung alarms all over the Catholic world. And when John XXIII told the Council Fathers that while dogmas do not change, our understanding of them must grow deeper and that the way we “express” the timeless dogmas can differ, it should have been evident to many more that it was not only the law of contradiction which was being subverted here potentially, but the very Bride of Christ!

It was incredible, and the stage was set, from then on, for others to abrogate and even subtly denounce the defined and ordinary teachings of earlier Popes for the first time in history. In the name of “development,” and “new wine bursting old wine skins,” new pentecosts and new advents were dangerously heralded. The
teachings of all previous Popes were said to be historically conditioned and thus limited in usefulness.

The Pope became the new principle of Catholic truth, a veritable oracle, as Catholic tradition and metaphysics were ousted. A new exclusive liturgy was cruelly imposed on the whole world suddenly, a new theology and catechesis likewise. All under the “specious pretext of a deeper understanding” of dogma.

Having abandoned theological and moral absolutes, and especially having abandoned the perennial philosophy of the Angelic Doctor, St. Thomas Aquinas, whom modernists exchanged for the likes Andrew Greeley, Rosemary Reuther, and Teilhard de Chardin, et al., the way to the promised land of relativism, theological and moral, was paved. If it were not so sad and pathetic, it would be funny to behold supposedly conservative theologians extolling the likes of Henri de Lubac, censured by one Pope and given a Cardinal’s hat by another, who at the time of the Council wrote a book entitled Teilhard de Chardin: The Man and His Meaning***, with the imprimatur of Cardinal Terence Cooke, in which he attempts to straighten us all out and vouch for Teilhard’s orthodoxy, utilizing the classic modernist method of extracting texts from their contexts and inventing whirling neologisms to counter traditional biblical clarity.

Of course modernists from the beginning have understood the utility of planting seemingly orthodox statements in their heretical works, so that they can be hurled at traditional Catholics as needed. These carefully planted disclaimers are then nuanced out of existence to make room for the real agenda.

The iconoclastic modernist assault on the Church, from the beginning, was and remains essentially an assault on the Catholic and Biblical teachings on sin and redemption. Autonomous man would rather relate to some ethereal, obscure, cosmic essence, inextricably identified with created being, than to a personal God Who, as Maker of Heaven and earth, of all being, declares the Good and, conversely, forbids evil, and Who tells man to halt before sin or face his eternal undoing.

All bad theology is, at bottom, based on and stems from a desire for bad morality. “Men prefer darkness rather than the Light,” our Lord said. Some form of Pantheism is much more palatable to the modernist spirit because, if we are all God, or the gods, or manifestations of the Gaia principle, then surely we can “go with the flow” and not worry about our choices, except perhaps in terms of what is politically (read: revolutionarily) “responsible.”

Thus God is replaced by the cosmos.

Progressives aim to reduce all religion and theology to the essentially incommunicable. For in the New World, the New Theology is declared to be a kind of new sacrament, where only experience matters, not objective Truth and not the law of contradiction. Is it any wonder then that, almost immediately after the conclusion of the “New Pentecost” called the Second Vatican Council, Paul VI blessed the Catholic Charismatic movement, so much of which, like much of the New Theology, was imported largely from Protestantism?

John XXIII before him, just after opening the windows of the Church to the new spirit, had similarly blessed the Protestant Taize movement of Protestant monks as a paradigm of the forthcoming new “unity.” Is it any wonder then that the legacy of pope Francis seems, in the end, to have been, tragically, the even greater distancing of theology from that of his predecessors? After all, our experience of what it means to “be” Church today is so different from theirs, so very different, his new theologians say.

SH

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* Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind, Simon & Schuster, NY, 1987, p. 25

** The Pope in consequence is viewed by some Conservative apologists as  practically above the Deposit of Faith, preempting any serious need for him to consult Traditional Catholic teachings on any issue. Ironically, this was always the Protestant caricature of the Papacy.

*** Mentor – Omega Books, NY, 1964

**** The Gaia principle, championed by many New Agers, “deep” environmentalists and theologians, suggests that the earth is alive, divine, and that human beings amount to the earth reflecting on itself, the consciousness-aspect of the divine.

Cf Wolfgang Smith’s Cosmos and Transcendence

— Redemption from sin and spiritual death