Contemporary Catholic civilization throughout the western world, and the Catholic peoples who benefited from it, fit into this second and truly pathetic category of the conquered. In our day, the vast majority of Catholics, clerics and laymen alike, consciously or unconsciously, fall on their knees daily only to commit religious and cultural suicide. They recite the tawdry slogans of their conquerors, beg instruction in their masters’ religion and customs, and burn incense before a host of “heroes” who are non-Catholic at best and vehement enemies of the Christian God and man at worst. Although the demoralization leading to this dreadful reality has been very long in preparation, it is only recently that we have seen such mass hara-kiri actually performed in public. This ignoble defeat, as T.S. Eliot lamented of the destruction of modern man as a whole, has been achieved “not with a bang, but a whimper”.

Second Vatican Council proved to be the tool—not the prime cause, but the chief tool—through which the conqueror imposed his marching orders upon the Mystical Body of Christ. Pope John XXIII’s Council ensured that Catholic personalists and their allies, taking advantage of the pluralist spirit sweeping the western world due to the victory of the United States in the Second World War---and the pressure employed to maintain it afterwards---could seize control of the powerful machinery of the Universal Church. Having done so, they then encouraged a Catholicism that “gave witness” to various vital energies. These ranged from Marxism to the final logical expressions of the moral and materialist visions of the Enlightenment, both Radical and Moderate, to Latin American Liberation Theology, and to Third World religions---in short, to anything “strong”, whose inevitable “convergence” in fulfillment of the “plan” of the Holy Spirit had to be prepared by men who believed themselves to possess a prophetic vision.

The result has been the greatest disaster for the spread of the corrective and transforming message of the Word in history. That message, the only truly different, vital, energetic force in human life, was the one force that these prophets of the Spirit would not permit to have further impact within a camp of the saints whose consciousness had been raised. They would not allow such an impact because it seriously could and must change man and society. Hence, the conquest of the Church and Catholics by the Grand Coalition of the Status Quo, its word merchants, and its program on behalf of “business as usual” demands of “nature as is” leading to the triumph of the strongest wills was prepared. Hence, the “spiraling downwards” of control of the Catholic world into ever more ideologically insane, libertine, or criminal hands was assured. And, sad to say, clergy and laity alike enthusiastically praised this disaster all the while that its dreadful consequences were painfully manifesting themselves.

Let me hasten to add that I am by no means arguing that the Church would have been in magnificent shape should Second Vatican Council never have occurred. Her ecclesiology and her understanding of her true strength as Christ continued in time were still not rigorous enough for that to be true. Readers will remember that many disputes over ecclesiological problems had emerged after 1563. These disputes had not been resolved at Trent and they were in no way fully thrashed out at Vatican I in 1870 either. It is hard to see how almost any specific issue emerging in the 1960’s would have surprised the controversialists of the previous four hundred years. The papal-episcopal college question, Church-State relations, the advisability of liturgical changes that included the use of the vernacular, and the need for a clearer teaching on the full meaning of the sacrament of matrimony were all matters familiar to past disputants. The only way for much of this discussion to appear unusual is to think that Trent and Vatican One pronounced dogmatically on more matters than they actually did. Many Catholics certainly believed this to have been the case. Thus, when the present crisis began, they were woefully mistaken regarding exactly what the definition of Papal Infallibility did and did not demand of them in the way of faithful obedience.

Moreover, we have seen that the Church was experiencing “dangers on all fronts”, making any move to deal with one dilemma an invitation for another to take shape and dominate the future course of events. Many Catholics did not respond to these dangers in a balanced fashion that was open to the fullness of the message of the Word in history. And even though Church authorities, highly alarmed over the situation created by a general European loss of faith, had made preparations for the shift of the center of gravity of Christianity to other continents, it was inevitable that their laudable work brought still further confusion and missteps in its train. But all of this was noticeable before 1962, and was merely exacerbated by the Council.⁰

On the procedural level, the disastrous developments briefly outlined above must be ascribed to Second Vatican Council’s failure to follow the wisdom of Trent. Trent, the reader will recall, had opted for a simultaneous treatment of pastoral and doctrinal questions, even in the face of tremendous pressure to ignore the latter. It had sound reasons for making this choice, given the fact that powerful new heretical forces were highly active in contemporary Europe and ready to shape any purely “pastoral” decisions to fit their packed doctrinal program. Doctrinal clarity gave Trent a much more solid control over pastoral initiatives.

But we have seen that erroneous beliefs and ideologies merely increased in number and violence over the following centuries. If anything, what might not have been as clear more than four centuries earlier, ought to have been absolutely transparent by the 1960’s: namely, that a “pragmatic” policy that did not address real, existing, powerful divisions of belief could easily lead to the triumph of hidden doctrines promoted by determined minorities. Nineteenth century intransigents had warned that anyone who failed to appreciate the errors of the modern definition of freedom and tried to act “pragmatically” on the basis of its teaching would drag what was, in historical fact, a weak Church into a “free” and “open” co-existence and competition with immensely willful and strong enemies. And, under such conditions, she was, at least humanly speaking, bound to lose. Such “pragmatism” would, in reality, be tantamount to tempting Providence.

A Catholic pragmatism, one that was dictated by the message of the Word Incarnate, recognized the central importance of doctrinal clarity, authoritatively taught, in defending the only truth that could honestly set men free. It understood just how much weak, struggling, sinful human beings needed all the concrete assistance they could get in order to grasp the fullness of truth and to do what was right and necessary for both their earthly happiness and their eternal salvation. Accordingly, it preached the obligation to correct and transform human societies and institutions so that they themselves would embody and teach sound natural and supernatural lessons. The omnipotent God could indeed protect the Church within a “free market place of ideas and life styles”, where truth was accorded no privileged place among the seductive and often violent advertising of ideological commodities. But He would do so through the heroic sufferings of His faithful and not through the merits of the personalist or pluralist “method”. A true Catholic pragmatism could not legitimately force believers into the spiritual equivalent of a game of poker with a team of card sharks and then blithely demand supernatural intervention from God to protect them. What one was likely to get, in consequence, was a new but disguised dogmatic teaching, uniting the Church with the State and the world more tightly than thinkers from Marsilius of Padua to Lamennais could ever have dreamed possible.

Still, even though Trent’s reasons for rejecting a purely pastoral approach towards dealing with problems within the universal Church were as valid as ever, and the intransigents had identified further grounds for following in its footsteps, the anti-dogma camp had also gained many new adherents in the intervening period. Trent’s own emphasis on the importance of demonstrating practical success had helped to give “pragmatic-minded” prelates, priests, and lay activists some justification in the decades and centuries following its closure. Readers have seen that these “pragmatists” came to include Jansenists, Mennaisians, liberal Catholics, modernists, and personalists. Numerous, pressing, scientific, political, and social changes exposing gaps—if not errors—in the Church’s corrective and transforming labors also worked to bring pastoral matters to the forefront of many faithful and concerned Catholics’ minds and hearts. In short, “pastoral” became a “good word” whose recitation could cover a multitude of treasonous acts, sins, and doctrinal stupidities.

The post-war climate of opinion offered the “purely pastoral” camp its latest and most powerful source of support. Taking advantage of the Zeitgeist, a partisan organizational talent that had gone from strength to strength since the end of the First World War, and a powerful sense of mission, the personalist-pluralist alliance steered Second Vatican Council away from the much more Tradition-friendly methodology its original program envisioned. Instead of a Tridentine-inspired, joint dogmatic-pastoral approach, a purely pastoral language and strategy was adopted. This ended by serving the cause of the willful manipulators of freedom and the word merchants profiting from their custom. In the name of a practical, pragmatic openness to understanding and dealing with the new and diverse needs of “modern man”, the inevitable happened. The council proceeded to confront a host of problems on the basis of a personalist and pluralist definition of what the words “pastoral” and “pragmatic” meant. And we have now clearly seen that this definition works in union with a vision of nature, man, and freedom that are not only different from traditional Catholic teachings on the subject, but also totally destructive to the corrective and transforming message of the Word in history.

Vatican Council as such could not and did not claim to act infallibly once it specifically proclaimed its intention to deal with issues on the pastoral as opposed to the doctrinal plane. Therefore, it could only bind consciences to those of its edicts that actually recalled already known teachings on faith and morals. Unfortunately, however, the personalist-pluralist victors at the council had as little interest in the substantive teaching of the “old” Magisterium regarding infallibility as on any other subject. Their concern was simply how the principle of infallibility could practically be used to promote their agenda. Joining together to interpret the council’s “spirit”, they were happy to play upon believers’ respect for the traditional teaching Church to give to what were purely pastoral decisions the aura of dogmatic pronouncements---more than that, the sole dogmatic pronouncements that modern Catholics were obliged to heed and obey in the future. Hence, the victory of a powerful faction serving an ideology blessing an irrational mindlessness was unjustifiably cloaked with the authority of the Holy Spirit—that same Holy Spirit whose infallible doctrinal guidance was at first rejected, lest it manifest the intolerant, closed, and pastorally divisive behavior that authoritative direction was chastised for displaying in the past.

Moreover, the fideism underlying the personalist and pluralist mentality choked a true Catholic inquiry into this mysterious return of the Holy Spirit from exile, just as it choked a true examination of anything else that happened at the council. Instead, it used its usurped magisterial role to demand Catholic recitation of the usual slogans regarding the need for pragmatism, openness, freedom, and peace as an alternative to serious Faith and Reason. Harping on its mandate from the Holy Spirit, it then tossed to the winds that entire corpus of nineteenth and twentieth-century theological, philosophical, political, historical, psychological, and sociological wisdom that had painstakingly analyzed exactly why such pastoral methodology could only end in a willful assault upon the full message of the Word in history. It ignored the fact that such pastoral methodology had actually already engaged in a similar assault once before, in the eighteenth century. Along with this wisdom went the guidance of the Church Fathers, previous ecumenical gatherings, the decisions of nearly two millennia of Popes, the canonical tradition, and everything else that could be cited to understand the extent of the council’s authority or put it into its proper historical and dogmatic perspective. The conquerors of the council insisted that a failure to heed their interpretation of its decisions, if not a sign of insanity pure and simple, could not signify anything other than a stubborn closure of one’s heart to the triumphant judgment of the Holy Spirit. In short, the triumph of openness was celebrated by shutting the door imperiously on the whole teaching of the Word Incarnate in history and the Seeds of the Logos harmonized together with it. “Words” alone were allowed to proclaim the Incarnate Word; words that servants of “nature as is”, from Isocrates to Marsilius of Padua and beyond, would have much appreciated—and similarly abused.

Before moving on, let us remember that another extremely dangerous contemporary accusation lurked behind every attack upon a critic’s stubborn closing of his heart to the will of this new kind of Holy Spirit: namely, his possession of a “fascist mentality”. The fascist label was used as an effective club to brutalize and silence any and all criticism. The outside secular world, ecstatic over the council’s acceptance of the reigning Zeitgeist, joined in the rhetorical game, with the late Pope Pius XII turned into the symbol of an evil fascist spirit still festering in the bosom of the Catholic beast. Ironically, a Church that had been consistently chastized for the slightest interference in the realm of the State was thereby proclaimed guilty of not having interfered enough, at least where the Nazis were concerned, and of continuing to harbor villains justifying this unforgivable failure of ecclesiastical responsibility in her sacred precincts. The agents of a purge deemed to be essential to the restoration of Church health were personalists who, more than anyone else, had themselves nurtured a philo-fascist outlook in the interwar period. And, sadly, all this was to prove to serve a new and global unity of Church and State, designed to ensure the “public order” dear to the hearts of legalists of all previous ages on the basis of a religion submissive to the demands of “nature as is” alone.

Pity the poor opponent of the “Spirit of Vatican Two” who wandered into the realm of the post-conciliar personalist interpreting the infallible Magisterium of the Catholic Church! He was like someone going to a dinner party given by a man who had declared cannibalism to be the expression of his and all his other guests’ deepest spiritual longing. Terrified at the thought of taking exception to his host’s proclivity lest he be identified as an unrealistic, shriveled-up, anti-social individualist lacking faith in the action of the Spirit—and a fascist to boot—the poor soul would be eaten alive; devoured, ironically, at the command of the only true representative of the principle of the Triumph of the Will who was present. At least the victim could console himself with the thought that he was not alone in his misery. The same fate was ready to befall all of the teaching tools of the Mystical Body of Christ; all the teaching tools, and Catholics in the United States, Europe, and the Third World along with them.

D. The Corrective and Transforming Tools Taken Captive

Needless to say, such a revolution required a massive weakening of all existing Church teaching authorities and Catholic pastoral initiatives working to correct and transform the world in Christ.⁰ Every thought and action of every pontiff, council, curial office, bishop, priest, religious, and faithful could now boldly be criticized by the infallible heralds of the Holy Spirit—Stalinists in Catholic garb—whose own judgments could, by definition, never be brought into question. The rhetoricians of the movement promoted this critical weakening of the Church’s administration and heritage at the council and in its aftermath through the Press, the numerous organizations lobbying for change in Rome, and the “experts”, the periti, who served as the spokesmen for the winning faction’s prominent bishops. All these forces, together, cited conciliar documents such as the pastoral Constitution, Gaudium et Spes, as well as the Declaration on Religious Liberty, as proof that the Church was now committed to working together with broad “human values” that taught her “signs of the times” requiring neither censure nor ecclesiastical guidance. Post-conciliar committees did especially yeoman service in carrying out the task of dismantling and destruction. They continued to utter the voice of the Holy Spirit in slogan after slogan, mantra after mantra, as they sucked out whatever traditional substance could legitimately be found in the now “dogmatic” pastoral decrees and refilled them with suggestions for a renewal in line with the Zeitgeist. Replacement of appreciation for dogmatic truth by an openness to substance-free sloganeering was essential for the creation of that false “pilgrim spirit” ready to accept everything that the prophets of the here and now presented to the orphaned “People of God”, without the slightest pretence of its Catholic correction and transformation.

Of all the doctrines that had to disappear, those of the Mystical Body of Christ and Christ as King of the universe were symbolically the most important. Both, together, emphasized much too clearly the direct connection of the Church with the Word Incarnate, her fleshly character as an organized society, and the practical effect that Christ’s appearance in history must have on man and all of nature. Both, together, forced society to seek to organize itself according to “the common good” rather than whatever “worked” to provide “public order”. The term “People of God”, stripped free of any of its more traditional interpretations and loaded down with Ockhamite, Mennaisien, personalist, and pluralist meaning, gave to the Church that democratic atmosphere in which modern factions have most effectively worked to enforce their will on their undiscerning and self-immolating victims.

Such essential changes of emphasis on the doctrinal level were accompanied by a retreat from the ultramontanist-inspired, papal-centered administration of the Universal Church favored since the second half of the nineteenth century. This was exchanged for a “collegial” approach to ecclesiastical governance, one that sought to hand greater power over to national episcopacies and local ordinaries. But these latter forces had proven themselves historically to be much more vulnerable to narrow secular pressure and self-interested factions than the Papacy. In consequence, the ever-more self-confident personalist and pluralist interpreters of the now painfully hyperactive “Holy Spirit” could control their decisions even more effectively. The natural human values these prophets promoted were identified as the ones that the bishops and the Spirit Himself preferred—to the detriment of the other members of the Blessed Trinity and the Church’s Magisterium as a whole. Ecclesiastical government thus fell from episcopal as well as papal hands. Constant papal traveling added to the destruction of normal administrative activity. It kept “the cat” so busy planning, taking, and assessing pastoral visits---along with potentially bankrupting the dioceses to which he traveled---that “the mice” could play at their massive work of dismantling the past and substituting the guidance of approved “natural energies” virtually undisturbed.

Meanwhile, traditional disciplines designed for the formation of Catholic theologians and philosophers, beginning with speculative theology and ending, ultimately, even with Holy Scripture itself, were swiftly emasculated as well, discredited as “contingent, outside forces” weighing down upon the energies of the present moment. Submission to such vital signs of the time promised a bright new day “when all will prophesy” with the spirit of “immediacy” of the first Christians. “Real world” problems, “felt reality”, “contextualization”, “the kerygma of travel”, and other slogans that storytellers of past eras would have envied inventing were dinned into the ears of seminarians, students, and congregations to the confusion of the faithful and the enhancement of the power of the servants of “nature as is” inside the Church. And these slogans were destined to change whenever the Roman, national, diocesan, and parish committees of personalist and pluralist experts that equated their voices with that of the Holy Spirit felt the need for new, prophetic bumper stickers to cement their hold on an “energetic People of God” unfailingly commanded to keep still, be silent, and obey.

Before moving on to discuss the effects of this weakening of Church authority on the political and social environment that reformers of all past ages saw to be of such great importance to the substantive labor of correction and transformation in Christ, let us first turn our attention to its impact upon the public prayer life of the Catholic world. For, as we have repeatedly reiterated, the daily worship of the Church is undoubtedly the most crucial of all the tools required for telling the varied members of the Mystical Body of Christ a good story about the true story of the Faith and its consequences for man and nature.⁰

This tale, the traditional liturgy told in a truly Word-friendly fashion. That liturgy was aimed entirely towards the worship of the Almighty and “seeing things” through His eyes. The most obvious sign of this orientation was its guidance by a priest who---pace Claudel---“did not turn his back on God”. In relating its story about things divine, the traditional liturgy consistently focused upon the central truth that mankind can only understand life and fulfill its real promise by means of a total subordination to the Trinity and its plan for Creation. Yet, just as the Father sent the Son for our Redemption, that same God-centered liturgy also identified man’s mission to nurture the whole of his created environment in order to gain its assistance in aiming his mind and heart to all the perfect gifts that only come from above, from Divine Light. In fulfillment of this mission, Catholics put all of the magnificent tools of nature to use in God’s worship, and with a rational and classical respect for the hierarchy of values in the process.

The holistic traditional liturgy then reinforced Catholic men in their mission regarding all the rest of their temporal activity. Believers left Holy Mass awakened to the Divine Light and to God’s grace. They therefore expected to see the whole of nature used, liturgically, to tell a good story that pressed them onwards to understand and fulfill the goal of the entirety of existence. Regularly awakened to the value of each and every aspect of nature in the service of God through exposure to the traditional liturgy, believers readily understood that they required the aid of authoritative communities as well as aesthetic tools. For, despite what those who wished to leave the individual naked and exposed to the Triumph of the Will might argue, serious disciples of the Word recognized that human beings did not reach “adulthood” through liberation from their various natural “structures of dependence”. Truly awakened Catholics grasped the importance of employing the authoritative labors of as many of these structures of dependence as they possibly could find, because all were a positive stimulus to a full grasp of reality and to proper, effective human action.

Moreover, they recognized that none of these natural tools could ever be rejected in the name of the “sea change” promised by preachers of an immediate apocalypse or millennium; that none became superfluous due to the arrival of some fresh, charismatic guide. None of these tools could be rejected due to having reached a “higher consciousness” as interpreted by prophetic voices that were not those of Christ’s Church. True students of the Word, enlightened by a liturgy that focused them on the riches of God rather than passing parochial enthusiasms, realized that all natural aids to human knowledge and action would always be necessary, each and every one, and this until the end of time—so long, that is to say, as they accepted the corrective and transformative ministrations of Christ; and so long as believers stood on constant guard against their sinful misuse of all such gracious gifts of God.

Turn of the century modernism may have failed chiefly because of its exaggeratedly intellectual character. If reformers were to have a renewed opportunity to reshape the Church, they were indeed well advised to go about their business through the more powerful and popular tool of the liturgy. Whether consciously or unconsciously, the post-conciliar interpreters of the hyperactive Holy Spirit followed this counsel. The result was that the most immediate and effective consequence of the kidnapping of Second Vatican Council was a liturgical revolution. And what emerged from the attendant upheaval was an incomparable victory for the business as usual demands of an uncorrected and untransformed nature.

No one ought to be surprised either by this liturgical revolution or its consequences. We have seen that interwar experiments testified to its imminent arrival. And if personalists insisted that Catholicism was obliged not merely to take into account but to bend unquestioningly to what was defined as the “Spirit of God tending towards convergence” in each and every vital community and culture that it encountered, the Church was equally bound radically to alter her liturgical practices to suit the pressing demands of her vital environment.

But diving into a naturalist atmosphere inevitably had to put men to sleep regarding the full promise of the created world. It had to teach them to end their hunt for nature’s “logos” at the uncorrected, passionate, community level—merely the first step in their enlightenment from a Socratic and Word-drenched standpoint. It had to teach them to stop looking for nature’s logos at a level that encouraged those communal “happenings” wherein societies worshipped themselves: exactly the kind of liturgical prayer that Rousseau suggested as the expression of the civil religion of the natural, virtuous State. And guidance of worship by what took place at this level alone was a direction ensuring indulgence in all of the evils identified throughout the course of the present work; indulgence both in what Dietrich von Hildebrand called ordinary or “classical” sins, as well as in all the bizarre sicknesses that ideological and libertine madness had discovered and cultivated in man in recent times.

Worse still, liturgy conceived of as a response to uncorrected nature was bound to seek yet more guidance each time a vital, active interpreter of spirits identified yet another energetic community with a message to which an open, pastoral Church must give witness. A Catholicism that continually pursued such novelty, while abandoning, as insensitive prejudice, all education and tradition standing in the way of a wholehearted acceptance of each new message coming in from the external world, was stripped of any means of judging whether it really ought to be ready to incorporate the teachings it received from its environment into the liturgy or not. Indeed, in the long run, its self-dismantling deprived it of any means of nurturing any memory of any doctrinal, philosophical, or historical point of reference to which to relate the liturgy at all.

Even giving the benefit of the doubt to the liturgical proponents of “listening to energetic nature”---presuming, that is to say, that they expected to hear messages basically in line with what they customarily took for granted as True, Good, and Beautiful---the awakened Catholic of an intransigent mentality knew exactly what lay in store from their approach. Turning inward, away from the focus on the truly other, involved, as Dietrich von Hildebrand so well described in Transformation in Christ, an ever-deeper plunge into the untutored self; into its temptation to view what was cheapest, most immediately impressionable to the senses, and most parochial as somehow more “real”, more rewarding and more expressive of the will of God.

This began, for many contemporary liturgical revolutionaries, by tapping into soldiers’ memories of hearing Mass on the back of a jeep, amidst their comrades, with the sounds of artillery around them. Liturgists stirring up such memories contrasted the “truth” of that soldierly experience with the “artificiality” of their liturgical and parish life under normal peacetime circumstances, calling for reform to recapture the lost ties with this more serious “reality”. Such a mentality also explained why certain priests in German labor camps, close to the pre-war liturgical movement, treated the hell that they endured therein as providing a more clear and “normal” teaching about the truth of life than the refined peacetime world that had nurtured them.

While in no way denying the potential value of the wretched wartime experience in focusing someone on existential questions, it is necessary to note that its possession of a certain merit is beside the point. The crux of the matter lies in whether or not the experience of overpowering hellishness should become the supreme and sole guide to the construction of the liturgy; whether Christian order should be built upon the vivid context of experienced hell; whether the man who wished to found Christendom upon reflection aiming upwards was merely a slave of a crippled past or the authentic voice of the mission of the Word in history. Modern, personalist-inspired liturgists opted for reality as hell. And this, as Professor David White notes, helps us to explain why our contemporaries devour Dante’s Inferno while his Paradiso goes generally unread. It is because “real nature”, for them, is hell, and hell is the defining element of their lives. Were heaven to be opened up before them, they would not want to enter into its precincts. The spirit of the death camp constructed by the doctrine of total depravity guided their whole mind, their whole heart, and their whole soul.

Whatever the case, the post-conciliar liturgical revolution abandoned that primary focus on God that unveiled the full meaning of the Word in history and, by showing nature its true vocation, helped still more to focus human eyes on higher things. The public prayer of the Church was drowned in energetic communal concerns as interpreted by the strongest element most active in shaping devotional life. These concerns diversified ad infinitum, as each nation, diocese, parish, and faction within a local community discovered its own startling new spirit, needs, and message to teach. True to the development of the principle of total depravity through modern naturalism, this has meant that the more drab on the one hand and the more grossly sensual on the other, the greater these concerns have been identified with what was thought to be truly “real”. A single liturgical revolution thus translated into endless liturgical revolutions “listening” to every “need” from that of the capitalist robber baron to the homosexual—with the former making good money off of the new missals and calendars dictated by each further change in church architecture and ritual practice.

Let us reiterate that such new rites do not emerge spontaneously out of any true—even if misled—communal desire, but, typically, through the revolutionary mediation of vital teachers of the will of the community, who decide what can and cannot be “heard” as the authentic voice of “The People”. I once witnessed an example of this phenomenon when I saw a Hispanic community singing traditional hymns to the Madonna silenced so that it could be forced to stutter other unknown tunes, declared by the liturgical experts who had created them ex nihilo to be more consonant with the true Latino spirit. Everywhere, the starting principle of the more serious liturgical movement—the need to go back to the ancient sources and their organic development—has given way to a reliance on no teaching other than that of these interpreters of the community will and a demand for “faith” in the spirit and signs of the times that they reveal. And everywhere, anyone criticizing the changes demanded has been chastised not on the basis of what such criticisms really are—a call back to true faith, to objective use of reason, and to a respect for that traditional spirit that any real culture always takes seriously. Instead, their criticisms have been maligned as something racist, elitist, restrictive, anti-pluralist, and, inevitably, fascist. Deny the wishes of the liturgical revolutionaries and the doors of the concentration camp swing open just around the corner.

This now brings us to the question of the political and social effects of the “pastoral” dogmatists. Their approach obviously required a rejection of any organization with the distinct purpose of promoting the corrective and transforming work of the Word in history. It obliged not just Catholic States and political parties but all Catholic Action groups as well to renounce whatever unique religious character they possessed as a precondition for survival. After all, the existence of such a Catholic aura represented an “outside context” and a “contingency” weighing down upon the immediate contemporary vitality of the population of any particular land. The People of God were meant to witness—not to teach a religious or a rational principle. They were meant to witness to the messages that their prophets wished them to bring to perfection “in the Spirit”, and exactly as those prophets interpreted them. If they did not do so, the court of modernity had once again to proclaim judgment upon them as the philo-Nazis they obviously were.

Still, the voluntary abandonment of the Word-drenched mission had to lead to a Catholic subservience to whatever force was most powerful in any given nation, diocese, or parish. If the personalist, pluralist, post-conciliar prophet was already an enthusiastic spokesman for such a force, then all would go well for him, since it would show that he had chosen his vital energy accurately. If he had not read the signs of the times properly—that is to say, if he had not correctly judged who possessed the strongest will in the environment in which he operated—then he had but two options before him. He could bend his message to fit that of the still more powerful force triumphing around him, or he could seek to raise the People’s consciousness to his own view through cultivation of some form of underground opposition to the stronger group or individual will.

Whatever the nature of the winning energy, the future for the Catholic peoples of the world was dim. The door to the influence of the libertines and criminals who most benefit from pluralism was opened wide into their communities. Invitations to accommodate themselves to their willful definition of freedom and use it to secure their own illicit desires while still calling themselves Catholic were too enticing for many to turn down. In the meantime, firm believers found that they were pressed to work more openly, more closely, and more approvingly with the dominant elements in the society around them than they had ever been expected to do by any past pontiff or monarch who had overstepped his proper authority. But the nature of this union of conquered Church and Triumphant Will differed somewhat depending upon whether it took place in the United States, in Europe, or in the Third World.

E. Captive Catholic America

Let us broadly examine the general practical results in greater detail with reference first of all to the situation of Catholics in the United States, where pluralism had already long been the civil religion, protected by a host of powerful inquisitors in the courts, the Press, and the educational system. A study of America is especially important given that the model of the United States was supposed to dispel all doubts about the merits of the pluralist methodology as Defender of the Peace and Freedom of the believing Catholic population.⁰

“Diving into” and gaining the graces of the freedom and order offered by the Divine Republic meant obtaining something that “sounded Christian”, both because it could easily be related, historically, to its fundamental Puritan Protestant roots and because supporters of the Moderate Enlightenment always preferred to keep the language of God in their public speech even after they had lost all traditional faith in Him. We have seen that the system’s “godliness” was convincing to American Catholics of the turn of the twentieth century. It seemed even more credible to their post-Second World War descendants, thrilled, as they were, that their country stood out as the chief “God-fearing” nation sheltering the world against atheist Soviet Marxism, and, therefore, the only “practical” alternative to godless Communism. But Catholic Church “freedom” within this system really meant a number of things that had precious little to do with the definition of the term “God-fearing” according to a Tradition that praised the Word over words and equated liberty with correction and transformation in Christ.

First of all, it meant the freedom to rip the communal authority of the Mystical Body of Christ to shreds, reducing it to the status of a religious “club”. All attempts to hold onto Church authority and, worse still, to try to use that authority to lead men to Christ, were chastised as assaults on “real freedom”, “common sense”, and “public order”. They were condemnable in the eyes of the anti-institutional, atomistic God of Protestantism, the anti-institutional Nature of the liberty-loving Moderate Enlightenment, and the postwar anti-institutional inquisition permanently on campaign against the revival of fascism.

Commitment to true freedom had therefore to be displayed in a very precise and by now quite familiar two-fold fashion: by a show of contempt for the Church’s real self, and through an enthusiastic acceptance of the one unquestionable doctrine guiding human life---an “inclusive” openness to diversity. This was expressed by vigorously favoring whatever had not been approved of or encouraged by authentic Catholic tradition. As suggested above, each “open”, “inclusive” advance required a new statement of principles, a new program of renewal, a different kind of educational curriculum, and, very frequently, a fresh diversion of ever more limited parish funds to alterations in the physical structure of the local church. These changes always replaced something distinctly familiar with ideas and symbols that were not. And such changes were destined to continue so long as there was something new to "integrate"; even, as Jean Mienveille said, the vital, lived message of the Antichrist himself.⁰

An embrace of the freedom to be inclusive predictably led to the domination of the Catholic branch of the American Pluralist Church by precisely those sort of strong, clever, unscrupulous individuals and groups to which the American scene had historically been inclined to give birth. There is no need to explain once again why and how this resulted in the overwhelming influence of commercial, sexual, and psychologically disturbed crochets, as well as the pseudo societies that promoted and sustained them. Plato, in The Republic, explained this phenomenon much better than I could do here, even without having experienced the history producing such results.

Suffice it to say that openness, freedom, inclusivity and fear of intolerant divisiveness disturbing the peace of the American desert led to the “deconstruction” of even the most sublime Catholic themes on purely sexual grounds; to a concern for justifying everything religious on the basis of its market appeal or adherence to "professional business standards”; to democratic votes determining which doctrines were acceptable in the eyes of charismatic prelates, pastors, religious, theologians, journalists, and certifiable madmen; to the churning of all Catholic life through endless committees, councils, chanceries, and advertising firms, making approach to what were supposed to be compassionate, pastoral-minded, post-conciliar bishops something akin to seeking audience with semi-divine oriental potentates.

Hence, the Catholic branch of the American Pluralist Church came to mirror the war of all against all found everywhere in the atomistic society that it adulated. It regularly intensified this war under the pressure exerted by groups and individuals who expanded the borders of what “common sense” must accept for the sake of peace and consensus. Let us once again remember that it was this “multiplication of factions” constantly battling one another that James Madison praised in the Federalist as the special political and social tool of the American Defender of the Peace. Peace, this system certainly has provided, at least for the moment, although the tranquility coming with it has little to do with the “peace that passeth all understanding” that was dear to the Church’s former self.

Secondly, individual believers discovered that their apparently radical personal as opposed to communal freedom did not guarantee them the right to be “more Catholic than the Church”. Given the influence of other powerful elements in American life, that personal freedom also had to be exercised in a way that did not disturb the peace and order preferred by the supporters of the Moderate Enlightenment and their heirs. It also had to be “inclusive” and avoid “divisiveness”. Of course individual Catholics had the liberty to present their own varying magisterial teachings for the guidance of their restricted, impotent, cocktail party worlds. Nevertheless, their practical, public, political, social, and economic lives had to be different; more in line with the dismal vision presented to the children victimized in Hard Times, as expressed by whoever could most powerfully interpret it in their immediate parochial circumstances. Pluralist insistence on separation of thought and action thus gave individual believers the freedom to cultivate a profound psychological disorder; the freedom to become mentally ill; the freedom to live a schizophrenic existence. It is now worth exploring this horrible truth at some length.

Fallen man in general already suffers from the temptation to separate purpose and action and then to go along his path to eternity as though such clinical separation were not destructive. Pluralism constructs its whole methodology upon encouragement of this temptation, with major consequences for the unity of the human personality. It praises the man who thinks one thing about his purpose in life and behaves as though his actions in the society around him need not be coordinated with that goal. Hence, it permits him to believe that he has done his duty to the truth and to his conscience if he asserts his convictions about the meaning of existence but avoids the divisive actions in daily life that would give them concrete significance. Most men would like to be courageous but would also appreciate calm and lack of friction with their neighbors. Pluralism provides them a way to have both. It makes courage easy by defining it in a manner that disturbs nothing and no one---least of all the brave men in question and their ordinary routine. Whether a person sees the contradictory situation this prohibition leaves him in or not, it marks him in a way that deforms his personality. It obliges him to turn in upon himself, to deny the crucial importance of his social environment in shaping his destiny, to construct a dike against all energetic action founded upon Faith and Reason, and to declare an introspective sterility to be the normal condition of life. I am, therefore, in no way exaggerating when I say that pluralism literally creates psychological disorders that drive individuals and societies under its influence insane.

Life in a pluralist world has the same disordering effects on even the most well-intentioned Catholics, so much so that they unconsciously prevent Christ from being King over themselves as individuals. Many orthodox bishops, priests, religious, and lay leaders do, indeed, still look for guidance from the Catholic Magisterium. Nevertheless, because they have been formed within a pluralist environment, they are subject to what St. Cyril of Alexandria called dypsychia. They have two guiding spirits; two guiding lights. Their Catholic Magisterium is combined with, and ultimately subordinated to, a second, Pluralist Magisterium. It is this Pluralist Magisterium that shapes their concrete daily actions, their whole way of life, their “second nature.” This second Magisterium permits the first to survive, but only in the fashion indicated above: in the private sphere. Thus, as we have seen, it tells them that they have done all that they can legitimately do for their beliefs if they merely talk.

Talk is good, but it is not enough to assure Christ’s reign. Popes, prelates, priests, and every living Catholic man, woman, and child could reaffirm and recite every word of every fine catechism, pastoral decree, conciliar and papal pronouncement, and canonical judgment from the time of the apostles down to the present, from dawn until dusk, without it necessarily making a bit of difference in their lives. A simultaneous commitment to the concrete Pluralist Magisterium would show the world that all such talk was simply impotent chatter. If someone lives under the influence of this second Magisterium, he will act only with reference to things that it considers important, undercutting the value of what he says. A well-intentioned, orthodox Catholic who has digested the messages of pluralist culture that bombard him day in and day out will conclude that he cannot put true Catholic models into practice. He will presume that he must act in a way that pluralism considers to be practical and pragmatic. Pluralism reminds him that theology, philosophy, history and everything else that can really help him to understand the full implications of his Faith for his personal life are not “useful” in our sexualized, commercialized, democratic Empire of the World. This concrete Pluralist Magisterium drives home the argument that all of his fine Catholic words must remain just words lest they become dangerous and divisive. But it also assures him at one and the same time that Catholicism cannot help but prosper in a pluralist society. Hence, it teaches him the “good story” that distorting Christianity along pluralist lines in daily life is the best way to gain benefits for the Faith. In other words, his second Magisterium gives him a dagger to commit religious and cultural suicide. He uses it without ever realizing what he is doing since he is, after all, still reciting the correct orthodox words, in which he firmly believes.

Allow me to offer but a single example. I know of one good bishop—and there are many more like him—who delivers excellent public talks on Catholic catechesis. The Catholic Magisterium is honored in every one of his words. Still, he prides himself on being a practical, pastoral, post-conciliar leader. Therefore, his diocese is filled with practical programs of the kind suggested by the Pluralist Magisterium. But exactly the same type of irrational enthusiasts and willful bureaucrats who dominate unorthodox dioceses administer these programs. Both programs and administrators are focused upon the latest sexual obsessions, the most up-to-date commercial gimmicks, or the best in anti-authoritarian democratic changes. The bishop does not think of stopping their antics, since he, too, has been shaped by pluralism. He fears that actions against them would render him naïve, impractical, undemocratic and divisive. To prove that he has no sympathy for such evil tendencies, he goes out of his way to encourage their projects. The faithful learn from such programs and such stewards exactly what it is that the bishop’s orthodox statements really mean in daily life: absolutely nothing. If the faithful try to build their Catholicism upon the innumerable recommendations of diocesan bureaus and spokesmen, they will never have time to investigate Catholic Tradition as a whole, to see whether or not these “practical” projects are actually as good as they are told.

If the dilemma is pointed out to the bishop, he often reacts vigorously, but in a way that aids the pluralist cause and hurts Catholic Tradition still further. He calls attention to his personal orthodoxy, which no one doubts, but which is simply not sufficient to deal with the problems of the diocese. He acts as though his charism as bishop guarantees the legitimacy of pastoral methods that cannot really lay claim to infallibility. If one insists upon the distinction of doctrine and prudential action and continues the critique, making reference to a variety of arguments from Catholic theology, philosophy, history, psychology and sociology to demonstrate what is happening around him, a fideist pluralist bell goes off in his head. He dismisses his critics on pluralist grounds, for closed-minded, divisive attitudes; for lack of "faith" in the methods dictated by the council and its “spirit.” He points to the pope, who points to the council. Their statements reiterating Catholic doctrine are called forth to assure the critics to have no fear. One might then try to indicate, yet again, that it is not the words of the council, the pope, and the bishop himself that are under question, at least when these merely repeat orthodox teaching, but the practical, contradictory methodology accompanying them.

Still, once this point has been reached, further discussion is hopeless. Nothing is permitted to bring into question the degree to which such methodology is de fide and valid. No rational evidence of what has transpired, in practice, by following it is allowed in court. The bishop insists upon defending the truth and simultaneously encouraging its enemies to subvert it. The new age of freedom and reason within the Church requires Catholics to abandon the free use of their faith and their reason to complain of the destruction of the diocese. At best, the bishop laments the manner in which some people reject “true” pluralism and deny the Catholic Church’s right to have her full message heard. But when he does so it is he who is deceived. Many of the very servants he defends are active in smothering that full message and working, consciously or unconsciously, to make sure that Catholics do the only thing that "true" pluralism really permits them to do: emasculate and destroy themselves.

Finally, both the Mystical Body of Christ as an institution and her individual members are given the freedom to thank profusely the powerful, competing, civil religion preached by the American Pluralist Church not only for protecting them better than any other force in human history but for expressing their Catholic beliefs in a more godly fashion as well. This, in one sense, is nothing new. We have repeatedly seen that the Zeitgeist of each and every era produces powerful “traditions” and “customs” of its own, sufficient to influence Catholics eager to “succeed” in their particular environment to ignore and even revile what their real traditions and customs teach them. Supporters of supposedly practical, prudent, pragmatic, successful, and therefore apostolic “traditions”, such as the “traditions” of the Sacred Empire, the corrupt papal and episcopal courts and curias of the late Middle Ages, or the Most Christian Kings and Divine Republics of the early modern era, all divinized ideas and practices that were actually not part of Catholic Tradition at all, but, rather, errors and abuses. They all then treated critics of such false traditions as wild-eyed and destructive zealots, even heretics, reminding us, once again, that nothing does more to aid and abet a nightmare than an unwillingness to admit that it really is disturbing our true peace and quiet.

From the end of the nineteenth century, American Catholics were pressured to join this unhappy historical club with greater insistence than ever before. They were more and more raised on the same national heroes, myths, symbols, rituals and sacred texts as their non-Catholic neighbors, and actually fought for these in two world wars. Patriotism seemed to demand that they jell the civil religion of their homeland together with their baptismal faith. Thinkers began to tell them to accept the dicta of the great men of America as Catholic in spirit, if not, indeed, integral to the Deposit of Faith itself; that the Founding Fathers were Doctors of the Church; that "tolerance", as the Founders’ hero, John Locke, proclaimed, was the essence of “true” Christianity; that a full embrace of the American “heritage” actually enhanced the “Catholic Moment” in history.

With the added push given by Second Vatican Council and its exposure of Catholics to whatever was the strongest force in the world around them, they now embraced this heritage with wild abandon. A corrupt eighteenth century vision was treated as though it were the perennial message of the Church. Everything desired by Puritan, Whig, and Moderate Enlightenment thought, as transmitted through the will of the Founders of the Divine Republic, gained ecclesiastical blessing. 1776 became the date when grace really entered the world for Catholics as well, leaving all those saints who were transformed in Christ without experiencing its impact lacking in serious foundation for their holiness. For sanctity was achieved not through dancing the dance of life according to the music of the spheres, but by mastering the rhythms suggested by the ever downward spiraling, materialist-inspired “common sense” of the American way of life.

Catholic subservience to the principles of pluralism had another side effect as well. Left to its own devices, the American Religion was bound to wreak havoc with the world that Catholics previously loved. When Catholics attributed the good that they saw in America to the truth of the false ideas guiding their nation, and even declared such ideals to be Catholic ones, they helped to bring on the impending disaster even more swiftly. They ceased to apply that healthy, distinctively Catholic pressure that had contributed to the defense of the remnants of a traditional-minded Protestantism so that both, together, might divert the sickly American tradition away from the logic of its own beliefs and towards more suitable goals. In doing so, they allowed the opportunity for American culture to degenerate more quickly and systematically into the nightmarish nowhere land we see around us today. With nothing uniquely Catholic to contain it, a Protestant-Enlightenment society that had been falsely identified as Catholic-friendly has resulted in what it was bound to produce: a new Sack of Rome.

F. Captive Catholic Europe

Let us remember that an all too similar version of this conquest of Catholicism portrayed as the will of the Holy Spirit has played out in Europe as well as in North America.⁰ The strong, clever, unscrupulous individuals and groups that have taken advantage of the dismantling of the corrective and transforming mission of the Word in history have varied, due to circumstances, just as much in the Old World as in the New. Still, two variants on the same basic theme should be noted in discussing the situation in Europe.

One involves the fact that, unlike the United States, whose tradition was Protestant from the very outset, Europe had actually once been Catholic. It had also been home to a Greco-Roman culture whose Seeds of the Word had been cherished by a powerful Catholic Church that had, at times, actually tried to accomplish the work that Christ had given her to do. Even if that labor had to a large degree been abandoned over the past few centuries, the imprint of this combined secular and sacred heritage was still there, in many both open and hidden forms. If the notion of a Catholic State seeking the common good, and the concept of a proper role for Catholic parties and Catholic Action had had a lengthy history anywhere, it was in Europe. This meant that the demand for an assault upon that powerful, natural and supernatural teaching had to be, if anything, perhaps still more insistent, brutal, and complete than in an America where rejecting it came more easily. Europeans had to be shown that they were under a special obligation to make one crucial exception to the otherwise inexorable command to accept and bend to the dictates of vital energy. That exception was the vital energy still displayed by Catholic-Greco-Roman culture itself. This alone had absolutely no message to tell anyone. And it had no message for the Old Continent in particular.

Luckily for the supporters of nature as is, the Second World War had already devastated Catholic political parties and much of Catholic Action. Efforts to rebuild the latter in countries where it had once been very powerful, as in Germany, were negligible even before the council began. Interpreters of the Holy Spirit made sure that whatever Catholic political and social structures were still in place after Vatican Two rapidly disappeared in the name of “human values”, pluralism, and the fight against fascism. Concordats based upon the idea of the Church as the Mystical Body of Christ rather than an amorphous People of God manipulated by willful strong men were abandoned. Christian Democratic Parties proved their commitment to openness by serving as the conduits for introducing divorce and abortion into Catholic lands and seeking “historic compromises” with anti-religious forces. Catholic Action groups, where they still existed, were all transformed into versions of the Grand Sillon, with emphasis placed upon the technocratic skills required for the work in the media, educational, industrial, and agricultural spheres that they tackled rather than the Catholic Faith and teleological end of the people that might militate in their ranks. Efficient, professional, pragmatic success according to the standards of the naturalist world became the model for a Europe wandering faithlessly through the desert but filled with gaudium et spes.

Secondly, when the council met and for several decades thereafter, there was still a Soviet Bloc to confront. That Bloc was officially guided by a Marxist-Leninist vision that continued to exercise a certain charm over many personalist spokesmen for the Holy Spirit. Moreover, let us remember that thinkers like Jacques Maritain had argued that any problems presented by Marxism-Leninism for the Christian Faith might be transcended if only they were approached with the aid of the pluralist message emerging from the United States. Hence, the post-conciliar passion for an accommodation with the existing system reflected in the so-called Ostpolitik pursued by the Vatican during the reign of Pope Paul VI. This policy gave gaudium et spes to Pax priests in their efforts to cooperate with the Peoples Republics.

Unfortunately, all this openness was to a “vital energy” that was dying a slow and painfully embarrassing death. Rather than coming to grips with a truly natural reality, what Ostpolitik did was to aid in giving credibility to the Marxism of the cynical apparatchiks and political opportunists who more and more dominated the Soviet Bloc. Hence, rather than helping the cause of devout Soviet Bloc Catholics who continued to suffer from the cynical but still powerful evils of a dying Marxism, Ostpolitik merely aided in delaying its inevitable demise. That came, ultimately, from determined confrontation with communist regimes rather than attempts to accommodate them. And when it did come, unemployed apparatchiks and opportunists easily found their way, after the Soviet collapse, into the two fields of activity provided by the pluralist system for the unnaturally ambitious: multi-national corporations and organized crime.

Apart from these two differences, the contemporary conquered European Catholic world looks largely similar to its victimized American Catholic counterpart. This, of course, is not particularly surprising. Given the many common Protestant or Enlightenment influences that Europe shared with the United States, the themes emphasized by the conquered Catholicism of the Old Continent were bound to be largely those same commercial, sexual, and psychologically disturbed cultural crochets, translated into endlessly evolving liturgical and moral revolutions, familiar to Americans. Insofar as European influences were different, pressure from the United States, the homeland of the new Empire of the World, unceasingly helped to direct the consequences of the abandonment of the corrective and transforming message of the Word in history down the path dictated by the culture of the now global Defender of the Peace. Sad to say, the mindlessness that this demanded would eventually wipe out memory of the European past to such a degree that all of the ideological errors bringing on the disasters that made the peace of pluralism attractive to the Old World in the first place could be forgotten and some day perhaps even repeated anew.

G. The Captive Catholic Third World

We have seen that intransigents were convinced that the naturalist civilization they were fighting inside Europe was guilty of terrible injustice in its dealings with the rest of the globe. Instead of allowing a different world providing further Seeds of the Logos to be corrected and transformed in Christ, western colonial empires often suppressed legitimate aspects of native cultures or prevented their evangelization for purely utilitarian and power political motives. Intransigent Catholics would therefore not have been surprised by post-colonial movements of all kinds: neither those that reasserted legitimate native pride, nor others that expressed an illegitimate spirit of vengeance, nor still others that proclaimed commitment to one or another ideological development of a false western naturalism that had made unhappy inroads among them.⁰

Tragically, another outgrowth of western naturalism, in the form of that twentieth century personalist and pluralist alliance that kidnapped Second Vatican Council to serve its own agenda, continued to try to manipulate what has become known as the Third World. These Western- bred forces have labored mightily to the detriment of Catholicism in Third World lands. But they have also done so to the detriment of the native cultures that the work of the Word in history truly does respect and can actually bring to as great a fulfillment as it did Europe’s classical Greco-Roman heritage. Personalism and pluralism have accomplished this negative activity through the post-conciliar advances of Liberation and Third World Theology. Both of these theologies sought to bend the corrective and transforming message of Christ to the demands of “nature as is”: always, of course, as such demands were interpreted by the strongest active wills in a given land, with the prophetic voices of the personalist European heralds of the Holy Spirit chief among them.

Liberation Theology is most associated with Latin America, a vast and very diverse region, composed of countries some of which are almost entirely European, others Indian or Black, and still others highly mixed in population. A number of Latin American nations had developed serious Ninth Crusader movements, including political parties and Catholic Action associations, all of them highly conscious of the importance of corporate and State institutions for individuals living in a properly ordered society seeking the common good. Many activists, such as Garcia Moreno (1821-1875) in Ecuador, were deeply marked by the militant spirit of the intransigents and maintained close ties with the evolution of ideas and initiatives in Europe. This spelled familiarity with and enthusiasm for critiques of the evils of Protestantism and liberal capitalism, both of which were protected in Latin America through the political and cultural influence of Great Britain and the United States. Alas, it also meant familiarity and enthusiasm for the various manifestations of personalism as well.

In Latin America, as elsewhere, the Second Vatican Council encouraged the increased autonomy of regional and national episcopal organizations, along with that of local ordinaries. And just as everywhere else, these proved to be highly susceptible to the self-confident guidance of the voices of the Holy Spirit interpreting the Council according to the wishes of its prophetic, personalist and pluralist conquerors. The voices of Jacques Maritain, with his so-called Integral Humanism, alongside those of the heirs of the Mounier-Uriage school of Vichy France, were especially influential and very active in various Latin American nations’ episcopal circles, in the Chilean Christian Democratic Party, and in institutions like the Instituto Catequistico Latinoamericano, founded in 1961.

With rapid industrial and agricultural change and the attendant social problems intensifying traditional Catholic irritation with liberal capitalism; with military governments backed by the United States threatening to dominate everywhere; with Christian Democratic Parties expanded to embrace “human values” rapidly failing, the “vital energy” expressed by movements such as those of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara gained more and more support from personalist inspired activists in the region. Personalist thinkers, both European and native, then translated their practical acceptance of the “signs of the times” into that Liberation Theology that the hyperactive Holy Spirit now commanded the Church to embrace and teach.

Liberation Theology, which interpreted the Church’s Social Doctrine and the spirit of the Council according to its own time-bound political concerns, proved to be yet another support for “nature as is” in modern, revolutionary form. According to its theorists, the primary need of all men was, not surprisingly, “freedom”. Dependency of any kind was the only evil in life. Native freedom in Latin America, they argued, with some justice, had been devastated by much that had happened since Columbus’ arrival in 1492. Evils connected with the Industrial Revolution intensified the damage still further. Rather than the Truth that sets men free, however, what was first said to be required to put things straight was a revolution that would liberate the region from the atomistic capitalist system nurtured by the United States and its military henchmen. And insofar as the native population itself did not recognize this to be true, its insouciance was predictably ascribed to its need for a systematic course in “consciousness raising”. This could be given it by releasing it from traditional parish bonds and re-organizing it in “base communities” where it could be taught what it really felt, in its heart of hearts, by the liberation theologians trained to read its soul. Should it balk at such training, the machine guns of the guerrilla soldiers fighting the fascist proponents of dependency could awaken it to a more suitable response.

Perhaps more significant still for the future of Catholicism in the post-colonial environment was the development of Third World Theology. This emerged out of both Protestant as well as Catholic missionary circles and began, as we have already seen, with concerns regarding “inculturation”. Whatever the true merits of inculturation may be—and I think that there are a good number, always connected closely together with the doctrine of the Seeds of the Logos—its historical alliance and its radicalization in the Catholic world in conjunction with personalism and pluralism have been a disaster. Through their influence, any attempt to convert others has been castigated as the product of “racism” and “Eurocentrism” and as an insult to the “felt reality” of the people being evangelized. The very word “missionary” has thereby become a term of abuse.

What the former “missionary” was urged to do was to “give witness” to his Faith unaffected by “outside information”, including the entirety of the Christian Tradition and the Socratic tools harmonized with it. By insisting upon an unprejudiced dive into the vital, active milieu in which the “witness” works, no contact with a vital, active historical Christ outside of and above this milieu was permitted. The objective reality of the Incarnate God-Man was thus ultimately called into question, the very concept actually being identified as merely a “western” understanding of the work of the Spirit in human life. But all cultures are thereby reduced to ultimate meaninglessness, with none being allowed the possibility of making an objective contribution to human life capable of influencing another. All cultures become like ships passing one another in the night, with no philosophy, no theology, and no Christ as polar star above them by means of which they might navigate with precious natural cargo safely from port to port.

“Contextualization” is the term favored by the word merchants in dealing with what remains of the “witnessing” mission. Contextualists are obliged to favor whatever they find alive in native cultures in the lands unfortunate enough to endure their ministrations. Their task is to bring such living realities to their natural perfection. This is true whether one is speaking of religions of blood sacrifice, cannibalism, or the primal significance of the maternal womb. Once again, the call for unquestioning faith in the spirit of God operating in the vital active communities one encounters---unguided by an historical Christ and the objective, corrected achievements of these traditional native cultures themselves---is a recipe for self-lobotomy. It denies all merit to reason and logical judgment, sarcastically denounced by many personalists as more of that useless baggage of the crippled individual who needs to be enticed into the supra-rational vitality of community-minded personhood for his own spiritual benefit. And it is no wonder that they do so! For the more one encourages abandonment to a spirit that neither dogmatic Christian faith nor objective norms of reason and science are allowed to judge, the less one will see what that “spirit of Christ” to which he is obliged to “witness” really is.

Indeed, this could, at times in history, involve something that is good and blessed by the hands of God. But practically speaking, in our own time, and under personalist and pluralist influences, it is most often a “spirit” inspired by a libido for the base and the ugly rejected as something sinful or blasphemous by the whole of the Christian Tradition; a “spirit” interpreted by strong willed individuals and groups who themselves arbitrarily determine the essence and contours of the irresistible progress of the Holy Spirit through time. Unfortunately, those who have lost the most in this victorious advance of Third World Theology are the believing and practicing Catholics in such regions. They, like the Greek and Roman Catholics of the ancient world, know the value of the new life that they have found in Christ, even when this required abandonment of previously venerated beliefs and customs. But, then again, their views do not count. Their consciousness needs to be raised. And the Empire of the World is on the side of the bullies in the war between sophist words and the Incarnate Word.

H. Freedom Fighting and the Irrational Power of the Zeitgeist

The central theme of this book has been twofold: first of all, the need to take the complete message of the Word Incarnate in history seriously in order to fulfill the corrective and transforming mission of Christ; and, secondly, the recognition that taking that message of the Word seriously is of supreme benefit for natural as well as for supernatural life. We have seen that the full teaching of the Word is effectively held captive in our own day. It needs to be liberated from the darkness of its captors’ caves, so that man and nature may come to recognize once more who, exactly, their true friends and who their committed enemies really are. Our last task in the remainder of this chapter is to outline the enormous difficulties faced by any freedom fighters taking up that liberating mission in a world where even the very salt of the earth—the Church of Christ—has lost most of its savor.

Let us begin discussion of our freedom fighters’ task by noting that the one thing that they do not have to worry about is the availability of the materials needed to teach any potential students of the Word Incarnate the fullness of His truth. All of the information required for a solid Catholic Enlightenment is readily accessible in much of the globe, out in the open air for any interested party to consult at will. Every text that could demonstrate, intellectually, what is essential to Catholicism, what is transitory, and what has elbowed its way into the Christian enterprise simply to obtain an easier ride to its own peculiar destination lies at hand. Examination of what they have to say indicates how failure to be rigorous in relating pragmatic action to eternal truth has regularly led the faithful to indulge narrow, time-bound, and often self-destructive concerns that are ultimately not in harmony with the Faith at all; concerns that have resulted in hasty and dangerous alliances with predatory “friends”, and retreat from their ill-considered embrace only to run headlong into still another disastrous tryst with different but equally mismatched lovers.

Readers will remember that it was just such concerns that caused many Catholics of previous eras so to misunderstand the character of Christ’s message as to bury it under the “divine” guidance of secular “sacred States” of various kinds. It was also just such concerns that brought them to “correct” their blunder through the singularly more egregious error of rejecting the necessary and proper cooperation of Church and State. And it was this more recent error that invited the imprisonment of the full teaching of Christ in the exceedingly dark cave of that disguised sacred system promoted by the personalism and American pluralism that dominate our own time and place.

It is of course true that digesting all this readily available knowledge is a task that requires a systematic, disciplined, and patient labor. It is a project that, similar to the work of reform in the age following the Great Western Schism, cannot be accomplished “on the cheap”. The full message of the Word can only be learned on the intellectual plane by a study of the pre-Christian world and the “Seeds of the Logos;” through an examination of the Fathers, Late Antiquity, the Middles Ages, the Renaissance, and the Revolutionary Era; by means of consulting popes, councils, speculative and positive theology; and through meditation upon the practical mistakes that have been made by believers throughout the entire life of Christendom and the pastoral successes that their long-time labors have obtained. In short, a solid academic knowledge of the Word comes only with immersing oneself in the whole of the Tradition. It is this that we have tried to offer the reader the possibility of beginning to appreciate with the present work.

But, unfortunately, the first problem that the freedom fighters face is not that of convincing a potential convert to persist at the intellectual labor involved in systematically learning and digesting the full message of the Word. The problem of liberation is primarily that of breaking the hold of non-rational influences convincing a man that it is foolish to begin to undertake the work of Catholic enlightenment in the first place. In one sense this has been the difficulty that we have been studying from the very outset, through the repeated mobilizations of non-rational customs, alongside personal and group passions and willfulness, by conscious and unconscious members of the Grand Coalition of the Status Quo disturbed by the desire for deeper and higher wisdom. All these powerful weapons were mustered to block the ancient hunt for the “logos” of things, the acceptance of the good and perfect gift of knowledge that could only be completed by means of a revelation from the Father of Lights, and then the proper and harmonious use of the manifold natural and supernatural tools that the Incarnation taught us to cherish and employ to understand the full meaning and purpose of our lives. The chief barricade that freedom fighters face in rousing a potential convert today is that provided by the same arsenal of non-rational weapons, but writ large. For everything in their environment, shaped as it is by the modern naturalist Zeitgeist, works to stifle their efforts to stir men and women to open the book of the wisdom of the Word, take it to heart, put it into effective practice, and thereby also uncover the errors and the trickery of their willful oppressors.

What this means is that the freedom fighters’ battle is not primarily a struggle against any substantive ideas that lie behind the contemporary, naturalist Empire of the World. Rationally speaking, the defenders of that order are paper tigers. Rather, theirs is a conflict with a psychological system that provides men, from cradle to grave, with a form of “obedience training” that short circuits questioning about the cave that they live in and its intellectual foundations. It is crucial to emphasize this point to avoid the illusion that the better armed with rational arguments the liberators might be, the greater their chance of besting the influence of the representatives of the Zeitgeist. There is absolutely no question but that such rational arguments are necessary and of immense value in and of themselves. Nevertheless, strategically at least, they are not as important for the initial awakening of most captive men to the importance of opening their minds, hearts, and souls to the message of the captive Word. What ails the bulk of mankind has to be dealt with first by removing the psychological obstacles to confronting the search for the truth. And this is a much more holistic activity than that involved in ratiocination.

No Catholic freedom fighters should be surprised by this greater environmental significance. If they themselves have been awakened to the full message of the Incarnation, they already must know that dependent, created beings in a dependent, created nature—rational beings though they may be—require all the assistance that God has given them in order to understand the meaning of their existence and to dance the dance of life well. They must realize that it is through the exceedingly variegated and powerful “teachings” of literally absolutely everything in their daily environment that men build their will and courage; the will and the courage that they need not only to open their eyes to examine and digest the message of the Word that lies readily available before them but also to believe what their minds tell them that they must take seriously so as to follow their Faith and their Reason through to their logical practical conclusions. We have seen that it was this kind of environment that men of mind and soul sought to create, and that they were at least partially successfully in building, since the days of Socrates—though much more effectively from the time of Christ.

Our modern environment, far from aiding the ever new ascent of Mount Tabor that such a labor entails, closes and confirms nature in its fallen state, building its political and social systems on the basis of a willful sinfulness that must never be examined lest its errors be unveiled. Modernity has thus created a world whose supposed natural laws are actually savage “calls of the wild”. Through their assistance, the already powerful mystery of iniquity works its curious charms much more effectively than in a society where its insidious effects are battled. These laws, and the institutions they inform, train men to view the truly rational and the solidly good to be pointless and insipid, while ignorance, lies, and downright filth are welcomed as something wise, beautiful, and almost irresistibly attractive. A serious invitation to investigate the foundations of the naturalist vision is, in contrast, dismissed as being nothing other than obvious, self-serving, propaganda of precisely the sort that the modern Zeitgeist itself both peddles and forces its customers to purchase. Bewitched and obedient populations therefore automatically reject the Grand Coalition of the Status Quo’s responsibility for evils that can easily be attributed to it. Indeed, the more patent and blameworthy the disasters that they perpetrate and their role in fomenting them actually become, the greater their vehemence in rejecting the GCSQ’s involvement in their genesis. Whole nations thereby open themselves happily to new and still more dubious explanations for why human woes are caused not by the true villains standing behind them but, rather, by the real friends of mankind—with the Word, His message, His Church, Catholics, and all those allied with them in opposing the “business as usual” demands of “nature as is” at the top of the list. The naturalist vision thus profitably continues to offer “cures” which merely deepen the illness it has spread ever more widely across the globe.

Attempting to incite anyone to escape the influence of any Zeitgeist, along with the institutions and mentality it shapes, is an immensely complicated affair. We have repeatedly noted that it is easy to arouse people to outrage over the failure of their fellow men who did not reject the Zeitgeist of another era in the past that they themselves do not have to live in and confront on a daily basis. In contrast, it is extraordinarily more difficult to get them to step back and maintain a critical distance from their own time and place. Each and every Zeitgeist, good and bad, commandeers the whole of the ballroom in which the pilgrim dance of life unfolds and the new steps necessary to performing it well are learned. But the personalist and pluralist inspired Zeitgeist of this last stage of modern naturalism buries men and women in a life guided by unnatural structures of dependence that have been proven to provide the most effective form of anti-Word obedience training in the history of the world. This Zeitgeist transforms the dance of life into that especially bizarre and exhausting danse macabre that everyone must join in executing throughout the course of each and every day. And the debilitating work of that danse macabre prevents its participants from opening their eyes to seeing, learning, and doing anything that might pull them away from its inhuman and self-destructive twirl.

I. Freedom Fighting: The Black Legends

and the Alternative Liberal Catholic Good Story

Let us begin our examination of the many obstacles that freedom fighters face due to the power of the Zeitgeist by noting what happens if they seek to respond to the specific lies of the various members of the Grand Coalition of the Status Quo as embodied in the endless variety of anti-Catholic black legends and alternative good stories. Attempts to respond to these, one by one, are terribly tedious and time-consuming. After all, the opponents of correction and transformation in Christ have, by now, defined the very words forming the vocabulary of ordinary discourse. It is these subverted building blocks of the language that then are battered into the particular myths that teach the wisdom and goodness of the GCSQ and the madness and evil of the whole Catholic enterprise. The contemporary public’s mind already has been molded according to the anti-Word spirit, and thus takes the existing, anti-Catholic meaning of words like “freedom”, “dignity”, “love”, and “order” for granted. Hence, Catholics entering the fray today, long after the damage has been done, find that they need to convince the population to reexamine what it takes to be obvious “givens” in order to uncover the game that the GCSQ is playing. The editors of La Civiltà Cattolica had noted the difficulty of such a campaign in 1850, when they thought the frenzy had already reached its height. Imagine how burdensome they would have seen their labor to be if they could have glanced nearly two centuries into the future! And who can foretell just how much worse the situation might yet become?

Moreover, the myths that have been fabricated, along with the popular tools that have been used to drive them home, all have an accordion-like flexibility. They can readily be changed, based upon what temporarily seems to work most effectively against the hated Catholic enemy. Each time any given line of argument loses its clout, a handy “new deal” can be called out of the treasury of two millennia of black legends to describe a different Christian error and the wonders emerging from opposition to it. Each of these new naturalist black legends is ultimately really based upon the same, unchanging, underlying appeal to individual and social passion and the fear of losing out in life by not satisfying it. But each is always presented in conjunction with a “discovery” that is said to be excitingly new and critical in importance.

In any case, by the time believers finally realize how historically and intellectually false one particular assault upon them is; at the moment they understand the exact way in which Catholics are stereotyped through cleverly disseminated caricatures; just when they discover a workable means of popularly and successfully answering their opponents themselves, the seized image and the Mission Statement its stereotypes embody are changed: sometimes slightly, sometimes drastically. Catholics are then left to direct their artillery against a fortress that their enemies have completely dismantled and abandoned.

Thus, to take but one recent example, by the time the faithful, armed with painstakingly accumulated historical, philosophical, and theological proofs, all finely packaged in an effective rhetorical envelope, advance to fight the repeated charge that they are enemies of technology, they find that a good number of the myth makers have radically altered their tune. Many now dedicate themselves to demonstrating that Catholics are actually the main cheerleaders for applied science’s ruthless, technologically advanced rape of the natural environment. In other words, as Catholics lag behind clumsily to lay siege to the empty enemy citadel of technological progress, the artisans of the black legends have calmly constructed a new environmentalist one on different terrain. In fact, these word merchants currently deny all memory of ever having defended technology at all. They sadly shake their heads and chastise their obscurantist foes for yet another manifestation of that psychological immaturity which continually prevents them from dealing with “fresh, contemporary problems”.

Problems of response to black legends vary with the change in tactics as well. If one argues that any given “seized image” is founded upon historical inaccuracies, its artisans claim that it is not the literal meaning of a specific event which ultimately counts but the absolutely valid Mission Statement which the rhetorically-reconstructed historical pictures that they have painted generally embody. Only pedantic obscurantists would adore all the particulars of a dead past. If the Catholic apologist refuses to surrender and boldly attacks the central truth of that Mission Statement, its “real” historical foundation will be resurrected, reasserted, and re-ennobled. Rational refutation of the veracity of both the Mission Statement as well as its historical reference points will once again be buried under heaps of familiar, dubious, exaggerated, stereotypical illustrations of Catholic stupidity and brutality of long proven popular appeal. Even men and women without firm views on the issues in question will be entertained by the dramatic historical wrapping in which the black legends are presented, and will generally pass by their scholarly denial with a long and profound yawn. The average observer will instinctively draw from the deep and wide legendary well whenever called upon to make some immediate superficial comment on historic or contemporary Catholic thought and activity.

We have seen that black legends derive from many different sources with appeal to different personalities. This, too, gives them a capacity seriously to confuse anyone honestly seeking to counter their assaults. Just when a more logical mind might think that he were debating successfully on a relatively sophisticated historical plane, the mythmakers can level an argument drawn from and appealing to their more vulgar supporters. This change of tactics requires a corresponding alteration of defensive strategy from the Christian, a lowering to the demagogic level. That modification of approach will, in turn, be condemned by insisting that dialogue only take place on the rigorous philosophical or aesthetic plane favored by other, more refined supporters of the black legends.

If the befuddled Christian, always responding to attack and never taking the initiative in this cat and mouse game, should then seek to discuss the absurdity of constantly changing the basic character of the argumentation, his opponents will emit an audible sigh of frustration. Valuable time necessary for the satisfaction of the “obvious”, “business as usual” exigencies of “natural” individual and social life was being lost to satisfy the unrewarding, abstract speculations of these ultimately impotent “enemies of mankind”. With this judgment, they will declare the debate to be finished, and they will find the population happily accepting their fiat. In the Kingdom of the Illogical it is the wily one who generally calls the shots. And in doing so, he drives the sane man stark-raving mad.

A final word has to be said regarding one specific black legend that leads us also into the realm of the substance-killing alternative good story: that perpetrated by the liberal Catholic fellow travelers of the GCSQ. According to this instructive mythical amalgam, the true historical foundations and real pilgrim spirit of Catholicism were badly obscured by the victory of the intransigent Ninth Crusaders in the age of Blessed Pius IX. Only liberal Catholics continued to nurture the desire to discover the real Apostolic Tradition, along with the Original Intent of the Founders of the Faith. It was fear and hatred of this truly pious yearning that caused narrow-minded intransigents to suppress liberal Catholicism anew during the reign of St. Pius X, delaying rediscovery of the Church’s root beliefs for another fifty years. Thankfully, however, Second Vatican Council finally admitted the intrinsic merit of liberal Catholic spiritual and intellectual labors, opening up the riches of the apostolic past for the emulation of the pilgrim present.

We have already admitted that there is no denying that many intransigents did, in fact, become obstacles to continued scholarly Catholic labor by the twentieth century. Moreover, it is undeniable that the standard bearers for ecclesiastical historical research since the mid-nineteenth century have generally marched to liberal Catholic tunes. And these historians have indeed achieved a great deal on the micro level to clarify numerous aspects of past ecclesiastical life. That much is true. But, after all, it would be hard to build a black legend and an alternative good story without at least a modicum of veracity.

The problem is that liberal Catholic scholars have embedded their admirable appreciation for a rigorous historical methodology in an overall Mennaisien and modernist-influenced faith in an emerging, evolving, palingenesist Christianity taught by the People’s prophets. Hence, whatever they may have accomplished in their private research, they have rendered meaningless through their exaltation of the principles of will and action in their practical conclusions, dissolving the value of every solid bit of the intellectual evidence they provide into an all too murky goo of directionless, prophetic passion.

Often praiseworthy as historians on the micro-level, liberal Catholics have encouraged a macro-ideology that ultimately justifies a complete disdain for the “dead past”. They have fed a vision that gives believers all the necessary reasons for not bothering to treat seriously that historical activity that they, as private scholars, have undertaken. For their history, like the speculative thinker’s metaphysics, is a block to a completely liberated, vital, action-centered life. It provides too many lessons, too many models to follow, all of which hamper a needed guidance from one’s own creative will. In the last analysis, therefore, the anti-intransigent liberal Catholic historians, like their brothers engaged in scriptural research, sit believers before a mountain of data, much of it crucial and immensely useful. Alas, they then tell the faithful to make their judgments as to what this data all means on the basis of what they “feel”and “will”—or, rather, what they tell believers that they must feel and must will.

More importantly with respect to our current concerns, this also often has a nefarious effect on the fullness of the material that the liberal Catholic historian chooses to present on the micro-level for the enlightenment of the public at large. For the foot soldier of modernity emerging from the liberal Catholic outlook, history is really only valid in so far as it can help to guide men to a confidence in will, action, and democratic faith. Historical research into an understanding of the growth of this confidence is undertaken and praised, but investigation of the arguments of thinkers critical of these cherished goods is excoriated or ignored. And since the rich, positive work of the nineteenth century intransigent school of thought stands in the way of acceptance of the liberal Catholic faith, study of its theological, philosophical, political, sociological, and psychological stance is generally rejected as a useless waste of vital human time and energy.

Creative writing has, therefore, also been an integral part of the liberal Catholic historian’s methodology, and knowledge of what it was that the intransigents had to say has been its first major victim. Their history was liquidated. To hate the intransigents was to know them; to know them in their fullness was beside the point. One all too famous history of the reign of Pope Pius IX, that of Roger Aubert, devotes pages to a description of the “vital” and “forward-looking” journal l’Ere nouvelle, which lasted but briefly in 1848, while it pays scant attention to La Civiltà Cattolica, founded in 1850, and still published today. Yes, it identifies Taparelli d’Azeglio as one of the greatest Catholic thinkers of the nineteenth century—although that is basically the last one hears of him. This is because La Civiltà Cattolica and Taparelli d’Azeglio testify to the positive character of the anti-modern intransigent school of Ninth Crusaders and therefore cannot serve the liberal palingenesist cause.

I, personally, had discussions at Oxford with a liberal Catholic don who criticized as an obvious “given” the “obscurantist” character of the Roman Jesuit journal. While he was magisterally laying that obscurantist beast to rest, I was enjoying the privilege of cutting open large numbers of the thousand pages of its volumes for the fifteen year period from 1850-1865, thus, presumably, becoming the first man actually to read them in the university library. I would not be surprised if the same were true for students in other libraries elsewhere. Committed opponents of the intransigents, today as yesterday, simply have no interest in their history as such, and therefore no willingness even to begin to grasp their explanation of how the full message of the Word has been smothered under the “business as usual” concerns of modern supporters of “nature as is”. A scholar making a painstaking case for intransigent achievements according to the best rules of the modern historiography to which liberal Catholics themselves subscribe is therefore lost in space. And a public formed in the spirit of willful, democratic, prophetic action has no time for his findings anyway. It has more vital, energetic things to do than finding out the simple, boring truth.

Hence, the good story told by a liberal Catholic don allows nothing to be taught of the intransigent discovery of the first period of captivity of the Word brought about by the influence of the naturalism of the eighteenth century Enlightenment. It permits nothing to be known of the liberating intransigent struggle for resurrection of the doctrine of the Mystical Body of Christ and of individual divinization. It effectively prohibits investigation of the movement’s sustained fight for Catholic universalism against arrogant, condescending, secularist, modernist imperialists. The record of intransigent battle versus nationalist parochialism, and against rabid, chauvinist, progressive pronouncements that would make most twenty-first century liberal Catholics shudder, lies buried in the archives and in scattered and little read texts. Believers are left ignorant of the real mistakes of the intransigents, but, much more tragically, of the central nature of the struggle of the intransigents against modernity---a fight for human freedom and dignity against the fraudulent gods of democracy and arbitrary willfulness; a combat waged in a nuanced fashion, taking gambles when gambles were deemed necessary on the basis of the thesis-hypothesis distinction; a struggle for the Logos alongside every enemy of sophism from Plato’s day onwards.

J. Freedom Fighting: The Pluralist Alternative Good Story

If freedom fighters could stir a potential convert to examine the faith-filled demands of the pluralist system along with the rational contradictions that they ensure, the death camp that this “prison of the peoples” represents could swiftly be revealed. The potential convert might cease to perform his part in its danse macabre and run from its twirl in revulsion. But, alas, the power of the Zeitgeist is nowhere as evident as in the iron curtain that pluralism constructs between a man and his mind. It has built this iron curtain with the aid of the most effective alternative good story deconstructing Christianity that has ever been invented. And it has therefore provided the most powerful psychological weapon that sophists have ever had at their disposal to blind men to the truth that the immediately perceived “facts” of life are often not those of nature as such but of erroneous and fallen aspects of it: selfish, materialist “facts” that lead us to take advantage of the sins of the world to ride roughshod over everything else that our “better selves” warn us to avoid; cheap, parochial “facts” that end by teaching us only that might makes right.

Any believer who has fastened the pluralist blindfold over his eyes will automatically reject the slightest criticism of its precepts as the work of the devil. For what could possibly go wrong in the pluralist system, the best system, the only just system, the Most Christian System? What could possibly go wrong when the Church herself has blessed its God-given methodology for defending the peace and freedom of mature, sophisticated, rational modern peoples? Why even bother to ask whether one might find criticisms and warnings against pluralism in past Christian teaching when one knows, by definition, that pluralism is both healthy and practical? It is because pluralist fideism has been so effective in stopping up the ears of its cult followers that each new assault, each new “sack of Rome” which ought to have been the final eye-opening disaster, seems to have done little to awaken Catholics to the major cause of their impotent and even non-existent defense of their own heritage.

If a Catholic freedom fighter wishes to employ all of the various tools western man has developed over the course of the ages for discussing the theoretical validity of pluralism’s definition of peace, freedom, and the ultimate meaning of individual and social life, all of these tools, one by one, including theology, philosophy, history, psychology and sociology, will be dismissed as both impractical and intrinsically dangerous. A desire to use them will be said to illustrate nothing other than a lack of “obvious common sense” on the part of the foolish, impractical, “loser” critic. Do such tools help one to maintain public order? Do they assist in making a killing on the market? On the contrary, all they do is bring up disruptive fantasies encouraging divisiveness and disturbing profits in the process. And like a father prohibited from objecting to his daughter’s betrothal to a scoundrel until he could produce someone perfectly suitable to make her a counter-proposal, the critic will be pressed to offer solutions to every single problem of contemporary society before the slightest theoretical questioning of pluralism as such would be permitted.

If, on the other hand, a freedom fighter seeks to demonstrate the long-term practical dangers of the pluralist mystique, and especially its degeneration into a reign of “might makes right” disguised as the victory of freedom, its totally unquestionable “godliness” will once again be called up by incredulous believers to smother the dialogue. The critic will be accused of lacking faith in the obvious Christian nature, language and mandate of the system…as revealed through the infallible will of its God-loving Founders and their latest batch of effective interpreters. Here, the Catholic liberator will be condemned for his cynical rejection of the God-given “last and best hope” for securing individual freedom and social peace---whose nature, once again, he cannot discuss---and his consequent lack of charity for suffering humanity.

Should he take up the challenge and return to the realm of theory, demonstrating that it is an acceptance of pluralism as an irrational, fideist Faith that prevents a practical sociological analysis of the purely materialist conception of life and the victory of a willful oligarchy it ensures, he will be dragged back down to the “true grit” pragmatic level once again. With complete disregard for the change in tactic and argument, he will be assaulted for his childish naiveté; his hopeless idealism in the midst of a jungle universe whose history is that of a war of all against all. Surely only a Catholic “loser” envious of the success of his betters would think that life was susceptible to guidance by his utopian spiritual babble. Isocrates would not have been able to express himself better.

But what if our freedom fighter persists in his position and emphasizes the fact that he has been the subject of an absurdly irrational attack, accused simultaneously of being a faithless cynic on the one hand and both impractically naïve and viciously envious on the other? First, he will be mollified, told that everyone appreciates the fight for the indefensible cause that he has made, and warned that he must now be a nice boy and go out and make some money. If this last “good willed” strategy does not do the job of silencing the troublemaker, why, then, he will be condemned as the kind of “public nuisance” promoting unpleasant, logical consequences of first principles whom Marsilius’ Defender of the Peace would have been forced to silence, whom David Hume would have sent to play billiards or take a warm shower to render traquil, and whom Ralph Waldo Emerson would have chastised for cultivating the “hobgoblins” of a “petty mind”. Contemporary rhetoricians benefitting from the system will be summoned to find as many “appropriate words” as possible to brutalize him as an Enemy of the People. Truth will not matter in their campaign against him. He will perhaps be dismissed as an obvious lunatic. More effectively still, since pluralism fought the good war against the fascists, he will also be denounced as a Nazi; as an anti-Semite; as a paladin of genocide. Terrorism having finally begun to supplant Nazism as pluralism’s current manifestation of pure evil, the critic will also most likely be painted as a spiritual ally of “Islamo-Fascism”. With this, his expulsion from polite society will be complete.

Few Catholic freedom fighters will have the stamina to reach this final stage of unsuccessful dialogue. Should a hardy few maintain the passion to fight the good fight still longer, they, too, will eventually be forced to abandon the struggle due to the demands of the materialist environment created by the system in which they, after all, still have to function. That environment mandates work and ever more work in order merely to survive. Even the strongest opponent, over time, will simply be too exhausted to indulge the luxury of criticizing pluralism in the few hours of repose left to him by its free economic order at the end of the day.

Hence, pluralism, the Defender of the Peace, mankind’s “last, best hope”, retains its undeserved image and can continue to wreak its all too predictable havoc again and again and again, in country after hapless country, throughout the Empire of the World. Its danse macabre continues to move men relentlessly along, killing their will and their courage to consult even the most clear and open text revealing the message of Christ placed directly under their eyes. Everything in its Mad Hatter’s Ball pushes them away from reading the book of Faith and Reason. The directors of this debilitating game complete their work of diversion from the Word Incarnate by battering into the Catholic mind the conviction that the music of the danse macabre, which relentlessly transmits the message of “nature as is”, actually provides the best tune for the true dance of life to sway to in its pilgrim march to God. This is the Catholic music, they insist. This is the Catholic message. You have been privileged to live in the Catholic Moment. Under these circumstances, the slightest glance away from the back wall of the ballroom for further light from outside its precincts becomes a sin against human reason and the Holy Ghost at one and the same time. All this is accomplished with an effectiveness that surpasses anything that the supporters of the Sacred Empire or the medieval Rut Triumphant or the Most Christian Kings ever even distantly approximated. So the participants in the danse macabre twirl on and on, and its impresarios pursue their willful goals as their victims exhaust their bodies and deaden their minds, hearts, and souls.

K. American Freedom Fighting: Conservatives,

Neo-Conservatives, Libertarians, and Traditionalists

Before ending this chapter, let us emphasize the specific obstacles placed in the freedom fighters’ path by enthusiastic American Catholic fellow travelers of the GCSQ, many of whom do not seem to be aware of the damage to the Faith that they are doing. Such men and women are of major importance in allowing the pluralist Zeitgeist to continue to carry out its non-rational work effectively, happily blocking use of all of the tools one must employ to expose the flaws of the dominant system. These stimulators of the danse macabre include American Catholic conservatives, neoconservatives, libertarians, and, tragically, many traditionalist Catholics as well.

Conservative American Catholics think of themselves as being free from liberal mythmaking and open to the fullness of the Tradition, but they are merely another example of what conservatives throughout the West have always been: liberals who were “mugged”; proponents of a variant of the program of the nineteenth century Party of Order. Admittedly offended by one or the other modern beliefs and practices that have touched too closely those aspects of the Catholic vision that they most cherished and “chose” to maintain, they have nevertheless steadfastly refused to fit their reaction together logically with other “choices” that reflect their unwillingness to correct and transform all of nature in Christ. Hence, their desire to place the “will of the Founders” of the United States, American foreign policy, and American capitalism in a special category, Catholic by definition, with the one unthinkable thought being that they, too, might be in need of serious alteration if they are to fit properly into the plan of God. Illustrating this blindness, one major Catholic home schooling advocate has publically stated that believers should toss any book critical of the American Founding from their children’s curriculum as self-evidently erroneous. Isocrates could not have made the anti-historical, irrational, and sophistic mythmaking point any more clearly.

In other words, conservative American Catholics are men and women who love the Church’s teachings but do little or nothing to criticize, check, and ultimately abandon aspects of their country’s reigning ethos that militate against them, even when the overwhelming evidence of their destructiveness lies before their eyes. They do so because the “traditions” and “customs” of their country support the pluralist deconstruction of the Catholic vision. Like lovers of “traditions” and “customs” in other eras of Catholic History, their modern-day conservative American Catholic heirs find it almost impossible to separate the cause of the Church from that of the government of their land and their national “way of life”. Unfortunately, as we have all too amply seen, the American government and way of life are guided by presumptions about the relationship of the individual to society and the role of theology and metaphysical thought in practical life that are inimical to Catholic Truth; presumptions that, due to the peculiar history of the United States, have given birth to the doctrines of American pluralism that are now the doctrinal foundations of the Empire of the World. Following their guidelines directs Catholics to deal with their problems by seeking redemptive wisdom from Founders who were either consciously or unconsciously committed to the acceptance of “nature as is” and the triumph of the will that such a preferential option for the status quo ensures. Consulting Founder wisdom enables them to know a great deal about the breaking down of Catholic civilization by Protestant and Deist concepts of politics and society for the benefit of the strongest factions and individuals around us. It tells them nothing about the substance of their own Tradition and how to defend it.

Founder wisdom, developed into American pluralism, directs the faithful to assert and accept as pragmatic guidelines for Catholic self-defense and “renewal” strategies that are disastrous to the Faith. Even if the people who use these guidelines desperately want to be a “friendly” force, their anti-Catholic definition of what is and is not “practical” condemns as a horrendous waste of time precisely those pathways to Christian goals that the fullness of the message of the Word prescribes. Nothing within them soars above their immediate material surroundings in order to understand the meaning of the universe from the perspective of the eternal Creator and Redeemer God. And this inevitably subjects the corrective and transforming mission of the Word to manipulation by the petty, parochial, pragmatic interests of the supporters of business as usual, and, ultimately, the pragmatic libertines and criminals guiding the Empire of the World. Still, so long as the Founders can be cited for permitting such an outcome, conservative American believers must find a way to justify it as something eminently admirable, successful, and, above all, Catholic.

The mind boggles when one considers what would have happened had the pragmatism of the American system replaced a Word-dictated pragmatism in past Catholic History. Pragmatic guidelines of this type would have forced acceptance of the Sacred Imperial State, the Crescentii and Tusculani, the Reason of State of the bons français, the Founder Worship of the Giovani, and every other force chaining men and institutions to the spirit of their immediate time and place. Those same pragmatic guidelines would have reacted strongly against the “non-traditional”, truly pilgrim-spirited Catholic policies of a St. Maximus the Confessor, a St. Odilo of Cluny, a Pope Innocent III, the dévot party in France, and the editors of La Civiltà Cattolica of the nineteenth century.

Perhaps most interesting in this regard is a meditation on the problems of the era of the late medieval Rut Triumphant and the way that “low” and “high” road reformers approached their resolution compared with those of the contemporary pluralist Church and the strategies American pragmatism suggests to deal with them. Anyone examining both situations will notice little difference between the earlier flight from discipline—the mass desertion of religious, the desire for an easier moral code, the disappearance of the concept of mortal sin, the innumerable excuses for inability to fulfill sacred vows—and that of the 1960’s and the decades to follow. Indeed, one can discern little distinction between the sixteenth-century Church’s initial “intellectual” and “moderate” efforts to deal with critical abuses and those developed in the post-conciliar era. The same approach yielded the same disastrous results: ineffective decrees and reform constitutions on the one hand and endless workshops and programs discussing the nature of renewal on the other; “where licit” clauses that once favored an abandonment of residence in parish and diocese and today transform abusive “signs of the times”---such as permitting extraordinary ministers of the Eucharist and reception of communion in the hand---into accepted norms and even ironclad ecclesiastical mandates; a kindliness to heretics and to the rebellious, both then and now, that makes loyal Catholics think that the rogues who prey upon them do so either with the approval of or because of the criminal laxity of the Holy See.

The proponents of false traditions in the first half of the sixteenth century did not see that their standard operating procedures were helpless to deal with the disasters following Luther’s rebellion of 1517 or the Sack of Rome of 1527. Similarly, American Catholic conservatives who have accepted the false traditions of America cannot understand that the standard operating procedures of this heritage render them helpless in fending off a further collapse of their Faith. It was with the aid of the pluralist doctrines these enshrine that the Faith came crashing down in the 1960’s in the first place. Anyone relying on the false traditions of the American Framers and the “infallible” labyrinth of check-and-balance standard operating procedures which are molded by the Protestant-Enlightenment environment around them can do as little to avoid the Church’s destruction today as legalist administrators operating purely on existing curial and canonical grounds were able to do during the age of the Rut Triumphant.

In believing that prudent defense of their Faith demands the embrace of constitutional “business as usual”, conservatives embrace the highly impractical routine of the American political arena. Through this routine, whole lives are wasted trying to overturn one or another wrong at the price of praising the principles and methods that brought these very injustices into being in the first place. In fearing that they might be considered nostalgic for bygone social institutions should they criticize the structures central to American life, conservatives ignore the fact that they incense an irrational political rhetoric praising the “will” of long-dead Founders who are divinized, mutatis mutandis, as much as any ancient God-Kings. The Church might just as well have seized the Catholic Moment at the time of the Reformation by abetting the growth of Protestantism; the Romans called to defend their city from the Sack of 1527 might courageously have embraced the Roman Moment by joining the mutinous soldiers in breaching the Aurelian Walls; and sixteenth-century English believers would have proved their recognition of the Patriotic Moment be espousing a religious revolution promoted by a small clique of foreign-influenced fanatics and imposed by a tyrannical and heritage-hating queen.

Very little has to be added in speaking of the particular obstacles placed in the path of those fighting to liberate the captive Word by the neoconservative American Catholic camp. Just like conservatives, neoconservatives exclude America from the need for any correction and transformation whatsoever, whether from Reason or from Faith. As far as Catholics militating in neoconservative ranks are concerned, any necessary social influence of a Christian character would emerge from the American experience in and of itself anyway. Nothing could be more Christ-like in character, because the American Way, by definition, was already spiritually high-minded and morally good---even in fighting the kind of international conflict which, if conducted by foreigners, would be condemned as a manifestly unjust war.

What is distinctive about the neoconservative challenge to liberation of the captive Word is the fact that the strongmen behind this movement interpreting what “nature as is” according to “the will of the Founders” are primarily interested in the fate of the State of Israel. The corrective and transforming message of the Word in history therefore becomes whatever aids the cause of this extremely anti-Christian, nationalist, and ultimately quite racist entity. But any opposition to the neoconservative position on the part of fellow Catholics would immediately---and effectively---be dismissed as proof positive of the anti-Semitic, genocidal, Nazi sympathies of the unpatriotic villains and mauvais Americains daring to profer it. So many potentially critical souls censure their doubts as they might censure any other evil thoughts and images.

Contemporary freedom fighters will find that American supporters of libertarianism allied with the Austrian School of economics are among the most powerful of the contemporary captors of the message of the correcting and transforming Word. Pose, though these libertarians may do, as scientific minded students of natural phenomena that must be accepted by a Faith respectful of Reason, they fit both Plato and Aristotle’s description of fraudulent surgeons. They readily qualify as “quacks” for the simple reason that they obstinately refuse to operate with all of the knowledge that they need in order to be able to speak rationally about their chief concerns. Worse still, they hold up their determined commitment to yet another form of tunnel vision as though it were an intellectual badge of honor. Like their ancient sophist forbears, they seize hold of the language that substantive men hunting for the truth have developed and ennobled, stripping it of its full and proper meaning, and turning it to the service of their own program of uncritical acceptance of the data of fallen nature.

Their “rational” response to criticism presents an all too familiar admixture of sophistic silence, deconstruction, and mockery of serious intellectual opposition. Spokesmen for their cause frequently try to avoid entirely any mention of Catholic social thinkers and the arguments that they make---just as the pagan rhetorician, Symmachus, sought to avoid acknowledging the existence of the Church Fathers in the fourth century in his defense of Roman Tradition. When forced, unwillingly, to deal with criticisms, they readily betray their modernist as well as their sophist spirit, condescendingly treating believing Catholics who refuse to accept their reductionist theories as though they were sick patients requiring a revolutionary economic consciousness-raising. Distortion triumphs as they answer specific complaints about Austrian financial and industrial theories with jests ridiculing the lunatic foibles of obscurantists entertaining fantasies exalting an idyllic rural life. Last, but definitely not least, they play the familiar sophist card by dismissing their enemies as nothing other than envious “losers” who do not know how to “make it” in a “free” society, rather than what are really are: namely, men who have a completely different definition of nature, liberty, and success; men who detest the rewards that libertarians consider enviable as nothing other than the shadows of a one-dimensional, unnatural, cave-like zoo.

Such captors of the Word can write as many books as they wish to produce on every economic topic imaginable, from the role of the Federal Reserve to the cultural value of Walmart, and even make some solid points along the way. But there is no reason for a thinking Catholic to take any of their specific insights seriously until they abandon their conscious, determined, and irrational embrace of a back-of-the-cave ignorance. Until they do so, they will always be like Bitzer in Charles Dicken’s Hard Times: sucked dry of everything fruitful they might otherwise have to say. No Catholic should lose a night’s sleep hunting for a rational answer to the data that they marshal under their self-destructive ideological sloganeering. He should worry, instead, about how to overcome irrational fears that prevent him either from openly condemning this pseudo wisdom as the parochial nonsense that it is, or working militantly to counteract the damage it causes to the souls of its victims. Believing Catholics really have nothing to fear in confronting these captives of the Word but fear itself.

Sad to say, however, Catholics are shocked and awed into taking libertarian knowledge of the shadows of the back of the cave as though it were wisdom coming down from the Father of Lights. Breaking through the hold that such Catholic fellow travelers of the Grand Coalition of the Status Quo have over their co-religionists would be easier if their sophistry were the sole tool that they had at their disposal. Alas, once again, the exhausting demands on personal time placed upon everyone by that all too unbound rhinocerous called the existing American free market system are perhaps the greatest obstacle preventing even the slightest “lifting of the veil” to see beyond the libertarian lie to the full truth of Christ. People are simply too busy working to stay alive not to want to believe what they are told to believe, both by supporters of this camp as well as by those of every other naturalist force seeking an influence among the faithful and appearing to “make it big” while doing so.

In any case, the fact that Catholics who listen to them separate daily individual choices regarding economic matters from their impact upon our eternal destiny; that Catholics reduce market issues to the realm of the morally indifferent, judging right and wrong on the basis of success in manipulating fallen nature alone; that Catholics read history through the lens of a Liberation Theology of the Market that sees “the correction and transformation of all things in capitalism” as being infinitely more important, in practice, than correction and transformation in Christ, is terribly frightening. It is frightening not only because it is naturalism pure and simple but also because it is naturalism in a realm where everyone has his daily temptations and potential price. Allowing such a vision to triumph in Catholic circles means that worries about the morality of everything from Machtpolitik to sexual libertinism must logically disappear from the camp of the saints as well. Christian behavior in general must eventually mean absolutely nothing. Eternal salvation must be viewed as a reward for a lifetime of recitation of a purely intellectual and inconsequential---though orthodox---Creed after a lifetime cavorting in a morally indifferent playground has ended.

We have repeatedly mentioned that many of the early supporters of erroneous ideas did not desire the consequences that flowed from them. Martin Luther did not want the principles of Protestantism to aid radical enthusiasts. America’s Founders did not plan for the influence of Karl Rove. Cavour and Bismarck might have laughed away the prospect of a Hitler, and early sexual libertines did not necessarily foresee the spread of gross pornography from out of red light districts into their own neighborhoods and living rooms. Liberal bourgeois capitalists of the mid-nineteenth century would, perhaps, have run headlong from massive shopping malls destructive to more traditional centers of city economic life. And, certainly, most recent Catholic defenders of the unrestrained market whom I know do not wish to destroy what remains of Christian morality and Christendom.

The fact that so many heretical and ideological thinkers did not wish bad things to happen is a proof of the continued hold of traditional beliefs and presuppositions regarding personal behavior upon them. But it is also a demonstration of the failure of their logic. Regardless of the will or the choice of the Founders of any erroneous school of thought, the ideas that they espoused were what they were and spread their inevitable subversive poison. Some men, like the Anabaptists and Unitarians of Luther and Calvin’s days, accepted that logic straightaway. Nevertheless, the bulk of humanity requires time to do so---time, the slow dissolution of the beliefs and behavior which block extensive change, and the construction of a society which fully shapes people not on the basis of its Founders’ irrational conservative scruples, but their corrosive rational principles.

Enlightenment freedom and naturalism lead, logically, to the creation of radical, passionate men who care nothing for long-standing traditions and objective morality. The logic of Enlightenment capitalism, as men like Michael Novak exult, is to create a new kind of man who thinks and acts differently than citizens of traditional western Christendom. These new men ensure that the pattern of capitalist industrial development in twenty-first century Africa and Latin America is different than that guided by more traditionally minded individuals still shaped by the Christian remnants of eighteenth-century Britain. These new men do not define or practice a “charity” that can help to correct social imbalances in the same way that older Catholic believers could. These new men adore the anti-social, anti-historical, materialist way of life. If they nevertheless insist on claiming the “Catholic” label for themselves, all they do is to make of the Catholic Faith an after-hours parlor sport for those engaged in what really counts in a democratic, capitalist universe: earning vast incomes and spending them on an ever-expanding number of useless or destructive toys.

One of the sad realities of life today is that this new capitalist man, divinized in one way or another by conservatives and libertarians alike, already dominates the Empire of the World as a result of a global industrial and technological revolution that cannot be altered without untold dislocation and suffering. Dislocation of the economic order of the Empire is, of course, always possible, and not necessarily from the outside, but from the implosion of the system itself. It is understandable that many may find this notion difficult to accept, both because the system, by its very nature, discourages intellectual investigation of its problems and because a mere two hundred years of Enlightenment capitalist history may not yet have been enough time for its full disruptive potential to display itself. But both Reason and Faith indicate that its judgment day must come.

In the meantime, freedom fighters can at least put those men and women they are seeking to liberate on warning against praising a force that barters away their true freedom, their true knowledge, the true, redeemed order of nature, and the moral concerns of their true Faith for a tradition, mind, and soul-destroying “prosperity”. Christ came to save men from the consequences of their own evil; not to preach encouragement of Original Sin as the only sound basis for personal liberation and economic security. In short, freedom fighters dealing with Austrian libertarianism must keep in mind two Latin words popularized by Cato the Elder when treating of Rome’s relations with Carthage: delenda est---it must be destroyed.

This brings us, finally, to the Traditionalist Movement. Obstacles placed by traditionalists in the path of Catholic freedom fighters are of particular concern to me, since I myself have been involved in the work of this movement since 1970. Moreover, I am personally aware of the spiritual, intellectual, and even physical suffering that many and perhaps most traditionalists have had to endure in their defense of the Catholic Faith. Allow me to ease the pain of dealing with this subject by prefacing my comments regarding specific problems in traditionalist ranks with reference to one tragic note regarding reception of the message of the Word in history in general.

Despite the glorious work that has been done throughout the centuries to make Catholics more aware than ever before of the jewel box their Sacred Tradition places before them, most believers stubbornly persist in making the stingiest possible use of it. Some make appeal to the desires of the reigning pope but not to those of past pontiffs; some to Scripture but not to the living authority of the Bride of Christ; some to St. Thomas but to none of the Church Fathers; some to St. Augustine while reviling St. Thomas and the Scholastics; some to dogmatic purity but not to the social doctrine that teaches us how to practice our Faith in daily political and economic life; some to theology but not to history; some to the Holy Spirit in history, but not to fixed and unchangeable Truth. Every one of these truncated approaches to Christ tempts us to put on blinders and eventually return to that “low road” that a full knowledge of Catholic History would teach us to abhor.

Alas, the behavior of many of the traditionalist Catholics who are indeed aware of the extent of the crisis facing the Church indicates that they also do not always confront this terrible situation with the jewel box opened wide before them. Sad to say, there are all too many men and women calling themselves traditionalists who are guilty of almost every error that has afflicted the Church throughout the ages. Some are millenarians, using an approaching apocalyptic change as an excuse for doing nothing to correct and transform the world around them in Christ today. Some place the teachings of personal revelations and apparitions above the pronouncements of the Magisterium. Others are Protestant and Jansenist in their hatred for the world and its beauty. Still others are Enlightenment-minded Americanists, “conservative liberals who have been mugged”, neoconservatives, and libertarians, contemptuous of social institutions and authorities, from the State down through to the local community board, and hostile to their absolutely essential importance to individual life. Some are painfully timebound, treating everything from the clothing styles to the entertainments of a particular era—especially that of the America of the 1950’s—as normative and sacred. In other words, many traditionalists, in varied ways, are actually defenders of the “business as usual” demands of “nature as is”; unwitting fellow travelers of the Grand Coalition of the Status Quo.

How can they be so? They accomplish this illogical turnabout by denying that they could possibly espouse anything anti-Catholic because they are, after all, what they call themselves: namely, traditionalists. What else could a traditionalist be, in practice, but “traditional”? Clearly, repetition of the word “traditionalist”, like repetition of the words “Sacred Empire”, “plenitude of papal power”, “Most Christian King”, “legitimist”, “counterrevolutionary”, “intransigent”, “friend of the Holy Spirit”, and “People of God” make many men and women feel as though they are thereby freed of the need to correct their own intellectual and moral errors and transform themselves in Christ. They are not. And the result is the same as with conservative, neoconservative, and libertarian Catholics. If traditional Catholicism is what they represent it to be, then the traditional Faith and the traditional liturgy are nothing other than the same after-hours parlor sport for those engaged in what really counts in a democratic, capitalist universe as the game indulged in by the other groups discussed above.

There is also another sin to which many traditionalist Catholics fall prey: a manifest lack of charity in dealing with their internal squabbles and external enemies. This is disastrous for the work of the Word in history. Yes, they must never slacken in their public identification of scandalous heretical ideas and pastoral methods designed to spread them through the Catholic population. Still, they must constantly remind themselves repeatedly of the need to conduct their quarrels with the maximum of self-awareness and charitable restraint. Apostolic activity can never be based on the desire purely for winning points for one’s own camp, however admirable this camp may be. The eighteenth-century European reaction to the China dispute shows that the population-at-large will recognize and be repelled by the vicious backbiting predominating in a good battle fought in the wrong spirit. That kind of battle always ends tragically, with its warring participants eventually ignoring the serious issues at stake therein, and with them all falling prey to the machinations of enemies wishing to use their flaws to forward their own openly anti-Catholic agenda.

L. Smiling as We Die

Personalist encouragement of “diving into” the mystique of Marxism was a terrible thing. Nevertheless, that mystique was so patently fraudulent that it possessed a built-in self-destructive element. If one compares it to a drink, it offered a beverage that contained a poison one could taste and reject before it reached the point of annihilating absolutely everyone who sipped it. Personalist encouragement of a dive into the Americanist pluralist mystique is not quite the same phenomenon. It suggests the analogy of taking a poisoned cocktail that does still have something of a familiar, pleasant taste to it and seems, for a while, to provide what it promises: tranquility and the satisfaction of personal desire. One does not realize, until the very moment that he reaches the bottom of the glass, that there is really nothing good therein and that the poison has nevertheless done its job. The individual members of all of the “free”, dessicated, meaningless “clubs” who drink the American pluralist poison smile and toast their murderer as they die.

What happens to the members of the American Catholic Pluralist “Club”, the European Catholic Pluralist “Club”, and the Third World Catholic Pluralist “Club” once they dive into this mystique, witness to it, and then bring it to perfection? None of them have any hope of survival as distinct cultural forces. They are all obliged to destroy whatever distinguishes them as Catholics in order to practice a “non-divisive, integrating, materialist freedom”. They are all obliged to dismantle what is most essential to their character, especially what has been corrected and transformed through the message of the Incarnation, in order to “fit into” a jungle society which they must praise repeatedly as the most beautifully ordered in history. They must reduce the Church to the sociological significance of a cheerleading squad for a technologically advanced but barbarian civilization, whose warehouses are filled with intellectual and material goods which lead men away from the light and back into the darkest recesses of Plato’s cave; back to “nature as is”, with no Faith, no Reason, and no Seeds of the Logos whatsoever to guide them in the hunt for greater light. They are condemned to see their children treat this dismantling and emasculation as the obvious fulfillment of the real Catholic enterprise. They are condemned to hear their offspring repeat black legends that denigrate truly Catholic heroes as villains, while they relate fraudulent, alternative good stories regarding the faith-filled labors of anti-Catholic opponents of the Word in history. They are obliged to accept the fact that this dismantling and emasculation of true human achievement will change along with whoever is the strongest ideologue, libertine, or criminal of the moment and whatever it is that he wishes Catholics to support. And what that means in the terrorist-obsessed Empire of the World today is that while they are all obliged to repeat, as a dogmatic certainty, the belief that men and women have never experienced so great a liberty and so exalted a sense of human dignity, they must mock real Catholic concerns over just and unjust international conflicts or humane treatment of prisoners of war. Moral outrage must be saved for two evils alone. It must be saved to excoriate whoever fails to recognize “American exceptionalism” and whoever suggests the possible need to restrain illicit global profit making.

Let us remember Salvian (400-470), in his main work De Gubernatione Dei, who criticized a Gallo-Roman world that was apparently unconscious of its own cultural decay, injustice, and smugness. Like St. Augustine half a century earlier, he marveled at the hunt for pleasure-as-usual amidst barbarian threats menacing the foundations of Christian, Mediterranean civilization. “It dies,” he exclaimed, dumbfounded by the almost supernatural blindness of his fellow citizens; “it dies, and nonetheless, it laughs.”⁰ "It is already dead," one would be tempted to say looking at modern Catholicism as it tightens its pluralist blindfold and exhausts itself in yet another round of that impotent danse macabre welcoming yet more diverse ideas and lifestyles destructive to everything it stands for; “it is already dead, and yet it laughs as though it were in the midst of an indescribably successful renewal.”

Epilogue:

My End is My Beginning

An “End Time” is Always a New Beginning

Giles of Viterbo (1469-1532), Augustinian cardinal and humanist scriptural scholar, is most known in history for his discourse at the opening of the Fifth Lateran Council (1512-1517) in Rome. In this powerful address, he not only outlined the evils of the era in which he lived and labored but also enunciated the principle that every friend of the work of the Word in history must unceasingly repeat: that it is necessary to reform homines per sacra, non sacra per homines; that it is men who are to be corrected and transformed by Christ—not the teaching of the supernatural Savior through the words of His temporal students and His nature-bound patients.⁰

Many of Giles’ contemporaries were so horrified by the corruption of Christendom that they feared they might be living in the “end times”. So often were apocalyptic themes preached and discussed in the decades preceding Lateran Council that the Fathers of the Holy Synod felt constrained to warn against their further dissemination. How could they not be concerned about their impact? On the one hand, their fearful message of imminent approaching doom could be totally paralyzing to any effective struggle for future, serious Christian reform. On the other, their teaching, if not marred in its essential understanding of Christianity itself, was often coupled with dreams of swift, utopian, millenarian change that were equally detrimental to the solid work of correction and transformation in Christ. Sad to say, the council’s chief aid in blocking apocalyptic visions of both exaggeratedly hopeless and hopeful varieties was the general inertia of the leaders and the led---trapped as they were by the customary routine of the Rut Triumphant in just as flawed an appreciation of the full meaning of the Incarnation for individual human lives and the societies shaping them.

It was the influence of all of these factors together that molded the troubled mind, soul, and body of a Christian world badly in need of reform at a moment that proved not to be the End Time, but, rather, one of many temporal “end times”. It was this that allowed for what were ultimately anti-Christian mixtures of supernatural, natural, and magical ideas to flourish, whether in the high-brow Neo-Platonic speculations that a man like Giles of Viterbo himself indulged in, together with Marsilio Ficino, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, and Johannes Reuchlin, or in the popular obsession with the nefarious efficacy of witchcraft shared by peasants, preachers, and apparently certain prelates and popes alike. It was this that permitted men enriched through the enslavement of native populations in the new worlds uncovered by fifteenth and sixteenth century Portuguese and Spanish explorations to justify their oppression as the “obvious” means of dealing with pagan or Moslem enemies and thereby completing global evangelization. It was this that led even some well-intentioned early modern Christian economic thinkers to combine their religion with aspects of a soulless “business as usual” mentality blind to issues of commercial justice. And it was all this that contemporary pontiffs, bishops, and theologians had to sort through thoroughly, separating the chaff from the wheat, once again criticizing and correcting any of their predecessors who, as Tertullian and Pope St. Gregory VII lamented, mistook what were merely the customary dictates of the Rut Triumphant for the Truth that sets men free. Some did this work well. Some did it embarrassingly poorly.

Nevertheless, we saw when discussing that tragic era that reform of homines per sacra, non sacra per homines was coming even in the worst days of the “end time” through which Giles of Viterbo was living. It was coming through that spirit of an internal break with “the system” promoted by the vision of St. Catherine of Genoa, the Oratories of Divine Love, and the Theatines. It was coming through the revival of a speculative theology that, at the hands of men like Cardinal Cajetan, was reasserting the proper non-magical understanding of nature and its relationship to the supernatural. It was coming through the truly evangelical spirit of some of the explorers, conquistadors, and missionaries—and the courageous Dominican and Franciscan condemnation of the horrible injustices accompanying the opening of new worlds to which a real love of the Word Incarnate inexorably led them. It was this solid Catholic sense that brought about that magnificent examination of conscience undertaken by the Kingdom of Spain regarding the initial treatment of the Indians in the Americas and the admirable royal attempt to apply practical measures overturning “appropriate colonial justifications for oppression”.⁰

Reform of homines per sacra, non sacra per homines nevertheless proved to be a shock to many sixteenth century Catholics, and for two particular reasons. To begin with, as in all such cases, it demonstrated that the “end time” in which they lived was not the apocalypse but simply the conclusion of one era in the history of Christianity and the onset of yet another. Secondly, it showed that some phenomena that a number of believers considered to be eminently acceptable—such as magic and economic exploitation of their fellow men in the name of religion—were acceptable only to a fallen nature that had yet to be corrected and transformed in Christ. Would that that reform and the shock that it brought to the system had been completed! It was not. The new, Tridentine, Baroque Civilization it created also ran its course. It, too, came to its “end time”—the “end time” whose problems we ourselves are forced to endure and address.

The Present “End Time” and the Future Advance of the Word

Friends of the full correcting and transforming message of the Word may never have faced a situation more painful than the one confronting them today. Everything that that message proclaims is, for all intents and purposes, globally ignored and derided. Hopes for making the Word the king of the universe appear to be so utopian that many American conservatives, neoconservatives, and libertarians use faith in that goal as a means of illustrating the mindless, ideological limitations of Catholics entertaining them. Once again, Chateaubriand’s comment holds true: there are indeed moments in history when possessing a higher vision is treated by the enemies of the spirit as though it actually reveals a dullness of soul.

Sophistic words, in contrast, prosper as never before. The tellers of fine tall tales that guarantee the opposite of what they promise control all of the guiding myths of the pluralist Empire of the World. Believers themselves have generally been seduced into either directly abandoning their Faith or dialoguing with the mythmakers on their own terms, thus providing what amounts to a “Catholic” defense of “nature as is” rather than support for the correction and transformation of nature in Christ. Under such circumstances, there is no wonder that many traditionalists are seduced into dangerous millenarian delusions and long to hide in the underbrush of our rhetoric-drunk imperial society in order to await divine deliverance.

Still, let us consider what would happen to a man who actually was awakened by Catholic freedom fighters to the possibility of exchanging the modern danse macabre for the pilgrim dance of life in this present time of troubles. My contention is that he would find himself as changed an individual as that first brave soul who tore himself away from his fixation on the back wall of the cave in the magnificent allegory in Plato’s Republic. Like his platonic prototype, he, too, would realize that he had to do absolutely everything in his power to complete his journey to the light, and then to act in accordance with the insights gained through his enlightenment.

Our modern pilgrim’s first and most liberating step towards enlightenment would entail a complete, internal break with the false goals, priorities, and laws of the Rut Triumphant of the Empire of the World. This would mean a refusal to accept a “make believe” life of living death in which belief, knowledge, and action were completely separated from one another; namely, the life of living death—the euthanasia—required by the ruling imperial ethos. Such a refusal would bring with it an internal rejection of that schizophrenic Catholic club mentality that renders him impotent as a Christian while exposing him to the constant danger of conversion to the libertine or criminal outlook central to shaping his daily environment. As “passive” as such an internal break with “the system” might seem to be, it is, as St. Catherine of Genoa, the Oratories of Divine Love, and the Theatines realized in the age of the late medieval Rut Triumphant, actually the most decisive and contentious step a man can take. Moreover, it is instantly perceived as such by the defenders of the existing Establishment. They cannot help but recognize a dangerous threat to the dominance of the present disorder—as the personalists liked to call the reigning ethos and its political and social structures—posed by the emergence of even one single individual who will not publicly praise the danse macabre destroying man’s body and soul as though it were the height and culmination of the march of human history.

But the newly awakened and committed Catholic rebel would be pleased to learn of their irritation. He would not want to keep his decision purely internal. Rather, he would long to become a militant advocate on behalf of the full corrective and transforming message of the Word in the public sphere. Like both Plato’s escaped cave dweller, as well as the reformer monks of Cluny and their colleagues through the ages, he would be eager to take the offensive and illuminate the world around him, realizing that any long-term personal success must eventually involve determined social action as well. He, like his forbears, would know that he could enjoy no secure possession of the light unless he also somehow enlisted the communities in which he grew and perfected himself in his hunt for the victory of the True, the Good, and the Beautiful, altering their unnatural “structures of sin” to work for the common good of all. For he, too, would see that it was only in this way that he could escape the danger of himself being dragged back into the vast and soul-killing darkness of Plato’s cave.

Obviously, the Catholic militant, newly enlightened at the hands of his true Tradition, would be deeply concerned above all else about awakening his fellow believers and the co-opted ecclesiastical communities that sedate and misshape them according to the wishes of revolutionary prophets—a project in which the restoration of the traditional daily liturgical life of the Church would play a central role. But he would also recognize that he had to work with the secular communities that he inhabited as well, stirring them up to find ways of enchaining those strong men dominating communal life for the satisfaction of their own, narrow, “business as usual” desires. In short, he would know that he had to find some contemporary means of “binding the rhinoceros”.

In approaching this sacred and secular task, he would be wise to imitate the reformers of Cluny still further, identifying the proponents of “nature as is” who posed the greatest danger to his social labors, directing his primary public activity to converting rather than praising and witnessing to their sagacity. Marauding malitia of the tenth and eleventh centuries were the most significant threat to a just social order in the days of the new medieval ascent of Mount Tabor. They were the ones who brought forth the strongest efforts from contemporary reformers to tame. Today, both the pluralist ideologues and word merchants who stimulate and justify the danse macabre, along with those libertines and criminals who use the tellers of a good tall tale to serve their own agenda, must be the chief targets for contemporary evangelization on the part of Catholics. They are the “rhinoceros” who must be bound---for our sake, for the sake of the common good, and for their own sakes as well.

It would be cowardly to leave off discussing this theme without making one last reference to word merchant exploitation of the war of the Incarnate Word with His Jewish opponents to aid the GCSQ’s defense of fallen nature. For modern authors of black legends and alternative good stories take it for granted that all they have to do to drive the proponents of the cause of Christ the King from the field of combat is to make mention of Christianity’s wicked treatment of the Jews. But insofar as they do think this to be the case, they prove themselves deluded by their own sophist arguments.

That sinful Catholics, both now and in the past, must do penance for crimes against Jews is scarcely to be denied. They must also do similar penance for crimes against Moslems, pagans, emperors, kings, popes, prelates, priests, and ordinary men and women, Catholic and non-Catholic alike. If such Catholics committed their crimes in the name of Catholicism they must do penance for their hypocrisy or their ignorance as well. But the line to the confessional box and intense penitential expiation must be led by contemporary believers who have accepted the arguments of pluralist word merchants and joined in the demand that the Church qua Church—as the Mystical Body of Christ— apologize for her supposed crimes

This is a totally absurd demand. For the Church has made eminently clear what it is that forms part of her teaching and what it is that does not. She herself has entered into battle with Church Fathers, popes, bishops, emperors, kings, saints both cleric and lay, and ordinary believers who have taught doctrines that she cannot accept. And she has never accepted teachings and actions regarding forced conversions, racial theories, and genocides that modern word merchants and popular opinion ascribe to her. Teachings and actions of this sort—such as the struggles against the conversos in fifteenth century Spain—have regularly been the product of popular outbursts of anger over a complex mesh of social issues and political power struggles. Insofar as they have indeed compromised religion, this has been due to the work of individual preachers. But these errors and pogroms as such have regularly and courageously been fought by pontiffs and prelates who have emphasized the dignity of all men in and through the influence of the Mystical Body of Christ.⁰

Everything that brought about the twentieth century genocide against the Jews was the work of the Grand Coalition of the Status Quo: that formidable alliance’s insistence upon destroying the influence of the Church over the State; its reduction of knowledge to a natural “wisdom” that some powerful men wished to be understood on biological and racial grounds alone; its construction of a New Order founded upon the Triumph of the Will. Meanwhile, everything that could effectively have prevented that genocide was rejected as either the message of an unscientific and ignorant Dark Age or an imposition of religious “values” offensive to the dignity of man and State and their freedom of choice.

Sad to say, the State of Israel, which treats any criticism of its actions as a sign of latent “fascism”, is the chief contemporary teacher and practitioner of the theories and actions behind the sole genocide it permits mankind to lament: that which took place during the Second World War. Israel exercises an enormous influence over the Empire of the World, and it does so backed by American military strength. It, too, is a “rhinoceros” that must be bound by those wishing to fight for the Empire of the Word. But given the current political impotence of Catholics concerned to bring about such a binding, it seems that that labor is one that primarily calls for a regimen of fasting and prayer.

What kind of society might be produced through a successful attack on the pluralist Empire of the World and those who triumph—or believe that they triumph, to the actual detriment of their own souls and bodies—by means of its ethos? This is impossible to say. St. Peter and St. Paul could not have foreseen the character of a proper Christian imperial order. Neither St. Augustine, nor St. Boniface, nor Charles the Great could have predicted the development of the High Middle Ages with its new and comprehensive effort to ascend Mount Tabor. Reformers like the author of the Formicarius in the depths of the age of the late medieval Rut Triumphant could not have imagined Baroque Christendom. Jesuits driven from their missions and chained in Portuguese prisons in the decades before the Revolution would probably have treated prophetic announcement of a nineteenth century Catholic revival as the dream of madmen.

Nevertheless, we can certainly hope that it would be a world that would provide a still deeper understanding of the full message of the Word for man in nature than that which has been handed down to us today. We can hope so because we ourselves are now aware of similar developments having taken place in the Christian past. What a splendid contrast, to take but one major example, was the situation of early twentieth century Catholics in relation to that of their fourteenth century brethren. How much more obvious to them were the answers to questions regarding the relationship of written and oral Tradition, the Deposit and the unfolding of the Faith, the infallibility of the Roman pontiffs when speaking publically as the voice of Christ rather than addressing issues as private persons, and, finally, the very nature of Christendom as a whole. And all this, due to the work accomplished by the Tridentine Reformers and the intransigent Ninth Crusaders!

If we were to be successful in affecting a similar revival of the influence of the Word, our descendants might one day be able to enjoy the same splendid contrast in knowledge with respect to issues that confuse and weaken us profoundly today. Most importantly, our contemporary labors might well ensure that future Catholics would be infinitely more adept at uncovering and dismissing the fraudulence of the word merchandizing central to the work of the Grand Coalition of the Status Quo: both that which taxes Christianity with crimes that actually run totally counter to its teaching, as well as that which twists the meaning and significance of the Faith to serve some “nice” purpose threatening none of the “business as usual” projects of the defenders of a fallen nature.

One thing is absolutely—and perhaps painfully—certain in this cloud of unknowing regarding the future effects of such an auspicious revival: the fact that it would cut the ground from underneath many “customs” that have taken hold in the contemporary Catholic world to the detriment of the tasks truly assigned to us by Christ. For believers would inevitably discover that numerous ideas and practices that they today take for granted not only as perfectly compatible with Church teaching but even essential to its victory are terribly flawed “tall tales” invented by word merchants of the Grand Coalition of the Status Quo; by men who are, in fact, mortal enemies of the Word in history. These “Catholic” errors, in our own land, include the special, godly “exceptionalism” of the American system, the supposedly iron laws of a capitalist system run amock, and, sad to say, even certain traditionalist perceptions of the existence of some pre-conciliar Golden Age.

Were a revival to take hold, future generations of fellow believers, brought up on a more profound understanding of their authentic heritage, would incredulously question ecclesiastical historians as to how any American Catholic could ever have convinced himself that a system rooted in the twin errors of Protestantism and the Enlightenment might have produced anything other than a thoroughgoing “Sack of Rome”. Perhaps these historians would be merciful and inform the incredulous that it took the Catholic world seven hundred years to come to terms with the barbarian invasions, escape the influence of the evil beliefs and behavior of the German tribes, and jell any of their native achievements together with the Seeds of the Logos of Greco-Roman civilization. Perhaps they would therefore underline the fact that it was no shock that it had taken so long to deal with political and social confusions posed by a Grand Coalition of the Status Quo that was still more powerful than the barbarians—and lacked their redeeming qualities.

Let us dream that by having come to terms with the problems of the American pluralist regime, future Catholics will learn, once and for all, that it will never be possible for the Church to discover an infallible system for dealing with the political and social realm; that she will never find a system that obviates the permanent need for the support of solid doctrine, intense personal and communal labor, a pilgrim spirit, and an openness to new steps in the dramatic and ever-changing dance of life. A major flaw of all modernity has been its effort to identify just such a foolproof mechanism through which the difficulty of determining and doing the right thing in each and every new situation might be avoided; its attempt to dispense men, in effect, from the task of Christian living. It could not succeed in this enterprise. No constitution and no political system can ever be fully free from manipulation by the noonday devils. No individual can ever be liberated from the hard work required in order to escape from their seductive, demonic appeal. Prudent experimentation, guided by the unchangeable moral teaching of the Church, seems as though it must always be the order of the day in times of crisis and change. It was perhaps—just perhaps—a good thing for nineteenth century Catholics to have undertaken that experiment with liberal and democratic governments that they did. But it would be infinitely more judicious for us to learn from their mistakes in doing so, and to admit, once again, that if any form of government open to correction and transformation in Christ is valid, all, without exception, are also capable of corruption and destruction.

If contemporary believers would understand and accept this fact, they would be in a much more suitable position for aiding in the construction of a better and more Catholic future. They would recognize that flexibility regarding systems dictates that if they do participate directly in politics, that they always do so as free men liberated by the Word. Free Christian men would take it for granted that the systems within which they work are just that—systems, and not their Savior; that there will forever be aspects of them that will tempt people to abandon those teachings of the Word which inevitably assault venal self-interests; and, unfortunately, that there will repeatedly be Catholics who will worship at their political shrines, will twist their Faith to serve their substitute secular gods, will thereby create the fuel for seemingly legitimate black legends regarding the Church and her collusion with the powerful, and will need to be as vigorously combated as outright enemies of Christ.

If continuing to participate in a system that has gone so far astray that the anti-Catholic “teaching” that one imparts through collaborating with it outweighs the hypothetical benefits that might come from attempting to use it for decent purposes, then free Christian men must realize that they have to abstain from “regime politics”. But abstention, for social beings, does not mean passivity. Even under such unfortunate circumstances, believers are obliged to organize their abstention in a positive way. Like the members of the late nineteenth century Italian Catholic Action movement, they, too, must “abstain” from a politics designed to ensure their defeat for the purpose of actively preparing themselves, intellectually, spiritually, and practically, for handling national and international affairs responsibly in the future under better and more fruitful conditions. What does this mean in precise, practical terms? That is not a question for theoreticians to answer. That is for gifted activists true to the Faith and skilled in the pilgrim dance of life to specify.

All these lessons are especially important for Catholics in America, who, even when they are ready to admit the problems that afflict their land, ascribe them to evil “outside influences”, or to a “young country’s foibles”, and not to their substantial underlying cause: the same, unchanging hunt for a system built on “nature as is”, justified by means of an alternative good story and rooted in a heroic Foundation Myth, as preached by Isocrates in the pre-Christian era. American Catholics would do more good for the cause of Christ than anyone else at this juncture in history if they would admit that the United States is as vulnerable a nation, subject to the vagaries of human action and human history, as any other polity in the long record of the human race. It is no more divine than any other national entity or any other political system. It has had an historical beginning and it will also have an historical end. Far from being young, it is a very old nation in its repetition and perfection of errors rooted in the dawn of parochial hostility to the hunt for the Logos and its corrective and transforming message. No more powerful blow could be dealt to the Empire of the World than if American Catholics, more loudly than all others, insisted that no nation and no system can be our Mother; that only the Church is our Mother; and that only a Catholic Truth demonstrably respectful of everything truly natural can guide us to safe political action in the flux of changing historical conditions.

No one should be surprised that an awakening from the contemporary nightmare might involve just as many frustrating complexities as those experienced by our forbears of the era of the Great Western Schism. Would it really be any wonder that substantive improvement might require much criticism of clergy and laity from scandalized believers? Could anyone honestly be stunned that horrified men and women might reject the advice of “moderates” who wish to make a hopelessly illogical distinction between an “acceptable” criticism of a few abuses and their perpetrators on the one hand and an “unacceptable” critique of the essence and entirety of the scandal, as far up the sacred and secular totem pole as it extends, on the other? Might it not also be the case that laity similar to the “interfering” Emperor Sigismund and prelates like that “schismatic” Cardinal Colonna who eventually became Pope Martin V could end up, in the long run, on the Church’s list of historic heroes? And, this notwithstanding, that they would find themselves honored alongside equally serious “moderate” figures who worked for a return to the high road back to the corrective and transforming influence of the Word in history more quietly, “by the existing rule book”? Complexity might make many seemingly contradictory bedfellows indeed. But God’s Providence would ensure that all played their proper role in the dawning revival. In short, the Holy Spirit—the true Holy Spirit, not the Holy Spirit of Teilhardian convergence—could ensure that both Archbishop Marcelle Lefebvre and hardworking mainstream prelates might one day be seen to have been solid allies in the cause of a future Catholic recovery.

In any case, perhaps the future fruits of a renewed ascent of Mount Tabor would involve an unexpected correction and transformation of the single most dangerous aspect of modern naturalism in and of itself: willfulness. For this is what the modern naturalist vision ultimately is: a willful one; a recipe for the Triumph of the Will; an institutionalization of an Original Sin based upon that Triumph of the Will. Modern man does what he does because he chooses to do so, calling his choice “natural” and, in Catholic circles, a choice that is dictated by a hyperactive Holy Spirit as well. Perhaps God wishes us to redeem the willfulness so essential to modernity by an honest act of Catholic will: the will to pick up and read the whole book of Tradition; the will to appreciate all the spiritual and natural wisdom to be found working together in its various chapters; the will to open up the jewel box of Tradition and use each and every one of the gems that shine so brilliantly therein without exception; the will to greet life as it must be greeted: as an ever continuing, magnificent drama, involving the need for all of the patience, the flexibility, the pilgrim spirit, and the good humor and patience with comic human failure that one can muster. If now is not the time to make such an act of will when would it be likely to arrive?

C. The Faithful, Outsiders, and the Seeds of the Logos

Will a sufficient number of Catholics be awakened to the full message of the Word, take up the corrective and transforming work of Christ, and abandon any false traditions and customs that they have acquired in the decades of confusion behind them? I certainly hope so. But I personally think that the task of stepping back and reassessing the proper path to building Christendom was easier for tenth and eleventh century men of faith living in a similar age of iron. While the citizens of the Empire of the World are shaped by the cheap slogans of a rhetoric-drunk civilization that cannot look further into the future than the next meaningless election and fad-friendly advertising campaign, the hearts and spirits of the subjects of the Emperor Otto III were still being taught a much higher and exalted vision, flawed though it certainly was. The mentality of even the best members of the Catholic Club of the present imperial regime cannot be contrasted with that of the entourage of the Holy Roman Emperor without intense Christian embarrassment. But, then again, our ancestors, whatever the depravity of their historical environment, benefited from the nourishment provided by a liturgical rite that raised them continuously to contemplation of the highest heavens as the surest guide for their temporal activity.

Much of what I have said here may sound terribly “pessimistic.” This fact alone of course condemns it in the eyes of the true pluralist believer. His alternative good story demands a blind, irrational, “optimistic” faith in the fruits of the system, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding. But “pessimism” and “optimism” are sophist and not Word-friendly categories. Catholicism deals in “hope” and battles against “despair.” The precondition of Christian hope is an accurate appreciation of the reality of the situation in which men find themselves. Christianity can tolerate no blindfolds in its work of encouragement of hope, even if this forces it to speak of things that seem pessimistic to the world at large.

My sincere wish is that any pessimism in this book may lead my audience to remove that blindfold woven out of black legends and alternative good stories justifying abandonment to “nature as is”—the chief obstacle to a truly Christian hope and a really sound Christian victory. All of us must maintain hope in the only serious manner that a Christian can do so: by going in search of Christ and the full meaning of Christ’s Incarnation. With our eyes fixed on Christ we gain the aid of both Faith and Reason, along with all of the complex and eminently useful tools the two, together, provide for us for learning about the True, the Good, and the Beautiful and implementing their teaching. Acting in this way, we have concrete reason for a rock-solid hope.

Christmastide, 800, the time of Charlemagne’s coronation as Western Roman Emperor, was another in the many crisis-charged moments in the history of the Drama of Truth. The lesson that the events of that season taught us was to rush in where “wise men” less sage than the eastern kings who came to Bethlehem feared to tread. The work of our noble and courageous ancestors reminds us that the Christ child is still there, and that with a sound Faith and a little backbone there is nothing in this entire universe that we need fear. Yes, a future victory on one front may be followed by defeats on many others, just as Christmastide, 800, was followed by the evils of the late ninth and tenth centuries. Intelligent and well-intentioned believers of our own day may see their plans thwarted by ideologues and their fellow travelers. Christendom may seem to be a chimera. This should not daunt us. It should simply lead us to realize, once again, that there is no guarantee of an absolutely certain, stable, Catholic triumph until the end of time.

And earthly success is not our primary concern as active believing individuals anyway. Our primary concern is to know, to love, and to serve God through obedience to the fullness of the message of the Word Incarnate; to accept the conditions under which we labor joyfully, with good humor, even if these dictate living in a kind of internal exile, fighting a guerrilla warfare for the Word, waiting for the right opportunity to emerge into open battle when our pilgrim spirit allows us to see that that moment has finally truly arrived. Let us therefore concentrate on these real “first things”, and leave God’s Providence to grant our labors their just rewards in His own due time. We have no other choice. For, as Louis Veuillot indicates, our history proves that hopes based upon doing what God wishes us to do are our best—our only chance—for survival:⁰

The right tactic for us is to be visibly and always what we are, nothing more, nothing less. We defend a citadel that cannot be taken except when the garrison itself brings in the enemy. Combating with our own arms, we only receive minor wounds. All borrowed armor troubles us and often chokes us.

Yes, the times, on one level, do not seem to be propitious to Catholics, but God—nature’s true, supernatural God—sees and guides developments in ways that we generally only begin to perceive long after the event. Our perceptions are limited and all too frequently flawed. As St. Bede the Venerable, that magnificent early medieval raconteur of a “good story about a true story”, tells us in his Ecclesiastical History of the English People in describing Britain: “And forasmuch as…it hath light nights in the summer, …at midnight many times men looking doubteth whether it be yet of the evening past or break of the day following”.⁰

Whatever might happen in the immediate future—whether the naturalist inspired Empire of the World has enough tricks under its belt to survive for a time, or whether it disintegrates through its own unnatural excesses, the internal battling of the various, hostile units of the Grand Coalition of the Status Quo, or the push given to it by an anti-pluralist Moslem revival—even if only a small Church and a handful of Catholics remain to give true witness to Christ, all would not be lost. Even if this remnant had to confront an overwhelming mass of non-believers throughout the globe who were to persist in mocking the corrective and transforming mission of the Word in a socio-political desert, it would still find grounds for hope. For not all modern men are unreceptive to the Christian message. And a natural world that is a product of God’s love and grace and therefore cannot unceasingly be mocked would be firmly in its camp. In short, that Catholic remnant would see that our present modern “end” will be our new “beginning”.

Ernst Jünger, in his powerful work of 1939 On the Marble Cliffs, drives home my point much more effectively than I can. His protagonists are two brothers horrified by the triumph of the barbaric will of a tyrant identified as the Oberförster over the civilized order of a place called the Marina. The first step of these heroes is to make an “inner break” with the degenerating ethos of the Marina itself; that inner break that seems so defeatist to the mindless activist but actually is the spiritual mainstay of anyone oppressed by the brute force of overwhelming might. In their “retirement”, the brothers return ad fontes, to the sources, and dedicate themselves to the study of nature. They know that they will some day have to fight the Oberförster, and with an odd conglomerate of seemingly dubious and compromised allies. They are ready to accept this perilous coalition because their peculiar future comrades all still have a clear, underlying sense of the tyrant’s evil, and because the heroes know that they themselves were once “part of the problem” that these forces represent. They, like Jünger in his real life involvement with parochial-minded nationalist organizations, had once “ridden with the Mauritanians”—one of the groups that may, unwittingly, have aided the Oberförster’s rise. But they, like their future front-line friends, had proven to be open to change, and they know, as brother Otho says, that an error only becomes disastrous if men stubbornly persist in refusing to correct it. When they ride off again, it is with this band of brothers in a battle against demonic willfulness. And, despite the odds, they ride off in a spirit of Heiterkeit; a spirit of cheerful serenity; a Catholic Christian spirit.

Jünger’s vision was still flawed when he wrote Auf den Marmorklippen, because he had not yet come to that Catholic Faith which he finally did accept in the last years of his very long life. But believers should certainly take heed of the message of the very modern “Seed of the Logos” that his novel offers them. Men like Jünger’s heroes and their allies are lost and wandering in our age as perhaps never before. Migrants are to be found everywhere, both physically as well as intellectually and spiritually. It has almost become possible to see “migrants” longing for a true, natural community as members of a new corporate entity requiring a scholastic openness and analysis to understand and address properly. Some of these migrants wandering through the desert we call modernity will strive to understand the Logos of things. New Socrates will emerge to guide them on a rational journey toward the light; towards ultimate supernatural correction and transformation in Christ. Believers in the Word Incarnate who nurture the true Catholic pilgrim spirit will recognize them as allies and will welcome them in their midst. They will join in the fight against the Oberförster.

Nature herself will strike against her false naturalist friends, whose deceptive and misleading words demanded from her what she was not created to give. For the natural world, created through the grace of God, although fallen and marred in its beauty, cannot help but tell of His glory to those who have eyes to see and punish those who do not. And He is always there to polish, refine, and encourage this instrument of His superabundant love. “The supernatural is finished”, Cardinal Pie, speaking at the grotto at Lourdes, quoted nineteenth century man as gloating. “Well, look here, then! The supernatural pours out, overflows, sweats from the sand and from the rock, spurts out from the source, and rolls along on the long folds of the living waves of a river of prayers, of chants and of light”.⁰

Bibliography

Three Main Guides

Hughes, P., A History of the Church (Sheed & Ward, Three Volumes, 1949). Despite its age, still a fine source down to the beginning of the Reformation.

Jedin, H., and Dolan, J. History of the Church (Crossroad, Ten Volumes, 1981). An excellent guide for all eras, but difficult to find and purchase.

Mayeur, J.M., ed., Histoire du Christianisme (Desclée, Thirteen Volumes, 1990-2002). A crucial resource, although not yet available in English.

General Works

Carrol, W, A History of Christendom (Christendom, Five Volumes, 2010).

Copleston, F., A History of Philosophy (St. Mut, Nine Volumes, 1994).

Daniel, N., Islam and the West: The Making of an Image (U. of Edinburgh,

1960).

Daniel-Rops, H., A History of the Church (J, M. Dent & Sons, Ten Volumes,

1959-1967).

Denzinger, H., The Sources of Catholic Dogma (Herder, 1957).

Dolan, J.P., The American Catholic Experience. A History From Colonial

Times to the Present (Notre Dame, 1985).

Dvornik, F., Byzantium and the Roman Primacy (New York, 1966).

Ellis, J.T., A Guide to American Catholic History (Oxford, 1982).

Fliche, A., and Martin, eds., Histoire de l’Eglise (Bloud et Gay, Fifteen Volumes, 1950).

Folz, R., The Concept of Empire in Western Europe from the Fifth to the Fourteenth Centuries (Macmillan, 1992).

Genakopolos, D.J. ed., Byzantium (Chicago, 1984).

Hussey, J.M., The Orthodox Church in the Byzantine Empire (Oxford, 1990).

Jones, E. Michael, The Revolutionary Jewish Spirit (Fidelity, 2008).

Jungmann, J.A., The Mass of the Roman Rite (New York, 1950).

Krautheimer, R., Rome: Profile of a City (Princeton, 1980).

Lapidus, I.M., A History of Islamic Societies (Cambridge, 1988).

Lynch, J.H., The Medieval Church: A Brief History (Longman, 1992).

Mack Smith, D., A History of Sicily (Chatto & Windus, 1968).

Maguire, H., ed., Byzantine Court Culture (Harvard, 2004).

Marty, M., Pilgrims in their Own Land (Penguin, 1984).

Noble, T.F.X., The Republic of St. Peter (Philadelphia, 1984).

Norwich, J.J., A History of Venice (Knopf, 1982).

Ostrogosky, G., History of the Byzantine State (Oxford, Two Volumes, 1980).

Partner, P., The Lands of St. Peter (U. of California, 1972).

Pastor, L. von., The History of the Popes (K. Paul, Trench, Trübner, Forty Volumes, 1906-1913).