Modernism
Memorial to St. Pius X
The Neo-Modernism of Pope Francis
A Manifestation of Modernism

September - October 2020

Apotheosis of St. Pius X, Cathedral in
Treviso, Italy. St. Pius X was a canon
of the cathedral and chancellor of the
Diocese of Treviso. Painted by Biagio
Biagetti (1877 - 1948), an Italian painter
and art restorer, who was appointed
by Pope Benedict XV to be Artistic
Director for the Paintings Gallery and
the Apostolic Palaces, a position he
maintained through the papacy of
Pius XII. His paintings can be seen in
Loreto, Macerata, Jesi, Montelupone,
Porto Recanati, Padova, Treviso,
Parma, Udine, Lendinara, and Rome.

Letter
from the
Publisher
Dear Reader,
We are pleased to present to you this issue of The Angelus which covers the most dangerous heresy which the Church has ever faced: Modernism. As unsavory as the topic of
Modernism may seem at first, we of the Society of Saint Pius X are greatly indebted to our
namesake for having pierced through the mask of this evasive heresy. And the present malaise which we are dealing with at all echelons of the hierarchy is hardly more than a replica
of the Modernism of the earlier days.
Along with this effort, it is always an enriching exercise to pit our brains at the past woes
which can only put into full light the foundations of our Creed and our Christian morals.
In this, G. K. Chesterton, prominently figured here, was a real master with his depth of
thought and wit. Other articles give us lessons of history: an American perspective of Le
Sillon; a sketch of St. Pius X by G. K. Chesterton; and a study of the process of dechristianization in Europe bring a historical understanding of Modernism.
As we progress—or digress—through the 21st century, we can understand more readily the present ecclesiastical situation, in the midst of a more powerful and more universal
persecution, all the more insidious as it is more subtle. Hence, the formation of the socalled “remnant” mentioned in the Apocalypse (12:17): “And the dragon was angry against
the woman: and went to make war with the rest of her seed, who keep the commandments
of God, and have the testimony of Jesus Christ.”
Confronted with the seven-headed dragon, the best thing we can do, short of locking ourselves up in a monastery, is to feed our mind and soul with the eternal truths and
principles of our dear Faith, to have our families get on their knees at the end of the day
and entrust our future, our souls and our society to the mercy of God and the love of His
Blessed Mother. She is the one who has already crushed the head of the serpent.

Fr. John Fullerton
Publisher

September - October 2020
Volume XLIII, Number 5
Publisher
Fr. John Fullerton
Editor-in-Chief
Mr. James Vogel
Managing Editor
Fr. Dominique Bourmaud
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Mr. Gabriel Sanchez
Associate Editor
Mr. Patrick Murtha
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(Eindhoven, The Netherlands)
Mr. Simon Townshend
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Contents
— Letter from the Publisher

4

Theme: Modernism
— Memorial to St. Pius X
— A Historical Sketch
— The Neo-Modernism of Pope Francis
— A Manifestation of Modernism: Joyce’s Portrait
— Book Review: One Hundred Years of Modernism
— Getting into Chesterton

6
10
15
20
23
26

Spirituality
— Meditation on St. John
— Episcopus sum ego
— The Holy Sacrifice of the Mass: The Preface and the Sanctus
— God Is All

30
32
34
39

Christian Culture
— Modernism in Music—Who Cares If You Listen?
— “À nous deux, maintenant!”: Le Sillon, Modernism,
and Catholicism as Democracy
— Montmajour Abbey
— Celebrating the Priesthood

45
52
58
64

“Instaurare omnia in Christo”

The Angelus (ISSN 10735003) is published bi-monthly
under the patronage of St. Pius X and Mary, Queen of Angels.
Publication office is located at
PO Box 217, St. Marys, KS 66536.
PH (816) 753-3150; FAX (816) 753-3557.
Periodicals Postage Rates paid at Kansas City, MO.
Manuscripts and letters to the editor are welcome
and will be used at the discretion of the editors.
The authors of the articles presented here are solely
responsible for their judgments and opinions.
Postmaster sends address changes to the address above.
©2020 BY ANGELUS PRESS. OFFICIAL PUBLICATION OF THE
PRIESTLY SOCIETY OF SAINT PIUS X FOR THE UNITED STATES AND CANADA

— How to Educate the Child in . . . Honesty
— Questions and Answers

68
71

Catechism
— Complex Questions & Simple Answers
— Enemies Turned Friends
— The Last Word

77
81
87

Theme Modernism

Memorial to
St. Pius X
By G. K. Chesterton

We present G. K. Chesterton’s column from The Illustrated London News, which he wrote as a
memorial to Pope Pius X, who died August 20, 1914.
Among the many true and touching
expressions of respect for the tragedy of the
Vatican, most have commented on the fact that
the late Pope was by birth a peasant. Yet few
or none, I think, traced that truth to its most
interesting and even tremendous conclusion.
For the truth is that the old papacy is practically
the only authority in modern Europe in
which it could have happened. It is the oldest,
immeasurably the oldest, throne in Europe; and
it is the only one that a peasant could climb. In
semi-Asiatic States there are doubtless raids and
usurpations. But these are of brigands rather
than peasants: I speak of the pure peasant
advanced for pure merit. This is the only real
6

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elective monarchy left in the world; and any
peasant can still be elected to it.
There is something awful and uncanny
about the brilliant blindness of the enlightened.
Telescopes have they and they see not:
telephones have they and they hear not: some
secret paralysis in the mind or the knot of the
nerves prevents them from being conscious of
anything that is palpable and present. I was
told in a debating club that wars were now
practically impossible and out of date, while the
newsboys were crying the ultimatum of Austria
to Servia. I dare say they are saying so still—in
that debating club. And if I were to tell them
that the modern scientific age has been, beyond

and above all other ages, the Age of Militarism,
they would call that plain fact a paradox. And
as it has been with the old institution of arms,
so it is to-day with the old institution of power
in pedigree. It is much stronger today than it
has ever been before. It is infinitely stronger
than it ought to be. Modern heredity is ancient
hereditary right. There used to be many elected
despots in the world: to-day there are very few.
Wherever the power is personal it is accidental.
The modern world believes in the poetic and
sporting chance of primogeniture. To prove this
we need do no more than allude to the earthly
or unearthly circumstances in which we stand
at this moment. Whoever may be right or wrong,
it is quite certain that the two central Empires
now at war are made of many variegated bloods
and histories. And it is quite certain that what
holds each confederation together is not a public
constitution, but simply a private family. The
Austrian Emperor is trying to avenge his heir;
and the German Emperor is trying to revive his
grandfather. The feeling in both cases at least
is not a constitutional sentiment: it is rather the
sentiment that blood is thicker than ink. I think
myself that the Hapsburgs have been wiser
than the Hohenzollerns; understanding more of
human nature and of the roots of such domestic
despotism. For the House of Prussia points to its
good luck; and if it once lost the luck, might lose
all the loyalty. But the House of Austria rather
points to its bad luck; and appeals, as did Maria
Theresa, to men of many and alien races to rally
round something simple, a babe, a woman, or an
old man. I should not wonder if the calamities of
the Austrian Empire have alone kept it together.
In any case, we have a proof of the intense
modernity of mere hereditary right. The tribes
and clans that could not be kept together by any
State are kept together by a surname. The family
is larger than the nation.
But as compared with the case of the late
Pope, the case of republican and “representative”
rulers is just as strong. I do not remember that
a real peasant has lately been President in
France. I am quite positive that a real workman
has not been Prime Minister in England. It
must be confessed, I fear, that the longest and
slowest of all such ladders of advance is the
7

Theme Modernism
electioneering ladder. There is, of course, the
very respectable and highly conservative person
called a Labour Member. But how far he has
travelled from the average workman! And how
far he still is from the average Front Bench Man!
In America, I suppose (at least I was told so in
my youth) there was such a thing as “From Log
Cabin to White House.” As a boy I thought the
change of residence a deplorable deterioration
in the sense of the picturesque. But, for good or
ill, is there any British record “From CabinetMaker to Cabinet Minister”? Does any modern
politician, however republican, think it natural
to imitate Cincinnatus? Does he, at any casual
moment, cast aside the paludamentum and
go back to the plough? Has he through life the
speech and manhood and unmistakable make-up
of the class from which he came? Even in high
and heroic republics, like those of France and of
Switzerland, can one say that the ruler is really
the plain man in power?
Now all the evidence, from foes as much as
friends, attests that this was really true of the
great priest who lately gave back to God the
most tremendous power in the world. Those
who admired him most, admired the simplicity
and sanity of a peasant. Those who murmured
against him most, complained of the obstinacy
and reluctance of a peasant. But for that very
reason it was clear that the oldest representative
institution of Europe is working: when all the
new ones have broken down. It is still possible to
get the strong, patient, humorous type that keeps
cheerfulness and charity alive among millions,
alive and supreme in an official institution. But
I think it would puzzle the Parliamentarians,
and the Suffragists, and the Proportional
Representationists, and all the other correctors
of our complex machine, to tell me where else
it has been possible: except in that place now
empty.
As has been pointed out, with subtle power
and all proper delicacy, in numberless liberal
and large-minded journals, the great and good
priest now dead had all the prejudices of a
peasant. He had a prejudice to the effect that
the mystical word “Yes” should be distinguished
from the equally unfathomable expression “No.”
Many travellers wandering in peasant countries
8

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September - October 2020

have found traces of this belief. Mr. W. Yeats, in
his most beautiful poem, exactly answers the
peasant’s instinct for exactitude: for the green
arithmetic of ordered fields. “Nine bean rows will
I have there.” Many of the merely aristocratic
poets, Shelley or Goethe, might have said
nineteen bean-rows, or ninety: and Byron, when
his blood was up, would have said nine hundred.
But Mr. Yeats comes from a land of peasants:
and he knows how many beans make nine. This
obstinate belief that twice two is four, and three
times three is nine, undoubtedly possessed the
great peasant’s intelligence when he argued with
all the Intelligentsia of Europe. They were the
finest intellects of the age. They said so; and they
ought to know. The Pope never pretended to have
an extraordinary intellect; but he professed to be
right: and he was. All honest Atheists, all honest
Calvinists, all honest men who mean anything,
or believe or deny anything, will have reason to
thank their stars (a heathen habit) for the peasant
in that high place. He killed the huge heresy that
two heads are better than one; when they grow
on the same neck. He killed the Pragmatist idea
of eating a cake and having it. He left people to
agree with his creed or disagree with it; but not
free to misrepresent it. It was exactly what any
peasant taken from any of our hills and plains
would have said. But there was something more
in him that would not have been in the ordinary
peasant. For all this time he had wept for our
tears; and he broke his heart for our bloodshed.

352 pp. – Softcover – Photographs – STK# 6768 – $21.95

Saint Pius X:
Restorer of the Church
A powerful and brilliant
defender of the True Faith!

The work accomplished by St. Pius X was monumental. He was not
a pietistic simpleton, but a powerful and brilliant defender of the True
Faith in the face of the Modernism that was invading the Church
then and now. Mr. Chiron demonstrates that St. Pius X was a tireless
defender of the rights of the Church against secularism, devoting
himself especially to reforming the seminaries in order to form pious,
zealous young priests, on guard against the creeping infection of
Modernism.

Visit www.angeluspress.org — 1-800-966-7337
Please visit our website to see our entire selection of books and music.

Theme Modernism

A Historical
Sketch
By Fr. Dominique Bourmaud, SSPX

Extracts from One Hundred Years of
Modernism by Fr. Dominique Bourmaud.
Modernism as it appeared in Europe at the
end of the 19th century was the outpouring of
the liberal Protestants brought into Catholic soil.
Crossing the Rhine, the vague heretical ideas
came rushing into France under the guise of
criticism à la Kant. Textual criticism was applied
to Sacred Scripture, the privileged domain of
early “Catholic” Modernism, although it espoused
the philosophical and theological prejudices,
namely agnosticism and immanentism.

Modernism in France
Duchesne, in Paris, was particularly active
10

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in this domain and founded a scriptural review,
the Critical Bulletin, in 1880. He preached
the method of direct contact with the sources
and of uncompromising severity in textual
criticism. Father Alfred Loisy shone beside him
as a brilliant disciple and the students’ favorite
lecturer. Meanwhile, Renan, at the College
of France, was busily occupied with tearing
apart Holy Scripture, both the Old and the New
Testament.
Eighteen eighty-three marked a watershed
year for progressive exegesis, which suddenly
fell under a stigma. It was the year the Catholic
Institute broke with Saint-Sulpice. That year,
Loisy, with his pure critique, broke with
Vigouroux, who defended traditional exegesis.
At the same time, he began making friends with
the future leaders of the Modernist movement,

with Laberthonnière and Denis, of the Annals of
Christian Philosophy. Most notably, he met with
the Catholic Baron Frederick von Hügel, who
threw all of his influence, money and enthusiasm
into fostering the Modernist movement from his
home in London. Together with Duchesne, Loisy
was initiated into Kantianism by Fr. Hébert,
then director of the Fénelon School. Hébert
had espoused the exegetical thesis which Loisy
would later make his own: the Church, truth
and things divine all evolve; the Gospel is pure
legend and symbol. So it was that, little by little,
Fr. Loisy let go of the traditional Faith. However,
his professional situation waxed precarious as he
was forced to leave the Catholic Institute under
the pressure of the French bishops. In 1893, Leo
XIII published Providentissimus, censuring both
the Institute and Loisy for minimizing scriptural
inspiration and claiming to detect errors in the
Holy Bible.
In 1900, the liberal Protestant Harnack
published What is Christianity? In it, he
criticized Luther for only going halfway and
not rejecting dogmas and rites altogether
to rediscover, in its primitive simplicity, the
authentic religion of Christ. The essence of
Christianity had to be unburdened of its faded
wrappings.
The work, though foreign and Protestant,
interested intellectual circles. Loisy took up his
pen all the more willingly that his own Christian
synthesis lay waiting in a drawer. He gallantly
stepped forward, taking up the challenge thrown
down by the Berlin scholar with the publication
of The Gospel and the Church, followed by
Concerning a Little Book, its complement.
The evolutionist and symbolist declarations
which were rampant within and which would
be obvious to today’s reader, were camouflaged
at the time behind an excessively subtle and
ambiguous exposition. A clear affirmation was
nowhere to be found. Every expression of subtle
reserve in the French vocabulary had its place. A
strange, disconcerting book, perfecting the art of
insinuating conclusions without ever stating them
outright. It was destined to dupe, and the dupes
came in droves when it first appeared.
Loisy’s manifestos were grave enough to call
for a pontifical document listing and condemning

their errors. In France lay the epicenter of the
cataclysm; from France would come the initiative
for a response. Already in October 1903, the
theologians Letourneau and Pouvier presented
to Cardinal Richard of Paris, for submission to
the Holy Office, a report. The Holy Office put
Loisy’s works on the Index because “grave errors
abound in these volumes, touching mainly on
the primitive revelation, the authenticity of the
evangelical facts and teachings, the divinity and
knowledge of Christ, the resurrection, the divine
institution of the Church, the sacraments.” They
anticipated the Roman decree Lamentabili of
1907, where 50 condemned propositions were
taken from Loisy, the rest from Tyrrell and
LeRoy. The last of them gives a taste of the whole:
“Modern Catholicism can be reconciled with
true science only if it is transformed into a nondogmatic Christianity; that is to say, into a broad
and liberal Protestantism.”

Modernism Outside of France
The eye of the Modernist hurricane was in
11

Theme Modernism
France, but it wreaked considerable havoc in the
surrounding countries as well—in Italy, as we
shall see briefly in the next chapter, but also in
England. Its most prominent representative was
Tyrrell, a Jesuit; to him do we owe the theological
synthesis of Modernism such as it would be
condemned by Pius X. The advantage of Tyrrell’s
theology over the works of his friends abroad—
LeRoy, Blondel and especially Loisy—is that it
draws theological conclusions without weighing
itself down with dry philosophy or exegesis.
Tyrrell did not bother with tortuous, oversubtle
arguments but wrote clearly what he thought,
since he considered himself safely hidden behind
a pseudonym. Born in Dublin to a Calvinist
family and himself a convert to the Catholic
faith, he was carried along by his own personal
mysticism toward a theology of intuition over
intelligence, tainted with a certain Protestant
individualism.
He was forging friendships with the liberal
London set, particularly the Baron von
Hügel, who put him in contact with European
philosophers and exegetes. He abandoned
dogmatism and scholasticism, professing an
affinity for Blondel’s philosophy of immanence,
whose conclusions he claimed to anticipate by
a sort of spiritual kinship. Finally, he accepted
wholesale the conclusions of scriptural criticism,
all the more naively for his own incompetence in
the matter.
In Italy, the torrent of Modernism flowing out
of France and England was a rising tide. A fiery,
sanguine national temperament ill-disposed
Catholic Italy to intellectual innovation but
made it quick to assimilate the newest imports
from abroad. The Studi Religiosi appeared in
Florence in 1901, touting the advances of modern
science. Minocchi was the resident Scripture
critic and the Barnabite priest Fr. Semeria
wrote on the origins of Christianity; Buonaiuti,
who had already earned a name for himself in
Roman circles, arrived as an expert on religious
philosophy. This last, only 24 years old at the
time, went on to found the Rivista StoricoCritica delle Scienze Teologiche, treating with
consummate eloquence topics as varied as
religious philosophy and the history of dogma
and religion. The great Italian novelty was Murri’s
12

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September - October 2020

democratic movement, violent from the outset
and spreading like wildfire. As early as 1905,
Murri was translating the works of Tyrrell under
a pseudonym. Moreover, all of these authors were
in a sense but translators, taking the scholarly
works published in other countries and restating
them for the masses, with a new Italian flair and
passion. One man of letters, Senator Antonio
Fogazzaro (1842-1911), took it upon himself to
give a voice to the various Modernist aspirations
with his novel, Il Santo (Milan, 1905) and so
awaken the present generation to the principle
of adaptation. The novel—by no means great
literature—brought together in a single volume
the essential ideas of Blondel, Laberthonnière,
Loisy, and Tyrrell.
Not only was Modernism spreading throughout
Europe; the intensity, the density and the
sheer quantity of the polemics surrounding the
movement gave it all the earmarks of a crisis
within the Church herself. Religious philosophy
and psychology; exegesis; the history of dogma:
the attacks came from all sides at once and
Catholics seemed to be losing their footing. The
spirit of modernity was penetrating every domain
and forever mutating. Loisy’s cursed little red
books alone had worked considerable mischief
in a number of Catholic circles. Publications
of increasing boldness, all the more brazen for
their confident anonymity, were issued at regular
intervals to fan the flames. The sensus catholicus
was waning in a disturbing number of minds.
However, it is difficult to put a number on
the Modernist influence. In 1905, one French
intellectual at the heart of the fray estimated
the number of progressive priests at around
15,000. To which Loisy replied in 1909—with
perhaps a better vantage point—that there
were not more than 1,500. From the opposite
camp, a certain Franon quipped that the most
influential Modernists would fit comfortably on
two sofas. Sabatier, an insider, probably gives
the most accurate notion: “Modernism is neither
a party nor a school of thought: it is a tendency.
It would be a delicate task indeed to determine
the characteristic signs by which its adherents
might be recognized: they are so different one
from another! Beside the exegete, the historian,
the scholar, there stands the pure and simple

democrat. Beside the poet, the humble workerpriest. And yet, in spite of all their differences of
milieu, of concern, of vocation, they recognize
each other. There is no registry of members; they
do not wear a badge; nevertheless, they find one
another; they come together and are but one
heart and one soul.”

The Roman Reaction
St. Pius X deplored the extension of the crisis,
evoking its seamless ranks and, more precisely,
the large number of sailors, navigators and, sad
to say, perhaps even captains, who had put their
trust in profane novelties and in the lying science
of the times and so capsized rather than sailing
into their home port.
As soon as the 1907 decree of the Holy Office,
Lamentabili, was labeled a new Syllabus of
Errors, symmetry called for an encyclical to
echo Quanta Cura. Rome was well aware of
the need for a firm and direct attack in order to
thwart the progress of an international movement
of growing proportions. The project for the
encyclical had been launched early. One of the
distinctive traits of this pontifical letter is first
to expose at length, in a masterly presentation
of Modernism, the error it intends to proscribe.
It reveals Modernism as a methodical system
founded on very precise principles, not a formless
mass of disparate theories as the heresiarchs
would have had us believe.
If Modernism had only been a heresy, even
a generalized heresy like Arianism, the Roman
condemnations need have gone no further. The
obstinate heretics would have stepped out of the
Catholic ranks to found their own movement,
just as they had always done. Modernism, on the
contrary, was confident in its own righteousness
and so determined to reform the Church from
within. The wolves in sheep’s clothing obstinately
remained within the sheep-yard in hopes of
converting it into a wolf-yard. Modernism is
more than heresy and more than apostasy; it is a
fifth column. Pascendi speaks of the simulated
multitude of authors hiding behind pseudonyms,
the better to hoodwink unsuspecting readers. We
cannot be too insistent on this point: a Modernist

is not only an apostate, he is also a dyed-in-thewool traitor. Treachery and deceit are integral
to the very system of Modernism. The bona fide
Modernist is the one who can affirm his personal
faith from the pulpit and then turn right around
and contradict that faith in his writings as a
scholar and an historian.
St. Pius X denounced their behavior with
vehemence in his Motu proprio “Sacrorum
Antistitum” of September 1, 1910, three years
after the appearance of Pascendi: “Indeed, they
[the Modernists] have not ceased to recruit new
adepts and group them together in a clandestine
league, through them infusing into the veins of
Christian society the venom of their opinions by
publishing books and journals anonymously or
under false names.” The pope included after the
Motu proprio a special oath against Modernism.
The text was formulated with a precision
leaving no room for equivocation. Each of the
fundamental errors of Modernism had to be
reproved formally and the oath signed personally
by every member of the clergy charged with the
care of souls.
Obviously, such an act on the part of the
holy pope was ill-received by the opposition,
which attacked the barbarity of this country
curate with the mind of an unlettered Venetian
gondolier, pushing the bark of Peter along
with a pole. Whatever their invective, the
pole of the gondolier doubled as a formidable
harpoon! The incorrigible suffered ipso facto
excommunication, which put a quick end to the
clandestine agitating of the heresiarchs…until
better days should dawn.

13

364 pp. – Softcover – STK# 5242 – $26.95

100 Years of Modernism
The definitive explanation of Modernism—laid bare so can we can understand,
recognize, and finally fight against it.

One Hundred Years of Modernism is an everyman's survey of the history of philosophical ideas running from
Aristotle's sane realism to the existentialists’ insanity. It shows that Modernism, prematurely declared dead
after St. Pius X's reign, revived after World War II and reached the highest levels of the Catholic Church’s
hierarchy. The definitive explanation of Modernism—laid bare for all to see and understand, recognize, and
fight against.

Visit www.angeluspress.org — 1-800-966-7337
Please visit our website to see our entire selection of books and music.

The NeoModernism of
Pope Francis
By Fr. Dominique Bourmaud

At the turn of the 20th century, Modernism
was born and attempted to subvert the ranks of
the Church. The ringleader, the Scripture scholar
Alfred Loisy, exerted quite some influence in
France and abroad. His critique of the Gospel
was accompanied and extended by his numerous
ecclesiastical friends to all branches of learning
and diffused the Modernist seven headed
monster to the rank and file. It took nothing but
the integral faith and holy determination of St.
Pius X and Card. Merry del Val to put a stop to
this deleterious movement.

Resurgence of Modernism
However, the enemies of Christ did not die out
and they resurfaced a few decades later when the

weather was fair for them to continue the job of
undermining perennial philosophy and the Faith.
Neo-Modernism was a loose movement centered
around some hotheads in the wake of Teilhard
de Chardin. It was condemned again by Pius XII
in Humani Generis, yet all too softly because
the ringleaders went underground generally
undisturbed. They resurged as periti when
Vatican II opened its windows “to the world,” and
they ended up having the Council consecrate
their principles.
Modernism is not so modern any longer as it is
now 120 years old, but it is doing well and kicking
more than ever. It has been largely endorsed by
the post-Conciliar popes including the present
one, a statement which neither friend or foe
really disputes. What is perhaps more disputed
is the Modernism of Pope Benedict XVI whose
15

Theme Modernism
pontificate has about it an aura of conservatism
and even of traditionalism.
We are far from denying the real merits of the
pope called “emeritus” especially in liturgy, yet
his achievement can hardly be the solution to the
late neo-Modernist crisis which has triumphed
with Vatican II. He himself had been an active
protagonist of the Council and of its reforms. Yet,
in his first major discourse, he underlined the key
principle that Vatican II must be interpreted in
the light of the previous tradition of the Church,
including the light of the ecclesiology of the
Councils of Trent and Vatican I. He realized that
to reject previous teaching would be throwing
away the baby and the bath water, and Benedict
XVI, for all his liberal bent, would not consent to
this. Unless the Church held firmly to what she
had formally decreed and believed in ages past,
she would suffer a mortal wound.
A Bergamo Historian, Roberto Pertici, made
an insightful suggestion saying that the relentless
mediatic and ecclesiastic aggression raised
against the pope was the last straw which led to
his papal renunciation. Whatever we may think
of this interesting proposition, Pope Bergoglio
inherited from this traumatic situation, but took
further steps which tarnished even more the aura
of the papacy. If Pope Benedict put the brakes
on the post-Conciliar movement, Pope Francis
is accelerating it and leading it to its ultimate
consequences. Let us bring to the fore some of
the specific marks in the present pontificate
following three major promulgations, Amoris
Laetitia, Episcopalis Communio and Laudato
si’.

Pastorality vs. Authority
The Vatican commentators have brought to
light the pastoral aspect of the pope’s teaching,
meaning the clear gap between the doctrinal
theses and the pastoral problems, that is to say,
the opposition between the ideal moral positions
and the real engagements. “Who am I to judge?”
seems to signal the demise of the pontifical
magisterium. Far from seeing this as a personal
timidity or formation, it reveals a profound
theological choice, a rather doctrinal statement
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… by which the pope is refusing to be the
authoritative voice of Christ in matters of faith
and morals.
This de facto contradiction between doctrine
and practice logically begets moral relativism.
It signals the end of objective morality, good or
evil, regardless of intentions and circumstances.
We see it crystal clear in Amoris Laetitia where
the footnotes clearly reveal the mindset of the
pontifical document. Romano Amerio’s book Iota
Unum enumerates the rhetorical artifices used to
promote the so-called merciful pastorality while
throwing away morality: the “yes, but,” the “indepth study,” the “graduation, the more or less.”
The pope’s language is coherent with the passage
from doctrine to pastorality.
Ettore Gotti Tedeschi gave an interview to the
Vaticanist Aldo Maria Valli (November 12, 2018),
and explained this: “If we wish to be the ‘salt of
the earth,’ we cannot suspend our judgment of
reality. We need to understand the causes and be
ready to modify things, and this also in the moral
order. If we limit ourselves to consider only the
moral consequences of the behaviors without
seeing the causes, our diagnostic would be faulty.
Thus, we would commit an error in our prognosis
and would never resolve it. Have you ever thought
of the invitation of being ‘realists’ in the time of
Sodom and Gomorrah?”
And Tedeschi concluded with good logic
about the Protestantization of minds: “The moral
authority becomes a source of confusion when
it refuses its office. This occurs when it avoids
showing the Truth, when it says that there are
no absolute precepts, but everything is open
to discussion. This means that each dogma
can be interpreted in time in function of the
circumstances. This means that truth is made of
praxis and that faith is an existential experience.
… It is as if the moral authority admitted
that doubt is positive, theological pluralism
beneficent, doctrinal fidelity contrary to mercy,
and doctrinal coherence stifles charity. … We
would all become ‘pseudo-Protestants’ and would
incur the risk of doing good or evil according to
what satisfies us best.”
Intimately connected with this moral
relativism, we are experiencing a dissolution of
those sacraments which define Catholicism. The

auricular confession, the indissoluble marriage,
the Holy Eucharist are virtually gutted out of
their substance under cover of pastoral reasons
like “mercy” and “openness.” This is so much the
more dangerous as we usually mold our belief on
our practice. And the lowering of the sacramental
practice to allow anyone to approach it,
regardless of the state of their souls, cannot but
lead to the conclusion that “everyone gets to
heaven,” and there is “no need to keep the moral
standards to save our soul.”

Democracy vs. Hierarchy
Along with the dichotomy between doctrine
and practice the present pontificate is fast
eroding the meaning of Church authority.
Symptoms of the process of de-regulation of the
hierarchy were seen right from the beginning,
when the pope refused to live in the papal
apartments, avoided the terms of Pope, Head of
the Universal Church and Vicar of Christ. Vatican
II had already muted these titles, but the present
pope puts it in high gear, and wants to be called
simply the Bishop of Rome.
The Apostolic Constitution Episcopalis
Communio of September 15, 2018 gives full
measure to the levelling of the Church in its
intimate constitution. There is a democratization
and a de-monarchization which is at work

here. The Church as Christ founded it, was set
upon Peter or Kephas—Rock—as the rock, the
principle of unity and firmness of the universal
Church. Along with this universal power of
the pope himself, by divine right the bishops
governed their particular flocks under the pope’s
government. The Church, therefore, is a mixed
monarchy, with the bishops as both rulers of
their flock and subject to the pope. And this was
clearly defined at Vatican I which promulgated
papal infallibility. In the Conciliar aula, Bishop
Carli, while criticizing the future Vatican II
decree Lumen Gentium, stressed that: 1) the
episcopal power is essentially limited and does
not enjoy the universal power enjoyed by the
pope; 2) the pope has primacy over the whole
Church prior to the College of bishops.
The collegiality promulgated at Vatican II,
was based on opposite positions. It stressed that
the bishops are at first rulers of the universal
church prior to having their power limited. Also,
it suggests that the pope is ruler of a section of
the Church (the college of bishops) prior to being
ruler over the universal Church.
In paragraph #10, Episcopalis Communio
aggravates the process of democratization:
“Another fruit of the Synod of Bishops is
that it highlights more and more the profound
communion that exists in Christ’s Church both
between the pastors and the faithful (every
ordained minister being a baptized person
17

Theme Modernism
among other baptized persons, established by
God to feed his flock), and also between the
Bishops and the Roman Pontiff, the pope being
a “Bishop among Bishops, called at the same
time—as Successor of Peter—to lead the Church
of Rome which presides in charity over all the
Churches.”
This seemingly inoffensive text marks the
leveling of the “hierarchical ministry,” reduced
to spokesman of the community. Synodality is
pregnant with the ecumenical movement. At this
juncture, we can rightly ask whether there is a
difference between the Roman Catholic Church
and the separate communities—separated
precisely from the base of the Church, from the
rock upon which Christ wished to insure the
cohesion of His flock. This also explains why
Pope Francis had recourse to the geometric
figure of the polyhedron, the diamond with
various faces in opposition to the rock-based
church building. In his mind, the various facets of
the church represent the riches and variety of the
“Church of Christ,” which may include, why not,
the reformed churches in the spirit of “reconciled
diversity.”

Divine Immanence vs.
Transcendence
Vatican II had given its seal of approval to
the personalist philosophy, by contract with the
realist philosophy, and implemented it in Church
teaching, especially moral theology and Canon
Law. We recall the statement of Gaudium et
Spes (#22), which indicated that “in becoming
incarnate, Our Lord united Himself to every
man in a certain way.” That was also the theme
of Redemptor Hominis, unfolding the program
of John Paul II’s pontificate. If Christ is already
united to every man, the Church’s mission is to
help all men become aware of the fact that they
are already united to Christ.
Pope Francis goes further with Laudato
si’. For him, Christ is not simply united to all
men, Christ is united to the earth. The issue
is no longer self-awareness, which of course
is not denied; Francis’ perspective is far more
radical as the immanentist seed produces riper
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fruit. What we have to understand is that, in
the new perspective offered by Pope Francis,
all of morality is contained in the idea of being
in harmony with nature, with the earth. Why?
Because Christ is already united to the earth.
The pope indeed insists greatly upon the
unity and connection between God, man and
the environment. “God has united Himself
definitively to our earth.” Yes, compared to the
Council and its aftermath, this is a new claim.
So, “everything is connected” (mentioned eleven
times in Laudato si’) the forest and youth are to
be our model (final draft of the Amazon synod),
they are both theological topics, i.e., sources
of theology. In other words, we need to be in
harmony with ourselves and the environment,
with nature, the cosmos, but in a perspective
that denies original sin. With Pope Francis, man’s
relation with Christ becomes more distant, for
our immediate relation is with the earth. The
problem is that, with this radical immanentism,
it becomes impossible for man to accomplish
the religious act on which all other acts depend,
the act of adoration. Because man’s new axis of
salvation is earth-centered, his relation to God is
secondary, and perhaps, even the distinction of
Creator-creature becomes blurred at the end of
this bizarre ecological journey.
It is hard to surmise the mind of our present
pope, and perhaps the logical outcome of the
principles he laid out earlier on. Fifty years ago,
even in the thick of the Vatican II hurricane,
no one could have guessed what the Vatican
authority were going to produce and lead us
into. One thing is rather clear, and that is that
Pope Francis has no scruples to throw away the
“taboos,” that is simply the most sacred elements
of the perennial Roman teaching, of Tradition, of
Church hierarchy, papacy included. In ten years,
300 out of the 420 feminine religious congregation
will have vanished in the US. In ten years, will
there be a recognizable Roman Catholic Church?
Will Christ still find faith in the world in the very
near future?

Fresco painted by Florentine artist
and sculptor Giotto di Bondone
between 1297 - 99 representing the
story of Innocent III approving the
Rule of St. Francis. In the sixth
panel we see Pope Innocent III on
the right, sleeping in a bed under
an elaborate canopy, with servants
at his side. To the left is the falling
basilica, which St. Francis is seen
holding to keep it from collapsing.
The falling of the Roman basilica
also symbolizes the falling, yet
surviving, Catholic Church, as it
was a time when many heretics
were attacking the church.

Theme Modernism

A Manifestation of Modernism:

Joyce’s
Portrait
By Andrew J. Clarendon

In sections six and seven of his great 1907
encyclical Pascendi Dominici Gregis, Pope
St. Pius X defines the two foundational ideas of
Modernism: first, “Agnosticism,” the “negative
part of the system” in which “reason is confined
entirely within the field of phenomena,” making
any knowledge beyond the material impossible.
Secondly, the “positive part” of the system:
“vital immanence,” in which the explanation
for meaning must be found within man since all
knowledge outside of man either does not exist or
is unattainable. It follows that “faith, which is the
basis and foundation of all religion, must consist
in a certain interior sense, originating in a need of
the divine . . . emerg[ing] from the lurking-places
of the subconsciousness.” This logically leads to
the evolution of doctrine, since even the dogmas
of the Faith—not to mention other concepts—
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are mere “images of the truth, and so must be
adapted to the religious sense in its relation
to man.” As Salusbury F. Davenport puts it in
Immanence and Incarnation, vital immanence
“is the wholly psychological process of the
human consciousness unfolding itself . . . God
as transcendent is lost to sight; no room is left
for any kind of revelation; God is the permanent
possibility of progress, He is ever projected as
the ideal in advance of each successive stage of
evolution and changes as the advance proceeds.”
For the great twentieth-century philosopher Eric
Voegelin, this view is a “modern Gnosticism”
in which man with his immanent knowledge
replaces the now irrelevant God. Further, it is
not surprising these Modernist ideas are present
in various works of art, especially literary ones,
both before and after Pascendi. One need only

recall the existentialist elements in Herman
Melville’s Moby Dick, published in 1851, or the
announcement of man’s loss of faith in Matthew
Arnold’s 1867 “Dover Beach.” Contemporaneous
with Pascendi, James Joyce’s A Portrait of the
Artist as a Young Man, one of the most highly
regarded novels of the twentieth century and still
a feature of high school and college syllabi, is
an important illustration of this now ubiquitous
principle of vital immanence.
Published in 1916, Portrait is a semiautobiographical account of Joyce’s own youth,
from his Irish-Catholic childhood to his college
years and subsequent self-exile to the Continent.
However, the novel is not written in a traditional
way: there is little in the way of plot and no
quoted dialogue. Narration in the usual sense
is replaced by what is known as the stream of
consciousness technique, a disregard for form
that is analogous to other modern movements
like atonality in music or cubism in art; John
Senior comments, “The stream of consciousness
technique . . . is an artistic error to begin with.
Art, as Aristotle said, is not chronology but a
‘story’ that presupposes intelligent selection
according to a form conceived in the mind of the
artist.” Quoted conversations between characters
is replaced by the free indirect style, so that
the focus is more on the emotional reactions of
the central character—Stephen Dedalus—than
anything else. The action of novel, such as it is,
essentially begins as Stephen is off to the same
Jesuit-run boarding school that Joyce attended;

one gets a sense of turn-of-the-century Irish
Catholicism mixed with Irish nationalism and
the struggle for independence combined with
the world-famous Jesuit educational system. A
sensitive and quiet boy, Stephen encounters his
first examples of imperfect human nature in the
clergy and then begins to feel isolated from his
fellows. Later, Stephen experiences the teenage
angst that has become a feature of modern
culture and a million movies and shows in the
decades since Joyce’s work. For Stephen, the
budding Modernist, there are two elements to
his years of burning adolescence: first, rebellion
against everything he has been taught: “he had
heard about him the constant voices of his father
and of his masters, urging him to be a gentleman
above all things and to be a good Catholic above
all things. These voices had now come to be
hollow-sounding in his ears.” Secondly, and
unsurprisingly, Stephen gives in to lust, even
squandering a writing prize on Dublin prostitutes:
“His blood was in revolt. He wandered up and
down the dark slimy streets . . . He wanted to
sin with another of his kind, to force another
being to sin with him and exult with her in sin.”
The sixteen-year-old Stephen continues in sin
for months, even reflecting on how the spiritual
writers are correct to note that one sin easily
leads to another and to other types.
What makes Portrait more interesting than the
average teenage rebellion story is what happens
next. The next winter, Stephen participates in
an Ignatian retreat with the rest of his class;
Joyce dedicates some thirty pages to the retreat
conferences and the profound impact they have
upon Stephen. The scene in which Stephen finally
confesses is faithfully depicted; the reaction
to being back in the state of grace recalls that
of many penitents past and future: “He strode
homeward, conscious of an invisible grace
pervading and making light his limbs. In spite
of all he had done it. He had confessed and God
had pardoned him. His soul was made fair and
holy once more, holy and happy. It would be
beautiful to die if God so willed. It was beautiful
to live if God so willed, to live in grace a life of
peace and virtue and forbearance with others. . .
. How simple and beautiful was life after all!” The
presentation of Modernism in Portrait cannot
be fully appreciated without noting that Joyce
21

Theme Modernism
fully understands and portrays the supernatural
and even natural value of the sacraments.
It is at the point of conversion that stories like
St. Augustine’s Confessions or Dostoevsky’s The
Brothers Karamazov end. For the Modernist,
however, Stephen’s conversion is only a waypoint.
He lives a life of penance for a while, engaging in
various actions to mortify his external senses.
For the discerning reader, however, the element
of individualism remains a common denominator:
although he goes to confession a few times, there
is no mention of spiritual direction. Stephen is
so outwardly pious that the Jesuit rector asks
him to consider a vocation to the priesthood,
but it becomes clear that his conversion has no
real roots. Stephen soon considers the life of
virtue as he has been practicing it to be “too
hard” and so gives up, but more importantly, he
concludes that he must find his own individual
way at all cost: “The voice of the [priest] urging
upon him the . . . mystery and power of the
priestly office repeated itself idly in his memory
. . . and he knew now that the exhortation he
had listened to had already fallen into an idle
formal tale. . . . His destiny was to be elusive of
social or religious orders. . . . He was destined
to learn his own wisdom apart from others or to
learn the wisdom of others himself wandering
among the snares of the world.” Rejecting the
idea of the seminary, Stephen attends University
College, Dublin and begins to dedicate himself
to the study of aesthetics and art. Like so many
after him, Stephen’s rebellion is cemented while
at university. The novel essentially ends with a
conversation between Stephen and one of his
college friends, Cranly, in which a few excerpts
show how Stephen fully embraces the tenets of
Modernism:
—Cranly, I had an unpleasant quarrel this
evening. . . . With my mother . . . She wishes me to
make my easter duty
—And will you?
—I will not serve, answered Stephen.
After discussing apostacy, Cranly recalls what
Stephen had earlier defined as his life’s work:
—Yes, I remember it. To discover the mode of
life or of art whereby your spirit could express
itself in unfettered freedom.
Finally, at the end of the conversation,
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Stephen’s final non serviam:
—Look here, Cranly, [Stephen] said. . . . I
will not serve that in which I no longer believe,
whether it call itself my home, my fatherland,
or my church: and I will try to express myself
in some mode of life or art as freely as I can . . .
But I will tell you also what I do not fear. I do not
fear to be alone or to be spurned for another or
to leave whatever I have to leave. And I am not
afraid to make a mistake, a lifelong mistake, and
perhaps as long as eternity too.
With the beginning of the quest for perpetual
vital immanence, the portrait of the Modernist
is complete; the next to last line in the book is
pompous, hubristic, and expected: “Welcome, O
life, I go to encounter for the millionth time the
reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of
my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.”
While Modernism as the “synthesis of heresies”
appeared in a particular historical context—the
twin rejection of eighteenth-century rationalism
and nineteenth-century Romanticism leading to
torturous despair—the idea of rebellion leading
to vital immanence is not new. Shakespeare,
Dante, and Homer all warned against hubris,
against man’s tendency to want to become
God. Modernism is not just found in twentiethcentury literature: it is at the core of the Hamlet
problem, it is Ulysses’ chief sin in Inferno 26,
it is the central error of man in ancient Greek
mythology because it is at the core “of man’s
first disobedience” in Eden, and it is the root of
Satan’s non serviam. What is remarkable about
our age is the nearly universal acceptance of
this hubris, of vital immanence as a positive
good. Now over 100 years after the publication of
Portrait, the revolt has only grown deeper: from
Modernism to post-Modernism, which rejects
even the possibility of objective meaning, holding
that there is no prior meaning for the Modernist
to reject as everything is relative. No doubt such
ultimately nihilistic views will continue to be
held on this side of chastisement; for us, the
future is not in subjective vital immanence, but
as T. S. Eliot sings in East Coker: “There is only
the fight to recover what has been lost / And
found and lost again and again: and now, under
conditions / That seem unpropitious.”

Book Review

One Hundred Years of
Modernism
Fr. Dominique Bourmaud (Angelus Press, 2006)

Contemporary social and religious doctrines
have been founded on deceit. One can wait endlessly for some brave new world to come, but the
more one cogitates and goes back to common
sense, the more likely one is prone to realize
there is a whole propaganda about the phenomenon of modernity. For how many centuries will we
still delude ourselves that we live at the threshold of a spring, if at most we are challenged by
another revolution, infuriated with the past but
often gently disguised?
In his One Hundred Years of Modernism,
Fr. Dominique Bourmaud produced a compendium exposing philosophical traps that rendered
so many priests, scientists, and ordinary people
unable to understand the real meaning of what
they say, they think, and incapable to recognize
who does plant utopian views in their minds.
From the intricate sentences formulated by the
celebrities of ideas (Luther, Kant, Hegel, Sartre,
Bergson, Teilhard de Chardin, von Balthasar,
Rahner, de Lubac and, unfortunately, the popes
since the second half of the 20th century, and
many others), the book sketches the very essence of Modernism, which every time turns out
to be not only something hackneyed but, above
all, something absurdly stupid.
Fr. Bourmaud’s book is all the more noteworthy as it puts in order the exuberant conceptual
chaos of the language of fashionable philosophy
and theology. What seems to be rather unusual,
it can be read by minds skilled and trained in
humanities, as well by people who have no competence in philosophy. Both will find a genuine
model for reasoning, which enables to penetrate
and expose a large part of anti-Catholic manipulations. Readers will understand where the origin
of the lamentable state of the Church lies and
why the Second Vatican Council is like a pitfall
for faith. They will notice (if they have not noticed
it so far) that the highest form of philosophy and
wisdom is God’s Revelation. They will not have
to rely on someone’s private opinion, but on the

sentences and doctrines that have been held
always and everywhere as true in the Church because of God’s revealing authority. Furthermore,
those dogmas and theological truths do form a
perfect harmony, which can be observed even by
an unbeliever with a logical mind.
It is not a good thing to stand halfway when
one is ready to admit that there is something
wrong with the world. Only minor symptoms of
problems creep on the surface. Words striving
to obscure the Word of God Himself are situated much deeper. As de Maistre wrote, “False
opinions are . . . like false coins: first great villains
mint them and then honest people spend them
and perpetuate the crime itself, without knowing
what they are doing.”
If I were asked to recommend the book that
is worth reading to realize in one go what the
history of philosophy is about and how to explain
the nature of the contemporary crisis affecting
the Catholic Church and, in consequence, the
whole world, I would answer: “Read this one.”
—Justyna Kluska

23

The Modernists drew a false line between the “Jesus
of History” and the “Jesus of Faith,” relegating
the Annunciation and Virgin Birth to the realm of
myth. Yet Holy Tradition has never wavered from
proclaiming these miraculous events as part of the
deposit of Faith which no Catholic is permitted to
deny, diminish, or destroy.

Theme Modernism

Getting into
Chesterton
By Wojciech Golonka

Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936) is rightly
praised among Catholics for his outstanding
contribution to the defense of the Catholic
Church and Faith. He was indeed a “gifted
Defender of the Catholic Faith,” as cardinal
Eugenio Pacelli, the one to become later pope
Pius XII, stated in a condolences telegram sent to
the archbishop of Westminster when Chesterton
passed away. In fact the Holy See recognized
him as such even before he died, as altogether
with Hilaire Belloc they were awarded with the
Order of St. Gregory the Great for the services
they both rendered to the Catholic cause. Thus
Chesterton should be read, even more than he is
justly acclaimed, yet some readers may find him
obscure and somehow eccentric. And they are
probably right in feeling so.
So how to start reading Chesterton without
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getting discouraged? Of course you may try
to read one of his books, perhaps get addicted
with Chesterton as many do when they discover
him, and then you should easily go through his
more difficult or less appealing writings. But
you may also be rebuked at the very beginning,
and then, what to do? Let me try to sketch some
“instruction manual” for getting into Chesterton’s
opus, preceded by a glimpse on his religious and
literary evolution.
Chesterton was above all an observer seeking
for truth about man and his destiny. An honest
but autonomous and self-educated genius,
it took him really a long time to reach the
Catholic Church and get deeply influenced by
the clarity of its doctrine. This transformation
appears through his writings as well. Educated
in a vaguely Christian family, he first became

an agnostic while a teenager. Then, falling in
love with Frances Blogg by the end of the 19th
century, a girl brought up by Anglo-Catholic
nuns and sincerely Christian, though Protestant,
helped him to rediscover the Christian Creed as
stated by the Council of Nicaea, yet without an
attachment to a particular institution, especially
not to the Catholic Church. At that time the
heresy of Modernism was struggling not only
within the Catholic Church, but also undermining
more conservative factions among Protestantism,
to which, formally, he was adhering. But as he
had a Catholic understanding of the Creed, he
obviously criticized scriptural interpretations
leading to the rejection of the historicity of
miracles, statements of purely human origins of
dogmas or evolution of morals based on changes
of human conscience within time. At the same
time he was struggling with the great errors
of his times (though very ancient for some of
them)—Marxism, bringing all human activities

to material purposes; determinism, claiming
man has no free will; rationalism and positivism,
forbidding God any intervention in the human
history, especially through the miracles; but also
imperialism (one would say today “globalism”)
or even racism. His clash with all those errors—
and those who spread them—resulted in his first
major book titled Heretics (1905). Then, pressed
by his adversaries to state what his own views
were, three years later he published Orthodoxy,
exposing his beliefs on the human nature, the
world, and Christianity.
Both books contained witty reductions of his
opponents and some brilliant intuitions on the
concerned topics. Yet you may find Chesterton
quite obscure when it comes to developing
those ideas in a form of a treatise. So, did his
conversion to Catholicism change something on
that point? First, let’s remark that he was already
on the way to the Catholic Church in 1911, when
“he was more than ever inclined to think, though
he had not yet been admitted, that possibly the
claims of the Greek and Anglican Churches were
less near the truth than the Roman Catholic
Church” (William Oddie, Chesterton and the
Romance of Orthodoxy: The Making of GKC,
1874-1908, Oxford University Press, p. 382). He
also, meanwhile, developed sincere friendships
with some Roman Catholic priests and admired
their deep knowledge of human psychology. He
was surely under their influence, yet he did not
definitely embrace Catholicism until 1922. So
be patient if you are praying for a conversion of
a good and sincere fellow, as Chesterton was
one as well. And though, as he often admitted,
the Catholic Faith and thought unlocked to him
great intellectual perspectives, yet this process of
further clarification and illumination of his mind
also took some time.
For instance, The Everlasting Man, published
in 1925, is his great apologetic masterpiece in the
defense of the divinity of Christ and it contains
two simple intuitions: man cannot be just an
animal as he shows signs of spirit; Christ cannot
be just a man a he shows signs of divinity. Yet
the process of inducting these two clear ideas in
a long and obscure demonstration may be found
startling by readers.
Now, take his polemical essays with
27

Theme Modernism
Modernists and Protestants from the late 1920s
and 1930s, like those which were published in
two apologetic books: The Thing: Why I am
Catholic (1929) and The Well and the Shallows
(1935). They are easier to go through than The
Everlasting Man. This means, I think, that if
you want to receive the benefit of Chesterton’s
apologetic genius, it’s much better to start with
the books he wrote in the last decade of his
life, when he was already under influence of
Catholicism. I can also recommend my booklet
Protestantism As Seen by G. K. Chesterton. Its
text is composed 80% of his quotes extracted
from several dozen of his books, and above
of all, from The Thing and The Well and the
Shallows. I am not really recommending my
own work, but, as a scholar who spent several
years studying his writings, I recommend to you
his thought presented in a synthesis which is
supposed to bring you altogether the best of his
polemics on this topic. Furthermore, this work
exposes the evolution of Protestantism through
the centuries and also explains how it eventually
versed into Modernism and totally rejected the
Christian Creed, which in the current crisis of the
Faith is an even greater danger than in times of
Chesterton’s polemics.
There is also another, more chronological,
way to approach his apologetic thought without
taking too much risk of being rebuked by some
of his textual obscurity. He also wrote short
novels, and his novels are simple, present an
irresistible humor, and even though they have
some defects from a literary point of view (people
are usually disappointed by the way he ends
them), they actually expose vivid dialogues in
the fields of religion, politics, and morality. While
The Ball and the Cross (1909) depicts a very
curious struggle between the Faith and un-Faith,
the Flying Inn (1914) is an incredible prophecy
about Islam invading the Western world. The
Man Who Was Thursday (1908) brings in a solid
axiology in which heresy is shown be the worst
sin. Manalive (1912) is a great antidote to the
Puritan poison spilled by Calvinism on the AngloSaxon countries. You won’t waste your time
with those readings as these comical stories are
always hiding mini-essays disguised in the form
of dialogues.
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To finish, we may say that through a general
recommendation of his works, the Church
finds it good and profitable to read Chesterton.
Personally, I think that even while some of his
books written before his conversion contain
some doctrinal errors or inaccuracies as
shown by a French Thomist priest, Joseph de
Tonquédec, they aren’t in fact harmful to readers.
But the most important thing to stress is the
fact that he somehow foresaw the actual errors
mankind would be confronted with. Many were
already present in the form of false principles in
his time.
Thus, one could apply to him what he himself
wrote about William Cobbett: “In a word, he
saw what we see, but he saw it when it was not
there. And some cannot see it—even when it is
there. It is the paradox of his life that he loved the
past, and he alone really lived in the future. That
is, he alone lived in the real future. The future
was a fog, as it always is; and in some ways his
largely instinctive intelligence was foggy enough
about it.” And secondly, not only did Chesterton
foresee those errors, but he also refuted them in
a manner reachable to the common man. Here,
again, what he wrote of Chaucer, another genius
of past times, was also true about himself: “They
have not bothered to invent a small philosophy,
but have rather inherited a large philosophy. It
is, nine times out of ten, a philosophy which very
great men share with very ordinary men. . . . The
great poet only professes to express the thought
that everybody has always had.” This thought,
which everybody has always had, has a particular
name: Tradition. Reading Chesterton will bring
you better knowledge of its principles.

146 pp. – Softcover – STK# 8769 – $13.95

Protestantism
As Seen by G.K. Chesterton

A profound work that defends the Faith
while it informs and entertains.

An easy-to-read book that effortlessly pierces through the objections of the failed
Protestant reform while simultaneously introducing the reader to Chesterton’s
irresistible charm and ruthless wit, which has become so beloved the world over.
If you want to better understand why the Catholic Church stands impervious
to the attacks leveled against it by Protestants of all sects, this book is sure to
delight, inform, and elevate the mind to God.

Visit www.angeluspress.org — 1-800-966-7337
Please visit our website to see our entire selection of books and music.

Spirituality

Meditation
on St. John
By Pater Inutilis

The first week of Our Lord’s coming forth
publicly to manifest Himself and gather disciples
closes with the third day (Jn. 2:1) after calling
Philip and Nathanael. St. John then shows us Him
at a wedding in Cana of Galilee.
There is His mother who, aware of the wine
supply failing, gently appeals to her Son’s
goodness and suggests, by pointing the pending
embarrassment out to Him, that He use that
power she knows Him to have to forestall the
same. This occasions a word of Jesus that has
been variously understood: “Woman, what is that
to me and to thee? My hour is not yet come” (2:4).
“Woman” is not the language of familial
intimacy of Nazareth, but has in it something
more solemn and honorific. St. John will show
us Jesus so addressing other women on special

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occasions: the Samaritan woman, when He is
about to tell her of the new dispensation and the
fact that He is the Messiah (4:21). And also Mary
of Magdala, when Jesus reveals to her His risen
self (20:15). He will again so speak to His mother,
when entrusting her with St. John, and, through
him, to all of us (19:26).
“What is (that) to me and to thee?” This
phraseology is actually an Hebraism, which
translates rather poorly. It can hardly mean, as
it is often understood, “Why should that concern
us?,” when we know that we are dealing with One
Who does not forget even a sparrow and numbers
the very hairs of our head (cf. Lk. 12:6). Jesus,
moreover, is charity ( I Jn. 4:8 & 16). Rather,
let us remember that this way of speaking had
been used for more than a millennium by Our
Lord’s time, being read in Judges (11:12) and

then in the books of Kings (II Kg. 6:10; 19:22;
IV Kg. 3:13); and was still current in His time
(Mt. 8:29). Any such long-lasting phrases become
nuanced and apply somewhat differently, but
still aptly, to differing circumstances. It is not
surprising, therefore, that English will translate
the expression quite differently from passage to
passage. The fundamental idea is that ‘’We are
not in agreement” or “What you suggest is not
what I was thinking of.” It can go so far as to
mean “What do we have in common?” Another
example: “What have we to do with Thee, Jesus
of Nazareth?” (Mk. 1:24 & 5:7), which was said to
Our Lord by unclean spirits.
This is how St. Augustine reads 2:4. Therefore,
the commentators who understand by it that Our
Lord is reminding His mother that He is subject
to her in things temporal, but in things divine
must be about His Father’s business (Lk. 2:49-51),
i.e., she has no say when it comes to the work of
redemption. But this would seem to go beyond
the context: Our Lord gives a different reason for
seeming to refuse her request as not in line with
what had been prepared for Him by His Father:
“My hour is not yet come.”
It is this word of Christ that sheds light on
His reply to His mother. What He meant by “His
hour” will have escaped His disciples of the first
hour (some things they will have realized only
later, as e.g. when He was speaking of “the temple
of his body,” from this same chapter). But Our
Lord would speak more of “His hour’’ later on
and St. John would understand that it meant the
accomplishment of the work of redemption by the
Sacrifice of the Cross.
And so, Jesus, bringing this up as a response
to His mother’s delicate request. He is not
refusing it or spurning her. He is reminding
her of what it entails: He will be “manifesting
His glory and having His disciples believe in
Him” (cf. 2:11), and so becoming that sign which
would be contradicted. He will be starting on
that road that leads to Calvary. Her own soul
a sword would pierce (cf. Lk 2:34). It is as if He
were waiting on her word to begin the work of
redemption, as God Trinity had waited on her
word to operate the work of the Incarnation. And
here is her response, addressed to the waiters at
the wedding, “Whatsoever He shall say to you,

do ye” (2:5), is addressed more to her Son, telling
Him: “I give you leave. You must be about your
Father’s business; do this, though it takes both of
us to Calvary.”
The water was made wine, Jesus manifested
His glory, the Public Life had begun, He would go
forward unhesitatingly to what awaited Him at
His hour.
This explanation embraces, too, those that say
His mother is hastening His working miracles, for
this would be a preliminary to His rejection and
Passion.
On a spiritual note, let us take note that this
is the last word of Our Lady in this, or any,
Gospel. We shall see her again, but not hear
her. Let us take this as her final word to us also:
“Whatsoever He shall say to you, do ye.” This
then is a “word of wisdom,” spoken “among the
perfect” (I Cor. 12:8 & 2:6f).
On the rest of the chapter, we can but add a
brief word:
Vs. 11—“This beginning of miracles did
Jesus in Cana of Galilee…” It is His first. The
apocryphal gospels, relating the miracles of the
infant or boy Jesus, are fables.
Vs. 15—Hitherto, Our Lord going at least
annually to the Temple (cf. Lk. 2:41-43), had
tolerated the merchants and money-changers, but
now His public mission has begun. St. Jerome,
incidentally, considers this expulsion to be maybe
one of Christ’s greatest miracles: a lone rustic, in
the midst of a throng of grasping money-men and
priests, the latter having a temple guard, attacks
them in what they hold most dear—unopposed.
Let us note also that He will have to repeat this
shortly before His passion. Bad habits, born
of self-interest, are eradicated only with great
difficulty.
Vs. 18—“What sign… ?” As if He had not just
given them a great one! Self-love blinds.
Vs. 19—“Destroy this temple…” And yet He
promises a sign—which they will twist and hold
against Him.
Vs. 23—Now Jesus begins to work many
miracles, “signs.”

31

Spirituality

Episcopus
sum ego
By Cardinal Louis-Edouard Pie

On December 8, 1849, amidst the last, joyous echoes of the solemn Te Deum, Louis-Edouard Pie,
the young bishop of Poitiers—he was just 34 years old—took possession of his cathedral and of his
diocese. From the altar, mitered, crozier in hand, he addressed his flock for the first time. He introduced
himself with the same words with which his predecessor, St. Hilary of Poitiers, had stood firm before the
Emperor Constantius, in the troubled and violent times of the Arian heresy: “Episcopus sum ego!”

I am bishop. That says all. I will be for you a
father and a shepherd. I will love you as a father
loves his children. I will guide and nourish you,
as a shepherd guides and nourishes his flock.
But a bishop is more than a father; he is more
than a shepherd. As his name indicates, he is an
“overseer,” always vigilant. From the observation
post on which he has been placed, he observes,
he ponders and, if need be, he cries out a warning
against the danger. He is the sentinel of truth, the
defender of the rights of God, the custodian of
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souls: these are sacred titles that entail inflexible
obligations, responsibilities that cannot be
declined.
I am bishop. If you expect me to be among
you a man of peace, of conciliation, of
condescendence, of charity, you are right to
expect it. With the grace of God, I will be all
that. But those are not my only duties, and
circumstances might impose on me other
obligations that you will be perhaps less prepared
to understand.

As a bishop, I am among you the representative
of the Divine majesty, the ambassador of God.
If the name of the Divine King, my Master, is
insulted, if the standard of His Son Jesus is not
respected, if the rights of His Church and of His
priesthood are ignored, if the integrity of His
doctrine is threatened, I am bishop and I will
speak out. I will raise my voice and speak out. I
will raise high the banner of Truth, which is also
the banner of the Faith, the banner of my God.
Perhaps the weak will be startled, and perhaps
others will be scandalized, but it doesn’t matter. I
will speak out.
Peace is certainly the ardent desire of my
heart, the inclination of my character. But the
Holy Ghost has taught me that the love of Truth
must go before any other love, even the love of
peace. The recent experiences in the world have

shown you how many calamities are brought
about by error. Then, trust in my ministry, and
respect my words and my actions even when
you do not understand them. Allow me to work
for you, even if sometimes in spite of you,
remembering that from the top of the mountain
the shepherd sees farther away in the horizon
than the sheep quietly lying on the plain.

33

Spirituality

The Holy Sacrifice of the Mass:

The Preface
and the
Sanctus
By Fr. Christopher Danel

In this article we examine the Preface and the Sanctus, presenting the work of Msgr. Nicholas Gihr in
his fundamental liturgical commentary The Holy Sacrifice of the Mass: Dogmatically, Liturgically, and
Ascetically Explained. Msgr. Gihr was a priest of Freiburg in Breisgau whose work of liturgical research
took place during the time frame spanning the pontificates of Popes Pius IX to Pius XI, including that
of Pope Saint Pius X. The early years of his work were contemporaneous with the last years in the work
of Dom Prosper Guéranger. (The English translation of his study appeared in 1902; the original is: Gihr,
Nikolaus. Messopfer dogmatisch, liturgisch und aszetisch erklärt. Herder: Freiburg im Breisgau, 1877.)

Historical Origin
To trace the origin and introduction of the
Preface in the sacrificial rite, one must go
back to the days of the Apostles; this is evident
from the testimony of the holy Fathers, and
especially from the most ancient liturgies, not
a single one of which can be found without a
Preface. The oriental liturgies have had from
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the beginning until the present time but a
single Preface. In the West, on the contrary,
the number of Prefaces, even at an early date,
increased to such a degree that before the time
of St. Gregory the Great almost every formula of
Mass contained a separate Preface. It is probable
that St. Gregory himself reduced this immense
number to ten. It was under Urban II (1088 to

1099) that the Preface of our Lady’s Masses was
added. Therefore, the present 11 Prefaces in the
Roman Missal date back to the eleventh century.
According to their text and melody the Prefaces
belong to the most solemn, sublime and touching
chants of the Church; they are the purest poetry,
flowing from the inspiration of the Holy Ghost.

appeared as an angel of the Lord, rapt in devotion
and inflamed with love. Once when raising his
hands during the Holy Sacrifice, they shone with
crimsoned light and appeared adorned with
precious jewels. At another time his head was
environed with bright rays, as though his spirit
had soared heavenward.”

Introductory Verses

The Body of the Preface

The Introduction consists of three Versicles
with corresponding Responses.

The priest standing in a reverential posture,
with uplifted hands and elevated heart, continues
to say or sing the following hymn of praise and
thanksgiving on ordinary days (for some festal
and votive Masses, the following basic preface is
expanded with proper texts):

V. Dominus vobiscum.
R. Et cum spiritu tuo.
V. Sursum corda.
R. Habemus ad Dominum.
V. Gratias agamus Domino Deo nostro.
R. Dignum et justum est.
At the words Sursum corda the priest raises
his hands. By this movement of the hands is
expressed the longing for that which is exalted
above us, that is, for the heavenly and eternal.
Thus the Church complies with the invitation of
the Prophet: “Let us raise our hearts together
with our hands to the Lord in heaven’’ (Lam.
3:41). The Sursum corda, therefore, admonishes
us, especially at the Sacrifice of the Mass, to have
our mind occupied with heavenly things only and
to be intent upon them. “No one should be present
in such a manner, that, although he may say with
the lips: “We have lifted our hearts to the Lord,”
his thoughts are directed to the cares of this life.
We should indeed think of God at all times; but if
this be impossible, on account of human frailty,
we should take it to heart most especially at least
during the Holy Sacrifice.
St. Martin of Tours is a striking example in
this respect. The Church says of him in his Office:
‘”With eyes and hands raised toward heaven,
he never let his mighty spirit slacken in prayer.”
His life of constant prayer and attention to the
presence of God reached its highest degree of
perfection during the celebration of Holy Mass.
In a sacristy intended especially for his use, he
carefully prepared himself for the divine service:
when he afterward approached the altar, he

Vere dignum et justum est, aequum et
salutare, nos tibi semper et ubique gratias
agere: Domine sancte, Pater omnipotens,
aeterne Deus: per Christum Dominum
nostrum. Per quem maiestatem tuam laudant
Angeli, adorant Dominationes, tremunt
Potestates. Coeli coelorumque Virtutes, ac beata
Seraphim, socia exsultatione concelebrant.
Cum quibus et nostras voces, ut admitti jubeas
deprecamur, supplici confessione dicentes….
(It is truly meet and just, right and salutary,
that we should always, and in all places, give
thanks to Thee, O Holy Lord, Father Almighty,
eternal God, through Christ our Lord. By whom
the angels praise Thy majesty, the dominations
adore it, the powers tremble before it, the
heavens and the heavenly virtues, and the blessed
seraphim, exultingly celebrate it in common.
Together with whom we beseech Thee, that we
may be admitted to join our voices in suppliant
confession, saying….)
The priest calls special attention to the great
importance of the obligation of returning thanks
to God: “It is truly meet and just, right and
salutary, that we should always and in all places
give thanks to God the Lord.” Four reasons are
cited, which here clearly manifest the importance
and necessity of gratitude.
a) Dignum: Giving thanks acknowledges
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Spirituality
and glorifies the dignity of God, on the one hand;
and, on the other, it contributes to our moral
dignity, revealing the beauty and nobility of the
soul. Gratitude is the sign of a noble heart, while
ingratitude is the mark of a mean soul.
b) Justum: Gratitude is allied with justice:
for it is the will and the endeavor to return and
repay, as far as possible, the benefits received. He
who possesses strict justice, will also entertain
grateful sentiments, that is, he will strive to
reward the benefactor.
c) Aequum: Gratitude appears in the highest
degree an act of equity, which performs more
than what is required according to strict justice
and law. Reflect on the excessive goodness of
God toward you and the riches of His mercy,
wherewith He daily visits you: is it then requiring
too much, that your heart should be inflamed
with an ardent, strong, and grateful love?
d) Salutare: To thank God promotes the
temporal and eternal welfare, inasmuch as
it enriches the soul with great blessings and
precious graces. Gratitude opens to us the
treasures of the divine liberality. Inasmuch as
we sincerely thank God for benefits received, we
draw down new and more special graces upon
ourselves. God takes complacency in a grateful
heart; nothing shall be wanting to it.
To cultivate a spirit of gratitude toward God
is, therefore, a practice “truly meet and just, right
and salutary”: but how far must we go, what is the
extent of this thanksgiving? This is made known
by the words, that we “should always and in all
places” (semper et ubique) give thanks. There is
no time or place in which we should not from the
fullness of our heart say: Deo gratias!
The words “O holy Lord, Father Almighty,
eternal God” refer to the first Person of the
Deity: they express the majesty and glory of
the Father, and should likewise incite us to
fervent thanksgiving. But how are we, poor, frail
creatures, able appropriately and adequately to
thank the holy, the almighty and the eternal God?
“Through Christ our Lord,” answers the Church.
Christ is our mediator: through Him do all gifts
and graces descend upon us “from the Father of
Lights” and through Him must our gratitude and
praise ascend to God.
The Savior enthroned at the right hand of God
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is as man the Head also of all the angelic choirs.
They constitute a part of the eternal kingdom
of God, whose glorious King is Jesus Christ.
According to the common teaching (founded
upon Scripture and tradition) the angels are
divided into nine distinct choirs. Revelation gives
no further particulars as to the peculiar nature
or the special offices of the different orders of
angels.
According to St. Gregory the Great, their order
is: 1. Angeli (Angels); 2. Archangeli (Archangels);
3. Virtutes (Virtues); 4. Potestates (Powers); 5.
Principatus (Principalities); 6. Dominationes
(Dominations); 7. Throni (Thrones); 8. Cherubim
(Cherubim); 9. Seraphim (Seraphim). The two
lowest and the three highest are enumerated
in the same order by all, while the four middle
ones are differently grouped by others. In the
Prefaces all the choirs with the exception of the
Principatus are mentioned by name.
Penetrated with a sentiment of our total
unworthiness, we, therefore, implore of God that
He would suffer us to join our feeble voices with
the angelic choirs and in all humility we praise
the glory of the triune God and the glory of the
Redeemer in the Sanctus.

The Sanctus
Sanctus, Sanctus, Sanctus, Dominus Deus
Sabaoth.
Pleni sunt coeli et terra gloria tua. Hosanna
in excelsis.
Benedictus qui venit in nomine Domini.
Hosanna in excelsis.
This exceedingly sublime hymn of praise is
made up of words taken from Holy Scripture,
and consists of two parts. The first half contains
the glorification of the Holy Trinity by the
angels of heaven; the second half consists of
the welcoming of the Savior by the mouth of the
faithful on earth.
With regard to the first part, this magnifying
of the Lord God of Hosts is termed the Thrice
Holy (Trisagium) or Hymn of the Seraphim, or of
the Angels (Hymnus seraphicus vel angelicus)
and the second part of the hymn is designated

a hymn of praise to the adorable Trinity. Since
in God’s sanctity His infinite perfection, beauty
and glory shine forth most resplendently, He is
in the language of revelation and of the Church
very often praised as “the Holy One.” The divine
holiness is uncreated, immense, unchangeable:
the infinitely pure, luminous, spiritual being of
God is holiness itself. God is the “only Holy One,”
and from God the supernal splendor of holiness
is reflected over all the world of angels and of
men: His is the type and the source of all created
holiness.

Triumphal Chant to Christ

the Victorious or Triumphal Chant (Hymnus
triumphalis). The Trisagium is found whole or
in part in all the liturgies.

The Trisagium
The first part of the hymn, with some slight
alterations, is taken from the grand description of
a vision of the Prophet Isaias: “And the Seraphim
cried one to another, and said: Holy, holy, holy,
the Lord God of hosts, all the earth is full of Thy
glory. And the lintels of the doors [of the Temple]
were moved at the voice of him that cried, and
the house was filled with smoke [that is, with the
cloud of the glory of light]” (Is. 6:3).
St. John the Apostle also heard the celestial
canticle: “Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty”
(Apoc. 4:8). As is evident from the universal
doctrine of the Fathers and from several passages
of Holy Scripture itself, the thrice repeating of the
word “Holy” is intended, not merely to proclaim
emphatically the holiness of God, but rather to
indicate the threefold personality of God: it is

To the praise of the triune God follows the
jubilant salutation of the Redeemer, who will
soon appear mystically on the altar “in the
fullness of mercy.” The hymn concludes with
the triumphal chant with which the Savior was
welcomed by the multitudes as Prince of Peace
and Conqueror of Death at His solemn entrance
into Jerusalem, and with which He is now again
saluted at His coming on the altar: “Hosanna
in the highest! Blessed is He that cometh in the
name of the Lord! Hosanna in the highest!”
The Trisagium is not sung by the priest (as
is the Preface), but recited in a half audible
voice. When he joins in the hymn of praise of the
angelic hosts, to glorify the Most Holy Trinity, he
lowers his voice and with joined hands bows with
humble reverence, in sentiments of unworthiness,
to take up the heavenly hymn on his mortal lips.
At the joyful praise of the speedily approaching
Savior, hailed in advance, he again stands erect
and signs himself with the holy Cross to indicate
that Christ came as a victorious Conqueror and
Prince of Peace to establish His kingdom by
means of the Cross, and that He now comes down
on the altar to renew mystically the Sacrifice of
the Cross.

37

God Is All
By a Benedictine monk

St. Benedict died about 1360 years before St.
Pius X wrote his encyclical, entitled Pascendi,
in 1907 describing Modernism. In spite of many
centuries that separated these two men of the
Church, they had very similar thoughts about
society. St. Benedict in chapter 4 of his Rule
states that the monk must “Prefer nothing to
Christ.” St. Pius X, at the very beginning of his
pontificate declared that his goal, as the Vicar of
Christ on earth, was “… to restore all things in
Christ.” Although these two were so distant in
the history of the Church, they desired that both
the individual soul and the whole of society might
be consecrated to Christ.
The Modernist, according to one author, has
the “…ambition to eliminate God from all social
life.” The man that attempts to remove God from
society has already removed Him from his soul.

As the adage states, “Nature abhors a vacuum.”
If we remove God from mankind, the void must
be filled with something. Modernism replaces
God with man, denying God His rights as our
Father. St. Pius X explains that the Modernist
believes in “vital immanence” which is life
developing within man without God. In his Rule,
St. Benedict also reproves unstable communities
of monks that replace God’s will with their
personal whims. Whatever they like is considered
to be lawful and their dislikes are unlawful.
Every sin is a declaration of independence
from God and His Church. We, as sinners, replace
God’s will with our self-will. We unjustly usurp
His authority and convince ourselves that we no
longer need His assistance. Today’s crisis, both in
society and the Church, is not an external attack
but an internal one. It is a type of intellectual
39

Spirituality
decay of man’s reasoning ability. Through pride
the Modernist convinces himself that everything
comes from himself and all reality depends
upon his individual opinion. The unchanging
deposit of faith revealed by God and confided
to the Church is now subjected to each man’s
changing judgment or personal opinion. The
Modernist concept of truth develops with, in,
and through man and no longer exists outside of
man’s thought. God’s truth no longer transcends
from above as a gift of God but is developed by
the evolving complex advancement of man’s
thought. With this mindset, man’s religious duty,
the content of his faith and his moral behavior
are removed from the authority of the Church. All
of his decisions come from within and no longer
depend upon God and His Church. This evolution
confirms the Darwinian phrase “survival of the
fittest” in the realm of thought.
The Modernist grasps the unchanging,
coherent continuity of the faith of the teaching
Church as a major obstacle in the advancement
of mankind. This constant and stable doctrine
would block the natural development of man
and is therefore detrimental to society. They
essentially state that the stability of Truth stunts
man’s necessary evolutionary process. If we
lose sight of our absolute dependence upon God
as our Creator and the author of all truth, we
create an artificial world without a Father. The
Modernist replaces Our heavenly Father with
some idealistic slogans and becomes an orphan
in a society without a Father. The Modernist
declares he is essentially God.
Today’s society is fatherless. A Modernist’s life
exists by vital immanence which develops with
an internal energy that cannot be controlled.
This is the same idea of evolution that Teilhard
de Chardin proclaims “…is a general condition
to which all theories, all hypotheses, all
systems must bow and which they must satisfy
henceforward if they are to be thinkable and
true. Evolution is a light illuminating all
facts, a curve that all lines must follow.” Karl
Rahner also states “grace can be considered as
belonging to man’s existence.” From these ideas
the Modernist can conclude that he has become
God needing no Father.
These errors lead to the general upheavals
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in today’s society. Today children can choose
their sex if they are not satisfied with the way
they were born. One can legally marry another
of the same sex and adopt children. The strange
doctrine of transhumanism proclaims that man
can and should materially and intellectually
direct his evolutionary process. He can thereby
improve with modern science his intellectual and
physical capacities. They are even considering
how they can live eternally, conquering death
by science. They also speak of transferring their
intellect and will to some type of robot so that,
through technology, they can continue their
existence. They do not want a Father.
The modern association called Black
Lives Matter has been a catalyst for many
violent protests across the nation. They seek
a society without paternity as we know it.
According to their official mission statement
they declare that they want to “dismantle the
patriarchal practice” and also to “disrupt the
Western-prescribed nuclear family structure
requirement by supporting each other as
extended families and ‘villages’ that collectively
care for one another…” This is a new type of
communistic society without a Father and a cry
of independence in the face of God.
St. Benedict asks us to accept Christ as the
source and center of our life. He teaches us of
a transcendental God who loves us as a Father,
not the Modernist god of vital immanence.
Divine Providence is continually involved in the
development of our bodies and souls. He asks us
to humbly practice charity towards the elderly,
the very young and the infirm, knowing that what
we do to the smallest among us we do to Christ.
This is not Darwin’s idea of the survival of the
fittest. Our greatest glory is to be a child of God.
He shows us that we have a father in the person
of the superior of the monastery who takes the
place of Christ in our life. If we could summarize
the Rule of St. Benedict it is like the echo of Our
Lord teaching us to pray: “Our Father who art in
heaven…”

360 pp. – Softcover – STK# 8659 – $21.95

The Second Vatican Council
and Religious Liberty
Become Aware of the Changes
in the Church

This book deals with the right and wrong conceptions of religious freedom. Special emphasis is placed on the weaknesses
and confusions of the (non-infallible) Declaration on Religious Freedom of Vatican II, which only served to add to the
confusion of Catholics and others since it was approved by Vatican II in 1965. This makes The Second Vatican Council and
Religious Liberty” indispensable for any Catholic who wants to be truly aware of the recent changes in the Catholic Church.

Call 1-800-966-7337 and get yours today!

Visit www.angeluspress.org — 1-800-966-7337
Please visit our website to see our entire selection of books and music.

Contrary to the Modernists, who often wish to
deny the historicity of Marian miracles such as the
Assumption, the Church’s Apostolic Tradition has
never wavered from Mary being assumed body and
soul into Heaven and reigns as Queen.

598 pp. – Softcover – STK# 8577 – $27.95

The Second
Vatican Council:
An Unwritten Story
A brilliant explanation of the
rupture that was Vatican II.
By Roberto de Mattei

The Second Vatican Council has transformed the way both Catholics and non-Catholics
look at the Church. The Second Vatican Council is still a subject of fiery debate. Roberto
de Mattei answers the claims that the council is in full continuity with Tradition and demonstrates what it actually is—a rupture from the whole of the Church’s past that came
before it. A valuable work for those looking to know what is happening to the Church and
what’s behind the changes.

Visit www.angeluspress.org — 1-800-966-7337
44

The Angelus

September - October 2020

Please visit our website to see our entire selection of books and music.

Christian Culture

Modernism in Music—

Who Cares If
You Listen?
By Andrew Childs

“Jesus Christ belonged to the true race of
prophets. He saw with open eye the mystery of the
soul. Drawn by its severe harmony, ravished with
its beauty, he lived in it, and had his being there.
Alone in all history he estimated the greatness of
man. One man was true to what is in you and me.
He saw that God incarnates himself in man, and
evermore goes forth anew to take possession of his
world.”—Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1838: An Address
[Harvard Divinity School]
“God is dead. God remains dead. And we
have killed him. Yet his shadow still looms. How
shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all
murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all
that the world has yet owned has bled to death
under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us?
What water is there for us to clean ourselves?

What festivals of atonement, what sacred
games shall we have to invent? Is not the
greatness of this deed too great for us? Must
we ourselves not become gods simply to appear
worthy of it?”—Friedrich Nietzsche, 1882: The
Merry Science
“The philosopher has declared: The principle
of faith is immanent; the believer has added: This
principle is God; and the theologian draws the
conclusion: God is immanent in man.”—Pope St.
Pius X, 1907: Pascendi Dominici Gregis
“Who cares if you listen?”—Milton Babbitt,
High Fidelity, VIII, no. 2 (February 1958)
In 1907, Pope St. Pius X described Modernism
as “the synthesis of all heresies,” revealing both
45

Christian Culture

46

its danger, and its elusiveness. Ideas resembling
or built upon a single defined heresy have proven
dangerous enough throughout history, but the
Saint exposed Modernism as a black hole of
heresy, a realm error so dense that no light of
truth can escape. Modernism is the towering
achievement of the diabolical mind: no human
mind can resist or defeat it. Recognition and
avoidance provide the only possible defenses.
Most people make catastrophic choices

conditions established, man can finally realize
his omnipotence. He spreads his wings to soar—
and falls into the Modernist abyss.
What does this mean for art? What manner of
music does a god compose? Modernism manifests
itself musically most obviously in the realm of
academic High Art music—more on this below—
but the devil will use any means possible, good
or bad, to bring about our ruin. The present
discussion will consider first the relationship

voluntarily, compelled by pride. No choice
ranks higher on the scale of catastrophe than
the rejection of God, and the devil has worked
tirelessly throughout history to convince people
to deny God through the promise of a personal
divinity. The two positions in the epigraphs above
represent the logical end of humanist philosophy:
man is God, and God is dead. With these two

that has always existed between various genres
and styles of music, and then how, after the
dawn of Modernism, obvious yet complimentary
differences in various types of music became
hard divisions designed to force listeners away
from sustaining cultural good, and accustom
them to music either lacking in substance, or
outright morally dangerous.

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Picture a Cartesian graph where the horizontal
axis moves left to right from BAD to GOOD,
and the vertical axis moves bottom to top from
LOW to HIGH. Though good and bad certainly
involve matters of taste, before the 20th century,
the assessment of art involved recognized
objective standards; transcendental absolutes,
now shunned as insensitive or non-inclusive, had
not yet fallen out of favor. Low and high relate to
sophistication and purpose; both can be either
good or bad based on aesthetics, philosophy, and
morality.
Music in the upper right quadrant qualifies as
high/good. No need to linger here at the moment;
this is the music you know you should listen to.
Recall that music deals very specifically with the
relationship of intellect and emotion. God wants
to use emotions to draw souls higher, through
the intellect, to Heaven; the Devil wants to use
emotions to debase the intellect, subjecting it to
animal nature, leading souls to hell. The Devil
does not want us to have access to cultural
friends of real character who speak real comfort
to real problems. He works hard to discredit
substantial culture—subjecting it to ridicule
as stodgy, prudish, outdated, even prideful—
because he knows that keeping company with
great art provides real consolation and logically
results in a turning toward God.
The artist in the unsavory low/bad corner
of the cultural world uses art expressed
purposefully provocatively, violently, shockingly,
and loudly to encourage thoughts, words, and
deeds specifically recognizable as sinful. The
more sexually explicit, graphically violent,
and socially unacceptable the better. No need
to linger here; this is the music you know you
shouldn’t listen to. Its appeal—and we can never
forget the very real appeal of excess and sin—
merits separate consideration. Like everything
below the x axis, this music lacks cultural
nutrition, but unlike the musical neighbors to the
right, this music contains moral poison.
Good fences, Robert Frost posits, make
good neighbors. Unfortunately, no cultural
fence exists between good and bad art, and
the employment on the part both of low/bad
and low/good composers of exactly the same
musical materials to entertain or entice proves

immensely frustrating. On the good side of the
line—some of it very, very close to the line—
lies, in very general terms, Pop music and Folk
music. Sentimental appeal rather than technical
substance drives this music. Pop music is
cultural candy, fast food which never loses its
appeal, sung by fast, but unfortunately false
cultural friends: fast in that most popular music
deals with universal but superficial emotional
issues, false in that this sentimentality creates
an intellectual softness which makes appeals
to more sinister issues—isolation, generational
discord, sexual liberation—easier to believe. Folk
music is certainly good and inarguably necessary,
but just as sentimental as pop music. It merits
endorsement because it makes a legitimate claim
to tradition, speaks to less overtly questionable
themes, and allows for direct participation. Folk
music works beautifully as a means—to gain
literacy, as entertainment, as a connection to
cultural traditions, and as a technical foundation
required to appreciate masterworks—but not
a cultural end. We do not honor folk music by
pretending that it has more cultural horsepower
than it does, and when the Modernist attack
against music came from the lofty left, many
chose to remain below rather than fight for the
right. While prudently avoiding both elevated
sinister pride and obvious filth, however, this
choice deprives the listener of the necessary and
ennobling experiences that lie above.
“Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and
everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.”
—W. B. Yeats, The Second Coming
Modernism denies the supernatural, certainly
as a reality and the foundation of Faith, but also
as manifested in any system or pursuit founded
on anything remotely resembling a Divinely
instituted hierarchy. The center of music fell
apart as the result of conflicting forces and
unsustainable stylistic pressures. One force
47

Christian Culture
was populism, a direct attack on the social order
of Christendom. Aristocratic artistic patrons
not only provided security, but a guarantee
of quality. When popular demand overtook
artistic patronage, artists previously protected
by patrons had to submit to forces of trend and
the changing consumer tastes. Though the 19th
century witnessed an unprecedented outpouring
of musical masterworks, composers increasingly
began to explore extremes in terms of scale,
novelty, scandalous and sensational themes,
and technical complexity as a way to compete
for audiences. Both audiences and artists had a
breaking point. As listeners began to resist the
increasing demands of scale and complexity,
artists either acquiesced to public demand for
popular forms, generally more accessible, or
they continued to circle upward, oblivious to
any direction from below, unconcerned that few
could or would care to hear what they wrote. As
for accessibility—essentially communication
between the artist and the audience—composer
and conductor Pierre Boulez, a preeminent
champion of the Modernist musical cause stated
flatly “A whore is very accessible. In fact, she is
probably the ultimate definition of accessibility.”
Comprehensibility for the Modernist had become
prostitution.
The music in this upper left quadrant
is unquestionably high: phenomenally
sophisticated, requiring great skill, highly
exclusive—properly meaningful only to the
‘initiated’—and almost always a product of the
Academy. Only composers with tenure, it seems,
can afford to write music no one wants to listen
to; Milton Babbitt, an unquestioned Dean of
Modernist music proudly declared as much. In
the article referenced above, Babbitt claimed that
institutes of higher learning had an obligation to
provide composers of ‘New’ music a safe haven,
just as they would those who conduct scientific
research. This intellectual patronage would
guarantee that the composer experimenting with
the theoretical or obtuse could do so free from
any traditional aesthetic constraints or audience
approval. Experiment they did! Composers
Arnold Schoenberg, Anton Webern, and Alban
Berg formed the Second Viennese School,
producing mathematically complex “Serial” or
48

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Arnold Schoenberg. Austrian-born composer, music theorist,
teacher, writer, and painter. One of the most influential
composers of the 20th century. He was an innovator in
atonality, as well as developing the twelve-tone technique, a
compositional method of manipulating an ordered series of all
twelve notes in the chromatic scale. He was the first modern
composer to embrace ways of developing motifs without
resorting to the dominance of a centralized melodic idea.

“Twelve-tone” explorations in atonality, a system
which purposefully avoided recognizable tonal
centers or standard melodic shapes. American
John Cage, more a performance artist working in
the medium of sound than a composer, conducted
clever sound experiments involving, among
others, multiple radios, fish tanks, a piano eating
(or force-fed) hay, and the ultimate Modernist
expression of music, his immortal “4:33,”
precisely (or not…) four minutes and thirty-three
seconds of silence. Minimalism, a third strand of
musical Modernism, purposefully says as little as
possible, but does so for a very long time. Philip
Glass could provide your lifetime allowance of
this, ironically in a very short period of time.
Many others exist; they all stay on-script.

Modernist music is bad in that it destroys
rather than builds on that which preceded it,
and it makes a direct appeal to pride above all
else, certainly aesthetics. It excludes rather
than includes, by utilizing an alienating though
structurally and mathematically “perfect”
system of tonal, harmonic, and rhythmic
organization with no recognizable connection to
accepted, comprehensible aesthetic standards.
Supporters will argue that progress has always
seemed initially controversial, and that the
uninitiated lack the intelligence or sophistication
to understand, thus piquing curiosity and pride.
How, precisely, did this come about? Perhaps
not precisely at all, but as a matter of degree,
of ultimate limits tested, and finally found. The
gods of the 19th century composed mountains of
sound, pushing the limits of man, machine, and
audience stamina to a breaking point. The music
of Wagner, Bruckner, Richard Strauss, Verdi,
Puccini, and Mahler give the listener the giddy
and overwhelming sense that he could experience
nothing greater: Wagner’s Ring Cycle or Liebestod
(Birgit Nielsen, of course); Bruckner’s 7th; Strauss’
“Death and Transfiguration”; the first act of
Puccini’s “La Bohème” (or last act of “Turandot”);
the finale of Mahler’s 2nd (“Resurrection”), or 8th
(“Symphony of a Thousand”). The mind boggles
at the scale; the heart swells to the point of
breaking…and then, what can possibly follow?
The Modernist proposes to fix the broken heart by
cutting it out completely; what remains is neither
angelic nor human, but monstrous.
The Modernist artist, like every revolutionary,
congratulates himself for building something
new, while in fact merely wrecking something
old. Iconoclasm does not equal progress, and
aesthetics relate to unchangeable nature, not
merely technical trend: we like things that taste
good, and reject things that taste awful; we like
things that feel pleasurable, and reject things
that feel painful; we enjoy sounds that sound
beautiful, and…feel proud of our intelligence
when we pretend to like Stockhausen! The
Modernist denial of the supernatural by extension
means the denial of truth in an absolute sense,
a knowable truth to which we must submit by
avoiding sin (the existence of which the Modernist
certainly rejects), and by further extension the

denial of natural law, shepherd of artistic form.
Aesthetics for the Modernist—or morality—
represent personal choice, and nothing else, and
the traditionally or recognizably lovely becomes
an object of derision. The Godless intellectual
has made intellectuality suspect through pride;
the Devil and our fallen nature, manifest in
intellectual laziness, convinces us to remain
in cultural company ultimately beneath us. We
must as always endeavor to come up higher,
defying the synthesis of all error, striving in all
things, music included, to embrace the highest
expressions of truth.

49

Christian Culture

“À nous deux,
maintenant!”
Le Sillon, Modernism, and Catholicism as Democracy

By John Rao, D.Phil. Oxon.

Eugène de Rastignac is a principal character in
that series of novels dealing with the Restoration
and July Monarchy (1815-1848) Era that Honoré
de Balzac linked together under the title of La
Comédie Humaine (The Human Comedy). He
first appears in Le Père Goriot (Old Man Goriot,
1835) as a sympathetic, young, poor student
from the provinces who nevertheless wants to
“make it” in Parisian high society. While he does
indeed turn down an offer of direct help from
the devil, incarnated in another recurring figure
of the series by the name of Vautrin, Rastignac
flees from this satanic temptation, but only to
pursue the same goal by other means. “À nous
deux, maintenant!” (“It is between you—i.e.,
Paris—and me now!”) he proclaims at the end of
the novel as he confirms his quest for “conquest”
of the city through his own personal sell-out to its
52

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September - October 2020

moral corruption.
Far be it from me to suggest any exact
comparison of Rastignac with Marc Sangnier
(1873-1950), the founder in 1894 of the movement
called Le Sillon (The Furrow). Even though the
all too hagiographic discussions of Sangnier’s
life almost make one want to find in him some
hidden personal flaw, it is clear that he, like
Rastignac, also never made a direct deal with the
devil. Moreover, Sangnier did not even share the
moral weaknesses of Balzac’s fictional nineteenth
century social climber. He was too much of
a practicing believer for those flaws. Still, he,
too, did not abandon his dangerously obsessive
goal—that of a Catholic marriage with modern
democracy—but pursued it through the use of
other tools: in his case, dubious and ultimately
blinding “intuitive” ones.

It was in the crypt of the College Stanislas
in Paris in 1894 that the polytechnic student
Sangnier, born into a Catholic family wealthy
enough to allow him eventually to dedicate
himself entirely to his apostolic labors, first
founded Le Sillon. Designed for the promotion
of Leo XIII’s program of political and social
engagement as expressed in Rerum novarum
(1891) and Au milieu des sollicitudes (1892), the
Furrow’s first “study circle” rapidly expanded in
number, bringing into its orbit not just students,
but also priests, seminarians, and office and
industrial workers, both in the provinces as
well as throughout Paris. By 1905, after a good
number of cardinals and bishops had given
Sangnier’s efforts their blessing, following
pilgrimages to Rome where he and his followers
were welcomed by two popes, and having
established fruitful friendships with a variety of
other Catholic activist organizations, Le Sillon
claimed as many as 10,000 participants in 640
study circles.
Nevertheless, only one year later, in 1906,
when internal debates had revealed some serious
differences of opinion among its members,
Sangnier decided to transform the movement he
had created into something “new,” now giving it
the name of Le Plus Grand Sillon: “The Greater
Furrow.” But anyone familiar both with the
personality of the man as well as the modus
operandi of the organization’s meetings and
militant actions cannot really be surprised by
the “development of doctrine” characterizing
this supposedly new course. For Sangnier and
Le Sillon had from the very outset exuded
that overheated embrace of the importance
of an irrational “vitality” as the prophetic key
to Catholic teaching promoted earlier in the
century by the highly influential but eventually
excommunicated Abbé de Lamennais (1782-1854);
an approach that in the case of both men ended
in confounding Catholicism with a passionate,
energetic, “vitalist” commitment to democracy.
François Mauriac’s 1913 novel, L’Enfant
Chargé de Chaines (Young Man in Chains)
described his experiences while temporarily
under the spell of Le Sillon, later summarizing
Sangnier’s cultivation of “vitality” very succinctly:
“Everything about him was intuition, aspiration,

and movement of the heart.” (See Hughes
Petit, L’Eglise, le Sillon, et l’Action Française,
Nouvelles Édtions Latines, 1998, p. 128, also for
the material below). Jeanne Caron, author of
another useful book on the movement, underlines
his anti-rational, charismatic, Lamennais-like
character still more clearly, indicating that he
“made his choices with the light of intuition,
inventing his path as he went along…The modes
of his action made reference to an interior
certitude most often without passion for the
mediation of discursive thought” (Ibid., 128).
Henry du Roure (1883-1914), one of Sangnier’s
closest lieutenants, gives an explanation as to
why both the ordinary members of the movement
as well as the activists known as the Jeune
Garde breathed with “one common spirit in
one common goal.” This was because, although
the discussions at the study circles appeared
to observers to be free flowing, unguided, and
almost anarchistic in character, all his devoted
followers felt “the necessity to believe in Marc’s
providential vision and vow to him an absolute
and unconditional confidence” (Ibid., p. 17). For,
as with Lamennais, the vision of the prophetic
leader dominated all, and neither of the two
men was particularly willing to treat favorably
disagreement from anyone else.
Deeper implications of Sangnier’s unsurprising
“development of doctrine” were very much
emphasized by members of an organization with
which he had at first had quite friendly relations:
l’Action Française (French Action). Charles
Maurras (1868-1952), its founder, responded to
his “new course” criticism in a book entitled Le
Dilemme de Marc Sangnier (The Dilemma of
Marc Sangnier, 1906). Here, Maurras rejected
the Plus Grand Sillon’s argument that Catholic
social justice and modern democracy with its
conception of the need to “free the individual”
from “authority” were necessary partners,
along with its attack on l’Action Française
for its failure to recognize this indisputable
truth by preferring the governance of the
traditional French Monarchy. He noted that
Sangnier reached his conclusions by completely
overturning the movement’s hierarchy of
values. Democracy and liberty in the modern
revolutionary sense of the terms had become
53

Christian Culture
his supreme guides as to what was defined as
“Catholic” and “socially just”: even though an
historical study of what those pilot lights had
actually accomplished since the 1700s proved
that they destroyed the well-being of people
at large for the benefit of a small elite that
hypocritically waved the banner of liberty,
equality, and fraternity.
Maurras predicted that Sangnier—who to
him appeared to spout off all too disputable
slogans rather than logical thoughts designed
for rational discussion, somewhat in the manner
of Flaubert’s “Dictionary of Received Ideas”
in Bouvard et Péchuchet—would find that is
was “easier to agitate democratically than to
get a Catholic result from it” (Ibid., p. 145). And
referring to one of the most important new
features of Le Plus Grand Sillon, the opening
of its ranks to Protestants, Free Thinkers, and
Socialists alongside believing Catholics, another
Action Française supporter, Msgr. Anatole De
Cabrières (1830-1921), the Bishop of Montpellier,
perceived it as already having embraced heretical
principles:
“the novelties, the unclear formulas, the
chimerical hope of baptizing and canonizing
even opinions that are far removed from the true
Faith; that entire complex of confused notions
in the bosom of which the intelligent minds of
our times struggle, that Modernism, in one word,
that elusive Proteus of multiple forms, must
profoundly disquiet us because they menace
religion with the greatest peril” (Ibid., p. 158).
Catholic Social Justice teachings, all critics of
Sangnier insisted, were based upon the Kingship
of Christ and Natural Law, and were in no way
tied to any specific form of government, least of
all one that had a tainted record with regard to
openness to any supernatural and even rational
guidance whatsoever. Yet Le Plus Grand Sillon
took it for granted as a given that the morally
good and just order emerged not from obedience
to Christ and the world that conformed to and
corrected itself according to His unchangeable
message, but from democratic structures whose
“passion” and “vital action” constituted the actual
and sanctifying grace that moved men irresistibly
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heavenwards and in changing ways as well.
Heresy? Impossible! For their democratic fervor
on its own would prevent its Catholic followers
from falling into doctrinal error, even though
they seemed to be altering traditional definitions
of human nature, liberty, and the meaning of
“progress” along the way. Its goal, as the journal
of “social action,” Democratie, that the movement
began raising funds for creating in 1908 was
designed to promote, was the development in
France of a “truly” democratic republic, where
individuals were freed from all oppressive
authority, and this as the clear fulfillment of the
will of Christ. For, as Sangnier himself said:
“A man rose up who, working against political
barbarism, allowed the democratic regime to
prevail; a doctrine was founded which every day
made oppression and nature herself back off
before the Holy Liberty of souls; that doctrine is
the Christian Doctrine…that man is Christ Jesus,
our God! He alone founded, He alone maintains
the democratic principle” (Ibid., p. 201).
Two immediate effects of the creation of Le
Plus Grand Sillon alarmed bishops who had
once been friendly to and even quite active in
their support of Sangnier’s movement. One was
the abandonment to their own devices of those
study circles that were most closely connected to
their particular dioceses and not prepared for a
union with non-believers and even anti-Catholics
through the fraternal glue supposedly provided
by the grace of a common vital commitment to
democracy. The other was the enthusiasm for
the “new course” shown by a number of priests
and seminarians who, utilizing the arguments
provided through the movement, criticized
episcopal efforts to dissuade them as the sort
of oppressive authoritative behavior that would
soon be discredited as anti-Catholic anyway
under the development of doctrine desired by the
Divine Founder of Democracy.
Opposition in both France and Italy rapidly
mounted, with friends and foes of both Le Plus
Grand Sillon and l’Action Française fueling
the ever more public debate. But given the antiModernist campaign in Rome, it was inevitable
that Pope St. Pius X would intervene in this

clash of vitality and Tradition
on the side of the opponents
of Sangnier. His assault
came with Notre Charge
Apostolique (Our Apostolic
Duty) on August 25, 1910, just
as the movement’s standard
bearing journal Democratie
had finally appeared on the
scene. While praising “the
happy days” of the original
Sillon and urging a return to
its path, Pius went on to condemn the principles
of its “greater” successor along exactly the same
lines we have already indicated above. True
liberty, equality, and fraternity, he explained, do
indeed come from Our Lord, but at the end of the
process of obedience to natural and supernatural
laws and not through the mediation of an ever
more democratic liberation of individuals from
authorities that will remain valid until the last
days; through transformation in Christ and not
through some new form of democratic libertarian
“grace” superior to that initially offered by the
Savior. For St. Francis of Assisi was not somehow
less of a model of the holy, free, charitable
Christian man because he lived in a society that
did not possess the tools of sanctification only
unleashed through democracy.
Yes, it is true that Charles Maurras and
l’Action Française were not without serious
problems of their own vis-à-vis Church teaching.
Nevertheless, their practical defense of the
Catholic Faith at this time period was undeniable,
and their particular critique of Le Grand Sillon
was spot on. While the l’Action Française was,
to begin with, an association “of non-believers
which, because it had taken up the defense of
the Church in a number of circumstances, found
itself joined by a number of Catholics to such
a degree that these latter then occupied the
key posts within it,” Sangnier’s group was one
“founded among Catholics that opened up to
unbelievers, and which, by that fact alone, gave
proof of a certain softness in the fight versus
anticlericalism” (Ibid., p. 152).
Once again, Sangnier himself was devoted to
the Catholic Faith. His real dilemma, contrary
to the one that he posed to Maurras regarding

the sole compatibility of social
justice and an order of things
accepting the principles of
1789, was that his utter faith
in modern political democracy
blinded him to the battles
between the two. He was a man
who suffered from what St. Cyril
of Alexandria called dypsychia,
the possession of two souls
leading in opposite directions,
as this great Eastern Church
Father saw all too vividly among Christians of his
own day still also bound to pagan practices.
The founder of Le Sillon did, indeed “submit”
to Pope St. Pius X’s condemnation of his “new
course.” He did so, however, not by returning to
its earlier “happy days,” which always contained
the seeds of its further development within them
anyway. Instead, dissolving Le Plus Grand
Sillon, he dedicated himself in 1912 openly to
politics as such, through a movement called
Jeune République, totally democratic in its
aspirations. But Sangnier’s star began to rise
again, especially from the late 1920s onwards,
closely connected with the intensification of
the problems of l’Action Française with respect
to the Church—which we should return to
here some day—mentioned above. We, to our
misfortune, have lived to see the way in which
Sangnier’s political Modernism, basically
canonized by the mainstream Church in our
own time, has so overturned the hierarchy of
values that the Democratic Catholicism preached
around us today would most certainly offend the
believing Catholic psyche of the founder of Le
Sillon himself, whatever his dypsychia might
have been. For “Paris” in the form of Democracy
has today conquered “Rastignac” in the figure
of Sangnier and Le Sillon, and seemingly the
Catholic world as a whole. The battle is now
“between us and this monster from hell.” It is a
battle through which that monster can do a great
deal of damage to souls, but one that in the final
analysis it cannot win.

55

St. Peter, the Rock upon which Christ
built His Church, pray for the Church’s
deliverance from the scourge of
Modernism and all of its false fruits.

Christian Culture

Montmajour
Abbey
By Dr. France-Marie Hilgar

The Origins
The abbey was built on one of the three hills
a few dozen feet above the Rhone Plain, just
above two miles north-east of Arles. The three
mountains emerged during the Middle Ages from
a vast area of lakes and marshes formed from
the gradual silting up of an inland sea plied by
flat-bottom merchant ships during the days of
the Roman Occupation. Although a few traces
of what is presumed to have been a Roman
settlement have been found here, Montmajour
did not enter the pages of the history books
until the 10th century. It was already known as
Saint Peter’s island when a benefactress became
its owner. It is well established that a small
community of hermits had already settled there
and that, although deserted and isolated in the
middle of the marshes well-stocked with fish and
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game, the place was not inaccessible. In fact, the
geographical location was attractive. Montmajour
was a stopover on the road leading from the
Roman road to a fortress. Until the 17th century,
the rock on which Montmajour Abbey stands was
surrounded by marshland. The meadows are still
subject to flooding from time to time, a reminder
of this specific geographical location.
In the second half of the 10th century, as soon
as the eastern marshes of the area were freed
from Saracen occupation, Provence began to
enjoy a period of renewed economic prosperity
which was strongly supported by the religious
communities wishing to reform the morals of the
nobility and the priesthood. The expansion of
the tiny community was linked to this reforming
movement. Before the end of the century, the
monks who were bound by the Rule of St.

Benedict acquired land and churches far removed
from the “mountain.” Pope Leo VIII granted them
the right to elect their own abbots. They were
dependent directly on the Holy See and were not
subject to the authority of the bishop.

The Original NotreDame Church
It is presumed that it was started in the
11th century given the abbey’s power and
authority over a number of priories and some 30
churches. A number of 11th century texts give
information on the new building. Building work
was completed in 1069. It probably already had
a crypt. The only building still standing from
the 11th century is St. Peter’s chapel. It is partly
gouged out of the rock and is now the oldest part
of the abbey. A stone-built nave including a row
of arcading runs along a line of small caves.
Nave of St. Peter's Chapel
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Christian Culture

Apse of the abbatial church (12th century)

It is built in a natural cave high above the plain
that was once a marshland. In 1976 the capitals
of the Chapel were vandalized. Those which
have survived are badly damaged. Typical of the
Early Romanesque architecture, their decoration
combines Corinthian capitals and geometrical
designs. Another element is a pilaster standing
against a wall at the entrance to the corridor
leading to the square chamber behind the chevet.
Outside, the flat-slabbed roof indicates that it
was rebuilt in the late XIIth century. Four huge
buttresses were erected at a later date, two in the
15th century and two more in 1740 when the flight
of steps leading to the chapel was built.
Notre Dame church stands on the sheer north
side of the mountain. The first part open to the
public today is its crypt. The south side is dug
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out of the rock. It includes a nave, transept and
chancel of the church above while the apses of
the radiating chapels is included in a section
beyond the chevet of the church. In the central
rotunda is a Romanesque altar. A barrel-vaulted
walkway leads from the church to the crypt.
Visitors enter the church by a staircase
leading to the second bay in the nave. NotreDame church which has no side aisles is very
bare. The ribbed barrel vaulting in the nave is
reinforced with transverse arches supported on
projecting pilasters, typical of Provence as is
the half-dome apse and the two chapels opening
onto the transept. The monks’ entrance in 1153
may be considered to mark the end of the first
stage, which included the crypt and apse. The
second stage, vaulting in the chancel, south arm

of the transept and the nave, must have been
undertaken between 1153 and 1182 when the
north gallery in the cloisters was completed. The
north wall of the cloisters forms the south wall
of the nave. The vaulting in the transept crossing
is in Gothic style. The Romanesque nave was to
have been extended along another three bays.
The project was never completed. In the 14th
century the transept was extended. In the 15th
century another two chapels were added. Each of
them occupies the length of a bay.
The door into the cloisters leads off the south
side of the nave into the church. The oldest
section of the cloisters dates from the second
half of the 12th century. In 1149 the first Chapter
general was held, bringing together the entire
Order including monks and priors. The cloisters
lie between the south wall of the nave and the
south arm of the transept in the church. Its

four galleries have barrel vaulting and three
bays. The bays overlook the garth by a series of
small semicircular arches supported on twin
colonnettes. In the north and south galleries
there are four in each bay; in the east gallery
there are three. On the garth side the arcading
is interconnected by subbase arches supported
by huge pilasters reinforced by buttresses.
Differences in detail from one gallery to another
indicate the order in which they were built.

The Decline of the Abbey
in the Late Middle Ages
At the beginning of the 15th century the
abbey entered a period of decline that was to
worsen as the years passed. The commendatory
abbot was no longer required to reside in

61

Christian Culture
the monastery but received an income. He was
appointed by the pope and not necessarily a
member of the Benedictine Order. Monastic life
was in recession. Then there was trouble with
the Order of Saint Antoine. They took up arms
against Montmajour but were repulsed with the
assistance of the people of Arles. Then the wars
of Religion took place. The abbey had to take in
soldiers. The monks looked for refuge in their
community of Arles. When they returned two
years later, they found it almost uninhabitable.
In the 17th century the Benedictine Order of
Saint Maur took over. A concordat laid down
the conditions under which the Maurist reform
would be introduced. Comfortable pensions
would be paid to the elders who refused to
accept the Reform. In return the abbot was to
pay 4,500 pounds a year toward food for the new
monks and was to bear one half of the cost of
the upkeep of the buildings. Turned into an order
in 1621, St. Maur wanted to reform Benedictine
monasteries by insuring a return to the veritable
Rule of St. Benedict while at the same time
encouraging intellectual pursuits. The first task
of the reformed abbey was to set it on sound
financial footing. The concordat of 1639 had
left the monks with a very low income. In 1642
it signed a contract with the town of Arles. The
land reclaimed from the marshes produced new
revenues. The problems were aggravated by the
hostility of the people of Arles who considered
the monks as foreigners. A second concordat was
signed in 1646. At the dawn of the 18th century
their position finally appeared clear. And the
Congregation was ready to erect new buildings.
The plans were not drawn by a Maurist monk
but were the work of Pierre Mignard. In 1703 the
foundation stone of the building was laid. In 1719
the old Romanesque dormitory was turned into
infirmaries. It was linked to the new monastery
by means of a great arch. In 1726 a huge fire
devastated the new buildings. It was duplicated
in 1745.

The Modern Buildings
The first level included the wine cellars
flanked by a gutter to fill large barrels. On the
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intermediate level there are various service
rooms including the corn store and bake house
with its huge oven. This is where a fire started in
1726. The story above is the real ground floor of
the monastery. The upper two floors which are
now in a very poor state of repair are identical.
Unlike the ground floor they have a central
corridor lit by two semicircular lights at the east
and west ends with rows of cells: 44 in all. The
building has vaulted roofs. The architect merely
sought to roof each room as securely and easily
as possible.

From the Revolution
to the Present Day
The abbey was placed under the authority
in 1790 and immediately despoiled. The monks
were forced to leave, and the furniture, linen and
ornaments were scattered. It was sold a year
later to a lady described by a contemporary as
an adventurer who earned a living by pillaging.
The purchaser sold off everything that could
be removed. Just as she was about to bring
demolition workers from Marseilles the property
was repossessed on grounds that she was
unable to keep up the scheduled payments. The
next person who bought it sold the mediaeval
sections to various smaller owners and used
the construction as a source of building stones.
After the storm abated the town of Arles began
to rebuild it. In 1872 a general restoration project
began under the auspices of the Caisse Nationale
des Monuments Historiques. From 1927 to now
the aim has been to finally opening this superb
example of Classical architecture to the public.

[Top Left] View of the cloister from the watchtower.
[Top Right] Crypt of St. Benedict Rotunda.
[Bottom] Ruins of the Maurist monastery.

63

Christian Culture

Celebrating
the Priesthood
By Hierophilus

In Rome one can see a beautiful fresco of the
Good Shepherd in the catacomb of Saint Priscilla.
According to tradition, Priscilla was the mother
of Senator Pudens. She and her family must have
been baptized by St. Peter himself, soon after his
arrival in the Eternal City. The first pope knew
the family well and their home was to become
the center of his apostolate in Rome. There he
must have offered Mass and preached. Later a
catacomb was built under the house and the
fresco of the Good Shepherd was painted in one
of the underground rooms.
We are celebrating this year the 100th
anniversary of the canonization of St. Margaret
Mary, “the beloved disciple of my Sacred Heart,”
as Our Lord called her. It is touching to see how
the first Christians, not having yet the revelations
of Paray-le-Monial, used the image of the Good
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Shepherd to represent the Merciful Love of Jesus,
as in the fresco of the catacomb of St. Priscilla.
St. Peter was of course present when Our Lord
told His apostles the parable of the lost sheep.
Jesus also revealed to them that He was the Good
Shepherd who had come to rescue His wayward
sheep. St. Peter was never to forget this and, as
we will see, he experienced it in his own life. So
he was able to explain the mystery of Our Savior’s
Infinite Mercy to Priscilla and his family in these
words: “You were as sheep gone astray but you
are now converted to the shepherd and bishop of
your souls” (I Pet. 2:25).
In his first epistle, which he wrote in Rome,
maybe in the house of Priscilla, Saint Peter
exhorted priests, many of them he had himself
ordained as their bishop: “Feed the flock of God

which is among you, taking good care of it… And
when the prince of shepherds shall appear, you
shall receive a never fading crown of glory.”
The words of the first pope were thus echoing
Our Lord’s famous words to him on the shore of
the lake of Galilee: “Simon, son of John, lovest
thou me? Feed my sheep.” St. Augustine has this
beautiful commentary: “Our Lord is the Good
Shepherd and all the rest, all the good shepherds
are his members,” i.e., “shepherds under The
Shepherd.” “A good shepherd is one who knows
that he is feeding Our Lord’s flock for His Master
and not for himself.” Yes, Jesus shepherds his
sheep through his undershepherds the priests.
But the priests are themselves members of the
flock, so they too need the loving care of the
Good Shepherd. St. Peter, in his weakness, knew
this only too well. If priests want to be good
shepherds and not hirelings, if they desire to
work well for Our Lord, then they must “abide in
Him and Him in them.” They must travel on the
difficult road of their priesthood in His company.
After His resurrection, Our Lord served
breakfast to His apostles after the miraculous
catch of fish on the lake of Gennesaret. St. John
mentioned that it was on a charcoal fire that Our
Savior cooked the fish (Jn. 21:9). The other time
the same word is used in the Gospel is when St.
Peter stood in front of a “charcoal fire,” the night
he denied his master three times.
This detail brings together both moments in
St. Peter’s life. The first fire reminds us of his
sin and the second of the mercy of Our Lord
reassuring him that he had been forgiven. At
the second fire Jesus questioned Peter about his
love for Him. Peter, having been humbled by his
fall, realized now his great weakness. So when
Our Lord asked: “Do you love me more than the
others?” Peter answered: “Lord, Thou knowest”
and further: “Even though they all fall away,
I will not.” The charcoal fire reminded him of
this terrible night when he fell into sin through
presumption. Cured from his illusions, he now
placed his confidence in Our Savior’s grace and
no longer in his own strength. Later, he was one
day to explain all this, maybe with tears in his
eyes, to Priscilla and her family in Rome.
As they are called to shepherd others, priests
must always remember to depend on the help of

the Chief Shepherd. They must constantly bear
in mind their own fickleness and how much they
are in need of Our Savior’s Love and Mercy. Like
St. Peter, they can become a lost sheep that has
to be sought, found and brought back on their
good Master’s shoulders. As St. Paul says, they
carry the precious grace of their priesthood in an
earthen vessel which can be broken. How easy
it is to forget their spiritual poverty and thus run
the risk to deny their Lord and fall from grace!
“Watch and pray.”

We wrote about the two fires mentioned in
the Gospel, but we know there is a third one,
which the Church calls an “ardent furnace of
charity.” This is the Sacred Heart of Jesus, fully
revealed only to St. Margaret Mary in the 17th
century. This Heart of Our Savior was heard by
Saint John resting on Jesus’s breast during the
last supper , then pierced on the cross by the
lance of the centurion and finally shown to Saint
Thomas when he opened the folds of his tunic
and said: “Bring hither thy hand and put it into
my side.”
When St. Peter was still full of pride, he was
far from the fire of the meek and humble Heart of
Jesus. So he felt cold and went to warm himself
by the charcoal fire and then fell into sin. Yes
indeed the heart of the priest is made for God
and it cannot fully rest until it rests in Him. When
it becomes lukewarm, it will often seek the
65

Christian Culture
consolation of creatures an then disaster can be
expected. This is why the undershepherd must
seek intimacy with the Good Shepherd. The
priest takes care of the souls Jesus purchased at
such a great price, i.e., His own blood. This is why
the priesthood is such a mark of love. Our Lord
could have chosen others, but He chose these
because He wanted to make them His friends and
take care of His sheep (Jn. 15:15).
It is a mystery how the good priest, through
his fidelity, can console the Divine Heart and
give Him the happiness of saving many souls
through his ministry. On the contrary, the
unfaithful priest can be a source of grief for the
Sacred Heart of Jesus. We see this very well in
the revelations to St. Margaret Mary. Our Lord
suffers more from the sins of souls consecrated
to Him than from others. Priests are Jesus’
strength and weakness, His hope and His fear,
His joy and His sorrow. They can be in the Sacred
Heart either a burning flame of charity or a
piercing thorn of pain.
Knowing all this, Holy Mother Church has
given to her priests many models of holiness.
One of the most beautiful was St. Pius X. In
a letter soon after the death of the holy pope,
Padre Pio wrote: “Truly, he was more than ever
the good shepherd, the king of peace, the meek
and humble Jesus on earth.” When Archbishop
Marcel Lefebvre founded the Society of St. Pius
X with the goal of restoring the holiness of the
priesthood, he could not have chosen a better
patron than Giuseppe Sarto. This year, the
Society is celebrating its 50th anniversary. It was
approved on November 1st 1970, on the feast of
All Saints. The Archbishop always saw in this
date a powerful reminder that the very essence
of the Society is the sanctification of priests, to
give the Church holy priests who shall be good
shepherds of souls.
If Padre Pio was a great lover of the Sacred
Heart and a good shepherd of souls, we cannot
say the same of several other priests whom we
meet in his life. One of the saddest examples
was the Archbishop of Manfredonia and the
four canons of San Giovanni Rotondo. Theirs
was an extremely immoral life, with several
innocent souls victims of these “wolves in
sheep’s clothing.” Padre Pio’s saintly life was
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such a reproach to them that they decided to
calumniate him so that the Holy Office would
take disciplinary measures against him. They
succeeded so well that Pope Pius XI and even
Cardinal Merry del Val were deceived. A friend
of Padre Pio tried to use the media to correct
this injustice. Padre Pio disapproved of it,
probably because he feared that more harm
than good would come from public exposure of
this scandal. It is only several years later that
the truth finally came out and the culprits were
severely punished. Holy Mother Church has
always known the consolation of good priests
and the grief caused by the ones who did not
follow their calling to holiness.
Even in his own order, Padre Pio knew there
were quite a few scandals in the beginning. The
Capuchin Order was founded by Matthew de
Baschi. It was immediately successful since
10 years later it had no less than 700 members.
Capuchins were holy religious. They were also
wonderful preachers and this was a big help in
the fight against the Protestant Reformation.
Unfortunately Matthew left the order in order
to achieve independence. The second general
superior, Louis de Fossenbrune, had to be
expelled from the order for disobedience. But
the greatest scandal was given by Bernardino
Ochino, fourth general superior of the order. He
was at the time the most famous preacher in
Italy. In 1542 he apostasized and joined Calvin
in Geneva. He went so far as to preach polygamy
through his sermons and his example.
The pope resolved to suppress the Capuchin
Order. He was dissuaded with difficulty, but
Capuchins were nevertheless forbidden to
preach. It was a great humiliation for the order,
but God was purifying his children through
this trial. Thirty-five years later, St. Fidelis of
Sigmaringen was born in 1577. He was to become
the first canonized saint of the Order. The
Capuchins now count 15 saints and 51 blessed.
From a human perspective, it seems that the
ill repute into which the Order had fallen was
without remedy and that the Order was bound
to wither away. And yet God had other plans and
the Order was to produce great fruits of sanctity,
among them Padre Pio. Truly we can exclaim
with St. Paul: “Oh the depths of the riches of

the wisdom and of the knowledge of God! How
incomprehensible are his judgments and how
unsearchable His ways!” (Rom. 11:33). Here is a
beautiful quote from Our Lord to St. Margaret
Mary: “I know how to accomplish my designs,
even through means which seem contrary.”
As the Society of Saint Pius X now counts 50
years of existence, let us be grateful, first for the
priests whose holiness rejoiced the Sacred Heart
as well as edified us the faithful and who have
now gone to their eternal reward. The saintly
Fr. La Praz from Switzerland who carried so
patiently his heavy cross is but one example.
God took these priests sometimes at an early
age. But they are now praying in Heaven for their
confreres still struggling in this vale of tears.
Let us also bear in mind the tireless priests
who in the 1970’s and 1980’s maintained the
Traditional Mass, with the help of a few elderly
priests, when there was no indult Mass or
Ecclesia Dei fraternities. It was a heavy burden
but they carried it cheerfully as good shepherds
of their flocks. Theirs was often a gruelling
schedule with three and sometimes four Masses
on Sunday, with hours of confession. Those brave
priests traveled everywhere, toiled, suffered and
sowed in tears so that we could now enjoy the
fruits of their labors. Where would we be without
them? We would certainly have no Traditional
Mass, therefore we owe them a tremendous debt
of gratitude.
As faithful we have to pray for those of our
priests who are now suffering from illness,
loneliness or temptations. Priests know, more
than any other, that they have to follow Our Lord
on the painful Way of the Cross. Jesus is indeed
purifying them through their trials, since it is
only when their heart is broken that supernatural
peace and joy is fully released. Yet they are
weak so they heavily depend on the prayers and
sacrifices of generous souls. We should see Our
Lord in them, since they are “other Christs.”
At the end of her life, St. Therese of the Child
Jesus was offering all her sufferings for her two
“brothers,” missionary priests.
Let us not forget those priests who have
strayed from the path of virtue. They need our
compassion and our prayers. We may know one
or another of these unhappy souls who are now

like lost sheep, a shepherd no longer united to
the Chief Shepherd but separated from Him. The
Divine Heart seeks them and pursues them in
His Mercy, as He sought to bring Peter back to
repentance. Thanks be to God there are several
examples of beautiful conversions in this domain.
Until her death, St. Therese of Lisieux prayed for
the ex-Carmelite priest, Fr. Loison, who had left
the Church and married.
Last but not least, let us remember the good
priests who are doing their work with charity,
humility and fidelity: those who are saying Mass
for us on Sunday, hearing our confessions and
baptizing our children. These shepherds are
dear to us, they are our light in the darkness of
the world. They are patient with us, who are not
always docile to them. They are willing to give us
their time when we need someone to listen to our
problems. They quietly go about doing their work
of saving souls. Satan will certainly try to destroy
them. If we pray for them, he will not succeed.
The children of Fatima, especially Jacinta prayed
for priests.
We suggest to our fellow Traditional Catholics
the following prayer:
O Jesus, Eternal Priest, keep all Your priests
within the shelter of Your Sacred Heart, where
none may harm them. Keep unstained their
anointed hands which daily touch Your Sacred
Body.
Keep unsullied their lips purpled with Your
Precious Blood. Keep pure and unearthly their
hearts sealed with the sublime marks of Your
glorious priesthood. Let Your holy love surround
them and shield them from the world’s contagion.
Bless their labors with abundant fruit, and
may the souls to whom they have ministered to
be their joy and consolation and in Heaven their
beautiful and everlasting crown.
O Mary, Queen of the clergy, pray for us; obtain
for us many holy priests. Amen.

67

Christian Culture

How to Educate the Child in . . .

Honesty
By the Sisters of the Society Saint Pius X. Translated by Lauren Marie Webb

Honesty is a prime quality, indispensable
for the child: illuminating his conscience, it
permits him to progress; it gives him the right to
confidence in his parents, in those around him.
Its multi-faceted enemy is dishonesty…Parents
have the difficult mission to combat this defect.
The lies of children…How do we teach the
child to speak the truth!
“Educate them to love what is true,” says
Pope Pius XII. Upon the knees of his mother,
the child ought to breathe this love of truth and
learn respect, admiration, and the tenderness
that an upright and sincere heart merits. Jesus
Himself praised Nathanael: “A true Israelite in
whom there was nothing false” (Jn. 14:6). It is
necessary also to give children the horror of
every type of lie which offends God by recounting
to them the maledictions addressed by Jesus
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to the hypocritical Pharisees (Mt. 23:7), the
terrible chastisement incurred by Ananias and
Saphira. Let us tell them that liars lose the
confidence of others, that they cause great harm
and develop many vices: “Young liar, old robber!”
May they sense that dishonesty is a real shame
for us, a degradation. These good principles,
often recalled to mind, will arm them against
temptation.
“Be yourselves respectful of the truth and push
aside everything which is not authentic and true
from education” (Pius XII). Our strength is in the
example of a careful loyalty! Alas, sometimes
certain parents relativize their responsibility
on this point. False excuses, arranged reports,
promises or threats without following through,
unbelievable stories…The little eyes fixed on
them become cunning and wily… dissimulated

and liars! Let us always be true and upright,
without hesitation or inconstancy. Daily life gives
us a thousand occasions to show our children the
courage of the truth, whatever it costs. Example
is formative…
Let us not let a lie pass unnoticed, by lack
of time, without intervening. Let us seek first
its cause. The badly brought up child uses this
convenient “umbrella” out of fear, in order to
escape reproach and inevitable storms. In this
case, let us replace these brutally imposed
lessons by a discipline based on confidence, and
let us call upon the intelligence and the good
will of the child. It is with this heart to heart
contact, near to his mother, that the child learns
rules, interiorizes them and habituates himself
to open up, to communicate his impressions, and
see his faults. Let us also avoid reprimanding
too frequently… These constraints, that become
heavy, could lead them to habitually use ruses or
dissimulations.
The child also lies by pride, self-love, or vanity.
Not wanting to be considered guilty, he hides his
misdeeds or searches to find value in them… by a
lie. A punishment risks then hardening him in his
native pride. It is better to lead him to enter into

himself through calm, well-directed
questions; thus, obtaining an avowal
and rectifying in him what is false
and exaggerated. Let us seize these
occasions in order to ground our
children in a profound humility, a
simple recognition of our qualities
and our miseries. An excellent
means of developing this honesty
is the examination of conscience
together as a family in the evenings.
The loyalty of the little ones makes
an impression for the elder siblings.
Under your guidance, games are also
an exercise of loyalty.
The child also lies through egoism,
in order to satisfy his passions:
laziness, jealously, vengeance,
theft…The child must know that
each time he will be severely
punished, as the more serious fault,
much more than laziness, is to lie,
the act of deceiving those whom
we love. This sin can pass to a habitual state if
it is not severely reprimanded and it hides even
other sins! If a lie is evident, let us punish it
firmly without an afterthought and let us show
our pain. In uncertainty, let us place the child
before their conscience and before God, Whom
we cannot deceive. Let us call upon their courage,
courage to accept the consequences of their
acts, the eventual punishments. In order to avoid
a repetition of tricks, to obtain a costly truth,
let us not hesitate to soften, or even eliminate
a punishment if the child confesses their fault
immediately. “A fault recognized is already
pardoned,” says the proverb. Washington had in
his childhood cut down a cherry tree; his father,
terribly irritated, looked for the culprit of the
damage. Washington replied with simplicity,
“Father, I cannot tell a lie, it was I who did it.”
“Your honesty,” replied his father, profoundly
touched, “is worth more than a hundred cherry
trees.” He then embraced him and remitted all
punishment.

69

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Christian Culture

by Fr. Juan Carlos Iscara, SSPX

Protestants often reprimand us,
Catholics, for disobeying Our
Lord’s command by calling our
priests “Father.” Are they right?
Are we truly disobedient?
Protestants easily quote the Scriptures, but
too often separating the words from their context
and from any reference to parallel texts—while
it is that context and reference which illuminates

the true meaning of the expressions, a meaning
that has been confirmed, many centuries before
Luther, by the Catholic Church’s reading and
understanding of them.
In the Gospel of St. Matthew (Mt. 23:8-10), we
certainly read that Our Lord has said: But be not
you called Rabbi. For one is your master; and
all you are brethren. And call none your father
upon earth; for one is your father, who is in
heaven. Neither be ye called masters; for one is
your master, Christ.
As Our Lord does not seem to make any
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Christian Culture
exceptions, these words would demand that
absolutely nobody could be called father or
teacher or master. Therefore, if understood
literally, it would be forbidden to use those terms
even for those who have given us life or who have
taught us at school… Nonetheless, He Himself,
the Word of God, has applied those terms to men
in the Scriptures He has inspired.
He has used the term “father” in reference
to our biological parents when revealing and
then restating the Commandments (Ex. 20:12,
Lk. 18:20). But it is also abundantly used in
reference to relationships that go beyond the
purely biological generation.
The prophet Eliseus used the term in a
spiritual sense, claiming after Elias when taken
up to heaven in a chariot of fire: And Eliseus saw
him, and cried: My father, my father, the chariot
of Israel, and the driver thereof (IV Kings 2:12).
It is used when addressing a person deserving
a special respect, as when the rich man calls up
to Abraham from his damnation in hell: And he
cried, and said: Father Abraham, have mercy
on me, and send Lazarus, that he may dip the
tip of his finger in water, to cool my tongue: for
I am tormented in this flame (Lk. 16:24).
It is applied to our elders, even when they
persecute us, as Stephen did when addressing
those who condemned him: Ye men, brethren,
and fathers, hear (Acts 7:2).
It is applied to those who have the temporal
care of others, as the patriarch Joseph did in
Egypt: Not by your counsel was I sent hither,
but by the will of God: who hath made me as it
were a father to Pharao, and lord of his whole
house, and governor in all the land of Egypt
(Gen. 45:8).
The Apostles considered themselves as the
spiritual fathers of their disciples and called
them sons and St. Paul glories himself in this
spiritual paternity: I write not these things
to confound you; but I admonish you as my
dearest children. For if you have ten thousand
instructors in Christ, yet not many fathers. For
in Christ Jesus, by the gospel, I have begotten
you (I Cor. 4:14-15). It is in this sense that we,
Catholics, call our priests “Father.”
It is therefore clear that Our Lord does not
forbid us to use the term “father” in these senses,
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which the Word of God has abundantly used in
the inspired Scripture. He expresses Himself
forcefully, in a hyperbole, to condemn those who
demand special titles and honors, seeking to
exalt themselves above others.
Therefore, no, we are not disobedient to Our
Lord’s commands, because we are doing exactly
what He Himself has done.

In traditionalist circles, when
talking about certain groups
or individuals, we tend to
toss around too much the
accusation of heresy. But
what is, exactly, a heresy?
Originally, the Greek word hairesis was a
neutral term, signifying holding or choosing
a particular set of opinions. Appropriated by
Catholic theology, the term now commonly
means the profession of an error against the faith.
When someone expresses an opinion that
contradicts Catholic dogma, he is asserting
a heretical view, but that does not mean,
necessarily that he has committed the sin of
heresy or that he has to be considered as a
heretic.
As defined in Canon Law, heresy is a voluntary
and pertinacious error, in the external forum
and before God, against a truth which must
be believed with divine and Catholic faith, by
a baptized individual who confesses faith in
Christ.
It is a voluntary error—a false judgment of the
intellect, elicited by a malicious will. Although

the person is aware that his opinion contradicts
a dogma revealed and proposed as such by the
solemn or ordinary Magisterium of the Church,
he nonetheless willingly denies or positively
doubts that truth of faith. It is neither an error
arising from mere ignorance (even if such
ignorance is culpable), nor the simple assertion
of an error, by word or action, out of fear or other
motive, insofar as the internal faith is kept.
The error must be manifested in the external
forum, as canonical law deals only with what can
be ascertained from the exterior, with words and
actions externally manifested, and not with the
internal dispositions of an individual.
It is a pertinacious error. This “pertinacity” is
not simple stubbornness in holding one’s views,
but a precisely defined canonical term; it means
that the competent ecclesiastical authority
has made the person aware of the fact that his
opinions contradict Catholic dogma and that,
in spite of those repeated warnings, the person
persists in his erroneous opinions.

Finally, to be heresy, it also must be professed
by a Catholic who has acknowledged the divine
authority of the Church to teach men the truths of
faith. Therefore, it is not heresy if it is professed
by one who is not baptized (infidel, Jew, etc.) or
who has been baptized in infancy but never made
a personal act of faith.
In today’s world, it is evident that many
Catholics hold heretical opinions, but—unless
all the above elements are present—we cannot
necessarily conclude that all of them have fallen
into the sin of heresy.

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The Maria Wörth church is dedicated to the
Assumption of Mary and stands on a rocky
peninsula [once an island] on Lake Wörthersee,
Austria. During the Christianization of the
Carinthia region of Austria in the 8th century,
monks from Innichen Abbey [northern Italy]
worked here. Bishop Waldo of Freising had the
first church built on the highest point of the
small island, where it was first mentioned in 894.
Later the relics of Sts. Primus and Felician were
translated to the church, and around 1150, Otto I
of Freising founded a college of canons here. He
had another smaller church, named “Winterkirche,”
built close to the collegiate church. Both churches
burnt in 1399 and afterwards were rebuilt in the
late Gothic style we see today.

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Catechism

Part Five: Prof. Felix Otten, O.P. and C.F. Pauwels, O.P.

Editor’s Note: This article continues the series of straightforward responses to frequently-encountered questions and objections
concerning the Catholic Faith. The questions and answers are adapted from Professor Felix Otten, O.P. and C.F. Pauwels, O.P.’s
The Most Frequently Encountered Difficulties, published originally in Dutch in 1939.

It is said that Mary never sinned and
could not even sin. But the Evangelist
Mark indicates that Mary doubted
Christ’s mission. Wasn’t that a sin?
Mary has certainly remained free from various
temptations as a result of her Immaculate
Conception. Therefore there was no evil lust
in her, which is the result of Original Sin, and
which consists in the broken balance between the
higher and the lower. With us the body is often an

agent of sin, for it draws down the mind and often
rebels against the higher powers of the soul. And
of course, there was no such thing with Mary,
because she had not been contaminated with
Original Sin as a result of which that balance was
broken. So, she could not be tempted by a desire
of the lower forces against the higher. She could,
however, be tempted in the higher powers of her
soul, in her mind and will, as even Christ was
tempted by the devil.
But being tempted and sinning is quite
distinct. That Mary never actually committed a
sin is absolutely clear to Catholic theologians,
even though the Church has never officially
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Catechism
spoken out about it. Mary, as they say, was
without sin. But was Mary also un-sinful, that
is, could she not commit sin?
That is of course a completely different
issue. Most theologians hold that Mary could
not sin. The reason is not that she was free from
Original Sin, for even Adam and Eve themselves
were not contaminated with Original Sin, and
yet they sinned. We must seek the reason in the
fullness of grace with which God endowed her
for the sake of her divine motherhood. By this,
and therefore by God’s special assistance, it was
effected that the will of Mary always chose the
good.
And now as to the story of the Evangelist
Mark: He does not say at all that Mary would have
doubted Christ. He first announces, in the third
chapter, verse 21, that Christ’s relatives “went
out to take Jesus, for they said, He is mad.” So
apparently there were relatives of Christ who
did not believe in His mission. Who they were
is not mentioned; they may have been uncles,
cousins, and perhaps further relatives. Then we
are told something completely different, namely
that Jesus entered a debate with scribes from
Jerusalem about exorcisms. And then it said at
the end of the chapter, “Then came His mother
and brethren; they stood outside and called
Him.” Whether they talked to Him and what
about, we are not told.
It is not certain that this conclusion is
connected with the beginning of the chapter
which mentions the disbelief of some of Christ’s
relatives. And so, it is not certain why Christ’s
mother and brothers came. But even if it were
true that Mary had gone with unbelieving
relatives to Christ, it does not follow that she
also shared their unbelief. Such infidelity on
Mary’s part contends with everything else we
know about her. Why should we accept such a
conclusion from an arguably ambiguous text?

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Mary’s Assumption is a Catholic
dogma even though the Bible says
nothing about it. Has the Church
concluded that the Assumption
must be true based on what it
teaches concerning the Immaculate
Conception?

The Catholic Church speaks of Mary’s
Assumption into Heaven in contrast with Christ›s
Ascension. By using different language to label
these events, the Church wants to indicate clearly
that Mary did not ascend to Heaven with soul
and body by her own power. Rather, Mary’s
Assumption is a special privilege, conferred
by the power of God, that she be taken up into
Heaven in both soul and body. This doctrine,
long accepted by Catholics, was not called a
dogma in a strict sense for centuries because it
was not solemnly formulated, established, and
promulgated by the infallible Magisterium, as the
doctrine on Mary’s Immaculate Conception, for
example.
However, on November 1, 1950, Pope Pius
XII solemnly proclaimed the dogma of the
Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Before
this, the Assumption was presented to Catholics
by the ordinary magisterium of the Church,
which Catholics cannot oppose. The historic
recognition of the Assumption is confirmed by
the longstanding feast day given to this event
on August 15, and the fact that this feast was
celebrated by Greek and Syriac Christians during
the earliest centuries of the Church.
Undoubtedly it is true that Mary’s Ascension
into Heaven is not mentioned in the Bible. But the
Catholic Church also teaches that there are two
sources from which it draws God’s revelation,
namely the written word of God, the Holy
Scriptures, and next Holy Tradition. The Church
knows of Mary’s Assumption from Tradition.
It cannot be said, certainly in the strict sense,
that the Assumption is a consequence of Mary’s
Immaculate Conception, even though this
special grace gave her a unique dignity among

all who have or shall ever live. A comparison has
been made with the condition in which the first
humans lived before the fall, but that comparison
does not hold. For Adam and Eve had been
created in a state of sanctifying grace, but their
privilege of being free from suffering and death
and being taken up to Heaven without dying did
not follow as a consequence of the possession of
this sanctifying grace.
And although it can be said that Mary was
gifted what the first people had lost for all their
descendants, namely that she was conceived
without Original Sin and immediately possessed
sanctifying grace, she did not receive all of
the supernatural gifts that Adam and Eve
possessed. After all, she was not free from
suffering during her earthly life.
Of course, Mary’s death was not a punishment
for her sins, because she had never sinned; it was
a normal result of her body wearing out and her
strength diminishing. God did not arrange for
Mary to be withdrawn or exempted from this law
of nature. Why? We do not know for sure. It is,
however, probable that in her suffering and death
Mary might reflect the patient suffering of her
Son, and thus be an example for us.

79

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Theological Studies

Enemies
Turned
Friends
By Fr. Philippe Toulza, SSPX

Enemies Turned Friends
How is the decline of evangelization in Europe
to be explained? Strictly speaking, the answer to
this question is that any decrease in Christianity
has as its factor, at least in the adult portion of the
population that it affects, a lack of cooperation
with God’s action. Indeed, grace is never lacking; if
evangelization is not accomplished, it is therefore
because man, for whom it is destined, presents an
obstacle to it. Dechristianization occurs when, in
a human group, an increasing proportion of souls
are no longer won over to the Faith or, while remaining Catholic, slacken in their progress towards God
or even abandon the Faith (or the Christian life).
During the Enlightenment, the philosopher Julien de
la Mettrie (1709-1751) was just such a case; he was
born into a Catholic family in Brittany, and his father
thought he might become a priest. He preferred to

turn to medical studies, and they led him to materialism, atheism and libertinism; he spread these
convictions through his writings and went down in
history as a sorry example of secularization. Those
responsible for dechristianization are therefore
men like him and others who refuse more or less,
for themselves and for those under their care as the
case may be, the demands of Christ’s kingship.
This explanation lays the responsibility at a
multitude of doors and therefore does not provide
many specifics. For this reason, many often prefer
to explain this dechristianization not by its true
factors that are to be found within souls but by that
which incites souls to stray from Christ. Some of
these causes began their action on Pentecost: the
devil and the world. Other causes are more closely
connected to specific circumstances, and it is these
causes that interest us: which of them led to the

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Theological Studies
secularization of Europe?
Modern Thought
A reality as complex as dechristianization and accomplished throughout an entire continent over the
course of several centuries is necessarily a result of
diverse causes: the uprooting due to industrialization, the subversion of intellectual societies, the
ecclesiastical support of slavery, the headway made
by hedonism, etc. And some factors worked to promote other factors. However, the general consensus is that the principal cause of this dechristianization is modernity. Beginning with the Renaissance,
Europe thought it was rediscovering the grandeur
of human nature that medieval theocentrism had
supposedly concealed. There was doubt as to
whether the human race was really afflicted with
original sin and whether man really needed to
beat his breast. Then, with the momentum of the
Protestant Reformation, any religious authority
seemed dangerous for freedom; following Rousseau
and then Kant, Europe divinized man’s autonomy.
Just as Descartes during the 17th century refused
arguments that appeal to authority in philosophy,
the modern thinkers questioned dogma; they no
longer shared the Faith of Villon’s mother. In the
end, political upheavals such as those of 1789 challenged the institutions. Free expression of thought
was demanded. The alliance between the throne
and the altar was denounced. Priests were suspected of greed and the yoke of morality was thrown off;
Voltaire’s hatred spread. Religious diversity, even
simply between Catholics and Protestants, became
a pretext to do away with the priestly tutelage; there
were so many religions on earth… how did the fact
that Catholicism was the religion of our fathers
make it more believable than the others?
Human rights were pitted against the “intolerance” of the past, reason against belief, independence against law. These modern ideas encouraged
souls and institutions to stray from the traditional
religion. The result is that today, as Danièle HervieuLéger writes, “Christianity, which was the social,
political and cultural matrix of the Western world,
is now, even in the very areas where it develops its
civilizing power, increasingly pushed back to the
outskirts of the social life. It is the private business
of fewer and fewer individuals; it no longer deeply
molds behaviors and consciences.”
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Modernity is not the only thing; dechristianization has also been attributed to scientific and technological progress. Is this justified? It is true that
in the 16th and 17th centuries, man’s knowledge of
nature progressed; many discoveries were made in
astronomy, mechanics, and geography; men ceased
to attribute to spiritual beings phenomena that science was now able to explain. Athenagoras and St.
Thomas had, for example, attributed the movement
of the stars to the action of the angels, but now
universal gravitation explained this movement and
seemed to discredit theology. At the same time, the
printing press and optical instruments and later on
the steam engine increased humanity’s mastery
of nature. Living conditions improved, placing the
hope of an eternal life in parentheses. Medical science would soon be able to protect men from the
plague; did they really need to pray? First transportation and then communication became quicker
and led to encounters with other civilizations, which
put our religion into a different perspective. In
short, scientific and technological progress not only
went along with modern thought, they helped it to
flourish. Nonetheless, they were no more than a favorable opportunity for dechristianization, and not
it’s true cause; for science is not opposed to religion
in itself. Besides, even if modern thought had been
kept from flourishing for one reason or another, scientific and technological progress would still have
been accomplished, just as in the Christian Middle
Ages. The dechristianization of Europe had no other
principal cause than the growth of modernity.
What was the Church’s attitude towards it? She
first deplored it. The edifice of Christian Europe
was cracking, its walls were falling, it threatened to
collapse; for the Mystical Body of Christ, it was a
traumatism against the backdrop of supernatural
faith. St. Thomas More’s destiny was emblematic
of this time. Chancellor to the King of England, he
refused the new law passed by the Crown that separated the country from unity with the Church. He
was therefore imprisoned in the Tower of London
until his trial; he would later be decapitated, just
like Cosmas, Damian and Cecilia centuries earlier.
In 1535, during these tribulations, he wrote a book
in which he contemplated The Sadness of Christ
in the Garden of Olives. And his meditations also
express his own sadness in the face of death. One
can even see in them the sadness of the Church

in the face of the dechristianization of Europe, a
dechristianization in which the schism taking form
on the other side of the Channel was a step that
would lead England to Anglicanism. But the Church
did not simply bewail her lot. She acted, and the history of her action is composed of two major phases.
From the Reformation until Vatican II, the Church
opposed modernity. After the Council, she chose
a new attitude. We shall now consider these two
phases.
Initial Opposition
Until the middle of the 20th century, the Church’s
apprehension in the face of secularization was
expressed above all in the documents of the
Magisterium. They reveal that between 1517 and
1965, the Holy See’s judgment on modernity was
severe. From the 19th century on, most of these
documents are encyclicals. They are all composed
based on a fairly similar architecture, of which Pius
IX’s Quanta Cura is a good illustration. In this text
written in 1864, the pope described the birth of a
new idea of the role of religion in society; he deplored the naturalism of this idea and responded to
it with the traditional teachings on the public rights
of the Church. Pius IX based his encyclical on two
presuppositions:
1. Secularization proceeds from error and evil.
Quanta Cura stigmatized the “calumnies
of heretics,” “pestilential books,” “impious
doctrines,” the “nefarious enterprises of wicked
men,” and the “monstrous portents of opinion.”
What led Pius IX to be so severe was the fact
that 16 years earlier, revolutionary armies had
despoiled him of a portion of the Papal States.
In November of 1848, the head of the Holy See’s
government, Pellegrino Rossi, had even been
assassinated by rebels when the Quirinal Palace
was besieged by Giuseppe Mazzini’s followers.
The Pope had to flee during the night. Pius IX
experienced the Revolution first hand.
2. The Church’s opposition to modernity was
justified and the means used in this opposition
had always been prudent. As Pius IX saw it, his
predecessors had “had nothing ever more at
heart than . . . to unveil and condemn all those
heresies and errors” with “apostolic fortitude,”

and he intended to follow their “illustrious
example.” Neither Pius IX nor the other pontiffs
were repentant for the Church’s opposition to
modernity. They invited the bishops to pray, to
be careful in their choice of candidates to the
priesthood, to preach the truth more, to refuse
errors, to win souls back; they forbade bad
publications and handed down sanction after
sanction. Later on, Leo XIII would opt for a less
virulent tone in his teachings. No pope acted
exactly in the same way as any other pope, but
they all agreed on these two presuppositions.
Some will object that there were inflections in
this uniform confrontation between the Church
and modernity. For example, Leo XIII asked French
Catholics to rally to the Republic; Pius XI condemned the Action Française; Pius XII gave modern
radio messages; other concessions could be mentioned as well… This remark is justified; nonetheless, from Leo X to Pius XII, the Church’s conduct
was constant overall.
The Great Torment
At the beginning of John XXIII’s pontificate,
this dechristianization was still a cause for worry.
Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre entered the conciliar
amphitheater in 1962 wondering how it could be
checked. For his time as bishop in Tulle had opened
the former missionary to Africa’s eyes to the condition of Europe: deserted seminaries, discouraged
clergy, churches with scarcely any faithful. The
perseverance of the youth was particularly preoccupying for parish priests. Already in 1938, François
Mauriac had written, “A child’s First Communion
is the official and admitted sign that he is going to
abandon Christ and the Church.”
What was to be done? This question preoccupied the Fathers of Vatican II and a text on the
Church’s relation with the world was prepared. It
led to the constitution Gaudium et Spes: in it, the
Council published a turning point in the Church’s
conduct. According to certain Council Fathers, the
opposition between the Church and the world not
only had not bridged the gap between men and
religion but had widened it. The Church had lost
the support of the civil power, and she now needed
to find a new balance; she had lost the trust of the
people and she needed to become more at83

Theological Studies
tractive. In a word, the Church needed to adapt to
the situation. Benedict XVI related this endeavor:
“Christianity, which had built and fashioned the
Western world, seemed to be increasingly losing its effective strength. It seemed worn out and
the future seemed destined to be ruled by other
spiritual powers. The perception of this loss of the
present on the part of Christianity and of the task
it implied was well expressed in the term aggiornamento. Christianity needed to be in the present in
order to be able to form the future.” The popes of
the Council essentially pointed out the path to be
followed. In the inaugural speech in 1962, John XXIII
insisted that the past was not as wonderful as they
had thought, nor were present times as bad as they
thought, paradoxically uniting an awareness of the
secularization with an underlying optimism; he concluded with the promise that henceforth the Church
would be more merciful. In the closing speech in
1965, Paul VI praised what he believed the Church
had in common with contemporary humanism: the
cult of man. These speeches, along with the texts of
the Council, defined the new attitude. The two former presuppositions were abandoned and replaced
by two contrary presuppositions:
1. Not everything in modernity was false or evil.
Many of men’s aspirations were justified. The
severity of the Church’s judgment on the world
was replaced with benevolent optimism in order
to obtain a reconciliation.
2. In the Church’s historical opposition to the
modern world, certain stances had been contrary
to the Gospel and demanded repentance.
Based on these presuppositions, the Church’s
new attitude would affect the three ecclesiastical
powers:
1. The Magisterium: it was to denounce errors less
and highlight more the converging elements
shared by Catholicism and the cultures in whose
midst Catholicism has to live; the first of these
elements was the conviction that man is good.
Dialogue between religions became a byword of
the Magisterium. Openness to the world.
2. The sacraments: it was decided that the
rites would be revised in order to make them

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acceptable for our times, less austere and more
popular. The clear boundary between the profane
and the sacred was questioned.
3. The Church laws: they became less numerous,
less constraining for nature, and the authority
would henceforth prove more supple in
controlling the fidelity to these laws.
Not everything was to be found in the Council,
but everything was expressed or experienced in its
wake. A portion of parochial activities was henceforth oriented towards the creation of a fairer world.
Alongside the other religions and governments, the
Church intended to fight against financial inequality, work for peace and promote human rights. The
theology of Pope Wojtyla provided this program
with an intellectual density. As totalitarian regimes
were inflicting great misfortunes on nations, John
Paul II explained that the human person was the alpha and omega of all government. His personalism
was seen as a way to escape collectivism.
The End of Christ the King
As a token of this friendship with modernity,
the concept of Christendom was abandoned. This
choice was no coincidence. Indeed, the alliance
between altar and throne had been a priceless
strength in opposing modern ideas, but these ideas
were no longer demonized. And Catholicism as an
official religion of State was not in keeping with the
freedom and sovereignty of the people.
Christ was therefore wholeheartedly uncrowned.
Up until the beginning of the 20th century, the mission received from Him applied to man in the three
dimensions God had given him at his creation: as
individual, as member of a family, and as citizen.
The liberal Fathers denied the third dimension. They
proclaimed religious freedom (Dignitatis Humanae);
Vatican II did not go any further than that, it did not
support the religious neutrality of the State. But the
pope and the bishops finished the job afterwards.
They agreed to the dechristianization of governments that had already been imposed upon the
Church here and there. She had been wrong, they
claimed, to get involved in politics. Theodosius was
tried and condemned, so to speak. The historian
Jean Delumeau claimed that Christendom had been
harmful for the Faith, for the religion of our ancestors was fragile and their fidelity to the command-

ments rare! Christendom had failed; in fact, it was
responsible for this failure: “The present dechristianization is to a large extent the price to pay for
this enormous aberration that lasted a millennium
and a half.”
Delumeau was only following the turn indicated
by the authorities of the Church. This turn was as
it were a slap in the face inflicted by Paul VI upon
Pius IX and his other predecessors. But this turn
did not just happen on its own. For up until 1965, if
religion caused an opposition, it was an opposition
between the Church and the world. But with 1965,
a new opposition was born, an opposition between
those who adhere to the Church’s entire past—and
Archbishop Lefebvre was among their rank—and
those who no longer do so.

85

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The
Last
Word
Dear Reader,
You’ve probably had a visit from them. They’re very smartly dressed, very polite, and
they’ll offer you a free subscription to the Watchtower. They show up at a newly purchased lot at the crack of dawn on Saturday morning and before you can say “day of
rest,” there’s a brand new Kingdom Hall in place. They’re the Jehovah’s Witnesses, and
they know their Bible like the back of their hand. “Mary was not a virgin,” they’ll say, “look
here: it says that ‘the brethren of Jesus were there.’” Shakespeare was probably thinking
about the Jehovah’s Witnesses with: “The devil can cite scripture for his purpose.”
It might seem a bit odd but the Modernists are a bit like the Jehovah’s Witnesses:
true, they’re not very smartly dressed, not quite as polite and they don’t offer freebies,
but they tend to use Scripture in the same way. They take one verse out of Scripture that
suits them and they forget about all the rest (especially that one that really annoys them
—II Pet. 1:20).
Think about it—what’s the most quoted verse from the Gospel in the post-Vatican II
springtime? You probably know it … it’s “judge not that you may not be judged” (Mt. 7:1).
And this is meant to mean that nobody can say if anybody is committing a sin. NonCatholics can’t go to heaven? “Judge not.” “He shouldn’t be living with his neighbor’s
wife?” “Judge not!” “Sodomy cries out to heaven for vengeance?” “Judge not.” Boy, don’t
they look smug when they say that!
Now I wonder are there any parts of Scripture that might throw light on what Our Lord
said? Maybe later on in the same chapter, perhaps? “Beware of false prophets, who come
to you in the clothing of sheep, but inwardly they are ravening wolves. By their fruits you
shall know them” (Mt. 7:15-16). “By their fruits you shall know them”—might that involve
judging?
The poor Modernists. They have to make everything up themselves. We can safely
follow what the Church teaches: Never make rash judgments (he had a red face when
he came out of the bank—he must be a robber); never judge the level of someone’s guilt
before God, always say: “if he had as much grace as I, he would be better than I am,” but
please, call a spade a spade—if someone is doing something intrinsically evil, you owe it
to yourself to judge that action is wrong. Otherwise, why can’t you do it too? Who knows,
you might even end up with a brain like a jellyfish—or a Modernist.

Fr. David Sherry

The Society of Saint Pius X is an international priestly society of almost 700
priests. Its main purpose is the formation and support of priests.
The goal of the Society of Saint Pius X is to preserve the Catholic Faith in its
fullness and purity, not changing, adding to or subtracting from the truth that
the Church has always taught, and to diffuse its virtues, especially through
the Roman Catholic priesthood. Authentic spiritual life, the sacraments, and
the traditional liturgy are its primary means to foster virtue and sanctity and
to bring the divine life of grace to souls.
The Angelus, in helping the whole man, tries to be an outlet for the work of the
Society, helping them reach souls. We aspire to help deepen your spiritual life,
nourish your studies, understand the history of Christendom, and restore the
reign of Christ the King in Christian culture in every aspect.

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