M ARCH-APRIL 2022

The

“Instaurare omnia in Christo”

ngelus
T he V oice of T raditional C atholicism

The World between the Wars
Hope in the Incarnate Word: The Unexpected Theme
of T.S. Eliot’s Poetry by Dr. Matthew Childs
Fr. Robert MacPherson: The Nouvelle Théologie versus Neo-Scholasticism
Jonathan Wanner: Chesterton’s “Ordered Chaos”:
Knowledge of Ignorance in The Everlasting Man
The Art of War by Prof. David Clayton
Dr. Andrew Childs: An Inverted Pose: Culture amid the Wars

L etter from
the P ublisher
Dear Reader,

Fr. John Fullerton
District Superior of the
United States of America

It is sadly ironic that this issue of The Angelus is dedicated to the
theme of the World Between the Wars when, at the time I write
this letter, Ukraine and Russia are the midst of one. Will the rest
of the world soon enter this conflict? Will Russia’s ambitions end
at Ukraine or are other lands, such as Poland and Lithuania, in its
sights as well? In a way the world is already embroiled in this conflagration. The United States and Western Europe have imposed
stiff sanctions on the former Soviet Union and continue to arm
Ukrainians defending their land.
The Priestly Society of Saint Josaphat, a fraternity of traditional
Greek Catholic priests from Ukraine affiliated with the Society of
Saint Pius X for over 20 years, recently made a request to the Society’s Superior General, Fr. Davide Pagliarani, to invite traditional
Catholic faithful to pray for Ukraine. While people may differ in
their opinions on the war’s origins and purpose, we should never
forget the devastation being felt by the Ukrainian people. At the
same time we cannot help but wonder what larger reverberations
this conflict will have.
In this issue, we examine the cultural effects of World War I
and how they contributed to the even greater conflict that was
World War II. As several of the articles make clear, it is impossible
to understand either breakout of mass hostilities in isolation from
each other. Unsurprisingly, both cataclysms had considerable consequences for the Catholic Church which are still felt today.
No true and lasting peace is possible without Our Lord and King
Jesus Christ. Even if many nations around the world turn away
from Him, faithful Catholics cannot. Now is the time to pray for
His Mercy and the protection of the Blessed Virgin Mary, not only
for the people of Ukraine, but the entire world.
Fr. John Fullerton
Publisher

ON OUR COVER: World War I Roman Catholic chaplain depicted in a Knights of Columbus poster, 1917. Artist: William Balfour Ker.

CONTENTS
Volume LXV, Number 2

MARCH - APRIL 2022
Publisher
Fr. John Fullerton
Editor-in-Chief
Mr. James Vogel

FEATURED:
4 FEATURED Hope in the Incarnate Word:

The Unexpected Theme of T.S. Eliot’s Poetry
Dr. Matthew Childs

Assistant Editor
Mr. Gabriel Sanchez

9

Associate Editor
Miss Esther Jermann

CULTURE:
14 CONTEXT The Nouvelle Théologie versus Neo-Scholasticism

Marketing Director
Mr. Ben Bielinski
Design and Layout
Mr. Simon Townshend
Mr. Victor Tan
Director of Operations
Mr. Brent Klaske

FEATURED

An Inverted Pose: Culture amid the Wars

Dr. Andrew Childs

Fr. Robert MacPherson

21

COMMENTARY

The Distributism of Belloc and Chesterton

Michael Warren Davis

25

COMMENTARY

The World of Integral Humanism

Pauper Peregrinus

28

A RT

The Art of War

Prof. David Clayton

30

Chesterton’s “Ordered Chaos”:
Knowledge of Ignorance in The Everlasting Man
L ITERATURE

Jonathan Wanner

33

A House Divided Against Itself:
Catholic Action and the Interwar Era
H ISTORY

John Rao, D. Phil. Oxon.

38	
R EVIEW “In the meantime, in between time”:
“To publish Catholic
journals and place them
in the hands of honest
men is not enough. It is
necessary to spread them
as far as possible that
they may be read by all,
and especially by those
whom Christian charity
demands we should tear
away from the poisonous
sources of evil literature.”
–Pope St. Pius X

Films portraying the interwar era
Bridget Bryan

FAITH:
43 FROM THE ARCHBISHOP A Knight’s Spiritual Guide
Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre

50	
L IVES OF THE SAINTS Innovation with Integrity:

Pope St. Pius X Confronts the Modern World
Dr. Louis Shwartz

54

THEOLOGICAL STUDIES

Karl Rahner: The Greatest Modernist of All Time

Fr. Dominique Bourmaud

59

SCRIPTURAL STUDIES

Meditations on St. John’s Gospel: Chapter Twelve

Pater Inutilis

61

Q UESTIONS AND ANSWERS

65

THE LAST WORD

Fr. Juan Carlos Iscara, SSPX

Fr. David Sherry, SSPX

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.
©2022 by Angelus Press. Official Publication of the Priestly Society of Saint Pius X for the United States and Canada

1

Entry of the banner of St. Therese
of the Child Jesus into St. Peter’s
in Rome on the day of her
canonization, May 17, 1925.

Clarification
The Angelus always invites thoughtful feedback from its readership on the articles featured in its pages. Certain concerns raised
about the January/February 2022 issue warrant a reply.
In art, literature, and movies, it is exceedingly difficult to illustrate the magnitude of Our Lord’s Redemptive Act. How can one
adequately represent the depth of darkness from which this grace
can draw souls? Would the heroism of Desmond Doss have been
as dramatic, or as appreciated, without the graphic violence shown
in Hacksaw Ridge? For those that have experienced actual combat,
maybe such visual horrors are not needed. But for many, they cannot fathom the brutal experience of war. The use of such intense
and graphic violence can be debated, but it certainly does aid the
naïve audience in better understanding Doss’s incomprehensible
feats. This may be why Mel Gibson’s The Passion had such a tremendous impact on viewers. For many, perhaps most, this was the first
time they were presented with or seriously considered the reality of
our Our Lord’s suffering for our sins. Much of what people show
of themselves and see of others in the public sphere is sanitized;
when the true horrors of sin are exposed, their reality cannot be
witnessed without remorse and weeping.
At a minimum, for a thing to be considered “good,” its consumption should improve the consumer. The greater the benefit, the more
the thing is “good.” Of course, what is consumed is unlikely to be
perfect, nor, in the case of a film, suitable for all audiences. For all
the good produced by The Passion, allowing a 5-year-old to watch
it could be traumatic, and would be imprudent at best.
Films worth watching may be “worth it” not for their moral perfection, but for the depth of the message. There are many films that
are neither for the whole family, nor perfectly in line with moral
perfection, but can certainly contain valuable food for thought.
Works of human artistry are never perfect; there always remains
some flaw, some point or theme that could have been done better
or perhaps completely avoided (these things can be debated). As
Montesquieu wrote nearly three centuries ago, “Le mieux est le mortel ennemi du bien” (the best is the mortal enemy of the good). This
does not mean the pursuit of the best, that is the perfect, should be
abandoned; it is a warning against abandoning the good too hastily.
In future issues of The Angelus, greater care shall be taken to
highlight articles and recommendations, whether books, music, or
movies, that may not be appropriate for all audiences, particularly
children and adolescents.

FEATURED

Hope in the
Incarnate Word:
The Unexpected Theme of T.S. Eliot’s Poetry
“Not Known Because Not Looked For” (“Little Gidding” V. 145)
Dr. Matthew Childs

I

n Part V of “East Coker,” the second of T.S.
Eliot’s Four Quartets—the earth quartet—the
speaker recalls “Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l’entre deux guerres” during
which time “every attempt” at “trying to use
words” has been
. . . a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better
of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the
way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. (128)

We can understand that sense of waste or
failure (which is actually a mature valuation of
art per se in light of the eternal, rather than a
sense of futility) from Four Quartets itself, but we
can, as well, assess for ourselves whether or not
T.S. Eliot’s efforts between the two great wars
of the twentieth century—a period during which
the poet became a British citizen and converted
to Christianity—were largely wasted. If we can
4

The Angelus u March - April 2022

“have the experience” of reading his work and
not “miss the meaning” (“Dry Salvages” II. 133),
we can both assure Old Possum his time was
not wasted and come to understand something
about the possibility of hope even for hollow
modern men in the waste land of post-modernity. Eliot’s major poems of the period between the
world wars, from “The Love Song of J. Alfred
Prufrock” to Four Quartets along with his first
plays, are profoundly thematically of a piece.
All of these poems and plays acknowledge and
dramatize the emptiness and fragmentation of
the post-WWI landscape. The texts are absolutely truthful in their assessment of the modern
situation—they are non-sentimentally bleak—
but also surprisingly consistent and spiritually
hopeful, if read well. Hence Eliot’s poetry not
only helps us understand the world of his time,
but, more importantly, can help us avoid falling
into its despair as we read the signs of our own
times “That seem unpropitious” (“East Coker”
V. 128). Eliot’s years of “l’entre deux guerres” will

FEATURED

not have been wasted on us at least if we can see
that his poetry which in itself “does not matter”
(“East Coker II. 125) can “fructify in the lives
of others” (“Dry Salvages” III. 134) who read it
well since it consistently and increasingly insistently “Point[s] to one end, which is always present”—the Word (“Burnt Norton” I. 117).
Eliot’s first major poem, his first big hit, was
“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1915),
a work we can consider a WW I poem despite
the fact he began writing it many years before
the war. The dedication in later editions, “For
Jean Verdenal, 1889-1915 mort aux Dardanelles,”
along with its first lines, evoking the idea of gas
warfare and the sickness and death it caused, tie
the poem directly to that war. In those beginning lines all hope in the sentimentality of
romanticism is broken with the first image in
Eliot’s poetry of modern man, physically alive
but profoundly sick and only “partly living”
(Murder in the Cathedral 180):
Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table . . . (3)

Whatever ideals and hope modern man
may have taken into the war to end all wars
have been dashed and we are left in a state of
death within life, an idea that recurs especially
through “Prufrock” and the other early major
poems The Waste Land (1922) and “The Hollow Men” (1925). These early poems present
post-war man living a hell on earth. The epigraph to “Prufrock” is from Dante’s Inferno—a
damned soul speaking only because he is certain no one on earth will ever hear what he
says; Eliot’s introduction to his poem, his major
poetry, is a despairing start. The modern city
dwellers in The Waste Land who move mechanically to work in the morning, flowing like the
river they cross rather than walking, and returning home as “human engine[s]”(line 216, 43)
to eat food from tins and engage in loveless,
automatic, physical interaction—prelude to our
contemporary “hook-up” culture—are also compared to Dante’s damned: “ . . . so many,/ I had
not thought death had undone so many” (lines
62-63, 39). The hollow men of that poem can’t
even stand or speak, but only “[lean] together”
and “whisper”: having denied the eternal, the
speaker hollow man describes himself as “Shape
without form, shade without colour,/ Paralysed
force, gesture without motion” (I. 56). All these

poems present a profound loss of meaning and
of purpose in living, along with a more pernicious problem: the will to adopt “deliberate
disguises” (“The Hollow Men” II. 57), to avoid
even asking the “overwhelming question” (“Prufrock” 3) that could lead a pilgrim back from
the dark wood of mere temporality into the light
of eternal truth. Ironically, herein lies the hope
of all these poems: there is an awareness that
something has been lost and even a sense, if
only fragmentary, of what has been lost and the
means of its recovery. Though the stifling drawing room world in “Prufrock,” where “human
voices wake us and we drown” (7), holds him
back, that poem’s speaker has in fact gotten
away from the city enveloped and choked in
the ubiquitous fog of modernist malaise. He
has been on the seashore—the intersection of
land and sea, a symbol of “The point of intersection of the timeless/ With time” (“Dry Salvages V. 136), between time and eternity—and
heard the mystical “mermaids singing, each to
each.” Though he “do[es] not think that they
will sing to [him]” (7), the very fact he has heard
the sound of transcendence holds out a kind of
hope. That hope only gets stronger in subsequent poems.
Even in The Waste Land, Eliot’s most famous
poem, the awareness of loss is strong and, arguably, leads to hope and the possibility of recovery—water/ baptism—rather than despair and
death, though many commentators on the poem
insist upon its hopelessness. In the same way
Prufrock progresses from the city “Streets that
follow like a tedious argument/ Of insidious
intent” (3) to the beach, the speaker in The Waste
Land begins in a desert land where “roots . . .
clutch [and] branches grow/ Out of this stony
rubbish” (I. 19-20, 38), a place of ruin, “A heap
of broken images, where the sun beats . . .” and
there isn’t even the “sound of water” (I. 22-24,
38) and ends at the sea shore. The poem finishes
with the speaker fashioning the “broken images” of seemingly lost poetic tradition, beauty,
and meaning into a mosaic of recovery: “These
fragments I have shored against my ruins”
(V. 431, 50).
“The Hollow Men,” Eliot’s last major
pre-conversion poem, presents most directly
the true nature of transcendent hope only hinted and guessed at by way of mermaids singing or the thunder speaking (The Waste Land)—
along with many other images—in the earlier
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T. S. Eliot in 1934.

First U.S. edition published by Harcourt.

poems. The hollow men, like Prufrock who
has “seen the eternal Footman hold [his] coat,
and snicker, And in short . . . was afraid” (6),
wish to be no nearer to “death’s other kingdom”
(“Hollow Men” II. 57). Though they live in the
waste land—“This is the dead land/ This is cactus land” (III. 57)—where “There are no eyes,”
no “windows of the soul” and apparently no one
watching over them; and though they are likened yet again to the shades in Dante’s Divine
Comedy at the moment of death, “Gathered on
this beach of the tumid river,” (IV. 58) there is
the awareness of the possibility of redemption.
It is important to know that there are two rivers
souls take to the afterlife in The Divine Comedy:
one to Hell, Acheron, (referred to in The Waste
Land, I “The Burial of the Dead”) and one to
Purgatory, the Tiber. The hollow men may be
awaiting their angelic guide on the bank of the
Tiber, rather than Charon on the shores Acheron:
Sightless, unless
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose
Of death’s twilight kingdom
The hope only
Of empty men. (IV. 58)

The rose is the image of the saints within
the Empyrean of Paradiso; the perpetual star
is Our Lady, who prays for Dante the pilgrim
and his final vision of God at his journey’s end,
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The Angelus u March - April 2022

First lines of The Waste Land (1922).

and who can still intercede for modern, hollow
men if they throw off their deliberate disguise
of soul-less “stuffed men” and “dare disturb the
universe” ( “Prufrock” 5) by asking and answering “the overwhelming question” (“Prufrock” 3),
and by not fearing “death by water,” recognizing
it as the only source of life; for “we are buried
together with him by baptism into death; that
as Christ is risen from the dead by the glory of
the Father, so we also may walk in newness of
life” (Rom. 6:4). Their only hope lies in emptying
themselves of their stuffing of mere temporality
and opening the way for eternal action which
we increasingly see in the later poems that insist
repeatedly eternity can and still does intersect
and interact with time, even in the waste land.
Eliot’s post-conversion poems and plays
become more explicit and sustained ref lections upon religious themes—though religious
imagery and allusion are present even in the
early poems—and the source of hope for modern man is more clearly expressed in the later
work. What the earlier poems present “through
a glass in a dark manner” the later poems and
the plays—especially Four Quartets and Murder
in the Cathedral—propose directly, “face to face”
(I Cor 13:12). Though the message becomes
more explicit, it is not obvious, for Eliot’s poetry is hardly ever obvious, even when appealing, to first time readers, myself included. The
poems in their apparent difficulty—the paradoxes, the subjective images, the abstruse language,
the many allusions—are manifestations of the

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fact that while truth is still present to modern
man, “even among these rocks” (“Ash Wednesday” VI. 67), it is very difficult to see and to
keep, to grasp, without effort in our times. The
poems engage readers in the struggle and prove
that it is worth the effort to pursue the truth.
The eternal within time, only vaguely understood or barely hoped for in the early poems, is
named directly in Four Quartets, Eliot’s last great
poem and the transition point to his drama.
That poem—made up of four poems of five
parts each—begins with the problem or question that is resolved throughout its remainder
and resolves the overwhelming dilemma of the
early poems: “If all time is eternally present/All
time is unredeemable” (“Burnt Norton” I. 117).
If there is nothing beyond, outside of, or different from time, there can be no redemption
of time, no meaning or purpose to life. Each
quartet presents a moment “in and out of time”
(“The Dry Salvages” V. 136)—a scene that brings
together past, present, and future, or the living
and the dead in one way or another—demonstrating that we all have an inkling and even
some, albeit fleeting, experience of the eternal, just as Prufrock hears the mermaids on the
beach, or the hollow men perceive “the eyes”
of “death’s dream kingdom” in “Sunlight on a
broken column/. . . a tree swinging/ And in the
wind singing/ More distant and more solemn/
Than a fading star” (II. 57), or the traveler in
Part V The Waste Land who sees a “third who
walks always beside” his companion though
they two are alone (360-365, 48).
The third quartet, “The Dry Salvages,”
names the reality of eternity’s redemptive interaction with time:
The hint half guessed, the gift half understood,
is Incarnation.
Here the impossible union
Of spheres of existence is actual,
Here the past and future
Are conquered, and reconciled,
Where action were otherwise movement
Of that which is only moved
And has in it no source of movement . . . .(V. 136)

How many people are even aware Eliot, the
poet of The Waste Land, wrote these lines? They
are extraordinary, but the idea is already in the
early work, “Not known, because not looked
for” (“Little Gidding” V. 145), not yet named in
the earlier poems. Eliot’s poetry is God-haunted from the beginning and God-manifesting

toward its end—“Journey of the Magi” (1927)
and “Ash Wednesday” (1930) are also explicitly
“religious”—and that is the most striking thing
about his work as whole aesthetic that grows,
develops, and matures, demonstrating how,
even in the cultural, intellectual, philosophical, and theological wasteland of the twentieth-century, between two wars that took tens
of millions of lives and their companion revolutions that took many untold more, God still
works in souls. Eliot’s poetry, as a body, is a profound source of hope because when we read it
well, we can see the “unhurried Ground swell”
(“Dry Salvages” I. 131) of providence working
in it; his corpus is sacramental in the sense that
it stands as a sign of the often-hidden transformative work of eternity within time, changing
despair to hope, confusion to clarity. His later
work in particular might be described as a sign
of contradiction: as modernism in art turned
to postmodernism after WW II, moving on “In
appetency, on its metalled ways/ Of time past
and time future” (“Burnt Norton” III. 121) of
pure temporality, waiting for Godot rather than
looking for God, Eliot’s work turned to eternity
as the “still point of the turning world” (“Burnt
Norton” II. 119) that had always been there if
only as a “fading star” (“Hollow Men” 57), a
presence by way of absence or desire, “Before
the beginning and after the end” (“Burnt Norton” V. 121). The beginning and end only co-exist fully in the alpha and the omega, so it makes
sense that when Eliot’s poetry completes its
pilgrimage—“arriv[ing] where [it] started/ And
know[ing] the place for the first time” (“Little
Gidding V. 145)—it arrives at Incarnation. The
Word made flesh is the source first of vague
hope, despite its apparent loss, and finally of
redemption, giving meaning to our daily lives.
The final movement of Eliot’s work is his
transition from poetry to verse drama—his first
play Murder in the Cathedral was literally begun
with lines cut from Four Quartets—a transition
that applies the lesson learned in the poetry:
redemption requires incarnation and so the
poetry takes life on stage in order better to
“fructify in the lives of others” (“Dry Salvages” III. 134), to participate in the action of the
Incarnate Word, in a way. It is not an exaggeration to say Eliot’s drama, what I call the “theater
of the eternal” in another work, is an attempt
to bring true life back to the “dead land” of the
anomic and finally suicidal twentieth century:
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What I should hope might be achieved, by a
generation of dramatists having the benefit of
our experience, is that the audience should
find, at the moment of awareness that it is
hearing poetry, that it is saying to itself: “I
could talk in poetry too!” Then we should not
be transported into an artificial world; on the
contrary, our own sordid, dreary, daily world
would be suddenly illuminated and transfigured. (Poetry and Drama 31-32)

The goal is not to make some new myth or
deconstruct all myth, as many in the twentieth
century seek to do, either making new truths in
our own image—the positive, “vital immanence”
part of modernism, in St. Pius X’s terms—or
rejecting any capacity to find meaning—the negative agnosticism and concomitant phenomenology of modernism—but rather to engage in
“the fight to recover what has been lost/ And
found and lost again and again” (“East Coker”
V. 128). Eliot’s work insists upon the Real Presence, the reality of eternity’s action in time, our
“Ridiculous . . . waste sad time” (“Burnt Norton” V. 122).
“East Coker” starts with “In my beginning
is my end . . .” (I. 123) and finishes with “in
my end is my beginning” (V. 129). This invocation of the eternal present, which is God, is the
movement of Eliot’s poetry from beginning to
end; his work as a whole, a pattern—by which
alone “Can words or music reach/The stillness”
(“Burnt Norton” V. 121)—is an image of the pilgrim in the modern world, always moving, most
often without a sense of direction yet with a
heart that, even in The Waste Land “would have
responded/ Gaily, when invited, beating obe-

dient/ To controlling hands” (V lines 421-422.
49-50). By Four Quartets it is more clear whose
hands guide the boat, “expert with sail and oar”
(V line 420. 49); they are the “bleeding hands”
of the “wounded surgeon” (“East Coker” IV.
127) who heals from the cross, that “bedded
axle-tree” (“Burnt Norton” II. 118) connecting heaven to earth by way of which, all wars,
those “long forgotten” of men and the incessant
conflict of, dare I say oppressor and oppressed,
“the boarhound and the boar” are “reconciled
among the stars” (“Burnt Norton” II. 119). T.S.
Eliot’s work and vision in the twenty years of
“l’entre deux guerres” are not representative of
those times; they rise above those times, offering hope in a world which prefers despair, and
proclaiming light to a world of darkness, the
very Light presented to us at the end of every
Mass:
If the lost word is lost, if the spent word is spent
If the unheard, unspoken
Word is unspoken, unheard;
Still is the unspoken word, the Word unheard,
The Word without a word, the Word within
The world and for the world;
And the light shone in darkness and
Against the Word the unstilled world still
whirled
About the centre of the silent Word. (“Ash
Wednesday” V. 65)

If those twenty years were “largely wasted,”
it is not because of what Eliot left behind, but
because we receive his poetry in much the same
way many readers of Christ’s time, especially
the Pharisees who never read beyond the literal,
received the culminating object and resolution
of His work: “the light shineth in darkness, and
the darkness did not comprehend it” ( Jn. 1:5).
To see the eternal signs within the times, we
need to read well with the light of grace and
the “direct eyes” of faith fixed upon our true
end in “death’s other Kingdom” (“The Hollow
Men” I. 56).

Works Cited
Eliot, T.S. The Complete Poems and Plays 19091950. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1950.
——. Poetry and Drama. Harvard University
Press, 1951.
The Holy Bible, Douay Rheims Version. Bishop Richard Challoner, 1752. Reprinted, TAN
Books and Publishers, Inc., 1971.
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FEATURED

An Inverted
Pose: Culture
amid the Wars
Dr. Andrew Childs

C

ultural development in the 20th century prior to World War II occurred
in response to two cataclysmic episodes: the ascendance of modernism
and World War I. The relation of these two—
something very much like cause and effect—merits its own analysis, but if modernism declared
that the supernatural could not be believed, the
horrors of WWI made it difficult to imagine,
especially when amplified by artistic expression. A reader unimpressed by the factual news
reports of the “War That Will End War”1 should
question his sanity; a reader unmoved by the
war poetry of Wilfred Owen should question
his humanity. The present discussion will consider musical development during this time of
supreme disillusionment and will focus on two
points as motivating factors: the lingering societal shock and exhaustion that followed WWI,
and the emergence and coalescence of American popular forms that would come to domi-

nate global musical culture by the outbreak of
WWII.
The Faith draws a hard line between two
incompatible views of reality. The life of faith
assumes the necessary cooperation and compatibility of faith and reason and the existence
of the supernatural. The humanist worldview
progresses from the insistence on the distinction of faith and reason to the ultimate rejection
of any possibility of supernatural reality. The
believer who accepts the Church’s declaration
“If anyone says that the one true God, our Creator and Lord, cannot be known with certainty
by the natural light of human reason by means
of the things that are made, let him be anathema,” 2 and the agnostic philosopher who insists,
especially in relation to religious belief, that
“What can be asserted without evidence can
be dismissed without evidence,” will find very
little common philosophical ground. 3 In fact,
each views the other as delusional.

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A denial of absolutes accompanies the denial
of the supernatural—as truth evolves necessarily in the humanist construct—and the dismantling of hierarchy naturally follows. Preference
replaces objective qualitative standards, and
the leveling required to afford equal validity to
every expression of art or ideas creates a very
uncomfortable sort of critical chaos. Rubens
and graffiti, Shakespeare and cummings, ballet
and burlesque all deserve equal consideration
according to the enlightened assessor, but just
as the humanist philosopher commits a crucial
mistake in denying original sin—wrongly assuming optimistically that left to his own devices man will choose to do good—the humanist
critic errs in assuming that the elimination of
standards allows artists the unchecked creative
freedom necessary to develop greater and more
advanced techniques and genres. In an atmosphere of unchecked amoral liberality things
descend rather than ascend. Ultimate freedom,
as it turns out, remains ultimately subject to the
gravity of fallen nature.
Aristotle posited, “nature abhors a vacuum.”
Culture abhors a vacuum as well. Throughout
the history of western music, a healthy—or at
least reasonable—balance has existed between
cultivated and vernacular art. 4 When and
why, however, did the balance tip irretrievably
toward the vernacular? I have suggested previously in these pages 5 that vernacular dominance emerged as much from an abandonment
of purpose and process on the part of modernist
high-art composers as from the irresistibility

Stephen Foster circa 1860.
10

The Angelus u March - April 2022

of popular forms, though any honest observer must cede the point of undeniable appeal.
With the overthrow of hierarchy, dissolution of
standards, and betrayal by the musical Academy, audiences increasingly chose to indulge in
the previously guilty pleasures of lower forms.
Beyond this, listening well to music of substance
requires significant effort. I would argue that
the rewards—profound emotional consolation
and transcendent beauty, not to mention an
invigorating intellectual workout—make the
work worthwhile, but the counter-argument
exists that recreation should not require any
real effort, and that a man should at some point
be able to loosen his tie if not remove it altogether.
In the era in question, the issue of fatigue
loomed even larger. “The average American
youth,” writes Richard Weaver, “put into uniform, translated to a new and usually barren
environment, and imbued from many sources
with the mission of killing, has undergone a
pretty severe dislocation. All of this runs counter to the benevolent platitudes on which he was
brought up, and there is little ground for wonder
if he adopts the inverted pose.”6 Or put even
more passionately by historian Samuel Hynes,
“Those who survived were shocked, disillusioned and embittered by their war experiences, and saw that their real enemies were not the
Germans, but the old men at home who had lied
to them. They rejected the values of the society
that had sent them to the war, and in doing so
separated their own generation from the past

Scott Joplin around age 35 (c. 1903).

Music published by Stark Music Co, 1902.

FEATURED

Duke Ellington, ca. 1940s.

George Gershwin, ca. 1935.

and from their cultural inheritance.”7 Mankind
had taken a supreme beating and never had
easy and “rebellious” culture seemed so appealing.
At the turn of the 20th century, American
popular music had begun to dominate on a
global scale, building on the successes of indigenous talents Stephen Foster (1826-1864) and
Scott Joplin (1868-1917). Foster “understood as
did no other composer before him, that truly
popular music must be grasped at first or second
hearing, remembered with some accuracy after
only a few more, and must be easily performable at home by those with rudimentary skills.”8
Foster’s songs, canonical and instantly recognizable to this day, have a universal, almost preternatural appeal. “Musicological methods,”
according to music historian Charles Hamm,
“cannot adequately explain how he was able to
write…songs that have been popular for over a
century. The means are so simple as to suggest
that almost anyone could write such songs; yet
no-one but Foster did.” 9 Foster did not discover
the vein of nostalgia in American vernacular
music, but no one has mined it more effectively.
For an increasingly world-weary audience, “My
Old Kentucky Home” seemed a more comfortable and hospitable place than a Mahler symphony.
Ragtime, and particularly the music of Scott
Joplin, expresses a perhaps unlikely but undeniable mixed European and African lineage.
Though now a niche genre, ragtime at once
legitimized baser elements of the African tra-

1922 edition of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s book.

dition and gained acceptance as part of the
serious piano repertoire, imitated by numerous European composers including Debussy,
Stravinsky, Dvořák, Satie, and Darius Milhaud.
Joplin, through his distinctive stylistic and interpretive genius, proved instrumental in bridging
the crucial socio-cultural gap between black
and white, opening the door to broader popular
acceptance of African-influenced styles marked
by recognizable traditional elements: “call and
response” antiphony, repetition of short melodic phrases, non-melodic vocalization, syncopation, polyrhythm, and improvisation.10
Two marginalized demographic groups had
effectively conquered global musical culture
before the outbreak of WWII: the predominantly Jewish composers of Tin Pan Alley, and
black urban musicians who developed the Blues
and more or less related strains of Jazz, first
in New Orleans but eventually in major cities
throughout the country. Tin Pan Alley originally referred to a lower-Manhattan neighborhood
near Union Square which housed numerous
music publishers by the end of the 19th century.
These publishers employed genuinely talented
and prolific composers and lyricists, now universally recognized—George Gershwin, Irving
Berlin, Jerome Kern, Oscar Hammerstein,
Frank Loesser, Cole Porter, Al Jolson, Johnny
Mercer—as well as an army of “Song-pluggers”
to pitch new songs in public places and performances. They effectively franchised popular
music, creating easy to follow formulas guaranteed to succeed based on market research. Indi11

FEATURED

Advertisement for the film “The Girl with the Jazz Heart” (1920).

vidual songs sold by the millions. “Probationary” white Jewish and black composers formed
an understandable social and professional alliance, and their collaborative efforts not only
continued to expand the genres of Blues, Jazz,
and popular song, but resulted in the emergence
of new genres—Musical Theater and the American Songbook, Big Band, Swing, and ultimately
Rock ’n Roll.
Each of these popular sub-genres has persisted long enough to develop its own literature
and scholarship, some of it legitimate (objective
chronicling of stylistic development and cataloging of artists, performers, and repertoire)
and some of it mildly embarrassing (pseudo-musicological paeans to popular artists or works).11
The breadth of this literature notwithstanding,
these sub-genres do not represent many distinct mansions in an exalted artistic realm, but
merely different rooms in the same house in a
questionable neighborhood, the occupants of
which continuously redecorate, renovate, and
expand. Though in certain aspects the “structure” has been altered substantially, the address
has never changed.

12

The Angelus u March - April 2022

Here the cautionary tale begins. Though
tempting, demonizing popular or vulgar forms
does little to inspire noble behavior. We can
mock the architecture of the cultural boarding
house of popular music and excoriate the residents as purveyors of sin. We can express outrage at the “spirit of fornication” that animates
much of the genre, but this outrage can easily
turn to caricature, which speaks as much to the
critic as to the criticized. To wit, this piquant
50’s-era assessment of the effects of Jazz: “After
the dissemination of Jazz, which was definitely
‘put through’ by the Dark Forces, a very marked
decline in sexual morals became noticeable.
Whereas at one time women were content with
decorous flirtations, a vast number of them are
now constantly preoccupied with the search for
erotic adventures, and have thus turned sexual
passion into a species of hobby.”12 The Devil,
who plays Jazz saxophone, made her do it. Jazz—
specifically undefinable in technical terms,
simultaneously monotonous and dazzling—does
no more or less than any other popular form for
its particular group of adherents: it proves that
as regards cultural recreation separated from
moral consequences, left to his own devices,
man will choose to be naughty and seek pleasurable experiences at the lowest possible cost.
The hard fact remains that by WWII, men
had lost the will to fight for transcendental absolutes, and the forward progress of nearly a millennium of cultivated cultural development had
come to a near-full stop, hindered, derailed, and
impeded by friend and foe alike. As with anything, lost cultural momentum requires more
effort to restart than it would have to maintain.
Every individual striving for nobility must make

King & Carter Jazzing Orchestra, Houston, Texas, 1921.

the difficult decision to take up his cross and
work—to recommit daily to the efforts required
to transcend the alluring desolation of a purely
natural reality while never denying the realities
of human nature, shared by base and beautiful
souls alike. “Education,” writes Alan Bloom,
“is not sermonizing to children against their
instincts and pleasures but providing a natural
continuity between what they feel, and what
they can and should be.”13 The Devil is a wrecker, and 20th-century artists had to build amid
the rubble for an audience of disillusioned souls.
The popular artist built cheaply, but seeing no
other shelter in sight, the whole world went
inside and found an easy and familiar place to
strike a comfortable pose. While neither denying the need for shelter nor underestimating the
allure of ease, we must never lose sight of the
fact that this pose is inverted; we must choose
not to inhabit potentially dangerous cultural
spaces no matter how inviting or legitimately
pleasurable we find them. Culturally, we know
where we belong. The journey there remains
long, uphill, and absolutely glorious.

Endnotes
1

The title of H. G. Wells’ 1914 book.

2

Vatican Council I, De Revelatione, can. 1.

3

Christopher Hitchens, god is not Great: How Religion Poisons
Everything (Twelve Books, 2007), 150.

4

Handel composed alongside John Gay, and though audiences flocked to see The Beggar’s Opera—which contained such
immortal and edifying numbers as “Our Polly is a sad Slut!”—
few would have argued seriously for Gay’s artistic superiority.

5

“Modernism in Music—Who cares if you listen?” The Angelus
magazine, September-October 2020, Modernism.

6

Richard Weaver, The Ethics of Rhetoric (Hermagoras, 1985)
225

7

Samuel Hynes, A War Imagined: The First World War and
English Culture (Atheneum, 1991) iii.

8

The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (MacMillan,
1995) Volume 15, 101.

9

Ibid.

10

J. Peter Burkholder, A History of Western Music: 7th Edition
(Norton, 2006) 753-754.

11

Scholarly consideration of any of the Beatles’ concept albums
fall into this category.

12

Cyril Scott, Music, Its Secret Inf luence Throughout the Ages
(Aquarian Press, 1958) 152.

13

Alan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (Simon and
Schuster, 1987) 80.

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13

CONTEXT

The Nouvelle
Théologie
Versus

Neo-Scholasticism
Fr. Robert MacPherson

T

he teaching and conduct of the current
pontiff has shaken many Catholics to
their core. The papacy of Pope Francis seems to be characterized by one
shameful scandal after another. How could a
pope be willing to sacrifice one dogmatic and
moral teaching after another on the altar of globalism? Those that were adamant in their support of the preceding Pope are often the most
severe and insulting to the present one: he is
denounced as being demonically evil, as not
being pope at all, of being a fool, and of many
more derogatory attributes. By and large, the
ones least surprised or shaken by this pontificate seem to be those in the SSPX. This is largely because the bad fruits of the current pontificate have not sprung out of thin air, but out of
a bad tree that has been growing for years, one
which had taken root even before Vatican II.
Yet it would be both wrong and simplistic
to transpose the accusations of “demonically
evil” and “non-Catholic” to all the forerunners
14

The Angelus u March - April 2022

of these ideas from a century ago. The truth is
a little more complex; it is also far more instructive if we have the patience and wisdom to learn
from the past.
Although any theology might be considered new when it is first conceived, the “Nouvelle Théologie” (the “New Theology”) refers now
almost exclusively to the theological movement
in the Church from the 1930’s to the 1950’s.1
In brief, it was an attempt to revitalize and
“Catholicize” the already condemned errors
of modernism. To better understand why any
Catholic should wish to do so, one must appreciate the political and philosophical influences of the era that characterized the end of the
nineteenth century and the beginning of the
twentieth.
On the political side, the growing antagonism of anti-Catholic governments towards the
Church prompted a response from the Church
and Catholics to insist upon the importance of
adherence to Rome. The history of the First

CONTEXT

Vatican Council is itself a striking reminder of
the opposition of the City of God and the City
of Man. The Council, which was defining papal
infallibility and the rights of the Church, was
itself interrupted by a Freemasonic revolution
intent on overthrowing the Church. This harsh
division, so different from the ages of Faith,
stamped its character not only on the evolving
political powers, but upon the Church herself
and upon her faithful. As anti-Catholicism was
typified by opposition to Rome, so too fidelity
was typified by an absolute adherence to Rome.
Rome, of course, had always been the head
of the universal Church, but a simple example
can highlight how varied the notion of “adherence” might be. Citizens of a nation at peace
have little problem in critiquing government
policy (at least until recently), the wisdom of
their leaders’ decisions, or the like. Let the same
citizens do so in time of war and they will soon
find that a cloud of suspicion hovers around
them. Are they challenging the authority? Do
they sympathize with the enemy? The gravity
of the external threat can compel an exaggerated and mistaken notion of loyalty. This is not
to say that “war measures” are not reasonable
during war, but that does not make those measures the inherently necessary methodology for
times of peace.
The Church’s war had been intensifying
for centuries. The principles and powers of
Freemasonry had taken deep root, and they
led to open war with the Church. The faithful
responded by a deeper expression of loyalty
to Rome; there was a greater insistence upon
the authority of the magisterium and the infallibility of Rome. On the part of the hierarchy,
there was a centralizing of power. Rome was to
assume the brunt of the burden in dealing with
the non-Catholic governments, against whom
the local bishops were considered or assumed to
be too weak and ineffective. Yet Rome’s interventions in national affairs did not always show
the strength or prudence that would seem to
accord with her divine claims. A sound Catholic recognized therein the human element in
the Church hierarchy; more liberal minds felt
the Church was becoming more insular and
detached from the real world.
What solution lay at hand for a mind convinced that the Church was thus drifting from its

apostolic mission and fading into irrelevance?
As all too often is the case, many men turned to
what was ultimately a worldly solution in order
to answer the problem of the world. The fault—
so argued these “new theologians”—was not with
the Church as such, or with her revelation, but
with the outdated formulae in which that revelation was ensconced. Such arguments manifested
that these men had already become enchanted
with the philosophy that they would then try to
baptize, namely, existentialism.
Yet one would be mistaken to think that these
men opened up a book on a clearly defined system of thought and memorized it by rote. Existentialism was a tangled web of prevalent ideas.
It existed in many forms. It was an intoxicating
atmosphere that promised purpose and vitality
to thought and action. Fr. Dominique Bourmaud
summarizes the movement accurately and generally by saying that it is “the philosophy of
the concrete and of that phenomenon which is
human existence,” 2 but such was not the definition its early adherents were reading. Another
author describes its vision as follows: “the real
is only that which exists, and the human existent is a striving to transcend himself in anguish
without the possibility of help from any absolute… The striving is blind and the core of existence. Thinking is an instance of this striving;
it is not the illumination of reality but merely another blind manifestation of it.”3 Part of
its great appeal lay in its seeming vitality and
dynamism, in its opposition to stale rationalism
as well as to the detached idealism of Emmanuel
Kant. It seemed to offer a way to present theology as more than a stoic ordering of ideas. For
the Catholic existentialist, the Church is constituted by the religious strivings of Catholics
and from the attitudes those strivings produce.
All human life is supernatural, because God is
always breaking into it; the Incarnation is simply the apex. These are seductive words to those
wearied by syllogisms.
The First World War, which had not allowed
much time for study, had thrown many Catholics and non-Catholics together in the French
resistance movement. They surfaced with a conviction that the presentation of the Church’s
position could only be made more attractive if it
were placed in terms more vital and existential.
In fact, St. Thomas was argued to be an author15

CONTEXT

ity for this existentialist approach. Fr. Rousselot,
S.J. had written already in 1908 a work entitled
“The Intellectualism of St. Thomas.” Fr. Gustave Weigel explains Rousselot’s position: “for
St. Thomas the intellectual assent in judgment
was a dynamic grasp of the real, and not a mere
ordering of concepts in a pattern.”4 His work
was to garner renewed interest after the war.
As a short aside, it is worthy to note that
theology has never been a stagnant repetition
of previous statements. There have been many
schools of thought. Even among Thomists, there
can be a wide variation of emphasis, understanding, and development. The distinctions
may seem non-consequential to non-theologians, but there is great leeway of ideas where
the Church has not intervened, reserving her
solemn judgments for such occasions as the
Faith itself was at stake.
Coming back to the case in hand, however, not all were happy with the leeway already
given by the Church. In the philosophical arena
(as in the political), they thought theology and
apologetics were in need of a new energy. Reviving the notion of dynamism seemed to many the
way this could be done. The Jesuits and Dominicans both had their representatives among the
proponents of what would later become known
as the “Nouvelle Théologie.” Most inf luential
among the Jesuits were Fathers Henri de Lubac,
Jean Daniélou, and Henri Bouillard; among the
Dominicans, Fathers Marie Dominique Chenu,
Yves Congar, and André Dubarle. All held prestigious editorial or teaching positions in France.
In fact, this dominance of French theologians
at the core of this movement seems to be one
of the chief reasons for something of an academic oddity: the movement as such is virtually always referred to by its French appelation
(“Nouvelle Théologie”) regardless of the language
being used (rather than by its equivalent meaning in the given languages, e.g. “New Theology,”
“Nueva Teología,” etc.).
As mentioned earlier in the article, these
men did not examine a definition of existentialism and then embrace it as an abstract theory.
They were entranced not so much by a theory as
by a mood, an attitude, one that was sweeping
Europe and which they became caught up in. At
first it might have appeared only as an interior
attraction, with the person little grasping his
16

The Angelus u March - April 2022

own reason for that attraction. “A Catholic with
existentialist preoccupations will find the consideration of the Church as the Mystical Body
of Christ, a living human thing, very congenial.
On the contrary, a legalistic consideration of the
Church as an abstractly fixed juridical institution will be annoying.”5 Or again, the one with
existentialist leanings will see his purpose in
Apologetics as being to inspire a longing for
Catholicism rather to demonstrate the rational
validity of the act of Faith. Nevertheless, where
both attitudes may have their place, the existentialist philosophy could only support one of
them. The reason for this will be more evident
later in the article when we consider its corruption of the notion of truth and Faith. As a consequence, theologians promoting an existentialist
viewpoint drifted ever further from seeing the
perennial validity of the Church’s magisterium.
Before considering some of the “New Theologians” themselves, a word or two is due to the
Catholic French philosopher Maurice Blondel
(1861-1949). His influence on the Nouvelle Theologie is widely recognized, and particularly on
De Lubac. In 1906, Blondel proposed a new
definition for truth. Instead of the classic definition “the adequation of intellect and reality,”
he substituted “the conformity of mind and life.”
In his obscure and controversial work L’Action,
(1893), he argued from “human experience,
and maintained that it pointed to, and in the
end required, the supernatural. Thus by what
was known as “the method of immanence” he
arrived at the transcendent. By “action” he did
not mean only activity but all that is involved in
the human response to reality, including affection, willing, and knowing.”6 In addition to its
Pelagian spirit by which the natural somehow
leads to and necessarily requires the supernatural, Blondel’s position undermines the absolute
nature of truth. Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange thought
that Blondel little foresaw the terrible consequences that his theories would have for the
Faith. The “New Theologians” preferred this
new and “dynamic” definition of truth. But the
error of all that they would build upon this foundation of sand can already be seen in Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange’s rebuttal:
What “life” is meant in this definition of
“conformity of mind and life”? It means human

CONTEXT

Maurice Blondel, ca. 1890.

Fr. Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, O.P.

life. And so then, how can one avoid the modernist definition: “Truth is no more immutable
than man himself, inasmuch as it is evolved
with him, in him and through him.” One
understands why Pius X said of the modernists:
“they pervert the eternal concept of truth.”7

Indeed, by binding truth to experience, existentialism—for all its assertions of believing in
nothing but a “concretely lived reality”—cannot
help but fall into hopeless subjectivism. “Everything beyond the subject is known only in its ‘I’
relevance, never in itself.”8
Having now an idea of the spirit that animated the new theologians, let us consider
how they proposed to reform the Church. De
Lubac listed four things that he perceived as
“deficiencies” in the Church. These things, he
said, accounted for the Church’s weakness in
her interior life, in the sense of the supernatural, and for the corresponding rise of atheism.
The first “deficiency”: the contrast in many men
between their secular knowledge and their catechetical instruction which resulted in a certain dualism in their knowledge. For example:
science, evolution, polygenism on one side and
creationism and monogenism on the other.
Once one recognizes that De Lubac was not
simply advocating for Catholics to better understand and defend their position, but some kind
of “dynamic understanding” that would allow a
new presentation of Catholic doctrine, one sees
how absurd such a position must be. No amount
of representation can change the fact that the
human race originated from a single pair of
parents (monogenism) such that it can be made
more appealing to a polygenist.

Cardinal Pietro Parente.

The second perceived “deficiency” was a
“poorly balanced doctrinal edifice” whose
“dominant concern is less to seek an understanding of faith, to be nourished on mystery,
than to respond to heresies.”9 By this weak doctrinal edifice was meant too much emphasis on
theological argumentation based on Scripture,
Tradition, and the Magisterium. De Lubac did
not deny the validity of such reasoning, but he
argued that it was only preparatory. The surest path to understanding the faith was not in
the definitions and divisions of the scholastics, but in the contemplation and experience
of the mystery of revelation. This desire for a
more profound experience of revelation at its
source invariably leads the existentialist to do
two things: first, to set aside centuries of theological development and second, to “return to
the sources,” for example the early Fathers of
the Church. This was ostensibly to arrive at a
purer expression of Faith before the stagnating
effect of scholasticism had intervened. Among
these, they preferred the Greek Fathers whose
manner of expression was often more mystical,
and whose theological precision did not develop as quickly. The more mystical and metaphorical the expressions, the more freedom they
allowed for reinterpretation by contemporary
theologians.
The third internal “deficiency,” according
to De Lubac (and in his mind likely the most
important), was “a duality going so far as to be
a kind of separation between nature and the
supernatural.” He argued that this had become
so problematic that it would deny the “intimate
relation between them, an ordination, a finali17

CONTEXT

ty.” Although it is true that it is possible to separate these aspects (natural and supernatural)
in an artificial and dangerous way, the distinction between the two is essential both for understanding the Faith and for progress in virtue.
De Lubac’s assessment of scholastic theologians
was that they had pushed the distinction too far.
As will tie in with his next point, a “return to the
sources” was necessary in order to reclaim what
was lost. Effort must be focused on recovering
“the ‘breadth and depth’ of the tradition, including the Scriptures and the Fathers. These were
seen as crucial to the articulation of a ‘redemptive theology,’ which would bring the faith to
bear more fully on the lives of Christians living
in the world.”10
Although De Lubac’s writing is always
touched with moderation, the mistake in his
assessment seems to have been demonstrated
all too quickly. For centuries, the Fathers and
Doctors of the Church had found and taught
the true relationship between nature and grace,
showing their distinction and complementarity.
De Lubac’s attempt to re-establish this doctrine
by focusing on the “intimate relation” and common finality of grace and nature led unhappily
in his disciples to the merging of the two elements—and consequently promoted two opposing errors: a naturalist spirit on the one hand
and a pseudo-supernaturalism on the other. On
one side, one’s natural efforts are considered
salvific (and thus for example, we are told that
there is “good” in every religion; it matters not
that the religion is man-made. God is somehow

Henri de Lubac, S.J.
18

The Angelus u March - April 2022

Jean Daniélou, S.J.

obliged to reward natural goodness with supernatural beatitude). On the other side, there is a
tendency to proclaim as divine any and every
inspiration one has (and so for example, all the
claims that every innovation that takes place
in the Church is the “work of the Spirit”). This
confused mixing of the natural and supernatural would later become one of the fundamental
errors in John Paul II’s first encyclical, Redemptor Hominis, which links the redemption of man
more to the Incarnation than to the sacrifice of
the cross.
Finally, De Lubac complained of the “rationalist spirit of those theologians who…can
inventory, arrange, and label everything, and
who have answers for all objections—but who
have, unfortunately, lost sight of the mystery
of the Lord.” It is quite true that a theologian
may operate in a rationalist spirit; one might
study God without loving Him. But the fundamental “mystery” in theology comes from
the immensity and infinity of God—it does not
require obscurity of language and abandonment of years of theological development to
maintain the mystery. Quite the contrary, the
more one penetrates the profundity of God, the
more he understands how incomprehensible
the Divinity really is. But what De Lubac was
especially trying to highlight by this supposed
“deficiency” in the Church’s magisterium was
her neglect of ressourcement theology.
This desire for a “return to the sources”
(ressourcement) was a universally held position by advocates of the Nouvelle Théologie. It

Henri Bouillard, S.J.

CONTEXT

has already been mentioned above how this
allowed a means to circumvent the precisions
of scholastic theologians. However, equally if
not more important to these renovators was
emphasizing the notion of history in positive
theology. Positive theology is “the part of theology which seeks to establish the truth of the
Church’s teaching from the evidence of Scripture, tradition, and the analogy of faith, i.e.,
consistency with the whole body of Catholic
doctrine.”11 History has its place in this labor, of
course, because the work of salvation was realized in a particular time and place. But for the
innovators, the role of history in revelation was
considered intrinsically tied to the revelation.
So intimately united are the two, that the revelation can only be understood by understanding the time. As the times and cultures evolve,
then so naturally will the understanding of the
revelation, which—if it is to be current—must
evolve with the times. For example, the Jews
had a notion of the spirit world, so Christ may
well have spoken of “angels” simply to refer to a
spiritual influence from above. But if our modern culture is not open to the notion of angels,
then certainly there is no reason to say that this
is part of revelation; Christ was only speaking
according to His time. Contained in such principles were the seeds to undermine the whole
body of divine revelation. Champions of the
Church’s teaching were not long in stepping
forward to denounce this re-packaging of liberalism and naturalism.

Marie Dominique Chenu, O.P.

Yves Congar , O.P.

To Fr. Pietro Parente, one of the most eminent and respected of Italian theologians,
belongs the credit of first employing the expression “Nouvelle Théologie” to describe this dangerous movement. He critically assessed the
movement and condemned it in an article written for the L’Osservatore Romano in 1942. The
innovators did not at all care for the title, as
Parente clearly linked them to the already-condemned errors of Modernism.
A couple of years earlier, Pius XII’s personal theologian Mariano Cordovani had already
warned against the “new theological tendencies” at a conference held at the Angelicum, the
Dominican Order’s house of studies in Rome.
In 1946, Pius XII weighed in on the debate
personally in two addresses directed towards
the superiors of the two most illustrious orders
emmeshed in the debate: one address was
given to the superiors of the Jesuits, the other
to those of the Dominican order. He urged them
to abandon the new and dangerous theological
approach and to return to its antidote, namely
Thomism.
Deserving of special note, and whose article on the matter is as applicable today as it
was when it was written is Fr. Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, O.P. He was one of the most
competent and combative defenders of Catholic orthodoxy of his time. A professor at the
Angelicum in Rome, he was also an advisor
to the Holy Office. Recognizing the dangerous positions that many theologians were now
promoting, the respected Dominican wrote an

A work by André Dubarle , O.P.
19

CONTEXT

article which would later be published under the
title, “Where is the New Theology leading us?”
It should not be surprising that the publisher of
the Revue Thomiste, an influential Dominican
journal founded in France, was a fellow Dominican; however, what was disappointing (if not
altogether unexpected from a liberal) is that
although he showed every sign of “respect” to
his liberal contemporaries, he simply refused to
publish Garrigou-Lagrange’s article, the reason
apparently being that too strong a blow from the
representatives of the Magisterium would stifle
“dialogue.” Fr. Garrigou Lagrange simply had
the article published in the Angelicum’s own
journal in 1946. The article came as a hammer blow upon the liberals. It expertly tackled
the false principles and arguments of the new
theologians.
Consider his response to the misleading
attack against by Fr. Bouillard against Thomism. Fr. Bouillard had written that the Council
of Trent had not intended to “canonize an Aristotelian idea, nor even a theological idea conceived under the influence of Aristotle. It simply
wished to affirm, against the Protestants, that
justification is an interior renewal. Toward this
end, it used some shared theological ideas of the
times. But one can substitute others for these, without
modifying the sense of its teaching.” An old philosophical system, a new philosophical system—
one might think there is merely a question of
terminology. But Bouillard is not talking about
paraphrasing and synonyms. He is attacking
the very notion of whether there can be any
stable, human ideas. Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange
responds: “But how can one maintain the sense
of this teaching of the Council of Trent, namely that ‘sanctifying grace is the formal cause of
salvation’? I do not say, ‘if one substitutes a verbal
equivalent’; I say with Father Henri Bouillard ‘if
one substitutes another idea.’ If it is another idea,
it is no longer that of formal cause: Then it is no
longer true to say with the Council: ‘Sanctifying
grace is the formal cause of salvation.’”
Garrigou-Lagrange likewise points out that
if the ideas themselves can be substituted, then
the idea of truth can be substituted. Consequently, the very expression that “This thing is
true” could mean different and even contradictory things in different centuries. He dissects in
detail how the notions of striving, history, and
20

The Angelus u March - April 2022

progress had warped Catholic teaching based
on the principle that “a doctrine which is no
longer current, is no longer true,” giving special consideration to how the new theologians
had twisted the doctrines of Original Sin and
Transubstantiation.
On August 12, 1950, Pius XII published the
encyclical Humani Generis. In it, he critiqued
and condemned the novel teachings yet again
with the full weight of papal authority. Unhappily, the tares had already been sown far and
wide, and they would come to choke and smother centuries of the Church’s Magisterium at the
Second Vatican Council. Yet the Nouvelle Théologie is already dated. Its aging adherents forever
talk about life and vitality while all their work
is marked by death and decay. There is only
One who can “make all things new,” and His
theology is eternal.

Endnotes
1

Cf. Mettepenningen, Jurgen: Nouvelle Théologie – New Theology: Inheritor of Modernism, Precursor of Vatican II (2010), p. 18.

2

Dominique Bourmaud, 100 Years of Modernism, p. 190.

3

Weigel, p. 221.

4

Weigel, p. 215.

5

Weigel, p. 224.

6

https://www.encyclopedia.com/people/philosophy-and-religion/philosophy-biographies/maurice-blondel.

7

Where is the New Theology leading us?, Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange.

8

Weigel, p. 222.

9

Quoted in Murphy, Thomas & the Nouvelle Théologie, p. 9.

10

Murphy, p. 15.

11

“Positive Theology,” from Fr. John Hardon’s Modern Catholic
Dictionary, excerpted at catholicculture.org.

COMMENTARY

The
Distributism
of Belloc and
Chesterton
Michael Warren Davis

T

he atmospheric ugliness that surrounds
our scientific war,” said G. K. Chesterton, “is an emanation from that evil
panic which is at the heart of it.” And
that panic induced by a fear of the past. Governments were designing bigger, deadlier guns
because it was the guns that did the killing.
It takes a brave man to carry a gun into battle, of course. But the generals knew full well
that it wasn’t the caliber of men that won wars:
it was the size of the guns. So came the automated slaughter, the mustard gas, the napalm,
the atom bomb.
What drove Chesterton mad was the fact
that we call this “progress.” Today, a drone may
blow up a school in Syria if NATO thinks there
are terrorists hiding inside. The drone is operated by a soldier in an aircraft carrier hundreds
of miles away. One push of a button, and the
deed is done. The dead children are just black
specks on a screen.

All the while, we take pride in how far we’ve
come from the crusaders, who marched from
France to Jerusalem to defend the Holy Land
from Muslim invaders. Most would die along
the way. Those who made it to their destination
fought hand-to-hand with sword and lance in
the hot sun. They didn’t have pensions or benefits. They didn’t have their student loans forgiven; most couldn’t even read. There was no
life insurance, though most of them would never
see home again. They fought because Deus vult.
God wills it.
“The brain breaks down under the unbearable virtue of mankind,” said Chesterton:
There have been so many flaming faiths
that we cannot hold; so many harsh heroisms
that we cannot imitate; so many great efforts
of monumental building or of military glory
which seem to us at once sublime and pathetic.
The future is a refuge from the fierce competition of our forefathers. The older generation,
not the younger, is knocking at our door.
21

COMMENTARY

Hilaire Belloc portrait, 1910.

Chesterton was writing in 1910, four years
before the advent of World War I. As with Isaiah, Chesterton’s beautiful rant turned out to
be a prophecy.
But often enough a prophecy is just a pattern. It’s a matter of cause and effect. “But your
iniquities have separated between you and your
God,” Isaiah warned the Israelites, “and your
sins have hid his face from you, that he will not
hear.” In other words, your actions have consequences. You reap what you sow.
What was true for ancient Israel would also
be true for Victorian England. Because the West
had given itself over to the Industrial Revolution, of course its warfare must be industrial
warfare.
Put it this way. Back home, all the workers—
the farmers, craftsmen, and laborers—had been
replaced with laborers. Men no longer made
things. Machines made things, and men were
only there to assist the machines. So, too, in
battle. They weren’t warriors, like the old crusaders, but soldiers. Now the guns did the killing; the soldiers were only there to be killed.
Those who know Chesterton’s work will
know that all of these insights are part of his
philosophy, known as distributism.
22

The Angelus u March - April 2022

As you might have guessed, distributism is
anti-industrialism. Things that can be done by
men shouldn’t be outsourced to machines. To
be clear, though, it isn’t anti-industry. Men need
machines to build planes, for instance, so the
distributist doesn’t mind if planes are made in
factories (unless, like me, he’s afraid of flying).
War is another example. Imagine if World
War I had been fought with swords and lances.
We may as well try to imagine if it had been
fought with bendy straws. Machines can kill 68
million people in four years. Men can’t.
Politics is yet another. The Enlightenment
brought with it brand new theories on how to
build more rational governments based on scientific principles. The result was the most powerful machine ever created: the administrative
state. This new state controls everything, from
taxes and trade to healthcare and even education. As the Prince of Paradox observed, “The
State did not own men so entirely, even when
it could send them to the stake, as it sometimes
does now where it can send them to elementary school.”
Distributists generally admire the medieval
model of statecraft: governments so small and
weak as to be virtually non-existent. Chesterton
liked to say that the tyrant of the Middle Ages
“hanged and burned in quite a small way.”
Yet distributists recognize that a mechanized
government is impossible without a mechanized
economy. In his book The Servile State, Hilaire
Belloc—another leading distributist—records
how Henry VIII stole lands from the Catholic Church: about thirty percent of Medieval
England. He then gave most of that land to his
unscrupulous courtiers, the “New Men.”
In time, the New Men’s heirs would use their
fortunes to build factories, thus kicking off the
Industrial Revolution. Ordinary, middle-class
workers couldn’t compete with the speed and
efficiency of the machines. Their work was
superior in terms of quality and durability, but
the machines were quicker and cheaper. So,
those middle-class workers—men who owned
their own businesses, trading on their skill and
experience—were herded into factories to work
the boss’s machines for a small cut of the boss’s
profits.
Clearly, this system was bad for the workers.
But it also turned out to be bad for consumers, who were increasingly forced to buy goods
made in factories by “wage-slaves” rather than

COMMENTARY

goods handmade by independent craftsmen.
The only people who benefitted from the Industrial Revolution were the heirs of the New Men.
This system—what we call capitalism—has a
deleterious effect on a society’s morals as well.
According to Chesterton, “what destroyed the
Family in the modern world was Capitalism”:
It is Capitalism that has forced a moral
feud and a commercial competition between
the sexes; that has destroyed the influence of
the parent in favour of the influence of the
employer; that has driven men from their
homes to look for jobs; that has forced them
to live near their factories or their firms instead
of near their families; and, above all, that has
encouraged, for commercial reasons, a parade
of publicity and garish novelty, which is in its
nature the death of all that was called dignity
and modesty by our mothers and fathers.

According to Belloc, there were only two
ways out:
The first solution may be called the
attempted establishment of the Distributive
State. The second may be called the attempted
establishment of the Collectivist State.

Hence the name “distributism,” though Belloc uses different names:
Those who favour the first course are
the Conservatives or Traditionalists. They
are men who respect and would, if possible,
preserve the old forms of Christian European
life. They know that property was thus distributed throughout the State during the happiest
periods of our past history; they also know
that where it is properly distributed to-day,
you have greater social sanity and ease than
elsewhere. In general, those who would re-establish, if possible, the Distributive State in
the place of, and as a remedy for, the vices
and unrest of Capitalism, are men concerned
with known realities, and having for their ideal
a condition of society which experience has
tested and proved both stable and good. They
are then, of the two schools of reformers, the
more practical in the sense that they deal more
than do the Collectivists (called also Socialists)
with things which either are or have been in
actual existence. But they are less practical in
another sense (as we shall see in a moment)
from the fact that the stage of the disease with
which they are dealing does not readily lend
itself to such a reaction as they propose.

G. K. Chesterton at work.

The question, then, is how do we bring about
a “distributive state”? Well, first it should be
clear what we don’t do. Contrary to what our
critics claim, distributists don’t want to seize all
private property and dole it out equally.
Chesterton was very clear on this point: “We
have formulated questions to be addressed to
Parliamentary candidates,” he wrote. “We think
that something can be done through Parliament
to make small ownership easier to gain and to
hold. But we are not a Party, and our main effort
must be always outside Parliament.” Rather,
“The one thing needful is to preach steadily
and work steadily for small ownership and the
localization of production and consumption,
while refusing to consider the irrelevant problem of the big town.”
The distributist program is simply that. You,
as a free citizen, make choices that lead to a
fairer, freer society.
Step one is to get out of the city. Fr. Vincent McNabb, the third Founding Father of distributism, dreamed of an England “shaking the
town-dust of neopaganism from its feet.” When
asked by a young man for practical advice, he
published an open letter called “Fifteen Things
a Distributist May Do.” You can read the list in
23

COMMENTARY

the collection online, and you should. My favorite is number four:
Buy some hand-woven cloth. Wear it. Buy
some more. Wear that too. Remember the
noble advice on how to eat cucumber, cut
it into two parts (equal or unequal). Eat one
part. Then eat the other. Your home-spun will
instruct you better than the Declaration of
Independence will instruct you on the dignity
and rights of man.

Buy some land and start a garden. Grow as
much of your own food as you can. Forego a
vacation so you can spend a little extra money
buying the rest of your meat, dairy, and produce
from a local farmer.
If you can’t buy your furniture from a craftsman—very few of us can—get some used from a
consignment shop. Find something sturdy and
reasonably attractive. Just don’t, whatever you
do, give your money to a corporation like Amazon or Ikea. Even if we can’t give our business
to the good guys, we don’t have to give it to the
bad guys. As Fr. McNabb wrote,

anyone tries to tell you that distributism is a
kind of communism, look to St. Marys. That’s
what we strive for: a “family of families” working together to build a more just and fair society according to the perennial teachings of the
Catholic Church.
That’s a very rough definition of distributism,
and this has been a rough outline of the distributist philosophy. I hope it will at least whet
the reader’s appetite. If he’d like to learn more,
I recommend these three books: The Outline of
Sanity by G. K. Chesterton, The Servile State by
Hilaire Belloc, and The Church and the Land by
Fr. Vincent McNabb.
Then again, as Fr. McNabb himself said,
“The Bible, and especially the Gospels, are
the world’s best handbook of economics.” Start
there, and see if you don’t hear the call of Nazareth.

Quit Babylon for love of the Babylonians.
And do not seek ease or security you can
obtain by using Babylon. What will it avail you
to cease living in Babylon if you do not also
cease living on Babylon?

And, if you can, band together with other
families who share your values. The point isn’t
to have faithful Catholics holed up in little compounds all over the country. No: men are made
for community. And community is yet another
good that industrialism has robbed from us.
It’s simple, really. Every Christian is called
to imitate Christ; every family is called to imitate the Holy Family; so, too, every society is
called to imitate Nazareth. Again, to quote Fr.
McNabb,
Nazareth was always a highland hamlet,
whose every stone was hallowed by thirty years
of God’s redemptive love. Gradually our eyes
began to see this highland hamlet as one of the
necessities. . . of the enterprise of redemption.
For Nazareth was the Unit of human society.
It was a family of families gathered together in
aid and defense of life.

I’ve never seen this ideal lived more fully
than in St. Marys, Kansas—a place known and
loved by every soul reading this magazine. If
24

The Angelus u March - April 2022

Fr. Vincent McNabb, O.P. from a painting by Kenneth Green.

COMMENTARY

The World
of Integral
Humanism
Pauper Peregrinus

W

hen the nucleus of an atom is broken up, great energy is released,
for good or ill. This is not a bad
analogy for Europe after the
Great War. Until August 1914, a social and political order prevailed, which for all its grave spiritual defects gave to the old continent a certain
stability. What St. Pius X called “the suicide of
Europe” broke up this order of things; and after
the armistice of 1918, the revolutionary energy
that had been released was free to do its work.
Enthusiasts, both simple-minded and sinister,
sought to harness this energy, and to direct it,
each to his chosen end.
Pope Leo XIII, reigning from 1878 to 1903,
had set forth the blueprint for the evangelization
of the world and the rebuilding of Christendom
in a series of lucid and lapidary encyclicals. But
evangelization and rebuilding are hard work,
and the results were mixed. In the United States
and Britain, the Church grew. In other places such as France, Catholics were still giving

ground, despite the many monuments of holiness and learning that the reigns of Leo XIII
and St. Pius X had witnessed. No wonder that
some ardent Catholics, finding themselves after
the Treaty of Versailles in a new and uncertain
world, and fearing that the de-Christianization
of their native lands would continue apace,
looked with interest or envy at the revolutionary
energy that surrounded them, and wondered if
they could press it into Christ’s service.
One of the principal names here is that of
Jacques Maritain (1882-1973). Maritain was
the grandson, on his mother’s side, of Jules
Favre, who had been one of the founders of the
anti-Catholic “Third French Republic” in 1870.
While at university in Paris, Maritain underwent a powerful conversion and was baptized
into the Catholic Church in 1906. A philosopher by vocation, he put his considerable gifts
of intellect and rhetoric at the service of the
‘Thomistic revival’ launched by Leo XIII a generation before, and collaborated with, among
25

COMMENTARY

others, the Dominican theologian Fr. Réginald
Garrigou-Lagrange. By the 1920’s, his brilliant
expositions of St Thomas and his readiness to
bring the perennial philosophy to bear on all
the subjects of the day, from Einstein’s Theory
of Relativity to Picasso’s Cubism, had already
won him great prestige among French Catholics. Yet he wished to do more to bring his fellow countrymen, especially the workers, back
to Christ.
For a while, Maritain had co-operated with
Charles Maurras (1868-1952), the principal
organizer of Action Française, a movement that
combined intense French nationalism with
a desire to undo the atomizing effects of the
French revolution. In 1926, Pope Pius XI condemned Maurras and Action Française on the
grounds that it subordinated Christianity to
the goal of national greatness. This Pope, who
admired Maritain’s work, asked the philosopher
to write a work explaining the condemnation
to Maurras’s many Catholic supporters, who
were to be found not least among the French
clergy. Maritain obliged with a work called La
Primauté du Spirituel; translated into English
as “The Things that are not Caesar’s,” the title
literally means “the Primacy of the Spiritual.”
This was chosen as a riposte to Maurras’s wellknown slogan, La politique, d’abord! (“Politics
first!”).
These events proved a turning-point in Maritain’s political thinking. Yet it may be doubted
whether he had grasped the true intention of
the pope. Action Française was a ‘reactionary’
political movement that promoted monarchism,
but which, in Pius’s judgment, made religious
truth an optional extra. By the time the dust had
settled from the papal condemnation, Maritain
was endorsing a ‘progressive’ political movement that promoted democracy, but that also
made religious truth an optional extra. Yet it
was precisely treating religious truth as optional
in politics that was the problem!
The Church had long enshrined her political
doctrine in practice. The emperor Constantine
first legalized and then favored the religion of
Christ, making Sunday a time of rest and building magnificent basilicas. The emperor Theodosius I, who reigned from 379 to 395, united
citizenship and faith more closely, decreeing
that those who reneged on the Catholic faith
would be subject to the discipline of the laws,
and forbidding Arian heretics to reside in Con26

The Angelus u March - April 2022

Jacques Maritain, ca. 1930.

stantinople. In words that his successors would
often repeat, Pope St. Leo the Great (440-461)
told the emperor of his day that royal power
had been granted to him not only for governing the world but even more, for the protection
of the Church. Doctors of the Church from St.
Peter Damian and St. Bernard onwards would
later see this salutary union of the spiritual and
temporal powers as foreshadowed by our Lord’s
mysterious instruction to the apostles to take
“two swords” with them when they went out
into the night (Lk. 22:34-38).
The seal was set on Christendom when Charlemagne was crowned as the first holy Roman
emperor by the pope, on Christmas Day 800.
Although neither Charlemagne nor his successors governed all Christian people, the emperors enjoyed a primacy of honor over other Catholic kings, and the continued existence of the
Holy Roman Empire served to make vivid the
ideal of Christendom, as the realm where earthly matters are duly subordinated to heavenly
ones, and rulers recognize the service of Christ
and the defense of His faith as their greatest
glory.
The German philosopher Hegel once wrote
that “the owl of Minerva spreads its wings only
with the coming of the dusk.” Minerva was the
pagan Roman goddess of wisdom, and so he
meant that wisdom to understand the principles
at work in a given age only arises when that age
is drawing to its close. However that may be,

COMMENTARY

it is certain that the popes began to expound
the ideal of Christendom most clearly and thoroughly only when Christendom had been struck
by the cataclysm of the French Revolution in
1789. Although this was not the first secularizing revolution in Europe—Portugal, for example,
had already known the anti-clerical government
of the Marquis de Pombal—it proved to be the
most doctrinaire, dramatic and communicative
of them, and it has rightly been seen as a watershed ever since.
The popes of the 19th and early 20th centuries, with Leo XIII standing above them all
for clarity and thoroughness, articulated the
doctrine of Christendom from many angles:
the rights of God the Creator over the human
societies of which He is the cause; the rights of
Christ the Redeemer over these same societies,
which cannot be healthy except by His grace;
the need of men to be taught by divine light
and the hierarchy of the Church to live well on
earth; the need of men to be protected even by
material force from the wiles of the devil and
his human agents, witting and unwitting. At
times, as in Pius IX’s assertion in Quanta cura
that Scripture and the Fathers require the civil
power to favor the Catholic religion beyond
all others, even individual teachings during
this period rank as infallible judgments of the
Roman see. And when we consider this body
of doctrine as a whole, and how it was unanimously accepted by the episcopate, we can say
that the desirability of Christendom ranks as a
teaching of the ordinary and universal magisterium of the Church and hence as something
that must be held by all Catholics.
Maritain did not want to disavow the
Church’s past. He believed that Christendom
had been good in its time. But he supposed that
the time had come for a new organization of
society, in which the Church would seek no special aid or protection from the civil power, and
where countries would no longer declare themselves Catholic or even Christian, but would
give equal respect to all religions, or at least to
all monotheistic ones. For him, this was not a
betrayal of the gospel; he thought that it was a
way to advance it. Non-Catholics, he supposed,
would be more easily freed from their prejudices
against the Church when they saw her renouncing all claims to temporal power. By relying on
spiritual means alone, her true visage would
appear more radiantly. She would become the

inspiration, even if unacknowledged, of a more
fraternal human society, and this new society, since it would be animated by the grace
of Christ—which Maritain supposed was to be
very often found in the hearts of non-believers,
even pagans, atheists and communists, without
their knowing it—could be called a ‘new Christendom.’ Only it would be, he said, a ‘lay’ or
‘secular’ Christendom, unlike the ‘sacral Christendom’ of medieval times. He called this vision
‘integral humanism,’ the title of a hugely influential book that he published in 1936.
The idea of a fraternal human society,
respecting the rights of man, and inspired unbeknownst to itself by the grace of Christ, captured the imaginations of many French clerics
from the 1930’s on. Archbishop Lefebvre once
remarked that his time in Africa separated him
from the influence of this spirit in the French
church. Through them, and also through Pope
Paul VI, who in his youth had translated Maritain’s book into Italian, integral humanism
asserted itself powerfully at the Second Vatican Council and thereafter.
Today, a long lifetime later, it is easy to smile
at Maritain’s naivety. He did not realize that
the moral consensus of his time, itself an inheritance of the Catholic centuries, was destined
to pass away within a generation. Still more,
his belief that it was possible, even common,
to be in a state of grace without knowing and
confessing Christ as Saviour, prevented him
from grasping the enduring hostility of the
world toward the Church. What is stranger is
that he apparently overlooked the duty of rulers
to offer acceptable, public worship to the God
from whom all authority comes.
Maritain still has heirs in high places. Yet
they are less traditional than he. We still hear
many churchmen speak about fraternity and
human rights, but who among them today will
aspire to ‘Christendom,’ even to a secular one?
The phrase ‘secular Christendom’ has quite
passed away: a sign, no doubt, of its unreality.
We have, today, what Maritain partly lacked
in his time: empirical demonstration of the
papal teaching that states must publicly honor
Christ or tend to ruin. He who is not for me, is
against me, our Lord said: and this applies to
nations as well as to men. Integral humanism
sought to avoid this stern saying in the name of
‘the movement of history’; but Christ Himself
has told us that His words will not pass away.
27

ART

Gassed by John Singer Sargent.

The Art of War
Prof. David Clayton

Full size mural of the painting Guernica by Pablo Picasso made with tiles. Location: Town of Guernica, Spain.

W

ho does a better job as a war artist:
John Singer Sargent, or Picasso?First, consider this painting commissioned by the British Government’s British War Memorials Committee and
completed in 1919. It is called Gassed and shows
troops being led away from the field of war who
have been blinded by mustard gas. It is a large
painting, about eight feet by twenty feet, and is
in the Imperial War Museum in London.
Now, consider this painting, Guernica, commissioned by the Republican government of
Spain in the 1930s and painted by Pablo Picasso.
Its permanent home is in the Prado in Madrid.
I argue that Sargent’s portrayal of war is
superior to that of Picasso in that Sargent’s
approach is consistent with that of a Christian
understanding of the horrors of war and the
way that it directs us toward hope even in light
of war. It is also superior artistically, I suggest.
Here are my reasons:
First, Sargent’s painting looks as though it is
a painting of war. We know what we are looking
at with minimal explanation. I suggest that if
someone didn’t tell you what Picasso’s painting
was about, you wouldn’t know what you were
looking at. Clarity—the property by which we
can see what we are looking at with minimal
prior understanding or knowledge—is an essential quality of Christian art. Without clarity the
appreciation of art is only possible to the elite
cognoscenti who set themselves apart as the modern-day Gnostics who understand and appreciate what is beyond he masses.
Second, Picasso can’t draw; Sargent can. Sargent is a superior artist because the level of his
drawing and painting skill is orders of magnitude higher than Picasso’s. This is the obvious
fact that only those who have never been to
university dare state, for they haven’t had their
common sense ‘educated’ out of them—in this
sense, literally drawn out of them so that it is
lost. Some, I am aware, will point to the early
art of Picasso to claim that he was a brilliant
draughtsman who chose to paint this way deliberately in order to make a philosophical point.
The truth is that in comparison with other students who were academically trained at the
time, his ability was mediocre. He could not
have competed with them for skill if he had
wished to. True, he did have a philosophy that
was contrary to a Christian worldview and the
ugliness and distorted imagery of his art suited this purpose—but this doesn’t make his work
well drawn. He is certainly a master self-promoter, and that’s mostly what you need to make

ART

it in 20th and 21st-century mainstream art. If
someone on an illustration course at any university produced Guernica as a project, they would
get an F for bad technique.
Third, Picasso’s painting is ugly and dull. Its
childish caricatures of screaming faces obviously portray suffering and angst, unsubtly and
crudely. Neither design nor accident makes this
portrayal appropriate— it makes it a bad painting. Some critics tell us it offers hope as well, but
you could have fooled me. If I see anything, it is
despair, crudely portrayed, without hope. This
demonstrates an artist who doesn’t care for his
audience and an artist who doesn’t have a grasp
of truth. For the Christian, no matter how desperate the situation, there is always hope that
transcends suffering.
Fourth and finally, Sargent portrays the horrors of war clearly, but that horror is still infused
with hope and compassion. Picasso’s painting,
to the degree that it communicates anything,
communicates despair, and this is anti-Christian. In Gassed, we see compassion and hope in
the human interactions: the blinded are being
led by those who have sight. The light of the sun
pierces the gaseous air and is painted so that it
seems to be their destination.
Sargent modeled his painting style consciously on that of the 17th-century Baroque
Master, Diego Velazquez. The Baroque style
is one developed specifically to communicate
hope in suffering and is an authentically Christian tradition. In traditional Baroque art, the
bright light is typically contrasted with deep
shadow as a visual language that is intended
to communicate the fact that there is evil and
suffering in this fallen world, but that through
Christ, who is the Light, there is hope and consolation that transcends the suffering. In this
painting, Sargent is more subtle; the contrast
between light and dark is veiled and not so great
as in a 17th-century painting. However, his use
of the sun as a focal point, albeit veiled by the
thick gaseous clouds, indicates to me the Light.
Furthermore, the gestures of the figures communicate compassion. This use of gestures to
communicate loving interaction is also intrinsic
to the Baroque style of art. The Baroque style,
as used by Sargent, is uniquely suited to portray
therefore the suffering of war without compromising on revealing the truth of the degree of
that suffering, but ensuring that Christian hope
is portrayed at the same time. Sargent was not a
Christian, but his mastery of this Christian style
meant that hope was there; as such he has, in
my opinion, created a Christian painting.
29

LITERATURE

Chesterton’s
“Ordered
Chaos”
Knowledge of Ignorance in
The Everlasting Man
Jonathan Wanner

“The function of the imagination is not to make
strange things settled, so much as to make settled
things strange.” —G.K. Chesterton

I

     have long read Chesterton’s apologetic
works with a sort of agitated veneration.
As an icon of the Catholic Literary Revival (1845-1961), he is hailed as the “prince
of paradox”:1 even his arch-nemesis (or as he
puts it, “friendly enemy”) George Bernard
Shaw confessed that “He was a man of colossal
genius.” 2 Yet, the little English professor inside
my skull complains he breaks all the Writing
101 rules: he is neither clear nor concise, but
rambles prettily and swerves wherever his fancy
pleases—sometimes off the road entirely. Often,
he speaks in absolutes, granting him a commanding and decisive tone; at the same time,
his ironic style—the constant parade of paradoxes, reversals, and chiasms—blurs the boundaries
between words. In short, Chesterton is master
of being definitive and ambiguous at the same
30

The Angelus u March - April 2022

time. The preface of The Everlasting Man is a
prime example. It begins,
“There are two ways of getting home …”3 So
far so good. Sounds plain and resolute. That is,
until the punchline: “… and one of them is to
stay there.”
And now your brain is a bowl of mashed
potatoes. In the face of such a blatant contradiction, who wouldn’t toss their sanity into the
Kitchen Aid? Next comes the gravy:
“The other is to walk round the whole world
till we come back to the same place.”
The sentence sounds sensible. Yet, it doesn’t
explain how “staying home” is a way of “getting home.” Was the opener a red herring? A
faux punchline to hook the audience? It isn’t
until five cocktail parties later that you realize
“getting home” is a poetic way of saying “understanding home.”
As you can see, Chesterton draws a fine line
between confusion and wonder. One might
describe his style as an “ordered chaos.” Of

LITERATURE

course, the most endearing part of reading
Chesterton is that he makes your brain do a
handstand. He has a way of turning the pockets
of every phrase inside out, and if you read him
long enough, you begin to realize that you disliked Chesterton because there was too much
to like about him. For this reason, every Chesterton critic is a fanatic in disguise.
To be honest, there are two reasons why
every literate soul should read Chesterton:
1) 50% of the time, you have no idea what he’s
talking about, and 2) if you’re an educated
Catholic, he almost always concludes with an
idea you already know. To put it more plainly,
he’s the kind of writer whose greatest vices are
actually virtues. You see, ignorance—and even
confusion—becomes a virtue when it inspires a
reader to move from error to knowledge. All
too often we think we know when, in fact, we
don’t know that we don’t know. It is the difference between ignorance and error, and as
every sage realizes, it is much better to know
you don’t know than to think you know when
you don’t. A lapsed Catholic with the firm convictions of an atheist is always worse off than a
child who has never heard the name of Christ.
Even for a rational giant—an Aquinas—steeped
in philosophy and Revelation, ignorance outpaces knowledge. There is a reason the “Angelic Doctor” famously declared, “All that I have
written seems like straw”; he knew that man’s
nature allots him more ignorance than understanding. As much as we pretend to have “gaps
of knowledge,” as if the human mind is a continent with a few craters in it, the reality is our
little islands of knowledge dot a vaster ocean of
ignorance. Or, if you prefer, our knowledge is
not simply gapped like Swiss cheese: if we zoom
out, we learn that there are more holes around
the Swiss cheese than there are inside it. This is
not to say that ignorance is bliss. Not knowing
should agitate us: it nags us to seek knowledge.
Conveniently, there is a word that compacts
this idea into a few microcosmic syllables: wonder. Wonder, in its classical sense, is “the passion that arises from consciousness of ignorance.”4 Emerging from an encounter with the
extraordinary, the strange, the baffling, it seizes
the soul and disturbs it with the realization of
“I do not know.” As Josef Pieper says, “Wonder
acts upon a man like a shock, he is ‘moved’ and
‘shakend’ and in the dislocation that succeeds
all that he had taken for granted as being nat-

ural or self-evident loses its compact solidity
and obviousness; he is literally dislocated and
no longer knows where he is.”5 It is Gollum’s
agitation of not knowing the answer to Bilbo’s
riddle; it is the anxiety of not understanding
the seemingly meaningful and yet elusive symbols of Eliot’s “Wasteland”; it is the perplexity of reading that time-old paradox “love is a
pleasing pain” for the first time. What makes
this disturbance unexpected is the fact that it
is rooted in the ordinary: whatever is in Bilbo’s
pocket, it is surely something simple and common to a traveler; whatever Eliot’s poem signifies, it is about fire, a sailor, London; whatever the paradox means, pleasure and pain are
part of everyone’s daily toil. This is where the
wisdom of life lies veiled: in common places.
In the words of Pieper, “the deeper aspects of
reality are apprehended in the ordinary … it is
in the things we come across in the experience
of everyday life that the unusual emerges, and
we no longer take them for granted.”6
To the average Joe and Jane of today, however, this two-syllable word is, if anything, cheap
in meaning: in a time when dish soap, Wonderbread, Taylor Swift, and the latest iPhone
are “wonderful,” literary critics tend to dismiss
wonder as mere sentiment. Yet, its significance
cannot be overstated. As the beginning of wisdom, it yokes poetry to philosophy; as the cattle prod of the intuition, it awakens the heart
to the joyful disturbance of the passions. It
extends beyond mere sentimentality and awakens readers to the awful and sublime mystery
of the real. I say awful because when we arrive
at any point where knowledge is inaccessible—
for who can comprehend God’s allness or evil’s
nothingness?—then we must have enough courage to allow reality’s unknowability to terrify
us. Experiencing our ignorance’s enormity, in
an odd way, gives us an experience of truth’s
immensity: truth, after all, is infinitely vaster
than our infinite souls. The wiser man knows
that the more you know, the more you know
what you don’t know. This is, in fact, Chesterton’s enchantment—he teaches knowledge by
forcing the reader into a state of ignorance. By
the riddling language of irony, he turns confusion into an art and fashions stale ideas in
strange, new garments.
Which brings us to his tour de force: “The
Everlasting Man.” If I had to choose, I’d say
my favorite chapter is the one that isn’t one: the
31

LITERATURE

preface. It is about a book he never wrote—one
that tells of a farm boy who galivants far from
home in search of a giant’s grave only to find,
upon his return, that it was under his kitchen
garden the whole time.7 The moral: squint hardest at what is right in front of your eyes. If you
do, you may just find that strangeness is tucked
under the familiar, that the extraordinary is
entombed within the ordinary. You might just
wonder.
Most of all, the book is a bullhorn of wonder for lapsed Christians. More than anyone
else, these souls need a full dose of ignorance
because their familiarity with Christianity fools
them into believing their errors are truths. They
are the kind of people who need to know that
they don’t know that they don’t know. The surprising truth is that apostates would be much
better off if they knew nothing whatsoever
about Christianity. Then, at least, ignorance
might be a gateway to wonder:
“It would be better to see the whole thing as
a remote Asiatic cult; the mitres of its bishops as
the towering head dresses of mysterious bonzes;
its pastoral staffs as the sticks twisted like serpents carried in some Asiatic procession; to see
the prayer book as fantastic as the prayer-wheel
and the Cross as crooked as the Swastika.”8
Oddly enough, the problem with lapsed
Christians is that they are so familiar with
Christianity that they don’t understand what it
is. This is why “while the best judge of Christianity is a Christian, the next best judge would
be something more like a Confucian.”9

32

The Angelus u March - April 2022

Of course, even devout Catholics have their
errors and routinely need to be jolted into an
awareness of their ignorance. If Aquinas’ greater writings were straw, how much cheaper are
the thoughts of pious Joes? The ones who presume to know the Catechism are rarely the ones
who live by it, and even the devil can quote
canon law. We must never be too faithful to
wonder, just as we must never believe ourselves
too wonderful to need faith. Even when you are
inside Christendom, you need strange eyes to
see how often you live as one outside it.
By now I have sufficiently failed to explain
what The Everlasting Man is about with the higher hope that you may know what the book is for.
Do not thumb its pages expecting to comprehend Chesterton’s riddles at the first bat of your
eyelashes. Here is a book for unhurried rumination, for leisure. Second, convince yourself
that this book—as challenging as it is—is charged
with mystery. You will encounter old errors and
older truths, but Chesterton labels them with
new and peculiar names to remind us that the
strangest realities are the familiar ones. Look
where you have always been and you might see
how scarecrows hang on crosses, how crosiers
hang off fiddles, how even God may live in your
stomach.
Flannery O’Connor once said, “The truth
will make you odd.” In Chesterton, this notion
comes full circle: He makes the truth odd so
that, made familiar with falsehood, we might
become as strange as we always were.

Catholic Action Men's Group, Monza, Italy, 1935.

HISTORY

A House Divided
Against Itself:
Catholic Action and the Interwar Era
John Rao, D.Phil., Oxon.

P

erhaps no word characterizes the interwar era better than “intensity.” This
intensity was enormously encouraged
by the sense in the minds of many contemporaries that the First World War and its
revolutionary aftermath had somehow offered
an unparalleled opportunity for a general “purification” of Western Civilization, interpreted by
social and political activists in a kaleidoscope of
ways. Believers at least began the era by joining
in this intense battle for purification, possessing as they did a nineteenth and early twentieth
century treasure trove of theological, philosophical, and socio-political writings on just how
a Christian order should be constructed—the
so-called “thesis”—a sense of the life and death
importance of putting this thesis into practice,
and a network of organizations with an experience of the manifold, practical, historical difficulties of actually working to achieve their
goal through “Catholic Action”—what thinkers
labeled the “hypothesis.”

Attempting a practical Catholic purification
of the social order based upon sound doctrine
has always been a daunting enterprise, even
where such a labor has been undertaken in societies publicly confessing the Faith. When evangelization of a non-or anti-Christian world has
been at stake, it has involved the taking of serious risks that might or might not be successful;
risks whose mistakes could only be handled
through maintenance of a truly self-critical attitude on the part of believers prepared to entertain objections to their hypothetical decisions
and correction of them in line with the Catholic thesis. Pius XI’s establishment of the Feast
of Christ the King in his encyclical letter, Quas
Primas (December 11, 1925), might be looked
upon as the most solemn of calls for continued
commitment of the entire Church to the thesis in its broadest strokes, and documents like
Quadragesimo anno (May 15, 1931) a proof of the
presence of the thesis in dealing with precise
economic and social questions as well.
33

HISTORY

34

Vatican and Italian government notables posing at the Lateran
Palace before the signing of the treaty, 1929.

Collective wedding organized by the Jeunesse ouvrière
chrétienne (JOC), Quebec, 1939.

Consideration of the “hypothesis” to which
the “thesis” had to be applied in the years 19181939 involved dealing with a number of forces—
philosophically hostile liberals, friendly but primarily politically rather than religious focused
monarchists, military men of unpredictable
faith, and even some fascists and communists.
All of these, either for the sake of maintaining a
“Party of Order” against a greater and obvious
common menace, or by appealing seductively
to one or two emphases of Catholic Social Doctrine, sought to forge an alliance with activist
believers. But here, unfortunately, the actual
“hypothetical” interwar decisions of popes, local
episcopacies, and many lay leaders left contemporary observers, anxious friends and hopeful
enemies alike, with serious doubts as to just how
efficacious the thesis supporting substantive
Catholic Action would ever be permitted to be.
Italy provides the basic key to the Roman
outlook and its potential deficiencies. Already
before the Great War, St. Pius X had brought
its free ranging and basically lay dominated
national Catholic Action movement, organized
in 1874 in what was called the Opera dei Congressi, to heel. Pope Pius XI confirmed his approach
through his abandonment of the Partito Popolare
Italiano, which had appeared on the national
political scene in 1919 to fight for control of
Parliament with initial Vatican support. In Italy
and elsewhere, Rome was worried that political
parties could easily nurture the temptation both
to call “Catholic” whatever might appeal to the
voters at large, as well as to make “being Catholic” seem to demand support for all manner
of party programs about which believers could
legitimately disagree. The Holy See came to the
conclusion that a suitable lay activity that could
justly be given the name “Catholic” would have

to be more lobby-like in character; a “Catholic
Action” composed of a variety of organizations.
Each of these would be entrusted with specific
tasks—such as the defense of education—whose
doctrinally solid goals could clearly be identified for the sake of a proper purification of the
precise “spaces” of political and social life that
they targeted. This unambiguous, lobby-like
Catholic Action, carried out by laymen, would
then be kept to the straight and narrow path
under a firm and properly doctrinally and spiritually focused parish, diocesan, and Vatican
clerical control.
No one should underestimate the difficulties of the issues concerned. The willingness of
a number of Popolari leaders to value an alliance with the militant Socialists of the time and
to demonstrate commitment to liberal Italian
political institutions that had not been particularly friendly to Catholics in the past did not
seem particularly suitable for attainment of the
Catholic thesis. Moreover, it was still not fully
clear exactly what Italian Fascism really was all
about in the early 1920s, thereby offering some
justification for allowing its leadership the benefit of the doubt, especially given its “Party of
Order” appeal to a joint front against the obviously anti-Catholic “Red Menace.” Nevertheless, trustworthy Italian Traditionalist friends
of mine have always been very critical of the
Lateran Accords, signed by the Holy See with
the Mussolini government in 1929, as a longterm disaster.
Yes, they would admit, these did set up
an independent base for the Papacy in Vatican City, proclaim a respect for at least those
Catholic moral teachings that fit in with Fascist goals, and promise freedom for the Italian-style Catholic Action movement to function.

The Angelus u March - April 2022

HISTORY

And, yes again, they would agree that abuses
on the part of the government were met with
Vatican reiterations of practical commitment to
the theoretical demands of the Catholic thesis,
very firmly so once Mussolini started to adopt
Nazi-like racial laws in 1938. Still, their chief
complaint is that the general spirit that was created and maintained among Italian Catholics
was really one of “not rocking the boat.” With
sacramental life guaranteed, the clergy free to
teach the catechism, divorce prohibited, and the
Reds in check, the grumbling was to remain just
that—impotent lamentation.
In fact, all too many Roman interventions in
Catholic affairs elsewhere in the interwar era
seem to me to presume that the local hypothesis
would continue forever; that the best one could
do was to obtain governmental guarantees:
either from friendly “Party of Order” forces or
from liberal, Enlightenment-minded, constitutional or Concordat-backed “laws” somehow
infallibly preventing anyone—hostile dictators
and the devil included—from arbitrarily violating them. In other words, they indicate a general papal desire simply to get along with the
“powers that be” in a way that would keep clergy and cult alive while consigning the project of
“transformation of all things in Christ” to the
practical, historical trash can.
Rome had to tread much more lightly in
imposing any Italian-like policy in lands where
strong lay leaders of obvious Catholic inspiration directed government policies. This can
be seen in the Portugal of António de Oliveira Salazar (1889-1970), or in Austria, where a
Christian Social Party had long existed, under
Engelbert Dollfuss (1892-1934), aided by the
editor of the newspaper that the chancellor
funded to promote his vision, the great Catholic philosopher, Dietrich von Hildebrand.
Both Salazar and Dollfuss sought to construct
the kind of holistic, thesis-friendly “corporate”
society that many nineteenth century thinkers
had described and Quadragesimo anno seemed
to approve: an anti-totalitarian, anti-materialist
“society of many societies” honoring the principle of subsidiarity that would jointly protect
the freedom of the human person and social
equity. Rome realized that interference in their
overwhelmingly lay-dominated ventures could
have disastrous consequences—in Austria’s case,
the victory of the National Socialists, the prevention of which led the Vatican to back away

considerably from its Italian anti-Catholic Party
position.
The Low Countries were equipped with
long-established and successful Catholic Action
organizations that continued to exercise an
enormous inf luence in the Interwar Era. In
these lands, local episcopacies served as the
organ for clerical influence over lay social and
political activity, especially to torpedo any new,
potentially boat rocking personalities and forces, as happened in Belgium with Léon Degrelle
(1906-1994), the Christus Rex Movement, and
his Rexist Party.
Belgium was also the home of Fr. Joseph
Cardijn (1886-1967), who became convinced of
the need to create a “specialized” form of Catholic Action that sought to target and develop a
fervor within specific “milieu” giving birth to
evangelists ready to bring the light of Christ to
others like them in the world at large. His Jeunesse Ouvrières Chrétienne (1924), aimed uniquely at young workers, was very influential as a
model in the “years between,” spreading to
France in the following decade, where it paralleled the similarly inspired Scouting Movement,
and was looked upon by the bishops as the great
hope of the future. But here, too, dangers lurked
for the Catholic “thesis,” which I will return to
at the conclusion of this article.
Germany was the home of the oldest organized Catholic Action movement, ranging from
political parties to mass cultural organizations
and labor unions. All of these had different
emphases that could pull them in contradictory secular directions, with those interested in
economic justice ready to work together with
leftist Social Democrats and others eager to
pursue nationalist goals more inclined to ally
with rightist forces. They became so divided by
the late 1920s that the Papal Nuncio, Eugenio Pacelli, the future Pope Pius XII, urged the
more rigidly parish and diocesan-focused Italian Catholic Action model upon them.
In fact, the only way that the Catholic Centre
Party itself could retain some unity was by reinforcing its religious base and naming a priest,
Msgr. Ludwig Kaas (1881-1952), as its head. The
final interwar result was clarified in 1933 when
the Centre, many of whose members were influenced by fears of the “Red Menace” and eager
for a “Party of Order” response to it, voted full
powers for the Hitler Regime and dissolved
itself. A much reduced and generally persecut35

HISTORY

ed remnant of German Catholic Action, aided
by certain courageous bishops, managed to survive within an Italian-like framework under the
new Concordat, signed in July. Pursuit of the
“Catholic thesis” in Germany was quite clearly
gone with the wind—and here not only or even
perhaps chiefly due to the Vatican.
Two other examples of Catholic Action can
complete this overview of the interwar era,
the first of them in France, whose story was
complicated by divisions regarding the form
of government and the absence of any serious
political party representing believers’ interests.
Before the First World War a number of French
Catholics had been attracted to Marc Sangnier’s
(1873-1950)’s republican movement, the Sillon. It
was condemned by St. Pius X in 1910 for falling
prey to the error of treating a political system—
in this case, the democratic one, which was also
proving to be highly anti-Catholic in behavior
in France–as though it were itself redemptive,
and thereby more important than the Faith for
the purification of society.
Charles Maurras’ (1868-1952) Action Française
was fervently in favor of a return to the legitimate monarchy. Although the Holy Office had
deemed his movement worthy of censure as well
as that of the Sillon, Pius X had blocked it, on
hypothetical grounds, given that it so strongly
defended the French Catholic Church. When
Pius XI did proceed to its condemnation, as
he did between December 29, 1926 and January 7, 1927, the grounds given were, broadly
speaking, similar to those used against the Sillon and, more recently, the Popolari. He argued
that it put support for a political system, the
legitimate monarchy, before things spiritual in
importance, thereby overturning the hierarchy
of values for Catholics, who, in Maurras’ case,
were compounding their error by following a
man who was not even a believer.
Aside from alienating many practicing Catholics, who now saw the only hope for their particular political views to succeed as involving
the same kind of reliance on other apparently acceptable Party of Order forces, the condemnation did nothing to prevent the victory
of the ”politics first” mentality. What it actually
accomplished was a resurrection of the “democratic politics first” position of the Sillon. Rome
reshaped the French episcopacy with anti-Action Française bishops more and more open to a
democratic secularist vision of society, which,
36

The Angelus u March - April 2022

through men like Achille Lienart (1884-1973),
appointed Archbishop of Lille in 1928, was to
be one of the central radicalizing forces of Second Vatican Council. Pius XII ultimately lifted the condemnation of the Action Française in
1939, after the damage had long been done.
Our second example, the vigorous Mexican
Catholic Action movement, had no quarrel with
the form of government as in France, only with
its anti-clerical and anti-religious policies. These
became so outrageous by 1926 that they forced
Catholics into an outright rebellion, the Cristiada, which lasted until 1929 and the sacrifice
and even martyrdom of the Cristeros, men and
women specifically invoking the call of Pius XI
to make Christ their King. There is no space
here to go into detail regarding the Arreglos of
1929, supposedly bringing the persecution to
an end. Suffice it to say that the agreement in
question turned out to be yet another “save the
basics and chuck the rest” decision. Brokered
by the Vatican, several Mexican bishops, and
an American government worried more about
restoring peaceful, profitable business south of
the border than anything else, it proved to be
incapable even of guaranteeing its main goal,
since persecution soon broke out again with
even greater intensity in parts of the country.
Mexican Catholics ultimately had to rely more
on a change of heart on the part of the ruling
Institutional Revolutionary Party after 1940
than on assistance from Rome or the local bishops.
Portugal and Austria tried their best, but as
Salazar openly admitted, such little countries
could not do much to defend Christendom if
the Great Powers were not “converted.” The
murder of Dollfuss and the abandonment of his
successor to a Nazi takeover in 1938 proved this
to be true. General Francisco Franco’s victory
in Spain on the eve of the Second World War
seemed promising, and certainly saved clergy
and cult from destruction, but the pyramid of
Party of Order forces on which his power was
based did not allow for any really solid Catholic
direction. Portugal at least had the stimulus of
Salazar’s brilliant writings and the message of
Our Lady of Fatima to help the Catholic cause,
and Austria the private devotion of Dollfuss, but
all three countries were working mostly from
the top downwards, and Austria, once again,
with a gun aimed at its head.
The interwar era’s failure to tie hypothetical

HISTORY

Engelbert Dollfuss, Chancellor of Austria 1932-34, ca. 1930.

Signing of the Reichskonkordat, 1933. L-R: Msgr. Ludwig Kaas,
von Papen, Pizzardo, Card. Pacelli, Ottaviani, and Buttmann.

policies together with the thesis in a more constructive, long-sighted, evangelical manner—as
did the missionaries of the Middle Ages, who
were highly conscious of all manner of cultural issues as being central to the success of their
labors—set Catholic Action up as a sitting duck
for the annihilation that it was to face by the
1960s. Catholic activists still loyal to the movement were left like unguarded sheep, open to
seduction by the clever wolves laying traps for
them throughout the broad cultural environment in which they daily lived and breathed.
All that was needed to blow the entire hypothesis and thesis argument sky high was for these
wolves, whether conscious predators or self-deceived, to exploit the failures of the mainline
Catholic approach.
Significant intellectual support for this demolition were very much already available in “the
years between” in the writings of men such as
Emmanuel Mounier (1905-1950), the founder
and editor of the journal l’Esprit (1932). Mounier’s “Communitarian Personalism” argued
that Catholics were losing the battle for control
of society because their thesis was corrupted
by a doctrinal and philosophical “rationalism.”
Victory required an expansion and perversion
of Cardijn’s vision of the importance of cultivating specialized “milieu,” going beyond the
Belgian’s more limited approach to urge “diving
into,” ceasing to criticize, and bringing to fruition the “energies” unleashed by successful contemporary cultural and political “milieu,” Fascist and Marxist in particular. This was because
such successful energy indicated the obvious
presence of the Holy Spirit, whose guidance
would cause the present contradictions of these
vibrant movements to converge for the benefit of mankind and the greater glory of God.

In other words thesis and hypothesis would have to
merge, since the embrace and acceptance of the strongest existing hypotheses is being urged upon us by the
Third Person of the Blessed Trinity as the sole guide
to Catholic Action.
Fascists lost energy, the Second World War,
and, therefore, the support of the Holy Spirit. The more energetic Marxist-Leninist Soviet
Union, in alliance with the United States, the
representative of another “vital milieu”—that
of Pluralism—won it, proving that they both
had a pneumatic friend in the Godhead. The
divine merits of the latter conduit for the voice
of the Holy Spirit were underlined by Jacques
Maritain (1892-1973), whose work on Integral
Humanism of 1936 had pointed the way to his
later evangelization of the American message,
itself already a cultural giant in the interwar era.
Marxism-Leninism made an appeal to Catholic Action because of a superficial connection
with its concern for an economic social justice
neglected by individualist American Pluralism.
American Pluralism made an appeal to Catholic Action against Marxist-Leninist atheism.
Acceptance of the voice of the Holy Spirit found
in the message of American Pluralist “liberty” by the Church of the Conciliar Era opened
the door to the ravages of every conceivable
“milieu” foisting its loud-mouthed, vital, energetic teaching upon the Catholic sheep as channels of irresistible pneumatic prophesy: Marxist, sexually perverse, psychotic, and, yes, once
again Fascist and racist as well. The intellectual
and cultural time bombs for the sell-out were
laid down in the Interwar Era, at least partially through the failures of Catholic Action. And
the only way to deal, “hypothetically” with the
ruins is to dive into, cease to criticize, and bring
to fruition the Catholic Thesis.
37

“In the
meantime, in
between time”
Films portraying the state of the world
in the interwar era
Bridget Bryan

Note: Each film reviewed has scenes, characters, or language that are objectionable. But nothing in this life is perfect, clean, always acceptable: real life is a mess, and it is into that mess that
Christ wanted to come and save us. Some parts definitely need a “skip” or “fast forward,” but the
author trusts the viewer is adult enough to recognize when one ought to do that.
“Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of
twists and turns
Driven time and again off course, once he
plundered
The hallowed heights of Troy. . .
Many pains he suffered, heartsick on the open
sea. . .
Launch out on his story, Muse. . .sing for our
time too.” 1

B

etween World War I and World War II
there was discouragement, and there
was hope. Five films portray this time
well. To understand the films more
deeply and our connection with them, I’d like to
highlight eight monumental impacts the world
was experiencing during the setting of the films.

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First, the world had just been heavily depleted of its population: 57 million people died in
WWI. That would be equivalent to 2,850 average-sized US cities or present-day England
being wiped out completely. Another 50 million
people would die with the onset of the Spanish
flu in 1918. That’s nearly a combined two present-day Englands gone, and another war soon
to come.
Second, Christendom was dying. The three
main Christian empires of Russia, Germany,
and the Holy Roman Empire of Austria Hungary had been killed, 2 making way for democracy. . . and communism. There is no large country to stand by the truths of Holy Mother church
now, no country to help man to his eternal end.

REVIEW

Third, the natural family unit was being torn
apart, and through the woman. No longer protected by civil governments standing consistently for absolute truth, and helped by advertising,
the family was besieged by feminism, abortion,
birth control, contraception, and eugenics. Very
quickly the family, the building block of society,
began to crumble.
Fourth, WWI was originally called the “War
to End All Wars”; it brought about an inverted
peace, an upside-down order: the ultra-nationalism and imperialism that had fueled WWI
only enabled godless socialism, democracy, and
worse to flourish.
Fifth, Communism was energetically blossoming in Russia, fertilized by barbaric slaughter. Our Lady of Fatima had just appeared, the
sun had danced, and Mary implored the world
for prayer and penance and the consecration
of Russia to her Immaculate Heart lest Russia’s
errors were spread throughout the world.
Sixth, while continental Europe gasped for
breath, completely ravaged by war, America
reveled in the money she had made by the war.
Seventh, a world unlike any other was influencing and distracting the sorrowful survivors
of the war. The artificial world created by television, journalism, advertising, entertainment,
and popular music made the world smaller.
Advertising constrained man’s thoughts and
choices to the trend of the moment. 3
Eighth, this artificial environment created a
world at the “height of its material power and
the depth of its spiritual emptiness.” Because of
all this suffering—war, death, sickness, and the
loss of Christendom—a spiritual vacuum was
created. Mankind looked for meaning—and for
distraction. The interwar era presented a utopia: “the salvation it promises is collective and
of this world. But the earthly order is part of
the heavenly order. And to reject the heavenly order is to reject reality.”4 To reject reality is
what makes an insane person. Ultimately, in a
world made safe for democracy by World War
I, mankind was being brainwashed into forgetting where he came from. So much for the
garden of Eden.
Having considered the background of the
era, we can now turn to the five films reviewed
here—but make sure you’ve got only a mature
audience. The movies below are not for children.

The Great Gatsby, 19745
Roaring 20’s in America, here we come! This
film, starring Robert Redford, is based on F.
Scott Fitzgerald’s book, The Great Gatsby. Set
during one summer in upper-class New York
society in the 1920’s, the hope is revealed of a
self-made man, Jay Gatsby, who has built his
dreams around his war sweetheart Daisy.
The story is told to us by the eyewitness
Nick Carraway, cousin to Daisy and neighbor
to Gatsby. Daisy, from an old wealthy southern family, instead of waiting for Gatsby after
the war, married Tom Buchanan because “rich
girls don’t marry poor boys.” Regardless of the
amount of money Tom has, it is clear from the
beginning of the film that Tom is an unfaithful
husband, chauvinistic and racist to boot, and
Daisy knows it. But Daisy also avoids any difficult conversations that get to the bottom of
things. Tom’s immoral behavior is portrayed as
typical and to be expected of men in their circles. Daisy tells Nick of their child’s birth; she
cried when it was a girl because all a girl can
hope to be these days is a “beautiful fool,” she
tells her cousin Nick. (The sad objectification of
women was well on its way in this era.)
At the same time, Nick is let into Gatsby’s life.
His unassuming, nonjudgmental comportment
and conversation win Gatsby’s trust. Through
Nick, we’re able to see the immense hope Gatsby has in Daisy’s love, and how hard he worked
to create a fortune that would be accepted by
her and her family. Gatsby’s end justified the
means to achieve his American Dream.
As the story unravels, a sad tapestry is
revealed: infidelity, dishonesty, an inability
to confront the truth and talk about difficult
things, the distractions of parties, drinking, love
affairs, and extravagant trips, the veneer of status hiding shallow morals: ultimate consumerism. And no real authority—there’s no one to be
beholden to, and might makes right.
If there is a God, it’s the solemn eyes of T.J.
Eckleberg looking down on everyone from an
old billboard advertisement for eyeglasses, but
even this is up to a subjective interpretation.
The only one who really stops to think about
God is the desperate destitute husband of Tom’s
mistress.
It may sound a little depressing, and yet this
era is part of our story; this particular story
can help us to be more understanding of where
we came from. The conversion of souls today
39

REVIEW

requires much compassion—a compassion perhaps embodied by Nick in his friendship with
Gatsby. Nick stuck by Gatsby to witness his
journey, stood for him when friendship was
most needed, and was willing to see the ugly
and the beautiful. Nick’s line, “reserving judgment is a matter of infinite hope,”6 can be so
typical of non-judgmental indifferentism, but
perhaps there is something of a gem here.

The Untouchables, 1987
Overlapping with Gatsby’s era in New York
is the Prohibition era. During this time a group
of heroes called The Untouchables brought
down Al Capone in Chicago. This iconic film
depicts the integrity of Eliot Ness and his few
good men; it’s a classic good guy/bad guy story.
This has the elements of an Indiana Jones movie
(Sean Connery stars in it, and Kevin Costner
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The Angelus u March - April 2022

wears a fedora), some Godfather aspects with
Al Capone, and some tender drama with Eliot
Ness’s family life.
The Untouchables tells the of an epic struggle to enforce Prohibition laws during the time
when our country made it illegal to produce and
sell alcohol from 1920 to 1930. It’s an insight
into how Protestant America, fueled by moralizing institutions, enforced by government
mandate a matter that was too intricate and
prudential to be mandated away. Rather than
asking “why” men might want to drink so much,
or presenting a moderate way to consume alcohol, Prohibition laws created a huge and illegal
market for the very thing they were trying to
restrict. Bootleggers and rum runners became
heroes by bringing in the spirits to the towns.
Al Capone, the mafia king of Chicago, was
a huge supplier, and Eliot Ness of the Justice

REVIEW

Department, with the help of an incorrupt crew,
brought him down in an unlikely way. Where
most of the people in The Great Gatsby lead lives
without principle, the men in this story were not
perfect, but they stood for what they believed
in and were willing to lay down their lives to
make the world a better place.
Be prepared for realistic heavy language and
violence, redeemed by an incredible true story
of how the integrity of a few good men triumph
against the odds of a corrupt metropolis and
bring down the giant Al Capone.

O Brother Where Art Thou, 2000
Flannery O’Connor, humor, and old-time
bluegrass meet the Odyssey in this 2001 film.
Set in the deep south, O Brother Where Art Thou
tells the story of Ulysses Everett McGill, played
by Gerard Clooney, trying to get home to his
family. He has a small crew of men with him
(Tim Blake Nelson), and the hope of treasure
lures them all on, all the while hounded by a
relentless seeker of justice. The crew has many
memorable twists and turns before their journey’s end is reached.
While Ulysses makes his way home, his wife
is being wooed by another, more ‘bona fide’ suitor. No Odyssey is complete without the Sirens
and Cyclops, and instead of being turned into
pigs, one of them is turned into a toad.
All the while the viewer is treated to, in a
light-hearted way, what life would have been
like in the Depression-era South with the justice
system, politics, cops and robbers, radio shows,
dress, good ol’ bluegrass music, and the heavier and sadder realities of white supremacy, the
Ku Klux Klan oppressing its Papists, Jews, and
African-Americans.
Like George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life,
and like so many of us after a long trip, Ulysses
just wants to come home, back to his Penelope
and his Warby Gals. His wife doesn’t take him
back so easily; this shows both her self-respect
and that he cares enough about his family to do
what it takes to be reunited with them.
The best part of the film, besides the great
quotes, is the music. Even if bluegrass isn’t your
thing, the music, drawn from that era, draws
you in and sets the mood perfectly. The trick
to enjoying this “picture show” is to not expect
anything out of it. The quality of the movie is
seen when appreciating it at face value. While
this is a humorous spin of the Odyssey, it’s sim-

ply that, with a nod towards our old-time American culture. Many a person I know has sat
down to see a modernized Odyssey and was disappointed. Those who approach the film with
no expectations, however, will be immensely
entertained.

North Face, 2008
Over in Austria, while Franz Jaggerstatter
(The Hidden Life) was converting and beginning
to wrestle with his religious convictions, and
just over in Italy Blessed Pier Giorgio Frassati,
an accomplished mountaineer, had just passed
away, Maria had married Captain von Trapp,
beginning their Sound of Music, and a particular mountain was calling to be climbed.
This German film captures the ultra-nationalism and socialism that had continued to infect
the world more intensely since World War I.
The North Face of the Eiger was the scene of
the intense competition to be the first country
to ascend the last frontier of the Alps.
Two Austrian young amateur climbers, Toni
Kurz and Andi Hinterstoisser, leave their soldierly duties to climb the Eiger. Originally Toni
is against it because of the serious life threat
presented by the climb. But encouraged—almost
pushed—by his girlfriend Louise to climb the
mountain, the boys accept the challenge.
Toni and Andi arrive in their hiking outfits,
poor gear compared to the sponsored Italian
and German groups also making an attempt on
the mountain. Louise, working for a newspaper,
also arrives with her boss to cover the story.
The film, filled with the majestic scenery of
the Alps, the ominous cloud of Nazism, and the
unmoving mountain with its precarious ice and
shifting weather, soon has you on the edge of
your seat. Near misses and falls on the mountain keep your hands clenched tight, as nationalistic competition turns men into cutthroats,
and hearts hurt as you see the influence of Louise, wishing she wasn’t so set on Toni tackling
the mountain.
It is in the hardest moments, in spite of the
intense nationalistic competition, that true
sportsmanship and nobility are live out on the
North Face of the Eiger.

Brideshead Revisited, 1981
While Jeeves was singing “Hodee-hodeehodee-ho. . .sah” to Wooster, Poirot was using
his little grey cells in solving a murder, Downton
41

REVIEW

Abbey was being carried along by the issues of
the day (and our day), the King was making his
Speech, Chariots of Fire were running, Gandhi
was challenging the world to practice what one
preaches, and the sacred and profane memories
of Charles Ryder were being made in Brideshead
Revisited.
This film is a masterpiece. It was made originally made for British television, won 17 international awards, and launched the careers of the
renowned Jeremy Irons and Anthony Andrews,
who appear alongside a whole host of great British stars.
A very messy story, a very real story, and
because it is so, Brideshead is the best of all the
stories told in the films here of this era. It is the
best because it embraces the guilty man while
giving him redemption. Brideshead, in telling the
story of a (rare) old aristocratic Catholic family
in England growing up in the moral upheaval
of the interwar era, tells the story of all families trying to raise children in this upside-down
world. It gives hope to the present and future
that God will give their children the grace they
need to save their souls as they go out into the
world.
Charles Ryder becomes good friends with
young Sebastian Flyte of the Marchmain family, and thus becomes bound up in his family: Lord and Lady Marchmain, and their other
three children, Bridey, Julia, and Cordelia. Lord
Marchmain is a father who has deserted his post
for his own selfish pleasure. Lady Marchmain is
a loving but somewhat overbearing mother. She
is strong and persevering in her faith, a perfect
sorrowful mother. Charles witnesses the odyssey of each of the Marchmains as they journey
through the twists and turns of life, and in his
telling of their story, we see his own.
The struggles of each character are very pertinent to our day: college life, friendship, status,
homosexuality, alcoholism, divorce, adultery
and fornication, perseverance in the Faith, marrying for money, unmarried and plain in the
eyes of the world, religious vocation, war, death.
In spite of the twists and turns that each of the
family and Charles go through, some sinking
lower than others, and some a constant lighthouse of God’s love, God’s grace does not abandon them.
Julia’s words to Charles in one incredible
scene reveal how Brideshead offers a view that

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resolves the other films’ stories and the story of
the interwar era:
“Julia, she can’t go out, she’s got to stay in
and take care of her sin . . .—Sin. It’s a word
from so long ago, from nanny Hawkins stitching by the hearth and the night light burning
before the Sacred Heart. Cordelia and me with
the catechism, in Mummy’s room for luncheon
on Sundays. Mummy carrying my sin with her
to church, bowed under it. . .slipping out with
it. . .Mummy dying with my sin. . .Mummy
dying with it; Christ dying with it, nailed hand
and foot and high among the crowds and soldiers. . .”

Like Nick, Daisy, Tom, and Gatsby, Al
Capone and Eliot Ness, Toni Kutz and his crew,
Ulysses, and all the rest, the Marchmains and
Charles lived in the interwar era. They lived
in the moral upheaval and all the impacts the
world was—and still is—suffering, but trying to
distract itself. Unlike any of the other films, the
true reality is shown: “the earthly order is part
of the heavenly order.” No matter how far the
Marchmains and Charles went with their sins,
“the hound of heaven” was at work. The way
Charles entered Brideshead was not the same
way he left it. God willing, it’s the same for us
too.
About the Author: Bridget Bryan has been writing and
drawing since she was ten years old. With her bachelor’s
in Catholic General Education from SMC, she taught for
10 years within SSPX schools and traveled the world in
the summertime. Bridget currently works as a freelance
artist and also for LIVE-ACTION, a pro-life organization. You can follow her work at bridgetbryan.com where
she’s excited to share this year’s project: The Camino de
Immaculata: a travel journal capturing both the physical progress of the building and the interior journey of a
pilgrim to the New Immaculata.

Endnotes
1

The opening lines of Robert Fagle’s translation of Homer’s
The Odyssey, the ancient story of a man’s return home from
years of war.

2

MacCulloch, Diarmaid. A History of Christianity: The First
Three Thousand Years. London: Penguin Publishing Group,
2010. Print. via Wikipedia.

3

Maclin Horton, “What the Culture War Really Is,” The Lamp,
Issue 07.

4

Caryll Houselander, Guilt (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1951).

5

The 1974 film is a work of art, very discreet and yet communicating perfectly. There is a 2013 film out, but sadly, it’s an
assault on the senses and doesn’t do the story justice.

6

Scott F. Fitzgerald,The Great Gatsby (Alma Classics, 2017), p. 3.

A Knight’s
Spiritual
Guide
Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre
43

ARCHBISHOP LEFEBVRE

A Knight’s
1. The Knight believes
Like all those who encountered Our
Lord and from whom He asked a personal
commitment of their faith, the Knight has
also encountered Our Lord, most notably
in the sacrament of the Holy Eucharist; he
has bowed down before Him; he has adored
Him, like Zacchaeus, like the man who was
blind from birth, like the paralytic, and, like
Peter, he has attested: “Thou art the Christ,
the Son of the Living God.”

2. The Knight believes in
Our Lord Jesus Christ
The Knight believes in Our Lord Jesus
Christ, Word of God, Who revealed His
Father and His Charity toward sinful men,
as well as the Mission that He entrusted to
His Son and to the Holy Ghost. He believes
that all these truths were handed down by
the Apostles, that is to say, by the Church.
With the Church, he believes that Public
Revelation ended with the death of the last
Apostle and that, as a consequence, the subject matter of his Faith is that doctrine which
has been passed down from generation to
generation by the successors of the Apostles,
that is to say, by Tradition. Imitating Saint
Paul, all the Fathers of the Church, all the
saints, and the whole Church, the Knight
has a duty to safeguard this sacred deposit
of the Faith. Therefore, he flees novelty and
all that might look like an evolution of the
Faith. His Creed is immutable.

ARCHBISHOP LEFEBVRE

Fundamental Principles to Which the Knight
Commits His Entire Life and Activity

’s Spiritual Guide
Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre

3. The Knight detests infidelity
Consequently, due to the nature of the Faith,
the Knight hates infidelity, as well as heresy,
schism, and all that interferes with safeguarding the sacred deposit of the Faith. He is ready
to do all in his power to prevent heretics from
harming the faithful or turning him away from
his Faith. He tolerates heretics only insofar as
intolerance of them would be a source of greater
evils. However, he does not forget that there is
nothing more precious than the gift of the Catholic Faith, without which one cannot be saved.
It is also in this sense that the Knight believes
that he has a God-given mission to protect the
poor and the weak from any errors threatening
their Catholic Faith. His own lively and militant
Faith, the result of ceaseless combat, makes him
suspicious of the enemies of that Faith. After the
example of Saint Paul, he does not put his trust
in conferences, discussions or dialogue, which
scandalize the humble and always favor error.
In fact, the only type of contact he has with the
enemies of the Faith is one imbued with a zeal
for their conversion to the Catholic Faith. On
this point of doctrine, he adheres faithfully to
the teachings of the Magisterium of the Church,
expressed with luminous clarity by Pope Leo
XIII, in his Encyclical Satis Cognitum (Pontifical
Teachings, Solemnes. The Church, I. no. 53 & sq.).
His zeal for the integrity of the Catholic
Faith causes the Knight to be suspicious, and he
takes great care to avoid any opinion or current
thinking that would attempt a forced alliance
of the Catholic Faith with the errors of heretics
or freemasons. Liberalism has attempted, and
continues its attempt, to show that the ideology of the 18th century philosophers, that of the

French Revolution, and that of all subsequent
errors, is not incompatible with the Catholic
Faith.
In this connection, and resting upon the
most solemn and irrefutable Church teachings,
such as that of Gregory XVI in his Encyclical Mirari Vos, Pius IX in his Encyclical Quanta
Cura and the Syllabus, Leo XIII condemning
the “novel conception of law” in his Encyclical
Immortale Dei, Saint Pius X condemning Sillonism and Modernism, Benedict XV, Pius XI
in his Encyclical Ubi Arcano, Pius XII in his
Encyclical Humani Generis, the Knight is ready
to fight, using all the means at his disposal, to
dispel these errors, which destroy the family
and civil society, ruin the Church, and lead to
the most atrocious wars.
In order to sustain his Faith and its integrity,
he would do well to study Church Tradition and
the unremitting battles fought by the Church to
protect the Catholic Faith. In order to fortify his
Faith in the midst of any trials it might have to
undergo these days, he should read the Fathers
and Councils of the Church.

4. The Knight is not afraid
to openly acknowledge
his Catholic Faith
He is deeply attached to what has become,
over the course of history, a witness to the Catholic Faith: churches, monasteries, pilgrimages,
wayside crosses. He is happy to know about
them, to make them known to others, and to
safeguard them. Conscious that he would thus
be promoting the reign of his King, Our Lord
Jesus Christ, and of the Queen of Heaven, the
45

ARCHBISHOP LEFEBVRE

The Knight knows that Charity
is queen of the virtues, but he
does not forget that this virtue
is very demanding and does not
merely consist in some vague
sentimentality, but in a more
or less sensible affection vis-àvis God or one’s neighbor. “If
ye love me,” says Our Lord,
“keep my commandments.”
That is why, in order not to
be deceived by false Charity,
the Knight fully expects to
prove his Charity by deeds.

most gracious Virgin Mary, he should encourage pilgrimages, and even bring them into
being himself and lead them, if necessary.
Just because Faith is one of the virtues
that best characterizes the Knight, it does
not mean that he should not develop the virtues of Hope and Charity. Moreover, they are
so interconnected, that zealously seeking to
practice the virtue of Faith produces an immediate increase in Hope and Charity.

5. Hope is the virtue of both
the warrior and the pilgrim
This virtue is also particularly well suited
to the Knight in combat, certain of the final
victory, but who is not surprised by numerous
apparent failures that may occur during his
struggle. “In te, Domine, speravi; non confundar
in aeternum.”—“O Lord, in Thee have I hoped:
let me not be confounded forever.”

6. The Knight knows that Charity
is the queen of all virtues
The Knight knows that Charity is queen
of the virtues, but he does not forget that this
virtue is very demanding and does not merely consist in some vague sentimentality, but
in a more or less sensible affection vis-à-vis
God or one’s neighbor. “If ye love me,” says
Our Lord, “keep my commandments” ( Jn.
14:15). That is why, in order not to be deceived
by false Charity, the Knight fully expects to
prove his Charity by deeds, that is to say, by
practicing the virtue of Justice, which also
characterizes Charity, as does Faith.
“Justus ex fide vivit.” The just man liveth
by Faith. The virtue of Justice has its source
in the Faith. Now the virtue of Justice is the
practical application of Charity towards God
and towards our neighbor.

7. The Knight is just
“Blessed are they that hunger and thirst
after justice: for they shall have their fill” (Mt.
5:6).
Justice is Order, assigning every person and thing to its true and rightful place,
according to God’s Will. The Knight hungers
and thirsts for Order. He instinctively detests
disorder. Now, it was by sin, which is disorder itself, that disorder entered Man, society
and the world.

46

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ARCHBISHOP LEFEBVRE

That is why the Knight closely follows the
advice of Our Lord and is always ready to fight
sin and the occasions of sin, both in himself
and in his environment. He rises up in opposition to impiety, which is contempt for God and
for His Holy Religion; like Saint Michael, he
exclaims: “Quis ut Deus!” Who is like unto God!
He works to restore authority in society, in the
family, in schools, and in social institutions. He
is ever ready to fight against the scandals caused
by public immorality. However, he never forgets that the most effective weapon of combat
is the Holy Cross and the Holy Passion of Our
Lord. That is why he is especially devoted to the
Cross, which he venerates with respect, and to
the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, Its continuation.
Uniting his life to that of Christ crucified is
an honor, a grace, a glory for him. That is why
he accepts suffering as a sign of Our Lord’s predilection.
After this brief outline of the depth and the
importance of the virtue of Justice, we will take
a look at the fields of activity in which it is practiced and how the Knight strives to be faithful to
it, so as to merit the most beautiful praise of all,
and only given to holy souls, like that of Saint
Joseph. “Joseph erat vir justus.”—“Joseph was a just
man.” Does Saint Peter not attribute this title to
Our Lord Himself, when he says: “Sanctum et
Justum negastis.”—“But you denied the Holy One
and the Just” (Acts 3:14).

8. The Knight is devout
The Knight is devout, in the ancient and
original meaning of the word. He recognizes
that the first duty in Justice for every spiritual
creature is to adore God, to love Him, and to
serve Him faithfully. The godless man lives in
the most profound injustice, in the most extreme
disorder. Order demands that God, the Creator
and Redeemer of the human race, be honored,
praised and adored.
That is why the Knight will dedicate the better part of his life to the service of his God and
King, Our Lord Jesus Christ. He will honor Him
publicly and in the solitary depths of his soul. It
will be a great joy for him to act as honor guard
for Jesus in the Holy Eucharist, thereby making
reparation for the outrages and the indifference
to which He is subjected. He will take care to
set aside moments for prayer, to attend Holy
Mass and to receive Holy Communion, daily,
if possible. Kneeling to receive Holy Commu-

nion, he will recollect this passage of Holy Writ:
“In nomine Jesu omne genu flectatur, coelestium, terrestrium et infernorum.”—“That in the name of
Jesus, every knee should bow, of those that are
in heaven, on earth, and under the earth” (Phil.
2:10). He will regularly approach the sacrament
of Penance, in which he will find the consoling
graces needed for his spiritual combat.
He will especially love all the ceremonies
and prayers in honor of the Holy Eucharist
and the Blessed Virgin Mary, toward whom he
should have a profound and tender devotion. He
will see her as his Sovereign and will strive to
extend her Reign everywhere. He will regard
the Rosary as a most effective weapon against
heretics and against Satan.
He will be mindful to make his home a place
characterized by its reverence for God, by decorating the walls with crucifixes and pictures
that elevate the soul to God.
The Church, being essentially of a priestly
nature, which is to say, made for the continuation of the Sacrifice of Our Lord, the Knight
should have the most profound respect for the
Supreme Pontiff, for bishops and for priests,
because of their priestly character, being the
selfsame character as that of The Priest par
excellence, Our Lord Jesus Christ. He will
refrain from showing this kind of respect to
Protestant pastors, even if they call themselves
bishops, whereas they possess no priestly character whatsoever.
He will refresh his soul in the company of
contemplative religious, who have kept all the
nobility and grandeur of Divine Worship. If it
is at all possible, he should pursue the study
of the Latin language and of Gregorian chant,
which remain the best means of conveying our
enlightened and prayerful Faith.
The Knight will rejoice at being able to pray
with his brethren-at-arms, thereby uniting his
Faith, his piety and his devotion to theirs. It is
in this common prayer that the brethren will
find the source of fraternal unity around their
Grand Master, and from which they will draw
the graces essential to co-ordinated and disciplined action.

9. The Knight is pious
Piety is the gift of the Holy Ghost that crowns
the virtue of Justice.
Unquestionably, this gift is practiced in the
most excellent way through the virtue of Reli47

ARCHBISHOP LEFEBVRE

gion, of which we have just spoken, but it also
extends to our behaviour in the various kinds of
societies to which we belong: family, homeland,
Church, and any other association.
In particular, Piety is practiced with respect
to all authority and paternity. Filial piety is what
makes possible the kind of respect that only
a deep Faith in God can give to relations of
authority and obedience.
Indeed, contrary to liberal ideology, which
names the people as the source of authority,
reason and Faith teach us that all authority
comes from God, “Omnis potestas a Deo,” even
in cases where someone in authority is appointed by members of society. No human being has
the innate power to command another human
being. All authority is a participation in the
authority of God. This basic concept is essential to the good ordering of society, because it
is a reminder to the man holding a position of
authority that this power does not belong to
him, and that he will have to render an account
of it to God. It is an invitation to practice humility and discretion. On the other hand, it makes
obedience easier, since obedience, when understood in this way, is made to God and for the
sake of God. It leads to respect for the person
vested with this authority. Now, respect is the
flower of Charity. It brings about truly Christian relations, raising them to the level of heavenly relations, because the reason for, and the
gift of, filial piety come from God.
Therefore, the Knight should have a sense
of respect, fruit of the gift of Piety, and will
endeavor to restore this all-important concept in
his family, in all social relations, and wherever
else he can. Nothing has been, nor continues to
be, more corruptive of societies than the false
notion that authority resides in the masses. For
the past two centuries, this has led societies into
anarchy and tyranny.

10. The Knight is merciful
Thus it is that the virtue of Justice would
restore Order in all things: order in one’s relationship with God, through devotion; order in
one’s relations with those in authority, through
filial piety; order with respect to one’s neighbor,
by means of great Charity, expressed above all
by mercy.
Like Saint Martin, the good-hearted Knight
cannot remain indifferent to misery. However, he should be particularly sensitive to moral
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decay, to those who are enslaved by sin. Solicitous of the conditions responsible for this slavery to sin, he will strive, with his brethren-atarms, to remedy the situation. This means that
any effort to improve legislation, the constitution, and occasionally the government, could
greatly benefit the salvation of souls.
This should not exempt the Knight from
making a personal effort to free souls from their
slavery to the devil. This slavery extends even
to the most cultured and wealthy people. By
all the means at his disposal, the Knight must
always be ready to drive out the enemy. Careful to act with prudence and according to the
gift of Counsel, he must also be confident and
courageous. His mercy should also be extended
to the humble in particular, to the weak and to
the forsaken. He will generously fight against
all the evils that afflict men, not only those who
are near and dear, but also strangers.
He should be ready to defend Catholics
everywhere, oppressed and persecuted by the
enemies of God and of His Church.
Meanwhile, during all these manifestations
of generosity, he must not forget, first and foremost, to faithfully carry out his duty of state,
which constitutes the Will of God for him. Specifically, he will take care to faithfully fulfill his
duties as a husband and father. In particular, he
will see to the proper education and Christian
instruction of his children. This is a particularly
difficult job today, given the current scandals
in our midst. He will be militantly in favor of
truly Catholic schools, devoid of the influence
and the spirit of liberalism, which is contrary
to the spirit of the Gospel.

11. The Knight is magnanimous
Lastly, because he practices the virtue of Justice and is strengthened by the virtue of Fortitude, the Knight is magnanimous. He is fully
aware of the dignity of his soul, baptized in the
Blood of Jesus Christ, while he tries hard to imitate the nobility of soul of his Lord and Master,
Who was magnanimous in all the circumstances of his Life, and particularly during the course
of His Sacred Passion. Jesus was never vulgar or
faint-hearted, even in the midst of the crowds
that surrounded Him. Therefore, amidst the
vicissitudes of daily life, the Knight must likewise keep his soul serene and brave. His conversation should always be worthy, out of respect
for his soul and his entire person, bearing in

ARCHBISHOP LEFEBVRE

mind that it is the temple of the Holy Ghost, and
that his guardian angel is also present.
Regardless of how strongly he may have his
heart set upon the virtues of Faith and Justice,
he should not neglect the virtues of Prudence,
Fortitude and Temperance.

12. The virtue of Prudence
Those holding positions of responsibility
must make a special effort to cultivate the virtue of Prudence and the gift of Counsel. They
should remind themselves that the three prudential acts of counsel, judgment and execution are necessary in order to act responsibly.
Relying on one’s own experience, on the wisdom of other people considered prudent, reaching a decision without undue delay, and finally
proceeding to the implementation of that decision, regardless of the difficulties encountered,
is proper to the exercise of authority. It is one
thing to consult other competent people, but
quite another to wish to associate all of one’s
subordinates with the exercise of power, as
though this authority also belonged to them.
It would be like agreeing with the liberals who
say that authority lies with the people.

13. The virtue of Fortitude
The virtue of Fortitude is particularly prized
by the Knight, since the incessant combat which
he has undertaken against the forces of evil
demand of him the two attributes fundamental to this virtue: patience, which sustains him
in difficulties, including failures, and courage,
which permits him to undertake hardy exploits,
without being presumptuous, but placing all his
confidence in He Who confers victory.

14. The virtue of Temperance
Temperance, which regulates the use of
worldly goods, helps the Knight to find in their
proper use and in all circumstances, that measure suitable to the Christian, to his duty of state
and to his responsibilities. However, he cannot
forget that the disorder resulting from Original Sin is revealed especially in concupiscence,
which is why he must take care not to enslave
himself to worldly goods and not allow himself
to be dominated by the “prudentia carnis,” but
rather by the “prudentia spiritus” (Rom. 8).

15. Conclusion
Thus vested with the seven Virtues and the
seven Gifts of the Holy Ghost as with an invincible armor, the Knight does not fear combat
with the powers of darkness, nor with the agents
of Satan in this world.
Drawing his spiritual vitality from the founts
of Penance, of prayer, of the Holy Eucharist,
of devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary and to
Saint Michael, and seeking true wisdom within
a deep Faith, enlightened by the entire history
of the Church, he remains vigilant and strong
in his attachment to Our Lord Jesus Christ and
to His One Holy Church.
Thus, he will discover that his membership
in the Order of Knighthood, his dubbing and
his personal commitment all strongly support
his spiritual life. He will find therein the courage to fulfill his duties and live his entire life as a
true comrade-in-arms of Our Lord, of She who
is as powerful as an army in full battle array
and of Saint Michael the Archangel, Prince of
the Heavenly Host.
He will have thus become heir to all the martyrs, to all the saints, whose noble lineage he
endeavors to continue, refusing to join those
who, under any senseless pretext, betray the
cause of the Church and deliver her into the
hands of her enemies.
Consequently, in his last hour here below,
he will be able to say with Saint Paul: “Cursum
consummavi, Fidem servavi, in reliquo reposita est
mihi corona justitiae quam reddit mihi Dominus in
die illo justus judex.”—“I have fought a good fight,
I have finished my course, I have kept the faith.
As to the rest, there is laid up for me a crown of
justice, which the Lord the just judge will render
to me in that day” (II Tim 4:7 & sq.).
La Croix-Valmer
Feast of the Epiphany of Our Lord
1970
✠ Marcel Lefebvre
Titular Archbishop of Synnada in Phrygia

49

LIVES OF THE SAINTS

Innovation
with Integrity
Pope St. Pius X Confronts
the Modern World
Dr. Louis Shwartz

A

liminal figure, and the first canonized
pope after a nearly 350-year hiatus,
Pius X clung tenaciously to sacred
traditions while stretching forth to
grapple with daunting modern problems. His
very motto: Instaurare omnia in Christo, “to
renew or restore all things in Christ,” indicates
a willingness to adapt time-honored teachings
to the impending challenges of a decadent new
secular era. During the eleven years of his pontificate (1903-14), Pius X focused on liturgical,
disciplinary, and educational reforms, relying
on sound doctrine and solid tradition as the
basis of his many new initiatives. He prioritized
Gregorian chant, supported frequent reception
of the Eucharist, standardized Church law,
encouraged renewed zeal and vigilance in education, catechesis, and priestly formation, and
endorsed traditional approaches to philosophy
and theology. In doing so, he developed an antidote—even a vaccine—against the modern errors
and callous worldliness which would infect the
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entire civilized world during the first half of the
twentieth century.
To the mind of Pius X, a renewal of Christian life in general would spring from a restoration of liturgical purity, a reality which could
only be accomplished by clearing away abuses
which had accumulated over the ages. During
the first year of his pontificate, Pius X issued
a motu proprio which insisted upon the restoration of Gregorian chant to its rightful place
of primacy in liturgical worship throughout the
Universal Church. He argued that, by drawing
on this ancient source of sanctity, the faithful
would flourish. The pope then stressed that,
thanks to recent zeal and study, the treasures
of Gregorian chant, faithfully preserved from
the vicissitudes of time in liturgical codices, had
been rediscovered and restored to their pristine dignity and integrity. Finally, he imposed
these ancient liturgical forms as the worldwide
standard of Catholic worship, thus intending to

LIVES OF THE SAINTS

counteract the profane and secular trends then
infecting sacred music.
Later in his pontificate, Pius X corrected
another liturgical abuse—that of denying to children access to the Eucharist—by recalling the
traditional norms laid down by Church law.
Citing the greatest ecumenical council of the
Middle Ages, the pope noted that all Catholics
who had attained the “age of discretion” were
bound to confess their sins and receive Holy
Communion at least once a year around Easter.
The pope argued, invoking many theologians
including St. Thomas, that since children could
generally distinguish between good and evil
around the age of seven, at that point they too
were bound to annual Confession and thus also
to Communion. By fixing a standard age for
reception of the Eucharist, the pope explicitly
sought to correct “deplorable abuses that have
crept in over the course of time.” Once again,
in the plan of Pius X, a renewal of Christian life
would spring from a reliance on tradition and
the correction of modern abuses.
Fixing an age for First Holy Communion
was simply part of Pius X’s grander plan for
standardizing and clarifying ecclesiastical discipline. Early in the second year of his pontificate,
the pope established a commission tasked with
organizing into one Code the sprawling mass
of canon law. He noted that, over the centuries,
some laws, which were once suited to the difficulties of their age, had grown obsolete; others had been rescinded or were unknown and
unapplied, hidden in obscurity within a growing heap of legislation; others still had become
less well suited to the common good of souls.
To resolve these infelicities, the pope imitated
the efforts of medieval canonists and the actions
of his papal predecessors; like them he would
bring together and up-to-date the law of the
Church. Consulting with select cardinals, he
himself would oversee a pontifical commission
tasked with addressing this pressing need for
legal clarity, uniformity, and utility. The 1917
Code of Canon law, promulgated by Benedict
XV, was the eventual result, a code which manifested to the Church and to the world the precise disciplinary norms guiding the Mystical
Body of Christ.
One of the most ancient and sacred traditions in canon law addressed the proper relations between spiritual and temporal authorities, between Church and State. Medieval

theories on this crucial topic guided Pius X
in his approach to the secular governments
of twentieth-century Europe. For example, he
refused to acknowledge as legitimate the despoliation of the Papal States by the new Republican government in Italy, and he openly and
vocally opposed legislation which sought to
curtail the liberty of the Italian Church. Similarly, when the French Third Republic passed
laws effectively confiscating all national church
property, placing it directly under secular control and proclaiming France devoid of any official religion, the pope denounced this injustice
and condemned, on principle, the complete
separation of Church and State. In an encyclical written to the French bishops in 1906, he
rehearsed traditional teachings on this subject,
ones echoed previously by his predecessors Pius
IX and Leo XIII:
That the State must be separated from the
Church is a thesis absolutely false, a most pernicious error. Based on the principle that the
State must not recognize any religious cult, it
is in the first place guilty of a great injustice
against God; for the Creator of man is also the
Founder of human societies, and He preserves
their existence just as He preserves that of
individuals. We owe Him, therefore, not only
a private devotion, but a public and social
worship.
Besides, this thesis is an obvious negation
of the supernatural order. It limits the action
of the State to the pursuit of material prosperity during this life only, which is but the
proximate object of political societies; and it
occupies itself in no way (on the plea that this
is foreign to it) with man’s ultimate end which
is eternal happiness after this short life shall
have run its course. But as the present order
of things is temporary and subordinated to
the acquisition of man’s supreme and absolute
blessedness, it follows that the civil power must
not obstruct its attainment, and must even aid
in promoting it.
The same thesis also upsets the order providentially established by God in the world,
which demands a harmonious agreement
between the two societies. Since both the civil
and religious authorities, although each in its
own proper way, rule over the same subjects,
they must have means of resolving disputes
which will inevitably arise. Remove agreement
between Church and State and the result will
be that from these disputes will spring the
seeds of most bitter conflicts, conflicts which
51

LIVES OF THE SAINTS

will obscure the truth and cause great distress
to souls.
Finally, this thesis inflicts great injury on
society itself, for it cannot either prosper or
last long when due place is not left for religion,
which is man’s supreme guide and sovereign
mistress for the sacred preservation of law and
order. Hence the Roman Pontiffs have never
ceased, as circumstances required, to refute
and condemn the doctrine of the separation of
Church and State.

In this powerful and lucid summary of traditional Catholic political theory, Pius X anticipated and perhaps even inspired the great work
of his successor, Pius XI, who 20 years later
would proclaim the social kingship of Jesus
Christ in the famous encyclical Quas Primas.
Involvement in high affairs of state did not
distract Pius X from the more humble but also
more essential matters of catechizing the youth
and forming seminarians. Indeed, the pope recognized that a renewal of the Church depended
on the sound education of the next generation
of Catholics. In an encyclical published in 1905
concerning the importance of religious instruction, the pope lamented that “it is hard to find
words to describe how profound is the darkness in which some Christians are engulfed and,
what is most deplorable of all, how tranquilly they repose there. They rarely give thought
to God, the Supreme Author and Ruler of all
things, or to the teachings of the faith of Christ.”
In consequence, Pius X urged his Italian bishops to invest heavily in catechesis. For instance,
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he commanded that on every Sunday and Holy
Day, one hour be set aside for the instruction of
the parish youth. The pope himself even developed a concise catechism for use in Italy which
later spread in translation to other nations.
Another practical initiative undertaken by
Pius X involved the reform of seminary life and
instruction. Again writing to the Italian bishops,
the pope acknowledged that he had received
“letters full of sadness and tears from several
of you, in which you deplore the spirit of insubordination and independence displayed here
and there among the clergy. Most assuredly, a
poisonous atmosphere corrupts men’s minds
to a great extent today . . . and what is even
more serious is the fact that such maxims are
being more or less secretly propagated among
youths preparing for the priesthood within the
enclosure of the seminaries.” To combat this
dire threat to priestly sanctity, Pius X insisted
that bishops exercise much greater vigilance
over their seminaries, expelling all who are
unworthy. He added that, in seminary studies,
the traditional courses of philosophy, theology,
and scriptural exegesis must hold pride of place.
Yet in the pope’s broader plan, this focus on
obedience and respect for traditional teachings
would extend far beyond the walls of Catholic
seminaries.
Perhaps the greatest combat undertaken by
St. Pius X involved the suppression of a whole
network of heresies conveniently labelled “modernism.” In his 1907 encyclical Pascendi Dominici Gregis, the pope identified the defining fea-

LIVES OF THE SAINTS

ture of modernism: an emphasis on subjective
religious experience leading to a rejection both
of objective truth and of an integral vision of
reality. To counteract this proud modern subjectivism which submits even the most sacred
realities to the private judgment of the individual, Pius X encouraged the study of traditional
scholastic philosophy and theology, particularly the realism and dogmatic precision found in
the medieval writings of St. Thomas Aquinas.
However, three years after the publication
of Pascendi, the pope recognized that, in general, the bishops of the world had not taken his
warnings about modernism very seriously. He
even complained that “this plague of modernism has spread through those parts of the Lord’s
field whence we expected to reap more abundant fruit,” that is, among the very households
and dioceses of the world’s Catholic bishops.
Therefore, in order to lend force to his condemnation, Pius X demanded that, in addition to the
traditional profession of faith, every ecclesiastical superior, including all priests and seminary
professors, take an anti-modernist oath before
assuming their duties of office, “lest the integrity of divine revelation suffer any loss.” This
oath included an explicit rejection of religious
subjectivism:
I hold with certainty and sincerely confess
that faith is not a blind sentiment of religion
welling up from the depths of the subconscious
under the impulse of the heart and the motion
of a will trained to morality; but faith is a genuine assent of the intellect to truth received by

hearing from an external source. By this assent,
because of the authority of the supremely
truthful God, we believe to be true that which
has been revealed and attested to by a personal
God, our Creator and Lord.

The pope thus insisted that divine revelation—unimpaired and uncompromised, in its
integral fullness as the unerring Word of God,
received from above and passed on through
sacred Tradition—is the only sure foundation
from which to attempt an authentic renewal or
restoration of Catholic life amidst the intellectual and spiritual confusion of the modern era.
Pius X’s emphasis on the sacred Liturgy,
Gregorian Chant, the Mass, and the Eucharist;
on clerical discipline, seminaries, and priestly
formation; on the social reign of Jesus Christ; on
education, doctrinal integrity, and Tradition—
are these not also the hallmarks of Archbishop Lefebvre’s vision for his own work? Indeed,
St. Pius X provided the good archbishop with
a clear plan for the great task of restoring all
things in Christ, of renewing and reinvigorating
the Church in a modern world where, according
to the words of St. Matthew’s Gospel, “iniquity
abounds and the charity of many grows cold.”
In this way, the first saint-pope of modern times
prophetically laid out the very path which leads
to a resolution of the crisis in the Church, a path
which Archbishop Lefebvre’s spiritual children
continue to follow with confidence.

53

THEOLOGICAL STUDIES

Karl Rahner:

The Greatest Modernist of All Time
Fr. Dominique Bourmaud

T

he figure of Karl Rahner, highly
praised by some, and surrounded by
secrecy and religious mystique by others, has marked the 20th century. In
Germany, he was given the title novus praeceptor Germaniae and Cardinal Frings of Cologne
hailed him the greatest theologian of the century. In his wake, every theologian of the Rhineland, whether mitred or not, echoed the Jesuit’s chorus of praise. Numerous talents identify
themselves with this singular individual. And
since he is recognized by all, friends and enemies alike, as the most influential theologian,
we propose to show that Karl Rahner, far from
being the greatest theologian of the twentieth
century, was in actual fact the greatest modernist of the modernist century, and of all time.
To achieve this, following a brief sketch of his
intellectual career, we will see what properly
defines a modernist theologian and then apply
this to our subject.

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Rahner’s life and works
Karl Rahner, born in Fribourg, Breisgau in
Germany, entered the Jesuit order at an early
age, like his brother Hugo, and studied theology in Holland before returning to Fribourg to
pursue philosophy under Heidegger and to prepare for a doctorate in philosophy and theology.
His philosophical thesis, Geist in Welt (Spirit in
the World), was quite comprehensive. Rejected
by his supervisor but nonetheless published in
1939, it proposed to be an existentialist interpretation of Thomist thought. It is Thomism,
but revised and modified by Kant, Heidegger
and Maréchal. From then on, the greater part
of his work revolved around the Department
for Dogmatic Theology in Innsbruck, Austria.
It was from there that he wrote the majority
of his books and articles. He also directed the
Latin edition of the Denzinger (compendium of
the Church’s dogmatic texts) from 1960 to 1965.
He published major works, disseminating his
new theology in all German-speaking univer-

THEOLOGICAL STUDIES

sities, including: Lexikon für Theologie und Kirche
(Dictionary of Theology and the Church), and
Quaestiones disputatae et Schriften zur Theologie,
which runs to 20 volumes.
In spite of the Roman mistrust which threatened his writings until the opening of the Council, due in particular to questions concerning
concelebration (1949), virginal maternity (1960)
and the married diaconate (1961), Cardinal
Köning of Vienna decided to take Rahner under
his wing and make him his theological expert
at the Second Vatican Council. This was the
moment that gave rise to his worldly fame. His
influence at the Council dominated as soon as
the European Alliance took over the leadership
of the Council. He was considered such a master
of thought in the German-speaking countries
and on the banks of the Rhine that everyone
was bowing down to his every wish. The attitude became: “Magister dixit, causa finita.” His
placet and non placet carried a lot of weight in the
burning debates: the question of the diaconate,
of the liturgy, of the sources of Revelation, of
the refusal of the mediation of the Blessed Virgin, of religious freedom, of ecumenism, not to
mention collegiality, which Rahner defined as
the decapitation of the papacy and the democratization of the Church. And this influence
was to be consolidated and perpetuated by the
Concilium Review—the bulletin of avant-garde theology—which he co-directed at the time
alongside Schillebeeckx, Vorgrimler, Metz,
Lehmann, Küng, and Ratzinger, his friends and
students. Appointed a member of the International Theological Commission from its foundation in Rome (1969-1974), he was to become the
apostle of ecumenism and of relations between
Christians and Marxists. Called back to God in
1984, he left in his wake some 4000 works that
confirm him as the most prolific and original
theologian of all times.

What is a modernist theologian?
Modernism, which was reviled in the time
of St. Pius X, was defined by the Pope saint as
the collective sewer of all heresies and the fruit
of Kantism which attacks all the branches, near
and far, of the Magisterium of the Church: faith,
dogma, philosophy, apologetics, Holy Scripture, history. In the Pope’s judgment, therefore,
it is indeed a very particular heresy. The “traditional” heresies were in fact limited to a few
dogmas and, around this clearly circumscribed

poison, they intended to preserve the whole corpus of doctrine on which they were based.
The “modernist” heresy is unique. It is a
complete apostasy that ignores the entire body
of dogmatic and moral doctrine, for it is the
very concepts of religion, faith and dogma
that are radically distorted, since God and his
immutable truth are rejected outright. Modern
man no longer accepts a faith imposed upon
him from the outside by a transcendent God. To
this rejection of all dogma is added the inseparable correlative of the rejection of all revelation
which is external to man. God, in the person of
the Word made flesh, could not reveal himself,
speak and act like any other man: the historical
Christ differs completely from the Christ of the
Faith as narrated in the Gospels. At the root of
all this doctrinal and scriptural agnosticism is
a radical skepticism which denies that things
exist, that they have a nature and that our intelligence can know them. It is this refusal on three
levels, philosophical, scriptural and dogmatic,
that constitutes modernism. Modernism, condemned by St. Pius X and Pius XII, is defined
as ontology without being, revelation without
the historical Christ and theology without God.
It is really the vertigo of emptiness, intellectual
and moral nirvana.
Any heresy must be able to seduce its followers with more tempting propositions than
pure and simple truth. If Luther’s free will could
exert a certain appeal of freedom and independence over the masses, the modernist void on
the other hand, presents none. The nakedness of
modernist error must therefore be adorned with
false ornaments in order to become attractive
and act under the guise of the Church. That is
why modernists are, by definition, professional impersonators. They are sheep transformed
into wolves who pretend to convert the Church
to their nihilistic ideas, so that the good modernist is an apostate and a traitor. At the level of
ideas, these adornments are the craze of immanentism which makes everything come out of
man, who becomes the center of the world.
They are also the new interest in evolution,
which makes everything come out of nothing
and makes it evolve into everything. Finally,
there is the desire to accommodate faith and
truth in the world in order to obtain its salvation, as if truth, and not the world, were to be
sacrificed for the salvation of man.

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THEOLOGICAL STUDIES

Rahner, prince of the Modernists
Philosophy teaches us that there is always a
princeps analogatum of some kind. The modernist genre must also have its princeps, its first and
its prince who exhausts all its possibilities. It is
Rahner who holds this place, since he perfectly
fulfils the definition of it.
Rahner’s philosophy is meant to be eclectic.
This is not without drawbacks, especially when
it is a question of amalgamating opposites such
as Thomistic truth based on reality and Kantian
truth based on the thinking subject: cogito-volo-est – I want, therefore I think, therefore everything exists. The philosophy of common sense
thinks being because beings are. Since Kant,
modern thinking thinks its thinking, and then
beings are. Under the pretext of interpreting
Saint Thomas, Rahner undertakes to introduce
into Thomism the following idealistic principles: identity between the intelligent, the intelligence and the being; unity of sensibility and
intelligence; identity between the object and the
subject. According to him, the truth of existing
beings is not specified in a determined structure, but resides in the uninterrupted becoming
of historical consciousness, in accordance with
existential factors at work in time. This is the
philosophical basis of the dogmatic historicism
of the modernists, according to which truth varies with time and morals.
For our protagonist, Revelation is also a
purely human and internal affair:
“I have experienced God, the nameless one,
the unfathomable, the silent God, and yet close,
he turned to me in the Trinity. . . God himself; it
is God in himself that I have experienced, and
not human words about him. . . (an experience
which generates such a) certainty of the Faith
that, if Holy Scripture did not exist, I would
still remain unshakeable.” As a good pupil of
Heidegger, the immanentist prison renders him
incapable of speaking of a revelation that is not
revelation by and for the thinking subject. “If
one wishes to speak of God, one must speak
of man. When man surpasses himself and the
world, he encounters transcendence: God. Naturally, the first experience of God. . . can only
be thought of as an experience of God given
above all and before all with the transcendence
of man, as the horizon of this transcendence.
That is to say, man as man is oriented towards
God. Orientation towards God is part of his
being. . . ‘Transcendence’ is given at the same
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The Angelus u March - April 2022

time as human nature. . . It is not grafted onto
nature, as the neo-scholastic says, but it is its
basis, its foundation.” When one reads this, it is
not surprising that Rahnerian philosophy is for
some the key to a third Copernican revolution,
where human subjectivity is the foundation of
the revelation of being and of divine revelation
in general.
Upon such irrational and unscriptural foundations, what theology will he be able to articulate? It will be anthropological theology, which will
also circle around man, the navel of the world
and, why not, the navel of God! It is above all
dependent on Hegel. In the latter, the Being
within oneself needs the Being outside oneself
in order to become the Being for oneself. The
Infinite needs the finite in order to become
the conscious Infinite. This conscious infinite
is the necessary consequence of the finite that
becomes the infinite, which defines God as the
Being dependent on man and man as the being
who makes himself God. No wonder the Hegelian system has been defined as the most logical and implacable pantheism ever conceived.
Rahner was to establish the Hegelian system
as a theological system. He focused his study
on human nature, the obligatory meeting point
between God and matter, for man is the link
between the created and the uncreated, matter
and spirit. It is the nature in which the Word
was annihilated and begotten, and it is the
same human nature which, in men, is open to
the divine. We are taught that man shares the
essence of the Word, that it is defined as the
capacity to become the Word and the exteriorization of God. In fact, the Rahnerian man
presents himself as the configuration, the photographic negative of God. In Rahner’s case
no more than in Teilhard’s, there is no solution
of continuity between the links of this Hegelo-Rahnerian chain that goes from God to the
non-God (man-world) to return to the superGod (conscious God).
Our theologian of man completes the work
begun by finally identifying God and man. It is
that man is the abbreviation and the number of
God, and that God has annihilated himself to
the point of becoming a non-God, that is to say,
man. “If God himself is man and has been so
from all eternity; if for this reason all theology
is eternally anthropology, if man is forbidden
to hold himself for little, for then he would hold
God for little, if this God continues to be the

THEOLOGICAL STUDIES

Karl Rahner.

ineffable mystery, then man is from all eternity
the mystery of God expressed, who participates
from all eternity in the mystery of his foundation. This reality proper to God Himself, which
He cannot abandon as outdated, must be for
us as our true salvation, beyond the difference
between God and the creature.”
Rahnerian theology has an obvious apologetic purpose: God is good, therefore he wants
to save all men, therefore he saves all men: Outside the Church, salvation! His theology identifies the unbeliever with the believer since, by
nature, every man is an answer to the question
of God, and he feels God on the horizon of his
conscience, “He who, therefore (even if he is
far from Revelation and the Church) accepts
his existence, and thus his humanity. . . he says
yes to Christ, even though he does not know
it.” In the process, it is the very concept of the
visible Church—the Ghetto Church—that falls
under the blows of the democratic theology of
the automatic salvation of man as a pure man.
Out of the ashes of the Vatican Church will
rise the pantheon of the modern ecumenical
Church, which joyfully blends opposites, letting
each one live in its own mellow stratosphere, in
a climate of cordial understanding, in the perfect acceptance of differences, and in the refus-

al of a realistic, unchanging and scandalously
exclusive revelation. Rahner’s religion is based
on man and remains his private property. The
supernatural being thus erased, one can only
identify nature and supernatural: man is naturally supernatural; he is called to grace and
glory by his own strength.
In addition to his cerebral fantasies in a
closed vase, there is a dubious morality in
which our author acts as a double man. It is
obvious that, as early as Geist in Welt, Rahner
was warned by his mentor to remain faithful
to St. Thomas or to abandon any serious philosophical or theological effort. It could only
have been with full knowledge of the facts that
Rahner systematically used St. Thomas to
forge viscerally anti-Thomistic and anti-realistic theses. Far from being an impetuous Teilhard who does not know how to quit while he
is ahead, Rahner knew how to imitate perfectly
his French colleague Henri de Lubac who knew
how to act under cover while relentlessly pursuing the destruction of perennial philosophy
and Thomistic theology. He could testify to his
satisfaction in 1981 of “having contributed to
the ousting of the neo-scolasticism of the 19th
and early 20th centuries,” but this presupposed
a conscious contempt for “the monolithism of
the Magi,” that is to say the Magisterium of all
time. Lehmann, a disciple of Rahner, explained
that his thought was “a concealed revolt against
a traditional and outdated philosophy and theology.” Rahner had the fine idea of keeping the
classical terms, thus giving the illusion of preserving their content, a task made all the easier
by the fact that he had to do so in the first place.
When the Holy Office threatened to censor him
and all his works, Rahner wrote to his friend
Vorgrimler: “I have already declared that in this
case I will write nothing more (and I thought:
then my name will be Vorgrimler, Metz, Darlapp). I have already warned König, Döpfner,
Volk and Höfer in a long letter.” Around him,
powerful trump cards stood guard and prevented the muzzling of the spokesman of the new
theology, who was going to make the sunshine
and the rain on the future German-speaking
Council Fathers and, from there, take the reins
of the Council. In the same way, when it was
known that the new Abelard had his Heloise in
the person of Louise Rinser from the Council,
the Jesuits did everything possible to hide the
affair that risked compromising the ascendancy
57

THEOLOGICAL STUDIES

of his revolutionary theology which served as
the locomotive for the wagon of the conciliar
Church.

Conclusion : Rahner,
paragon of Modernism
It seems natural to conclude our study with
an objective assessment of the scope of Rahnerian theology. Whilst Rahner did not have the
international influence of a Loisy during the
modernist crisis, nor the charisma of a Teilhard
and his reputation as a scientist and poet, or the
consummate prudence of a Lubac in protecting
his interests, he satisfied perfectly the definition
of a modernist. On this point in fact, he greatly
surpassed his predecessors, for reasons which
are multiple.
As for its achievements, this new Rahnerian
theology reaches the perfection of the genre by
its camouflage under orthodox and Thomistic
appearances, while the principles and conclusions are diametrically opposed to faith and
Thomism. There is not a single Trinitarian heresy that has not been endorsed by Rahner, not to
mention his lapsus linguae in speaking of “Christian polytheism.” There is no Thomistic thesis
that has not been vitiated by his truth and his
religion born of pure conscience. There is no
vision of creation and of the salvation of man
that has not passed under the wheels of the bulldozer that swallows God from man, the supernatural from nature and Jesus Christ from man
pure and simple, to end up with a Hegelian-type
pantheism. It seems that the new Rahner-style
theology is based on the sacred Gnostic tripod
dear to Hegel: the devaluation of the world, the
mystical flight to the beyond and the means of
this flight, Gnosis or esoteric knowledge. Now,
such an apotheosis of the Rahnerian cerebral
elucubrations alone constitutes the Omega
point of modernism.
As for the means used to reach the final
goal, it must be said that Rahner far surpasses his predecessors. Until the neo-modernism
of the interwar period, the heretics still being
hunted down had not been able to clearly state
their guiding principles. The new theology
was in vogue with its sails unfurled. Its principles are the cogito-volo-est of the existentialists
who come to deny the essences of things, and
Hegel’s dialectical principle according to which
the infinite is poured into the finite to become
the conscious infinite. These principles have
58

The Angelus u March - April 2022

nothing of the acidic aspect of pure Kantian
criticism nor of the vertiginous evolutionism of
Bergson and Loisy.
Not only are the Rahnerian principles in
full view, but they take on an attractive richness and fullness thanks to this theology of pure
consciousness. It is knowledge walled up within oneself and closed to beings. It is the most
complete immanentism which, by its natural
inclination, leads straight to narcissism and selfishness. This point of view is the exact opposite
of realism open to being. And these principles
command all intellectual effort according to
an implacable logic worthy of Hegel. They are
valid both for theology and for philosophy, so
that, leaning on a Kantian philosophy of consciousness, drawn from the Heideggerian revelation, Rahner’s Hegelian theology is defined as
a theology of consciousness without God, that is
to say, properly atheistic. This is why, with the
combination of Kant-Hegel-Heidegger-Rahner,
it seems that neo-modernism reaches the perfection of its genre. We will no doubt be able to
clarify it—our authors’ language is as obscure as
one could wish—it will be difficult to improve
it. In fact, for forty years now, thinking heads
have been simply warming up dishes prepared
with Rahner sauce.
But paradoxically, on this negative aspect of
man closed in on himself, forging his own truth,
is also grafted a broad-mindedness towards all
systems of thought. One is sensitive to the most
contradictory creations. Within the pantheon
that is the Universal Synarchical Church, there
is a niche for all gods, even for Jesus Christ. In
the Rahnerian theology of consciousness, in the
religion of man by man and for man, all find a
refuge there, excepting no creed or Revelation,
since all individuals are Christians who ignore
each other. Nowhere has modernism succeeded
in offering a synthesis that is both more logical
with its basic principles and more advantageous
for all.
That is why it seems that our thesis has strong
points of support. Rahner represents the Omega
point of modernism. Insofar as such a theology
represents the most perfect depravity of divine
wisdom, to call it by its name, it should be called
human folly to the highest degree.

SCRIPTURAL STUDIES

Meditations
n on
St. John’s Gospel
Chapter Twelve
Pater Inutilis

W

e now come to the last week of
Our Lord’s life before His death
and resurrection. We come, therefore, to subject matter common to
all four Gospels. Hitherto, St. John’s gospel has
treated of very different things than those of the
Synoptics: in common there have been only the
first multiplication of loaves and Jesus’ walking
on the waters following that (6:1-21). These St.
John also wrote of, we noted, because of their
relationship with the discourse on the “Bread
of Life,” as in the rest of that chapter. But now
we come, somewhat, to common ground: 12:1-8
is the anointing at Bethany, and 12:12-16 is the
triumphal entry into Jerusalem. Until Gethsemani and what follows, there will again be in
common only the foretelling of Peter’s denial
(13:36-38). St. John, obviously, writing over a
generation after the other evangelists, presumes
their teaching to be well known. He will supply
things they have omitted, particularly with an
eye to his purpose: “These are written that you

may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of
God” (20:31).
Let us note too that the Synoptic Gospels
treat primarily of Jesus’ mission in Galilee. The
only Passover they write of is Jesus’ last, when
He went up to Jerusalem to be delivered to the
Gentiles, to be mocked, and scourged, and spat
upon; and after that, to be put to death.1 Thanks
to the Fourth Gospel, we know that Our Lord’s
public life did not last only one year, with only
one final journey to Jerusalem. St. John speaks
explicitly of three Passovers during the public
life: 2:13; 6:4; 13,1. 2 It is Our Lord’s teaching in
the Holy City that takes up a major part of his
Gospel: 2:13-3:21, 5, 7:10-10:39, and 12-17. St.
John is more particular also when it comes to
chronology. The others, and especially St. Matthew, join Our Lord’s sayings and doings one
to another by theme, more so than by order in
time. And so, for example, this second anointing by St. Mary Magdalene: St. Matthew talks
of it after the solemn entrance into Jerusalem
59

SCRIPTURAL STUDIES

and several days’ preaching there, linking it to
Judas’ pact with the chief priests to deliver Jesus
(Mt. 26: 14-16), as a consequence to Judas’ indignation at the “waste,” as he called it, of the precious ointment (Mt. 26:8). St. John, though, is
careful to point out that it took place “six days
before the Pasch” (12:1), and on the eve of entering the City (12:12). It is his too to indicate Judas
as the chief murmurer against Mary.
From gospel to gospel there must be difference in details: different things strike different
witnesses or writers. Sts. Matthew and Mark
speak of Mary’s pouring the precious ointment
on Jesus’ head: she has been fully pardoned (Lk.
7:47-50) as is now a beloved friend (11:5). For his
part, St. John says she poured it upon His feet,
wiping them with her hair (12:3). She did both.
It had so pleased Jesus then, and herself,
that she wants hereby gratefully to please Him
again. Back then, it was Simon the Pharisee
who took umbrage; now it is Judas (12:4). On
each occasion, she does not speak in her own
defense: Jesus does. He adds delicately that this
accomplishes already her pious desire to anoint
Him again at His burial—which later she will
not be able to do (12:7; 20:1).
For some, Jesus is not the “star attraction”
at this feast: it is Lazarus, who was dead and
lives (12:9). He is a walking miracle, convincing proof of Christ’s mission (12:11). So what
do Our Lord’s enemies consider? They want to
kill not only Jesus (11:52) but also Lazarus. For
what semblance of crime? None, save the fact
that his being alive promotes and publishes the
truth that Jesus Christ comes “in the name of
the Lord,” as they sing on the next day. Is He not
the one who “called Lazarus out of the grave”
(12:17)? And so, is He not the prophesied meek
“king,” who “cometh, sitting on an ass’s colt”
(12:15)? He is, and they loudly hail Him “the
king of Israel” (vs. 13). The Pharisees cannot
abide this (12:19). They are blind. “And whereas he had done so many miracles before them,
they believed not in him” (12:37). Even those of
them who do believe this evidence would not
say so, not to be excommunicated (12:42), “for
they loved the glory of men more than the glory
of God” (12:43). This blindness Isaias again had
prophesied (12:38-41).
The people at large also must now see and
believe; there is not much time left to choose.
60

The Angelus u March - April 2022

“Yet a little while, the light is among you. Walk,
whilst you have the light. . . Whilst you have
the light, believe in the light” (12:35). This light
is, of course, Jesus Himself: “I am come a light
into the world” (12:46). This light will soon pass
from Israel to the Gentiles. Already they gingerly approach, through Philip, “Sir, we would see
Jesus” (12:21). “I came,” says Jesus, “to save the
world” (12:47)3. This will be the fruit of His passion and death. “Unless the grain of wheat falling into the ground die, itself remaineth alone.
But if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit” (12:24).
A poetic prophecy of His imminent passion and
death. He will be dead before the week is out.
He must be crucified. “I, if I be lifted up from
the earth, will draw all things to myself. (Now
this he said, signifying what death he should
die)” (12:32). Knowing its fruitfulness does not
make it any less dauntingly painful. “Now is
my soul troubled. . . Father, save me from this
hour” (12:27). But it is the Father’s glory that is
supreme for His Son. “Father, glorify thy name”
(12:28); “I know that his commandment is life
everlasting” (12:50).
He who would be Christ’s disciple, who
would minister unto Him, must follow Him
(12:26) in this spirit and along this way. “He
that hateth his life in this world, keepeth it unto
life eternal” (12:25).

Endnotes
1

E.g., Mt. 16:21; Mk. 10:33f; Lk. 18:31-33.

2

Some say 5:1 refers also to another Pasch: so, a public life of
3 years and some, rather than 2 years and some. (Be that as
it may, we commonly speak of the “3 years of public life”).

3

If He says “I came not to judge the world” (12:47), though He
will (5:22), it is because we must distinguish two comings (e.g.
Heb. 9:26-28): the first, in a body subject to suffering, to be a
victim for sin, a time of mercy and merit (e.g. Mt. 20:28); the
second, with an eternally glorified body, to reign in power, a
time of justice and reward (e.g. Mt. 16:27).

QUESTIONS & ANSWERS

Fr. Juan Carlos Iscara, SSPX

The spiritual authors
encourage us to acts of
devotion, but what is
“devotion” exactly?
In a strict theological sense, devotion consists in the ready giving of oneself with fervor to the things that pertain to the service of
God. Therefore, the “devout” are those who are
always available for everything that refers to the
worship or service of God.
Devotion is an act of the virtue of religion,
although it also comes from the virtue of charity. The two virtues influence one another: charity causes devotion, while love makes us ready
to serve the one we love; and, in turn, devotion
increases love, because friendship is preserved

and increased by the services rendered to the
friend.
St. Thomas warns that devotion, as it is an
act of religion, refers properly to God, not to His
creatures. Hence, the devotion to the saints—
and even the devotion to Our Lady—must end
in God through them. In the saints we venerate what they have of God, that is, we venerate
God in them.
The extrinsic and main cause of devotion
is God, who calls those He wants and lights in
their souls the fire of devotion. But the intrinsic
cause, on our part, is the meditation or contemplation of divine goodness and divine benefits,
together with the consideration of our misery.
Thus, it excludes presumption and leads us to
submit totally to God, from whom help and
remedy will come to us. Its main effect is to fill
the soul with spiritual joy, although sometimes
it can accidentally cause a beneficial sadness,
61

QUESTIONS & ANSWERS

either because we do not fully possess God or
because of the consideration of our own defects,
which prevent us from giving ourselves totally
to Him.
The fervor or readiness of the will consists
first and foremost in the forceful determination
of the will to remain faithfully consecrated to
the service of God, in spite of frequent and painful aridity and spiritual trials. This fervor of the
will constitutes, at the same time, the firm foundation on which the whole practice of devotion
rests and the cause of all its merit before God.
Without it, a purely sensible devotion, a “feeling,” has no consistency or true utility.
The truly devout soul remains calm and
unwavering in the service of God through all
the variations of sense impressions. In the midst
of desolations and the absence of any consolation, true devotion continues to sustain the soul
in the service of God. However, sensible consolations should not be despised, when God gives
them, for they constitute a powerful stimulus to
spiritual activity in the service of God. But we
must not inordinately cling to them—as if seeking the consolations of God instead of the God
of consolations.
This fervor of devotion, instead of being
a simple transitory and passing act, can and
must become a habitual disposition, existing
and influencing the practice of all acts of divine
worship. Nourished by a generous and constant
charity and strengthened by the gifts of the
Holy Ghost, particularly those of piety, understanding, science and wisdom, this habitual disposition is further aided by an incessant, faithful
fulfillment of the duties of one’s own state of life.
To be perfect, this habitual devotion must
extend itself not only to religious acts prescribed
by divine or ecclesiastical precepts, but also to
everything that appears clearly to one’s own
conscience as more pleasing to God.

62

The Angelus u March - April 2022

What is the “spirit of
penance” that we must
practice during Lent and, in
fact, throughout our whole
life?
The “spirit of penance” is the habitual contrition of the soul, expressed by the continual
repetition of acts of repentance, which impregnate our whole lives.
“If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us” (I Jn. 1:8). Even
when we have been forgiven, nothing prevents
us from continually saying to God: “Although
everything is forgiven, I will gratefully keep
repeating that I regret having offended Thee
and that I want to do whatever I can to remedy
that wrong.”
For souls that aspire to perfection, this spirit
of penance is necessary and is one of the most
excellent means to quickly ascend to the greatest holiness.
The spirit of penance helps us to avoid lukewarmness and keeps us humble and generous,
as compunction and lukewarmness cannot
coexist in the soul.
It is the source and origin of a lively charity towards God and towards one’s neighbor.
Towards God, because habitual perfect contrition is one of the purest and most delicate
acts prompted by supernatural charity, and, by
erasing our faults, it makes us more pleasing to
God. Towards our neighbor, because it makes
us merciful in our judgments and our conduct
with others, as he who knows himself well cannot despise his brethren.
It is also a sure bulwark against temptations.
Continuous vigilance over our own conduct,
persevering prayer, the spirit of humility, aversion to sin, and the sincere and loving search for
God are the means of sanctification provided
by the spirit of compunction. Thus, temptation
always finds the soul armed and alert and disposed to reject sin.
How can we acquire this spirit of penance?
First of all, by humbly asking God: “Almighty
and merciful God, who made a spring of living water
spring from the stone for the thirsty people; draw from

QUESTIONS & ANSWERS

our hard hearts tears of repentance, so that we may
cry for our sins and thus deserve forgiveness through
your mercy” (Prayer to ask for the gift of tears,
from the Roman Missal).
We must also consider with sincerity and
courage the abyss of our wickedness. Even the
smallest sin is an enormous evil if we consider it in the light of Truth and in contrast to the
immense Goodness of God towards us. Let us
remember the example of the saints.

We must remember how much our soul has
cost Christ. “I have not loved you in a laughing
way,” Our Lord said one day to St. Angela of
Foligno. Calvary, the bloodied Body of Christ,
His pierced hands and feet, the crown of thorns,
the spittle on His divine face and His ignominious death on the Cross, should remind us how
seriously God takes sin and to what extent He
has loved us.

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T he
L ast
Word

Fr. David Sherry
District Superior of Canada

Dear Reader,
In 2015, the veteran broadcaster Gay Byrne,
now retired from his many years of corrupting
Irish life via The Late Late Show, recorded an
episode of his new programme, The Meaning of
Life. His guest was Sir Stephen Fry, actor and
atheist. What would he say, Byrne asked, if after
death he discovered that he was wrong and that
there was indeed a God? Fry grew angry: “I
would say ‘How dare you! How dare you create
a world in which there is such misery that is not
our fault. It’s not right. It’s utterly, utterly evil.
Why should I respect a capricious, mean-minded, stupid God who creates a world which is so
full of injustice and pain?’ That’s what I’d say.”
That’s what he said. But tell me, Stephen,
why the anger? How can you be angry with
someone who doesn’t exist?
Surely you can’t blame a non-person for
something? Ever been angry with the yeti? The
tooth fairy perhaps? I have an idea. Could it be,
could it possibly be that it’s not that God does
not exist, but that you do not want him to exist?
The interview continued. Byrne: “And you
think you’re going to get in?” Fry: “No, but I
wouldn’t want to. I wouldn’t want to get in on
his terms.” He calms down and smiles. “Now if
it was Pluto, Hades and the twelve Greek gods,
then I would have more truck with it, because
at least they didn’t pretend not to be human.”

An atheist on the western front in 1918 writes
this about the same God who apparently didn’t
exist.
O universal strength, I know it well,
It is but froth of folly to rebel;
For thou art Lord and hast the keys of Hell.
Yet I will not bow down to thee nor love thee,
For looking in my own heart I can prove thee,
And know this frail, bruised being is above thee.

Self-sufficiency above God. Pride. “I will not
serve a God who doesn’t do things my way.”
Hatred of subsistent Good. Sin brought to its
logical and diabolical conclusion. Hell.
If the world is not to continue to suffer the
consequences of the hatred of God, and the
deepest hell on earth, we must convert. Dependence on God. Faith. True Humility. Charity.
The way? Penance. Christ and His Blessed
Mother.
Fr. David Sherry

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