Last year, when we interviewed Raymond Cardinal Burke (see here) he confirmed Catholics can no longer look towards Rome -- towards Pope Francis -- for guidance on critical issues. The good Cardinal said, instead, to turn to the catechism and tradition.
With that sage advice in mind, we bring you this guest Op-Ed, written by the highly-esteemed John Rao who, among numerous other things, was Rorate Caeli's first-ever credentialed Conclave correspondent in 2013:
A Not So Surprising Surprise of the Holy Spirit:
Today we were treated to yet another
of Pope Francis’ unending warnings against closure to the divine surprises of
the Holy Spirit. These warnings are themselves no surprise whatsoever. They are
nothing other than a tiresome rehash of arguments that have repeatedly been
offered by the idolaters of change since the time of the Abbé de Lamennais
(1782-1854). In particular, they are a rehash of arguments popularized in Latin
America after the Second World War by a number of men with close ties to the
school of Personalism represented by people like Emmanuel Mounier (1905-1950).
Mounier and Company were propagandists
for the need for Catholics to abandon their ties to fixed doctrines and
practices and open themselves up instead to the “living” and “vibrant” influences
of the powerful cultural forces and movements demonstrating such astonishing
vigor in the secular and generally non-Christian world; i.e., to abandon the
effort to transform all things in Christ and seek to transform Christianity by
reference to all things fallen instead.
This form of Personalism deeply
admired—and still admires---strength and the strong man. It is in awe of
willfulness and the need to submit to it as though it were an expression of the
wishes of the Holy Spirit While not racist in character, it nevertheless was very
much impressed by Fascism, which it thought that its own intellectual strong
men could guide to a happy goal (hence the need for base communities to train
unenlightened Catholics). The school set to up in Uriage in Vichy France to
prepare officials for leadership in the New Order such men saw coming into
being in the wake of the Nazi victory in 1940 was a main center for spreading
the kind of thought Pope Francis repeats regularly.
Shaking with rage over his latest statements,
convinced that the one not so surprising surprise of the Holy Spirit in our day
is the need to shut our ears tightly to
the nonsense coming out of Rome today, and yet having no time at the moment to
write a new article on this subject, I beg readers of Rorate to find a piece
that I wrote some ago for the Latin Mass
Magazine on this subject -- The Bad Seed: The Liberal-Fascist Embrace, which can be found in toto by clicking here -- to understand where the tyrannical Pope’s
usurpation of the authority of the Holy Spirit comes from. I cite one small
segment of that article below. The names mentioned are leaders and teachers at
Uriage; the citations themselves---which, once again, can be found in the
article in question---come from a number of valuable works on the Personalist
menace, including some from Personalists themselves.
Transformation of the world,
according to the doctrine taught at Uriage, was dependent upon the creation of
“persons” as opposed to “individuals.” Allow me briefly to remind readers of my
last article that “persons” were defined as men who responded to the call of
“natural values” which pressed them to surpass in community life their narrow
individual desires. One knew that he was dealing with a community dedicated to
a natural value constructing true persons whenever he saw that it possessed a
discernible “mystique,” and that it led to creative, self-sacrificing activity.
One day, the “convergence” of all such mystiques would result in the
establishment of a community of communities producing, in effect,
Super-persons, “the greatest transformation to which humanity has ever
submitted.” The nightmare of the twentieth century was actually “the bloody
birth of a true collective being of men,” mysterious indeed, but providential
and eminently Catholic (Ibid., p. 178).
Catholicism’s role in this
“convergence” was that of giving witness to the supernatural significance of
every natural value, reflected in the mystiques of the active communities of
self-sacrificing persons it saw around it, and helping each of them to come to
its own innate perfection. It must not sit in judgment of them, because
Catholicism itself could not fully know what it really was until everything
natural had matured and converged. Catholicism was part of a multifaceted
pilgrimage to God, linked together by intuition and action, whose destination
was unclear. What was important at the moment was encouraging deeply willed
commitment to self-sacrifice of all sorts.
Hence Uriage’s stunning
ecumenism, testified to in a myriad of ways. Beginning with Segonzac’s ability
“to form friendly relations, on the spiritual plane, with Protestants,
Catholics, Jews, Moslems, agnostics,” since he “preferred (rooted) people…in
their own setting, in their own culture” (Ibid., p. 83), it passed through the
Uriage Charter’s proclamation that “believers and non-believers are, in France,
sufficiently impregnated with Christianity that the better among them could
meet, beyond revelations and dogmas, at the level of the community of persons,
in the same quest for truth, justice and love” (Ibid., p. 59) and arrived, in
Mounier, at full-fledged Teilhardian rapture over the strange growth of the
“perfect personal community,” where “Love alone would be the bound, and no
constraint, no vital or economic interest, no extrinsic institution” (John
Hellman, Emmanuel Mounier and the New Catholic Left: 1930-1950, Toronto, 1981,
p. 85):
Surely [development] is slow and long when only average men are working at it. But then heroes, geniuses, a saint come along: a Saint Paul, a Joan of Arc, a Catherine of Siena, a Saint Bernard, or a Lenin, a Hitler and a Mussolini, or a Gandhi, and suddenly everything picks up speed...[H]uman irrationality, the human will, or simply, for the Christian, the Holy Spirit suddenly provides elements which men lacking imagination would never have foreseen (Ibid., p. 90).
May the democrat, may the communist, may the fascist push the positive aspirations which inspire their enthusiasm to the limit and plenitude.
As John Hellman explains, “Mounier’s belief
that there was an element of truth in all strong beliefs coincided with
Teilhard’s vision of the inevitable spiritualization of humanity” (Ibid., p.
128).
Let it be emphasized that the
message taught at Uriage was not a rational one. Its ultimate justification was
intuition and strength of will leading to creative action. Any appeal to logic,
either in support or criticism of strongly willed commitment to natural values
was dismissed as either belaboring the given, or dangerous, decadent,
individualist scholastic pedantry. Better to bury the temptations of a sickly
rationalism through the development of the obvious virtue of “manliness,”
again, defined in completely anti-intellectual ways: the ability to leap onto a
moving streetcar; to ride a bicycle up the steep hill to the Ecole like Jacques
Chevalier; to look others “straight in the eye” and “shake hands firmly”; to
endure the sweat-filled regimen labelled décrassage devised for students under
the inspiration of General Georges Hébert; to sing enthusiastically around the
evening fire in the Great Hall; to know how to “take a woman”; and, always, to
feel pride in “work well done.” Such manliness was said to have deep spiritual
meaning, aspects of which were elaborated in lectures like de Lubac’s Ordre
viril, ordre chrétien (Virile Order, Christian Order), and Chenu’s book, Pour
être heureux, travaillons ensemble (For Happiness, Let Us Work Together).
Finally, let us note that
Uriage’s teaching was unabashedly elitist, the particular mystique of the Ecole
being that of developing the natural value of leadership. “The select youth of
Uriage” were said to be “the first cell of a new world introduced into a
worn-out one” (Hellman, KMV, p. 65), “entrusted with the mission of bringing
together the elite from all of the groups that ought to participate in the
common task of reconstruction in the same spirit of collaboration” (Ibid., p.
63). Since they were destined to reveal the eternal supernatural significance
of the natural values witnessed to by the mystique of all virile communities,
Uriage students were actually priestly figures as well. Each class was
consecrated and given a great man’s name as talisman. Segonzac especially “took
upon himself a certain sacerdotal role, even regarding the wives and children
of his instructors” (Ibid., p. 90). This entailed also a “separation between
the leaders, the lesser leaders, the lesser-lesser leaders, the almost leaders
and the not-at-all leaders” irritating some of the interns. “The central team,”
as one of them indicated, “were gods” (Ibid., p. 75).
Fascism was seen by the
Uriage gods as a “monstrous prefiguration” of the new personalist humanity
waiting to be born. It clearly revealed the presence of strong will, virile
manliness, self-sacrifice to the community and even, in the context of the war
effort, a commitment to the construction of that European-wide order which the
leadership thought to be crucial to a more successful unleashing of the
creation of spiritualized personalities. Pétain’s so-called National Revolution
was appreciated both because of its anti-liberal bourgeois character and its
freedom from the gross “materialist” aspects of Nazism, racism in particular.
Nevertheless, the deportation of French youth to forced labor camps, the
increasing control by Germany of internal Vichy affairs and the outright
takeover of the Unoccupied Zone in the latter part of 1942 moved the leadership
of the Ecole closer to the growing Resistance Movement. This tendency was
matured by December of that year when Uriage’s enemies at court managed to have
it expelled from the Château Bayard.
But Uriage never did anything
haphazardly. Building upon the sense of being a modern version of a band of
crusading knights, the exiled Ecole leadership created in 1943 a chivalric
Order whose inner circle was bound by special vows of a character that Fr.
Maydieu compared spiritually to those of marriage. Members of the Order were to
sally forth to show the various elements of the Resistance how to perfect their
mystiques in the Uriage manner. Thus, high-level emissaries were sent to
contact de Gaulle, and “flying squadrons” into the countryside to guide the
maquis so that their deficient mystiques could be “transcended spiritually” and
“converge” in the construction of the better world of the
personalist-Teilhardian faith.
The enthusiasm with which
this labor was undertaken was genuine, especially with respect to the Marxist
aspects of the Resistance Movement (Marxism, like Fascism, being another
“monstrous prefiguration” of a happier future). Here, the Order’s activity was
paralleled by the efforts of priests and bishops trying to understand the
“mystique” of workers in labor camps and ordinary French factories, training
for the latter purpose being offered under the patronage of the supra-diocesan
Mission de France. Uriage teachers were themselves involved in these priestly
activities – Fr. Dillard, for example, canonizing the Soviets he encountered in
the labor camps, and insisting that all workers were born to their task with
specific virtues denied to other people. An Uriage-like openness was everywhere
in the air. After all, there were “riches in modern disbelief, in atheist
Marxism, for example, which are presently lacking to the fullness of the
Christian conscience” (Emile Poulat, Les prêtres-ouvrières: Naissance et fin,
Cerf, 1999, p. 408). Enlightened spirits had “to share the faith in and the
mystique of the Revolution and the Great Day (that of the total Christ)”
(Ibid., p. 386), as did one priest who asked to die “turned towards Russia,
mother of the proletariat, as towards that mysterious homeland where the Man of
the future is being forged” (Ibid., p. 244).
The sons of Uriage retained
their wartime sense of being a priestly nation, a people set apart, chosen to
judge which mystiques were and were not acceptable on the pathway to
“convergence.” Objects of contempt offered themselves aplenty. Soviet
apparatchiks did not seem to understand that Marxism was meant to be
spiritually transcended. A Stalinist mystique, therefore, had to be jettisoned.
American culture was even more hopeless. “The Americans,” Beuve-Mery
complained, “could prevent us from carrying out the obligatory revolution, and
their materialism does not even have the tragic grandeur of the materialism of
the totalitarians” (Ibid., p. 213). Jews were dangerous due to their potential
spirit of revenge (Ibid., p. 197). Perhaps most of all, however, traditional
Catholicism, which, from Uriage days, had feared the “insistence on bringing
together men with different ‘mystiques’ while affecting a ‘manly’ irritation
with clericalism, dogma and the orthodox” (Ibid., p. 88), needed to be tossed
onto the rubbish heap of contempt.
Mounier is particularly
instructive with respect to this growing dismissal of the Church. His vision
had always logically involved the possibility of shelving whole realms of
Christian scripture, theology and spirituality, should they clash with the
“emerging convergence.” By the last years of the war, “there was little place
for sin, redemption and resurrection in the debate; the central acts of the
Christian drama were set aside” (Hellman, Mounier, p. 255). Nietzsche’s
critique of slavish Christianity now seemed to him to be unanswerable, and he
“came to think that Roman Catholicism was an integral part of almost all he
hated. Then, when he searched his soul, he discovered that the aspects of
himself which he appreciated least were his ‘Catholic’ traits” (Ibid., p. 190).
Doing what one willed was the unum necessarium. Everything rational from the
Greek tradition used to support Christianity and dampen the will was execrated
as well. If there was anything valuable in the Greco-Christian heritage it had
to come from personalists rebuilding it from scratch; those appealing to the
Catholic name and Catholic practice in his day required diagnosis and
psychiatric help:
Mounier now flatly denounced
old-fashioned Christianity and Christians. Christianity, he wrote, was
“conservative, defensive, sulky, afraid of the future.” Whether it “collapses
in a struggle or sinks slowly in a coma of self-complacency,” it was doomed.
“Christians,” he castigated in even stronger terms in a rhapsodic style worthy
of his new master (Nietzsche): “These crooked beings who go forward in life
only sidelong with downcast eyes, these ungainly souls, these weighers-up of
virtues, these dominical victims, these pious cowards, these lymphatic heroes,
these colourless virgins, these vessels of ennui, these bags of syllogisms,
these shadows of shadows…” (Ibid., p. 191).
Metaphysical speculation,
Mounier declared, was a characteristic of “lifeless schizoid
personalities.”…Mounier even referred to intelligence and spirituality as
“bodily diseases” and attributed the indecisiveness of many Christians to their
ignorance of “how to jump a ditch or strike a blow.” ... “Modern psychiatry,”
Mounier wrote, had shed light on the morbid taste for the “spiritual,” for
“higher things,” for the ideal and for effusions of the soul…. Thus, many forms
of religious devotion were the result of psychosis, self-deception or vanity.
Prayer was often a sign of psychological illness and weakness (Ibid., pp.
192-193).
