The following address was delivered by Professor Roberto de Mattei at the Una Voce Canada Annual General Meeting held at Holy Family Parish, Vancouver, British Columbia, on November 10, 2018, and appears here courtesy of Una Voce Canada.
The Century of Revolutions
The Church is the Mystical Body of Christ: a reality that transcends
history, but in history lives and battles and hence is called the Church
Militant. For this reason we cannot speak about the Church without reflecting
on the historical horizon in which She operates. In 2017, we commemorated three
Revolutions which changed [the course of] history: the Protestant Revolution,
the French Revolution and the Communist Revolution. Three Revolutions that are
part of a single revolutionary process.[1]
2018 is the anniversary of two events positioned inside the same
revolutionary process: the hundred years since the end of the First World War
and the fifty years since the Revolution of 1968. Two anniversaries that help
us to place the crisis of the Church in its historical context.
The First World War shook up the political geography of Europe. The disappearance
of the Austrian Empire deprived the European continent of its centre of
gravity, paving the way for the Second World War. But the postwar period of the
early 20th century was principally a Revolution in the culture and
mentality of European man. It was the end of an era.
We ought to reread the memoirs of the Austrian writer Stefen Zweig
(1881-1942), Die Welt von Gestern (The world of yesterday).
Zweig writes in this book: “If I try to come up with a convenient
formula to describe the time preceding the First World War – the period I grew
up in – I believe the most concise possible would be to say that it was the age
of certainty. In our almost millenary, Austrian Monarchy everything seemed to
be eternal and the State itself appeared to be the supreme guarantee of this
continuity. (…) Everything in the solid Empire appeared to be sound and
immovable and in the highest position there was the venerable old Sovereign;
(…). No one was thinking about wars, revolutions and upheavals. Any radical
act, any violence, appeared then to be impossible in the age of reason”[2].
Everything appeared eternal, sound, immovable. However, behind those stable and apparently indestructible institutions, on which society was based, from the family to the Monarchy, there was a conception of the world founded upon an order of unchangeable values. The guardian of these absolute values, was, and still is, the Catholic Church.
Stability, order, equilibrium are all good things, but there is not one
good thing in this world that doesn’t come from the Church, the only Divine and
always perfect institution, no matter how imperfect the men who represent Her
can be.
On the eve of the First World War, the men who were at the helm of the
Barque of Peter were two saints: Pius X and his Secretary of State, Rafael
Merry del Val. St Pius X died a month after the start of the War and understood
its catastrophic significance.
During the First World War the Russian Revolution broke out. It was the
matrix for all the other social and political revolutions that came after. The
totalitarianisms of the 20th century destroyed the old order, but
they didn’t build a new order. The essence of totalitarianism is not the
hypertrophy of the State, as many believe, but the destruction of the natural,
social order. Totalitarianism dissolves, in effect, all principles and
institutions and renders man destitute of any social protection - to achieve
the dictatorship of chaos. Political, intellectual and moral disorder was the
common thread of the 20th century - the century of revolutions,
world wars and genocides. The bloodiest century in Western history.[3]
The Sixty-Eight revolution was a Revolution that
didn’t shed blood like those previously, but it shed something much worse: it
shed the tears of a generation that didn’t only lose their bodies but lost also
their souls. Sixty-Eight was the most devastating of all the preceding
Revolutions because it enthroned chaos in the everyday life of Western man.
From a fluid
society to a fluid Church
Sociologists like Zygmunt Baumann, in defining our age spoke of a “fluid
society” in which all forms are dissolved, even basic ones of social
aggregation. The “fluid life” that Baumann writes about is the precarious and
ephemeral life of modern man: a life devoid of roots and foundations, as he
lives only for the present, immersed in the liquefaction of all values and
institutions. Everything that is liquidated, is consumed, or, we might say, everything
that is consumed, is liquidated: from food products to individual lives.[4] Everything is fluid, since everything changes,
everything is in a state of becoming. In philosophical terms we might define
our society as based on the triumph of pure becoming, the most radical negation
of the primacy of Being that has ever existed in history.
The fluid society cannot be compared to a river that flows, since the
river comes from a living source and has a destination: the immense sea that
awaits it. The fluid society has no destination: it just erodes the rock. Yet
it only erodes the surfaces, dissolves the incrustations and everything is
transformed into mud. Rock in its essence is indestructible. Nothing can be
done against the force of being.
The first name of God is Being, as God Himself revealed to Moses at the
burning bush (Exodus 3, 14). All the
divine attributes flow from this Being as from a primordial spring. Every
perfection in reality comes down to a grade of being which refers back to an
absolute Being, without limit and without conditions.
This philosophical primacy of Being has been taught by the Church ever
since its birth. The Church has a doctrine and a law which is absolute and
immutable and reflects the eternal law, which is God. This law and this
doctrine are contained in Holy Scripture and in Tradition; the role of the
Magisterium is to preserve it and to hand it on. Not one iota of these
principles can be changed. Of course, throughout history, Christians may have
distanced themselves from the truth and from the precepts of the Church in
their personal lives. These are the epochs of decadence which demand a profound
reform, i.e. a return to observance of abandoned principles. If this does not
happen, then the temptation is to transform the immoral behaviour into
principles which are opposed to Christian truths. This temptation penetrated
the Church during the Second Vatican Council and is now proposed to us via the
concept of the primacy of pastoral practice.
The Spirit of the Second Vatican Council
The Second Vatican Council was a cultural Revolution which preceded that
of ’68. The slogan which sums up the spirit of ’68 is “It is forbidden to
forbid” (Il est interdit d’interdire),
which means: “it is forbidden to affirm”. Every affirmation, in effect, if it
is clear, firm and categorical, entails the negation of the opposite
affirmation. To forbid to forbid means that there are no categorical
affirmations, absolute rules nor non-negotiable principles. Man does not act by
following rules, but by obeying impulses, sentiments and desires.
This idea was formulated for the first
time by John XXIII in his allocution which opened Vatican II on 11 October
1962. Pope John explained that the Council had been launched not to condemn
errors or formulate new dogmas, but rather to propose, with language adapted to
new times, the perennial teaching of the Church.[5] We are told that Church doctrine
does not change but only the way in which this doctrine is communicated. What actually
happened was that the primacy attributed to the pastoral dimension effected a
revolution in language, in mentality and in the life of the Church.
The slogan of the Second Vatican Council was: it is forbidden to
condemn, since condemnation is a negative attitude, which results in aggressive
reactions in the one that is being condemned. It is forbidden to condemn means
that there is no need to fight evil or else evil will fight us. A slogan that
anticipated, not followed Vatican II.
According to the progressive theologians, the cause for the rejection of
the Church and anticlericalism of the 19th and 20th
centuries was in the intolerant attitude that the Church had against Her
enemies. The transition to a new kind of pastoral care would appease enemies,
and would open up a new era of peace and collaboration with the Church. The appeasing
coexistence, Ostpolitik, the historical compromise and today’s agreement with
Communist China, originate from this pastoral Revolution. The outcome,
nonetheless, was not a decrease but an exponential increase of anti-
Christianity in the world. The Church, in Her visible structures, lost Her militant
identity and has been liquefied.
Pastoral care is that which through updating. is modified and
transformed continuously. The primacy of the pastoral signifies a fluidization
of the principles and institutions of the Church. The solid, permanent Church
with a backbone has been replaced by a “fluid” Church, like the society in
which we live. This new Church is based on the primacy of becoming over Being
and of evolution over Tradition.
Principles, truths, certainties are solid because they constitute a
channel that ensures the waters of the river are not dispersed; they are a dam
that ensures the lake will not overflow. If the dam fails, society will be
flooded by the water.
According to Father Roger-Thomas
Calmel: “Doctrines, rites, and the interior life are subjected to a process of
such a radical and refined liquefaction which no longer allows for a
distinction between Catholics and non-Catholics. Because ‘yes’ and ‘no,’ the
definite and the definitive are considered outdated, the question arises as to
what it is that impedes non-Christian religions to also be part of the new universal
church, constantly updated by ecumenical interpretations.”[6]
This is the
spirit of Vatican II.
Revolution and Tradition
This process in the liquefying
of the Church and society is a revolutionary project that started a long time
ago.
We know the Permanent
Instruction of the Alta Vendita, a
secret document written in early 19th century that mapped out a blueprint for
the subversion of the Catholic Church. The entire world has witnessed a
profound change within the Catholic Church on an international scale, a change
that is in step with the modern world[7].
The anti-Christian revolution which runs through
history bears a hatred for Being in all its expressions. Opposed to Being, it
rejects all that is stable, permanent and objective in reality, starting with
human nature. The Church, Family, private property and the State are denied at
their roots because social institutions, rooted in human nature, are said not
to exist: everything is the product of a historical process. Man himself is said
to be deprived of any true nature: man is amorphous matter which can be pressed
into shape and adapted at will. The Gender Theory is a product of this
evolutionary vision, according to which man has neither his own nature nor
essence.
The only alternative to the nihilist revolution which
today is attacking not only the Church, but the natural order, not only the
natural order but even human nature itself, is to re-discover the fullness of
Being in all its forms. To do this is also to re-discover the stability and
permanence of the real in all its forms, both individual and social. We must
oppose the fluid conception of the world, based on the primacy of becoming,
with an axiological vision based on the primacy of Being.
Axiology is the science of values. Value is “that through which a thing
has worth”. Value is therefore that which gives reality its significance and
its perfection. Values are principles whose perfection is rooted in the supreme
principle of all reality. Above all principles there is a universal principle,
which is the centre and source of all laws without exception. This is God, the
most perfect Being, the first principle, the First Truth, as St Thomas defined
Him[8], on which the ultimate principles, absolute values
and universal truths are based. Only God does not change, and only that which
is based in God and dwells in Him deserves to be preserved, handed on and
looked after.
The Church, immutable in Her Divine constitution, Her doctrine and
Rites, is the image on earth of the perfection of Being. And in the Church the
reflection of the Divine Being is Her Tradition. Tradition is that which is
stable in the eternal becoming of things. It is that which does not change in a
world which changes, and it is this because it is a reflection of eternity.
The Church's Tradition, like Holy Scripture, is a source of Revelation,
divinely assisted by the Holy Spirit. Tradition is the Word of Jesus Christ
teaching his Apostles before and after his Passion, Death and Resurrection. In
the forty days between the Resurrection and the Ascension, He appeared several
times to his Mother and to the Apostles and explained clearly, and in detail,
the sense of the mission of the Church He had founded. He explained the
significance of the Last Supper and of the Divine Sacrifice which they had to
perpetuate. The first Mass, celebrated by St Peter, followed meticulously the
instructions of Christ and has been handed down to us by that rite which we
call traditional.
We know that Divine Revelation concluded with the death of the last
apostle, St John. However this Revelation is not contained only in the four
gospels and in Holy Scripture, but also in the teachings which the Apostles
received from Christ's own lips. We can imagine to what extent Our Lady
preserved and memorised all these truths and these rites in her pure Heart, and
with what faithfulness She then passed them on to the Apostles. St John was not
only the last to hand on in person the words he had heard. He was also, through
his intimacy with Our Lady, perhaps the one who received to the greatest extent
the light of Tradition. He died at the end of the 1st century and only a few
years after his death, the lex orandi and
the lex credendi of the Church had
been immutably defined.
In the course of the following centuries, the Church would explain, clarify
and define these truths. But she never innovated or transformed them. The
mission of the Church is to keep custody of Tradition, to defend it and to hand
it on. There is a relationship, which Father Calmel has brought to light,
between the immutable and permanent nature of the Church, on the one hand, and
human nature, on the other, which is equally stable and objective. It is not
just the perfection of its divine origin “which makes the Church definitive and
unchangeable”, says Father Calmel. “It is also the stability of the
characteristics of the human race which the Church has the mission and the
power to enlighten and to save.”[9] Stability of rites in defence of the sacraments; stability of the
dogmatic formulae in defence of revealed truths; stability of the lex orandi and of the lex credendi.
Tradition is not only the regula
fidei, the rule of the faith of the Church; it is also the foundation of
society. The Church, indeed, is our leader not only in faith but also in
morals. The morality of a society is expressed in practices, customs and
habits, that is, in a historic and concrete tradition which reflects divine and
natural tradition. Tradition judges history not in the name of history itself
but instead in the name of the truths which transcend it.
In this world, whether we are speaking of moral life or of physical
life, there are some things which pass away and other things which remain. Tradition
is the incorruptible and immutable element of society. Tradition is that which
does not pass away. And it is only within Tradition that progress is possible,
because we cannot progress or improve ourselves in things which pass away. We
can do so only in things which remain. Tradition is that of the past which
lives in the present; it is that which must live in order for our present to
have a future. It is the ultimate root of all that which is, and of all that
which will be. It is God Himself, in Whom past, present and future are grounded
in a single and infinite act of being.
Tradition and sensus
fidei
What encourages our conscience, enlightened by the eternal and immutable
Magisterium of the Church, is Tradition, that Tradition which goes from being a
remote rule to a close one when the actual living magisterium vacillates. In
the Church, indeed, the ultimate rule of faith during periods when people
desert it, is not the contemporary living Magisterium, in its non-definitive
aspects, but instead the eternal Magisterium which, together with Holy
Scripture, constitutes one of the sources of the Word of God[10].
There is nothing subjective or Protestant in this position. What
subjectivists and Protestants do is to replace the Magisterium of the Church
with a different magisterium. They deny the Church's right to teach the truth
and they replace the truths taught by the Church with their own truths. There
is none of this in our approach. We do not claim to replace the Magisterium of
the Church with any other magisterium. We see ourselves as simple members of
the learning Church, ecclesia discens,
simple faithful who believe that the teaching Church alone, ecclesia docens, has the right and duty
to teach.
The expression “simple faithful” contains the little that we are but
also the lot. The learning Church is not the teaching Church but just always
the Church, assisted by the Holy Spirit. As simple faithful, we are members of
the Mystical Body: while we do not have the right to teach, we have the right
to ask our pastors to confirm us in the faith.
We are guided in this by our conscience, which is not subjective but
which is instead rooted in faith. Our conscience tells us not to retreat, but
instead to raise the banner of Tradition. One becomes part of the Church by
means of the Sacrament of Baptism, which is fulfilled in the Sacrament of
Confirmation. Through Baptism we enter the Church Militant; but it is
Confirmation which makes us true soldiers of Christ. Baptism instils the faith,
Confirmation requires us to profess it and defend it in public. Baptism and
Confirmation instil in us the sensus
fidei which is the shared awareness of the faithful. This is adherence to
the truths of the faith by supernatural instinct, more than by theological
reasoning.
Tradition
is maintained and transmitted by the Church, not only through the Magisterium,
but through all the faithful, “from the bishops down to the laity” as the
famous formula by St. Augustine expresses. The doctor from Hippo makes an
appeal in particular to “the people of the faith” who do not exercise a Magisterium,
but on the basis of their sensus fidei guarantee
the continuity of the transmission of a truth[11].
The sensus fidei plays a decisive role during times of crisis in
which an evident contradiction between the subjective Magisterium and the
objective one is created, between the authorities that teach and the truths of
the faith they must guard and transmit. The sensus
fidei induces the believer to reject
any ambiguity and falsification of the truth, leaning on the immutable
Tradition of the Church, which does not oppose the Magisterium, but includes
it.
Cardinal Walter Brandmüller while speaking in Rome on April 7th 2018,
recalled how “the ‘sensus fidei’
acts as a sort of spiritual immune system, through which the faithful
instinctively recognize or reject any error. Upon this ‘sensus fidei’
rests then – apart from the Divine promise – also the passive infallibility of
the Church, or the certainty that the Church, in Her totality, shall never be
able to incur a heresy.”
It was sensus fidei which guided faithful Catholics during the Arian crisis
of the fourth century. It was then that St. Jerome coined the phrase wherein “the whole world groaned and woke astounded
to find itself Arian”[12].
What is important to underline
is that it wasn’t about a doctrinal dispute limited to some theologian, nor a
simple clash between bishops where the Pope had to act as an arbiter. It was a
religious war in which all Christians were involved, from the Pope down to the
last faithful. Nobody closed themselves up in a spiritual bunker, nobody stood
looking out the window, a mute spectator of the drama. Everyone was down in the
trenches fighting on both sides of the battle-lines.
It wasn’t easy at that time to
understand whether your own bishop was orthodox or not, but the sensus fidei was the compass to orient
oneself.
Saint Hilary
writes that during the Arian crisis the ears of the faithful who interpreted in
an orthodox sense the ambiguous affirmations of the Semi-Arian theologians,
were holier than the hearts of the priests. The Christians who for three
centuries had resisted emperors, were now resisting their own Shepherds, in
some cases even the Pope, guilty, if not of open heresy, but to say the least,
of grave negligence.
There are times when a
Catholic is obliged to choose between cowardice and heroism, between apostasy
and holiness. This is what happened in the IV century and it is what is
happening even today. Cardinal Willem Jacobus Eijk, Archbishop of Utrecht,
summarized the question earlier this year in these terms: “the bishops and,
above all, the Successor of Peter are failing to maintain and transmit
faithfully the Deposit of Faith.” These are very strong words which directly
call into question the Successor of Peter, Pope Francis.
A situation without precedent in history. Yet, the
history of the Church is always new, but always repeating itself. It is always
new because the external persecutions and internal crises She endures, change:
they have different motivations, different protagonists, different magnitudes
and different intensities. But in these crises, no matter how deep they can be,
there is something that doesn’t change: the force of Tradition, which is
destined to defeat any Revolution that opposes it.
The Success and
Failure of the Revolution
The philosophy of the Revolution is the philosophy of pure becoming. A
becoming that, as it is unmoored from Being, it flows irreversibly towards the
void/ nothingness, and thus self-destructs. This is the path the Revolution
takes.
In fact, the revolution, like evil, does not have its own nature, but
exists only insofar as it is the privation and a deficiency of good. “The being
of evil – explains Saint Thomas –, consists precisely in being the privation of
good.”[13] Evil, which is the privation of being, can spread,
like darkness in the night, following daylight. But the darkness does not have
in itself the power to defeat the light in a total and definitive way, because
it (darkness) draws its very existence from the light. Infinite light, which is
God, exists. “God is light, and in Him there is no darkness,” says Saint John (1 John 1:5). Absolute darkness does not
exist, because radical nothingness cannot exist. Our existence is the living
negation of nothingness. Evil advances when good recedes. Error is affirmed
only when the truth is extinguished. The revolution wins only when Tradition
surrenders. All revolutions throughout history have taken place only when an
authentic opposition is lacking.
However, if there is an evil dynamic, there is a dynamic of goodness. A
remnant – even a minimal one – of light cannot be extinguished, and this
remnant has in itself the irresistible strength of daybreak, the possibility of
a new day with the sunrise. This is the drama of evil: it cannot destroy the
last remnant of good that survives, it is destined to be destroyed by this
remnant. Evil cannot stand even the smallest surviving good, because it
glimpses its defeat in the good which exists. The dynamism of evil is destined to
shatter itself against that which stays, which remains solid in society’s
liquefaction. Therefore, the final step in the process of today’s
self-dissolution eroding the rock on which the Church was founded, is destined
to witness the death of the revolution and the sprouting of the beginning of an
opposed life: a mandatory itinerary of restoration of faith and morals, of
truth and of the social order to which it corresponds: this principle is the
Catholic counter-revolution.
Thus what is irreversible is not the triumph of the Revolution but
rather its defeat. And this will happen thanks to the dynamism of the good,
which opposes the dynamism of evil in history.
The Revolution is in fact a parasite which lives and maintains itself on
the remnants of the true and the good which survive in the order which it wants
to destroy. These remnants, although minimal, always constitute a seed of
potential multiplication and diffusion, whereas the Revolution is, of its very
nature, sterile and infertile. And if the Revolution is unable to annihilate,
this means that its dynamism is intended to break against a remnant of truth
and good which constitute the principle and presupposition of its defeat.
The Revolution of 1968 was successful because its creators occupied key roles
in politics, the mass-media and culture: it was successful because it changed Western
mentality and its way of life.
Nevertheless, the Revolution of Sixty-Eight failed because it was born
of a protest against a one-dimensional society, the bourgeois society of
comfort and wealth – but the society that Sixty-Eight produced – contemporary
society – is the society par excellence
for consumerism and hedonism; it is a relativist society in which all the flames
of idealism have been snuffed out. Today reality is interpreted as a system of power,
mostly economic, not of values. Power - power without truth, is the only value
of our time. All values – the philosopher Augusto Del Noce points out – are
destined to be incorporated into the category of vitality. But a society that
is unaware of any principle other than that of pure expansion of vitality can
only dissolve.[14]
The Revolution of Sixty-Eight failed because its slogan was “it is
forbidden to forbid”. However. contemporary society is a dictatorship
unprecedented in history; the dictatorship of relativism, a psychological and
moral dictatorship, which doesn’t destroy the body, but isolates, discriminates
and kills the soul of those who resist it.
In a similar way, the Revolution in the Church had success because the
progressive theologians of Vatican II and their heirs are governing the Church
today; it has been a success because it has transformed the Catholic way of
believing, praying and loving.
On the other hand, the Revolution in the Church has failed because it
was presented as a great pastoral reform and instead has resulted in the
corruption of the faith and morals: an unparalleled corruption, which has
reached the point of enthroning homosexuality amongst the highest
ecclesiastical hierarchies. It has failed because its slogan was “it is
forbidden to forbid” which did not result in greater freedom in the Church, but
resulted in a dictatorial regime, hitherto unknown, so much so, that a Catholic
historian, Henry Sire, described Pope Francis as The Dictator Pope.[15]
In my view, Pope Francis’s pontificate is at an impasse. The contradiction that he is faced with is this: in order
to ensure that the Revolution prevails in the Church he should exercise
infallibility. But he cannot do it, because the Holy Spirit will not allow it;
and he doesn’t want to do it because any defining act that he makes would be a
contradiction to the primacy of the pastoral over doctrine, which is what he
refers to. Pope Francis cannot replace the sword of truth with that of error,
since the heirs of Vatican II have replaced the battle with ecumenism. The
Church of Tradition, on the other hand, has not given up the battle, has not
given up brandishing the sword of truth and the first act of a Pope of
Tradition – who will be elected one day – will be that of exercising the munus of infallibility to define
solemnly the truths that today are denied and to condemn the errors widespread
in the Church today with the same solemnity.
The Hour of Victory
Certainly the blessed hour of victory will be preceded by a great
chastisement, because the contemporary world has not followed the example of
the inhabitants of Nineveh, who were converted and saved, but rather that of
the inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah, who refused conversion and were
annihilated. The theology of history tells us that God rewards and punishes not
only individual people, but also collectives and social groups: families,
nations, civilizations. But while individual people have their reward or their
chastisement sometimes on earth but always in eternity, nations – which do not
have eternal life – are punished or rewarded only on earth.
The revolutionary process consists in a plot of offenses against God
which, linked together over the course of centuries, form one single collective
sin, an apostasy of peoples and nations. And because each sin has a
corresponding chastisement, the Christian theology of history teaches us that
collective sins are followed by great historical catastrophes, which serve to
pay for the public sins of nations. In these catastrophes the justice of God is
never separated from His mercy, and because the mercy of God is linked to
repentance, chastisement becomes inevitable when the world, by refusing
repentance and penance, calls down upon itself not mercy, but the justice of
God. God however, does not cease to be infinitely merciful but at the same time
He is infinitely just, and the theology of history shows us that from the
creation of the universe to the end of the world there have been and will be
immense sins which are followed by acts of the immense mercy of God.
The sin of Revolution, which in the course of the centuries thwarted the
development of Christian Civilization and has led us to the spiritual and moral
ruin of our time, cannot but arouse a reaction which, sustained by divine
grace, will lead to the historical fulfillment of the great plan of Divine
Providence.
We are the defenders of Tradition and two virtues are required of us:
fortitude and confidence. Fortitude is the virtue of those who do not retreat
and resist; confidence is the virtue of those who hope in the victory promised
at Fatima by Our Lady Herself to the Catholic faithful. The militant spirit of
those who resist and trust must characterize our battle.
The heart of Tradition is in God, whose very essence is immutable and
eternal Being. It is in God, and only in God, and in Her who is His perfect
echo, the Blessed Virgin Mary, that the defenders of the faith and Tradition
can find the necessary supernatural strength to brave the current crisis.
We are warriors without power. Warriors without weapons, faced with an
enormous Goliath. And, from a human point of view, without power, without
weapons, a battle cannot be won. Nevertheless God is pleased with our weakness
and asks of us only a militant spirit. It will be God, through the Blessed
Virgin Mary, Who gives us the weapons and the power to fight a battle that is not
ours, but His. And God always wins – in time and eternity.
Translated by Francesca Romana
[1] Cf. Plinio Correa de Oliveira, Rivoluzione e Contro-Rivoluzione,
Sugarco, Milan 2009.
[2] Stefan Zweig, Die Welt von
Gestern. Erinnerungen eines Europaers, tr. it. Il mondo di ieri, Arnoldo Mondadori, Milan 1994, pp. 9, 27-28.
[3] Robert Conquest, Reflections on a ravaged Century, W.
W. Norton & Company, New York 2001.
[4] Zygmunt Bauman, La vita
liquida, tr. it. Laterza, Rome 2006, p. IX.
[5] John XXIII, Allocution Gaudet Mater Ecclesiae of 11 October
1962, in AAS, 54 (1962), p. 792.
[6] Roger T. Calmel o.p., Breve apologia della chiesa di sempre, Editrice Ichtys, Albano Laziale 2007, pp. 10-11.
[7] John Vennari, The Permanent
Instruction of the Alta Vendita, Fatima Center, Buffalo, N. Y. 2018.
[8] Summa Theologiae, II-IIae. q. 1, a. 1.
[9]
R. Th. Calmel, o. p., Brève apologie pour l’Eglise de toujours,
Editions Difralivre, Maule 1987, p.
23.
[10] Cf. R. de Mattei, Apologia della Tradizione, Lindau,
TUrin 2011.
[11] St. Augustine, De
Praedestinatione sanctorum, 14, 27, in PL, 44, col. 980.
[12] St. Jerome, Dialogus adversus Luciferianos, n. 19, in PL, 23, col. 171.
[13] Summa Theologiae, I, q. 14, a. 10, resp.
[14] Augusto Del Noce, in Aa. Vv., La crisi della società permissiva,
Ares, Milan 1972.
[15] Marcantonio Colonna (Henry Sire), The Dictator Pope. The Inside Story of the
Francis Papacy, Regnery Publishing, Washington 2017.
