Marcel De Corte
Itinéraires, No. 87 | November 1964
I HAVE JUST READ a few biographies of Saint Pius X. The marvellous ascent! From the humble seed of vocation planted by the Spirit in the soul of this little peasant to his constant concern for the priests entrusted to his care as bishop and pope, his whole life was organized around the defense and illustration of the sacred, indelible character of the priesthood, without which the called could never continue the work of redemption. More than any other successor of Peter, Saint Pius X saw, felt and understood that the threat posed to man by the modern world is aimed above all at the priest.
This danger is that of denial. It dates back to the very foundation of the Church. It dates back to Christ’s three temptations. It will always hang over God’s chosen ones. It is linked to the very notion of the mediator. As we know, there is a chasm between man and God that nothing can bridge, except God himself. The priest is invested with the formidable mission of intermediary. The sacred powers of the supernatural pass through him. Through his mouth, God forgives, bread and wine become the body and blood of Christ.
As a priest endowed with this power, which extends to the dimensions of the whole of Revelation, he is charged with transmitting to mankind the teaching that saves, the substance of the theological virtues, the presence of God himself. How can this be achieved without erasing every trace of subjectivity? The priest is the man in whom the ego has been emptied, to make room for God.
It is precisely in this renunciation of self that the possibility of betrayal creeps in. The entire history of the Church shows that the essence of the priest has been only imperfectly incarnated in most of those who heard the call of their vocation. But that’s not where the danger lies. It is not even in the so-called “bad priest”, nor in the priest of corrupt morals, nor in the mediocre priest. The perfidy lies in the priest who sacrifices his ego to his own idea of God, only to find it invisible, more virulent than ever, at the very moment when he seems to be abdicating it. The most serious, insidious and ruinous temptation for the priest or layman who arrogates to himself a teaching mission in the Church is undoubtedly to shape divine reality into a form fabricated by the mind and bearing the stamp of subjectivity. Saint Pius X knew, as well as anyone, that misconduct affects the clergy as much as it does the mass of the faithful. But he also knew that deviations arising from human gravity are infinitely less serious than those of the spirit. With sovereign perspicacity, this son of the soil, whose gaze was constantly turned towards heaven, saw that the alteration of truth by unrealism, by the refusal to adapt intelligence to things, by the unheard-of determination to submit reality to the individual or social categories of the mind, was tantamount to rendering vain the deposit of Revelation entrusted by Christ to the Church. He fought with all his might against this revolution, whose aim, whether avowed or not, is to substitute man for God by making Man the measure of all things, and which, for the first time in the history of the Church, was taking place within the Church itself.
Until then, Christianity had known heresies, systems that denied important points of doctrine and mistook errors for truths. It had not yet been confronted with the most formidable test that could ever befall it - the perversion of the meaning of truth itself. It was during the lifetime of St. Pius X that the view gained currency that truth is a construct of the human mind, a projection of the subject into the object, a demand of life which, springing from its immanent source, confers meaning on the world, and creates it, as it were, perpetually. Truth is no longer adæquatio rei et intellectus, but adœquatio intellectus cum seipso, which translates outwardly into ever more vast forms, encompassing particular consciousnesses in a universal consciousness. It takes place through its inadequate expressions, from which man frees himself as his consciousness deepens and expands to the dimensions of the universe. It is essentially progress, because it is the transformation and humanization of the world. So there is no such thing as absolute, unchanging truth. Every truth, whatever it may be, is constantly being called into question, superseded in favor of another truth which will suffer the same fate, but which will have had the advantage of being better attuned to man’s aspirations, to the infinite that man carries within himself. In this perspective, it’s not the real world that is internalized and nourishes the soul’s meditation, it’s the mental world, with all its inordinate aspirations, uncontrolled appetites, covetousness and mad dreams of surpassing the limits of the human condition, that is externalized and takes shape in institutions, mores and behaviors, thanks to a technique of domination of nature and matter which, by modifying man’s environment, at the same time modifies the substance itself. Henceforth, man no longer adapts to reality, but reality adapts to man. Humanity is in the process of becoming, through its knowledge and know-how, Prometheus, who will sing the death of God because it has made itself divine.
Saint Pius X was well aware that this transmutation of all values would lead the world into a deadly impasse. As early as his first encyclical of October 4, 1903, he revealed with anguish his vision of the future:
“We feel a kind of terror, when we consider the disastrous conditions of humanity at the present time. Can we be unaware of the very deep and serious illness which is now, far more than in the past, afflicting human society, and which, worsening day by day, and gnawing at its very marrow, is leading it to its ruin.”
Nor was he unaware that the Catholic clergy was allowing itself to be won over by the devastating nonsense that undermines the definition of man as a reasonable animal, and which inevitably reduces the human being to the state of a ferocious beast where the assaults of unleashed instinct are fed by the wiles of reason. As soon as man crosses his limits, he falls lower than the brute. The experience of the 20the century shows that, at least to those who are not blind, humanitarianism has never been allied with such savagery. Max Scheler made this clear in his dazzling analysis of the man of resentment, that specific product of our times, when man’s foolishness on the road to the “superhuman” inevitably leads him to the subhuman. The only difference between our time and that of St. Pius X is simply that the Pope was still heard and understood by an appreciable number of clergymen and lay people, whereas today a minority of Christians who cannot deny the principle of contradiction and proclaim white what they see black, are regarded as a bunch of “bastards”, in the Sartrean manner by most of the others.
Those Christians who remain irreducibly faithful to the concept of truth consecrated by evidence and centuries of civilization, as well as to the Revelation that crowns it, are considered “fundamentalists”. The good faith of those who adhere to the truth, without changing a thing, as loyal and truthful witnesses, is now a blemish! Let them console themselves! Saint Pius X, when he was Patriarch of Venice, already said to them:
“You’ll be called papists, clerics, retrograde; intransigent. Boast about it! Be strong and obey the command Isaiah reminds us of: “Cry out, and do not stop; lift up your voice like a trumpet and proclaim to my people their wickedness and to the house of Jacob their sins.”
From his first steps in the ecclesiastical hierarchy, Monsignor Sarto frequently repeated the Apostle’s words to his future priests: “Don’t let yourselves be deceived by fanciful and strange doctrines”. When he was appointed bishop of Mantua, he added: “Truth gives rise to hatred: but how beautiful is that, in a matter such as this, where the salvation of souls is at stake?”
What a completely fundamentalist Pope! I’m not personally suspected of excessive attachment to the faith of my ancestors, and I too often allow myself to be contaminated by the laxity of the century, but to my praise, if not to my glory, I confess quite simply that I prefer uprightness, if not the rigidity or even the narrowness of a believer rooted in the immutable certainty of dogma, to the spiritual decay and decomposition of these “abbés d’opinion”, more tyrannically governed by the winds of ideological fashions than the court abbés, whose ungrateful emulators they are, by royal moods. In this respect, I am reminded of a memory that compels me to compare the rectitude of Saint Pius X, whose intellectual faculties never ceased to unfold in line with the principles that preserve the health of the mind, to the fickle attitude, dictated by the movements of opinion, once displayed before me by a Prince of the Church whose enthusiasm for tradition had known no bounds during the war, and to whom I spoke, on the very day after liberation, about Teilhard’s new doctrines circulating under the cloak, naively asking him when such fables would be condemned: “Do you think about it, dear Sir,” he declared to me superbly, “it would be shaking the columns of the Church of France! “ I can vouch for the veracity of this statement, as I can for the weathervane’s successive sincerities.
This, by contrast, is one of the constants in St. Pius X’s temperament: he was a man of character. The breed is on the verge of extinction, and I would only be stating the obvious if I added that its last representatives are unlikely to seek refuge in the ecclesiastical gentry, unless they have suffered the ordeal of martyrdom or persecution in this “new world” that those who have not the slightest experience of it are calling for with all their might, or who tolerate its advent without a fight. There’s no doubt that St. Pius X was unable to maintain the height that our generation, which has tumbled down so many slopes, recognizes in him, without sainthood. This peasant knew that astuteness, cunning and deceit have nothing in common with the truth of things, because one does not trick with the truth of the seasons: solar evidence that our time constantly strives to despise. We have to say it out loud, at the risk of incurring some wet wrath: from Vatican I to Vatican II, much of the Church has been wavering with the truth. There’s no need to look for the cause. For anyone with eyes, it’s simple and sparkling: truth can only be grasped by people of the same rank as itself. On the contrary, truth is always humble, because it rests in the final analysis on the principle that two and two make four, that A is A and not B.
Understanding this, and the fact that it governs the whole life of the mind, notwithstanding the foolish, requires such a dose of humility, especially in those who profess intelligence, that this virtue never actually appears except in those with enough character to recognize their weakness. On the eve of my sixties, I take it for granted that real intelligence, even when it comes to positive science, is always linked to character - truth can only be perceived to the strict extent that the intellect is measured by things as if by a plumb line, which removes from it any propensity for obliqueness, self-righteousness and, above all, the fashion of the day. We can say a priori that the scholar who yields more or less to the taste of the age, to its whims, to the success it dispenses, to the vogue it grants, is promoted to oblivion as he is doomed to error. Truth, in any order, and a fortiori in the supernatural order, doesn’t care what people say. It always goes against the grain of opinion. The whole history of human knowledge and morality bears witness to this: a strong character is required of the man who recognizes his weakness in the face of truth, the evidence of which imposes itself on him despite prevailing ideas and mores. The weak, on the other hand, shun reality, are incapable of adapting their thinking to reality, and are constantly trying to conform to prevailing ideas. Debility always imitates the chameleon: just as the chameleon borrows its color from the environment in which it finds itself, it draws apparent strength from the social pressures in which it is immersed. Without the Popes, and without a certain number of successors to the Apostles (whose number should not be exaggerated), we may well wonder what would have become of the Truth of which the Church is the guardian.
I’m not exaggerating at all: you only have to look at what was held to be a truth of faith or a standard of morals in 1870, and compare it with statements made in 1964 by clerics and laymen protected by certain ecclesiastical authorities, to be convinced. One wonders whether the majority of bishops present at the Council would still dare to proclaim with St. Pius X in Pascendi dominici gregis that the proposition: “truth is no more immutable than man himself, for it evolves with him, in him and through him” is condemnable, or, if with Bishop Sarto of Mantua, that when we speak of the Vicar of Jesus Christ, this is no longer the place to examine, but to obey... society is sick; all the noble parts of its body are affected, the sources of life are reached; the only refuge, the only remedy, is the Pope”. Let’s repeat, just because it’s true, that an appreciable part of the teaching Church bends with the truth and has no care for the sixth proposition denounced by the aforementioned Encyclical: “In doctrinal definitions, the taught Church and the teaching Church collaborate, in such a way that it only remains for the teaching Church to sanction the common opinions of the taught Church.” Finally, the maxim favored by the modernists scourged by Saint Pius X, according to which “religious evolution must be coordinated with intellectual and moral evolution”, is fearlessly uttered by all those who dabble in the equivocation of a certain aggiornamento. If the word has made a fortune, it’s because its meaning has been distorted, and its distorted meaning used to authorize the worst kinds of resignations.
In no way am I exaggerating. Here, gathered in the space of a single week, are a few precise facts, which I can vouch for, showing us the extent of the imbecility, in the truest sense of the word, and stupidity to which the vanguard of our Belgian clergy, once renowned for its realism and solidity, has fallen.
A priest who claims to be authorized by his bishop talks to young couples about their intimate lives (this repugnant curiosity among clerics is commonplace today). He takes his lecture from one end of the diocese to the other. I have the mimeographed text in front of me. I’ll leave aside all the scientific clutter that wraps up the speaker’s thoughts: one of these days, a new Molière will have to bring us these new Tartuffes slathered in physiology. I’m simply quoting a passage that several listeners have confirmed to me:
“A household which cannot control its genital reactions (!!!) or for which the Ogino method is not possible, and which is still generously faced with the duty of living and expressing its love (?), while avoiding a new conception, not only could but should have recourse to one or other of the contraceptive procedures, choosing the one which, in his particular case, will seem to him to disfigure the expression of his love the least and help him to tend towards the self-control which remains indispensable to the conduct of encounters (!) so that these are always the expression of a fully human love.” Quite apart from his expression, which reveals pure cuistre, the author’s thinking dabbles in the most hollow subjectivism and the flattest romanticism, without the slightest concern for the principle of contradiction: using contraceptive methods is tantamount to promoting self-control! Let’s not forget that this priest, whose moral theology is widely criticized, is also the director of a major parish bulletin, where his false spirit is found in thousands of homes.
Let’s not forget that he’s also a regular on Catholic Radio and Television, where, having recently criticized the archaic Genesis concept of hard labor as the penalty for original sin, he went on to exalt the worker as God’s collaborator, along with St. Paul, who had previously been put through the mill of the new theology, specifying that we had to wait nineteen centuries for the great prophet Karl Marx to give the Pauline formulas their full meaning.
I know a good worker who hardly ever goes to church, but whose morals are irreproachable and whose judgment is sound. Unfortunately, he's afflicted with a wayward daughter who makes him despair. The other day, she left her father's house to go gallivanting with a boy in the neighboring town, only to return in the wee hours of the morning. The incensed father gave her a beating that sent the street into a frenzy, and earned him the intervention of the parish priest: "Come on, Bernard, you've got to get with the times! Your daughter (she's fifteen) has a heart like an accordion. That's her age. I'm a priest from 1964 and I approve."
The incident is minimal, and it’s neither the first nor the last time a vicious little girl repeats Mouchette’s story in her own way. It’s not the first or last time a priest will grant her forgiveness. But for a priest to invoke the aggiornamento to cover up teenage misbehavior is beyond the pale. There are words that make souls delirious, like hot breaths make milk sour on stormy country evenings.
A dean who doubles as a canon preaches on parables. There’s nothing proletarian about his parish. It’s definitely bourgeois. Bequests are abundant. Mass attendance remains at a healthy average. But an ill wind has passed. It’s time to cry haro on the bourgeois, especially if he’s a churchgoer, if he’s broad-minded, if he frequents the sacraments. The priest of a certain aggiornamento takes pleasure in vilifying the bourgeoisie whose boots his emulator in the XIXe century licked. What do you want? To be on the side of the stick, to howl with the wolves, to be supported in this endeavor by an audacious press that the hierarchy fears, cares for and caresses, is to ease one’s social conscience. By way of example, our canon transposes the parable of the Good Samaritan: “A wounded man lies by the roadside. A Mercedes roared past, driven by a daddy’s boy. Next came a Peugeot 404, please, driven by a shopkeeper: it too passed by. But then a Citroën two-wheeler stopped. Who got out? As you know, brothers, it was the head of the local Communist cell. I haven’t changed a thing in this Himalaya of stupidity.
I open the July 17 issue of La France catholique, which has just arrived. I read an article by Canon R. Vancourt, professor at the Facultés de Lille, entitled. “Les problèmes intellectuels du Catholicisme en France”, in which my distinguished colleague shows the ravages of agnosticism among believers: “De Dieu on ne sait rien; pour Dieu on ne peut rien; pour soi et pour les autres on peut seulement quelque chose”.
On this occasion, he cites the example of a priest who “showed girls he was catechizing photos of stars and Carmelite nuns, explaining that the former contributed more to the advent of beauty and goodness than the latter, lost in sterile contemplation”. Saint Thérèse of Lisieux certainly missed her vocation. Saint Teresa of Avila and Saint John of the Cross are nothing compared to Brigitte Bardot or Vadim. Girls, don’t go into cloisters to pray to God. The cinema awaits you. And my colleague continues with another example of this new-look Catholic religion, which is nowhere to be found in France being disavowed: “The Soviet scientist may not believe in the God of the Bible or in the historical Christ, but by shedding light on the cosmos or on life, he increases the power of reason and truth: implicitly, we are told, he is a Christian because he works effectively for mankind.”
I could go on and on, but I’ll stop at these examples for two reasons.
On the one hand, I can’t resist the joy of putting before my readers a passage from The Way of Perfection by the great founder of Reformed Carmel, outraged by an unworthy priest, in which she invites her daughters, at the time of the Council of Trent, to pray for the priests, preachers and scholars who support the Church: “You may wonder why I insist so much on this point, and why we must help those who are better than we are. I’ll tell you... Do you think, my daughters, that it takes little virtue to deal with the world, to live in the midst of the world, to occupy oneself with the affairs of the world, to adapt oneself, as I have said, to the conversation of the world, and to remain inwardly a stranger to the world, an enemy of the world, to behave as if one were living in the depths of a desert, finally to be truly like not men, but angels? If they aren’t, the captains don’t deserve the name they bear; and so may God not allow them to leave their cells. They would do more harm than good. This is not the time, for those who teach others to let imperfections show.”
On the other hand, my ecclesiastical drivel is heavily laden. I’m simply waiting for a Reverend Father, a Dominican if possible, or a Jesuit if he can’t, to show us that Christ made a mistake when he refused to turn stones into loaves of bread at the invitation of the Tempter. In this way, we could have fed all the world’s hungry and solved the problem of underdeveloped peoples once and for all. Of course, Christ has a valid excuse: he was born in the year I, at a time when the evolution of means of transport was still in its infancy: the economic infrastructure would not have allowed the God-Man to transform the planet into an earthly paradise. This advance of the Incarnation on the timetable of Progress is regrettable.
*
So I reread, pen in hand, the Acts of SS Pius X. They all relate to the problems facing the Church today. The solution is given masterfully each time, and is always the same: holiness. Of all Our concerns, the principal one is this,” he told the clergy of the world on the occasion of his priestly jubilee: “men honored with the priesthood must be absolutely such as the fulfillment of their office requires”, and no one can achieve this without imitating Jesus Christ, “Master and Model of all holiness”. There are some who think, who even dare to teach,” says the Holy Father, “that the merit of a priest consists solely in spending himself unreservedly in the service of his neighbor; consequently, leaving aside almost entirely those virtues by which man works for his own perfection (and which they therefore call passive virtues), they claim that one must devote all one’s strength and zeal to cultivating and practicing the active virtues.
It’s impossible to overstate how erroneous and pernicious this doctrine is. It is of this doctrine that Our predecessor, of happy memory, wrote in his wisdom: “To claim that there are Christian virtues more appropriate than others for certain times, would be to forget the words of the Apostle: Those whom he foreknew, he also predestined to become conformed to the image of his Son... Now Christ does not change in the course of the centuries, but he is the same yesterday and today, and he will be the same in all centuries”. “If the priest lacks this holiness, which is nothing other than the supereminent knowledge of Jesus Christ, he lacks everything. Without it, even practical skill and know-how... are frequently the source of deplorable prejudice”. This is why, he writes in the Encyclical E Supremi apostolatus of October 4, 1903, “if We are asked for a motto that expresses the very depths of Our soul, We will never give anything but this: Restore all things in Christ”. He continues a little further on, after showing that this mission begins with the priest himself: “If this is so, Venerable Brethren, how great must not be your solicitude in forming the clergy for holiness! There is no matter that must not give way to holiness. And the consequence is that the best and principal of your zeal must be directed towards your Seminaries, to introduce such an order and associate such a government with them, that we may see the integrity of teaching and the sanctity of morals flourish side by side (ut pariter integritate doctrinœ et morum sanctitate foveant)... As for Us, Venerable Brethren, We shall take the greatest care to ensure that members of the clergy do not allow themselves to be taken in by the insidious maneuvers of a certain new science which masquerades as truth, but which does not breathe the fragrance of Jesus Christ, A lying science which, with the help of false and perfidious arguments, endeavours to pave the way for the errors of rationalism and semi-rationalism, and against which the Apostle already warned his dear Timothy to guard himself when he wrote to him: Guard the deposit, avoiding profane novelties in language, as well as the objections of a false science, whose proponents with all their promises have failed in the faith. “
The Holy Father knows, by divine inspiration, that it’s all there. The Church is threatened from within, in its very substance. Quoting Saint Gregory the Great the following year in his Encyclical Jucunda Sane of March 12, 1904: “The Church is an old ship in disarray, taking on water from all sides, and whose worm-eaten hull, battered by the fury of daily storms, announces shipwreck”, he shows that “the passion for novelties”, as he had said on November 9, 1903 in his consistorial address, or, as he would say again in 1906 in the Encyclical Pieni l’Animo to the bishops of Italy, “the spirit of unhealthy novelty, which makes a mockery of the piety of the faithful, and in which there is talk of new directions for the Church, new aspirations for the modern soul, a new social function for the clergy, a new Christian civilization and the like”, is pernicious for the priest, in whose soul it destroys the taste for holy things and obedience to superiors. The priestly ministry is no longer fulfilled “for the salvation of the Christian people, but for their ruin”. These priests “will sow divisions, they will foment more or less latent rebellions, and the faithful people, astonished by this very sad spectacle, will be able to believe in a discord of wills in Christian society; and all the blame for this misfortune falls on the proud obstinacy of a few”.
There is not a moment’s doubt that St. Pius X regarded the Ecclesiæ renovatores, the Church’s renovators, as he wrote in Pascendi dominici gregis at the climax of his pontificate, as a danger that penetrates to the very bowels and veins of the Church (quamobrem in ipsis fere Ecclesiœ venis atque in visceribus periculum residet). As we know, this famous Encyclical speaks out against the “reforming mania” (innovandi studium) that possesses modernists.
Its prodigiously topical content shows the extent to which a significant proportion of today’s clergy have allowed themselves to be taken over by this fury. Just quote: “Nothing, absolutely nothing in Catholicism that it doesn’t attack. Reform of philosophy, especially in seminaries: relegate scholastic philosophy to the history of philosophy, among the outdated systems, and teach young people modern philosophy, the only true philosophy, the only philosophy suited to our times. - Reform of theology: let so-called rational theology be based on modern philosophy; positive theology, on the history of dogmas. - As for history, it should only be written and taught according to modern methods and principles. - That dogmas and the notion of their evolution be harmonized with science and history. - That in catechisms only those dogmas be inserted which have been reformed and which are within the reach of the vulgar... That ecclesiastical government be reformed in all its branches, especially disciplinary and dogmatic. Let its spirit, let its external procedures be brought into harmony with the conscience, which is turning to democracy; let a share therefore be made in government to the lower clergy and even to the laity; let authority be decentralized. - Reform of the Roman Congregations, especially the Holy Office and the Index. - Ecclesiastical power should change its line of conduct in the social and political arena; keeping itself outside political and social organizations, it should nevertheless adapt to them, to penetrate them with its spirit. - In morality, they embrace the Americanist principle that active virtues must take precedence over passive ones, both in estimation and in practice. - They call on the clergy to return to the humility and poverty of antiquity, and to base their ideas and actions on their principles. - Finally, there are those who, echoing their Protestant masters, wish to abolish ecclesiastical celibacy. - What is left, then, on which, and by the application of their principles, they do not seek reform?”.
“The first step was taken by Protestantism, the second by modernism, the next by atheism. The first step was taken by Protestantism, the second by modernism, the next will precipitate into atheism.” “Far, far away from the priesthood is the spirit of novelty: procul procul esto a sacro ordine novitatum amor.”
*
There is no end to the pages of this highly topical Encyclical. However, it is still necessary to transcribe these lines, which sound as if they came from a Pope or Prince of the Church today, zealously defending their most reliable defenders:
“After that, it’s hardly surprising that modernists pursue Catholics who fight vigorously for the Church with all their malice and acrimony. There’s no insult they won’t hurl at them. Ignorance and stubbornness are their favorite. If an adversary is made formidable by his erudition and vigor of mind, they will seek to reduce him to impotence by organizing a conspiracy of silence around him. This behavior is all the more reprehensible in that, at the same time, without end or measure, they heap praise on anyone who sides with them. A work appears, breathing novelty from every pore; they welcome it with applause and shouts of admiration. The more daring an author is in undermining antiquity, tradition and ecclesiastical magisterium, the more learned he becomes. Finally - and this is a matter of real horror to the good - if one of them happens to be struck down by the condemnations of the Church, the others immediately flock around him, showering him with praise, venerating him almost as a martyr for the truth. The young, dazed and confused by all this clatter of praise and insults, end up, out of fear of the label of ignoramus and ambition for the literatus of savants, as well as under the inner sting of curiosity and pride, giving in to the current and throwing themselves into modernism.”
*
If the Holy Father’s appeal was scarcely heard by the other successors of the Apostles, as the half-century that followed testifies to the urgent adjuration that follows: “We beg and beseech you not to allow anyone to find the least fault with your vigilance, zeal and firmness in such a serious matter.... We therefore wish the bishops, scorning all human fear, trampling underfoot all prudence of the flesh, without regard to the cries of the wicked, suavely, no doubt, but strongly, to take their share of responsibility in this”, the lucidity of the analysis and diagnosis only strikes the readers - and they are rare - of the Encyclical Pascendi in 1964 all the more. Almost every word is associated with a behavior, or even a contemporary name. It seems that almost everything that is thought, said and done by some of today’s clergy is exactly the opposite of the spirit, the words and the actions of Saint Pius X. Not even the Motu Proprio on sacred music is a throwback to the past. Let’s consider a simple quotation: “The proper language of the Roman Church is Latin. It is therefore forbidden to sing anything in the vulgar language during the solemn functions of the liturgy; and, even more so, to sing in the vulgar language the variant or common parts of the Mass and the Office. For each function of the liturgy, the texts that may be sung to music and the order to be followed in these songs being fixed, it is not permitted either to change this order, or to replace the prescribed texts with words of one’s own choosing, or to omit them in their entirety or even in part... Each of the parts of the Mass and the sacred functions as a whole must preserve, even from a musical point of view, the character and form which ecclesiastical tradition has given them, and which are perfectly reproduced in Gregorian chant. “
What remains of the work of Saint Pius X after only half a century? For the historian carried away by the movement of majuscular History, nothing, rigorously nothing: it suffices to compare the Acta Sedis of Saint Pius X with some statement made by a bishop in a Rotary Club, to get the distinct impression of being faced not only with different minds, but with different religions. I’ve been studying philosophy for almost half a century, and I’ve been professing it for over thirty. My studies have forced me to make numerous forays into the field of Christian philosophy and theology. At least in my own eyes, I’m not what fools would call a “fundamentalist”, being more of a “straight shooter”, even when it comes to religious matters. I simply note that what was proclaimed truth by the Church fifty years ago tends more and more to be repudiated as error by many Catholics, or, if they are not numerous, as I believe, by Catholics who have almost all the means of advertising pressure on their brethren. I simply note that what was denounced as error by the Pope in 1907 is today advocated as truth by these same Catholics, clerics and laymen alike, who wield an almost totalitarian power of persuasion over souls.
Any untrained mind can verify the accuracy of this double assertion and check its relevance. It is not only the teaching of Saint Pius X that is being denied, but that of all his successors, and above all of Pius XII, who, with supernatural zeal, went to every breach in the rampart - and God knows how many - to plug them.
The Christian religion, which has existed for almost two millennia, is being replaced by another religion, which the impartial observer can say (despite all the claims it makes and all the precautions it takes to “go back to the evangelical sources”) is no longer Christian. The process is not yet complete. It is ongoing. It is unprecedented. Protestantism and its thousand forms are and remain Christian heresies, fragments torn from the living whole that is Christianity. The new religion, or “neo-Christianity” as I sometimes misleadingly refer to it, is AN INDEED RELIGION, ARISING FOR THE FIRST TIME IN HISTORY, and one wonders whether, no longer deserving the name of Christian, as Saint Pius X predicted, it still deserves, as he suggested, the name of religion. Indeed, if there is a common denominator to all the innovations being perpetrated in today’s Church, with great disorder and without the slightest regard for papal warnings, it is indeed contempt for the Sacred, which is basically the very definition of atheism. At first glance, all the thrusts of the Council in the Church, in all areas of religion (not a single one unaffected), seem incoordinated, even contradictory. However, a closer look reveals something that is specific to each of them: the distance between God and man, the sense of Transcendence, the impression of a vertiginous Proximity that complements it, are disappearing in favor of an attitude that erases all difference between the divine and the human, in other words, that totally misunderstands the Sacred. Veneration, piety, adoration, devotion, spirituality, reverence, intuition of mystery - I’m quoting here and there - are no longer strictly speaking religious attitudes. What is “religious” is “action”, “the improvement of living conditions”, “work”, “peace”, “the union of peoples”, “the liberation of the oppressed”, “the conquest of nature”, “the building of a new society” and so on.
In short, what is religious is man, the relationship between man and man, the emergence of a “new man” completely freed from the constraints imposed on him by nature and society of yesteryear, and thus “open” to all mankind. What is religious is the “social” man, the “collective” man, the “communitarian” man, the “communist” man, always progressing, ineluctably evolving towards the “perfect man” for whom Christ is still temporarily held up as a model.
*
These ideas, these clouds in which today’s Christians and Catholics, clerics and laity alike, are bathed, are the culmination of the modernism condemned by St. Pius X, and particularly of what the Pascendi encyclical calls immanentism. The doctrine of immanence in the modernist sense,” writes the Pope, “holds and professes that every phenomenon of consciousness arises from man as man. The rigorous conclusion is the identity of man and God, i.e. pantheism”, since man’s awareness of God is God himself, and this awareness owes nothing to man alone. There is not the slightest difference between immanentism, which Pius X saw as the driving force behind modernism, and Marx’s famous formula for “human consciousness as the highest divinity”. An “immanentist” Christian can only be Marxist, or fascinated by Marxism, or tolerant of it, or hostile to anyone who practices “negative anti-communism”. A Christian who is not an “immanentist”, who submits to the traditional Church and its dogmas, who is a “fundamentalist”, is correlatively “much more dangerous than the communist” for the purity of the faith, as conceived by R.P. Liégé and so many others in his wake. Faith in man is the only faith in God that can be.
In fact, in strict logic, immanentism can only lead to collectivism: if consciousness and its object are identical, consciousness can only be collective, universal, total and divine, otherwise it will crumble into an anarchic multitude of individual consciousnesses. It is to Marxist pantheism that all forms of contemporary neo-Christianity flow, like rivers and streams to the ocean. It’s not surprising, then, that the most accentuated immanentism of all - that professed by R.P. Teilhard de Chardin and his followers - is in the direction of integral socialization, separated from Marxism by a hair’s breadth, and that the sect’s philosophers see it as the forerunner of the future amalgam between the new Christianity and Communism. The two systems reconcile and complement each other in terms of the denial of the principle of identity characteristic of all evolutionism. If matter is spirit, ape is man, man himself is god. Any consciousness enclosed in its immanence is the place where opposites coincide at the high temperature of “divinization”. The theology of collegiality develops along the same lines. As for the new “communitarian” liturgy, it is more than certain that it meets the definition of all real communism: “one brain is enough for a thousand arms” in a single mechanical Zusammenmarschierung, with a single orchestra conductor or gymnastics instructor. In this chaos of sonic inanity, where the priest is essentially a theatrical performer and director, no one is thinking of God, no one is thinking of his neighbor, no one is thinking of anything: no divine or human presence is the focal point of this anonymous singing, where everyone is killing time at Holy Mass. But Monsieur le Curé and Monsieur le Vicaire are happy: for a long time now, they’ve envied the position of crowd leader, a position somewhat devalued by politicians. Now they have it, and they experience the intoxicating feeling of leading a perfectly docile mass (false notes don’t matter much), not to the divine influx, but to their own authority.
It’s easy to understand why today’s Christian religion, modernized in the manner of the modernists condemned by St. Pius X, is increasingly eliminating the Sacred from its dogmas and rites. The Sacred is a force, a grace that in no way bends to our demands, our ideas or our feelings. Rather, it is the Sacred that imposes its mysterious presence on us through a language that is that of Revelation, through music and rites that may well be inspired, if not by supernatural inspiration, then at least by virtue of the artist’s poetic and creative gift, which is also, in its own way, a grace, a manifestation of the sacred in the order of nature. This hinders the distraught subjectivities, aspirations, demands and requirements of the “modern soul”. As soon as there’s a truth that’s independent of man, superior to man, freely granted to man, as soon as there’s a real presence that man hasn’t generated on his own, like ectoplasm, we’re quick to ignore it. Our contemporaries are no longer interested in real beings, whether supernatural or natural, that do not depend on man. Only signs influence them, and not signs insofar as they refer to the things signified, but signs as such, without more, like the banknote, the word, and all that we encompass under this name of structure that hides decay. So our clerics give them meaning. The platitude of most sermons and Sunday hymns is confusing. The marvellous beauty of the biblical texts, accompanied by a sober commentary that highlights them with all their truthful content, with the incentive to become better that they provoke in us, the splendour of the Holy Mass, which we never tire of reading and rereading, all this radiance of the Sacred, which is at one with language, with signs, with signified realities that do not come from man, is suppressed in favor of chatter and jingles that bear the stamp of vulgarity. At a time when Christians have apparently become “adults”, they are treated as if they were backward children, if not mentally retarded. We could cite countless examples of religious language that no longer conveys the sacred. Why is this? Because, by virtue of the subjectivist and immanentist postulate, the claim is to bring God within man’s reach, not to elevate man to God.
Whether we like it or not, to adapt to the modern world - to adapt to any world - is to say goodbye to the Sacred, not only because the modern world desacralizes everything - nature, art, religion itself - but because the modern world is no longer a world of presences: it is a world of representations, no longer a world of realities independent of man and which man has slowly humanized without enslaving, it is a world where modern man has projected himself, made by modern man in his own image, where he constantly finds himself, where there is no longer anything between man and man but man himself. How can we adapt religion to a world that has been secularized to the core, without constructing the incredible chimera of a secular religion? This is the current challenge, the outcome of which Saint Pius X foresaw: a religion in which man usurps the place of God, a religion that profanes everything it says and does. Greek tragedy raised a people, largely illiterate, to the summit of genius, and opened up the mystery of Destiny. The time is coming, if it has not already arrived, when the tragedy of Calvary and the new “pastoral” will be presented to the Christian people, carefully enucleated of every vestige that reminds man that he does not belong to himself and that nothing is due to him: on that day, we will record the death of the Sacred and the ruin of Transcendence. The Christian people will no longer even know what the pagan people knew when they, mortals, lent human form to their ever-living gods: that the Divine is all the closer to man the more inaccessible it is to him, and that the night of the soul is its deepest light.
*
“To better understand modernism and its present-day consequences, we need, with St. Pius X, to look briefly at “the causes that gave rise to it and feed it”.
“There can be no doubt that the proximate and immediate cause lies in a perversion of the mind: proximam continentemque causam in errore mentis, esse ponendam, dubitationem non habet”. St. Pius X’s diagnosis is dazzling: perversion of the spirit, falsity of the spirit, imposture of the spirit, there is no disease more common today among the clergy and the faithful degraded by a modern world that debases everything that emerges from its bosom. How can we turn a blind eye to the fact that the greatest scientific discovery of modern times, the splitting of the atom, still represents the greatest threat of death to the world that prides itself on it? How can we fail to see that the same world that saves thousands of young human lives sends them, barely adults, to the slaughter? How can we remain blind to this world which claims to liberate men and peoples, when in fact it enslaves them with a ferocity unheard of in the ancient world? The victor takes the power at his disposal as far as it will go”, said the Athenian orator to the Melians who were about to be massacred: this is the harsh law that reigns among gods and men alike. Cruel, of course, but no lie: good remains good, evil evil. We’ve changed all that: victory is immediately transformed into defeat, freedom into slavery, prosperity into ruin, prey into shadow, reality glimpsed in words, bread into stone, good hoped for into evil. Each step towards individual and collective liberation has been accompanied by a lowering of the standard of human nature: at the end of the day, there is no longer any such thing as human nature, only a plastic material that the techniques of ideological persuasion are able to mould, with the very complicity of those who are their victims. And the worst thing is not being a slave, it’s consenting to be one. Ruunt in servitutem.
The concrete freedoms of the peasant of yesteryear are priceless compared to the shackles of all kinds worn voluntarily by the greasy slave of today’s urban civilization, chained by his revolutionary fevers to the social machinery. If we thought things through, we’d be terrified by the enormous regression of modern times. But we no longer think things, we think, so to speak, words: it’s enough for a word to be pronounced, freedom for example, for us to be convinced that we are free, whereas our liberation from a given situation is nothing more than a consolidated slavery to another situation which no word designates, which we are careful not to name, and which therefore doesn’t exist in our eyes.
Such is the lie of the modern mind. To lie is to say what is not and not to say what is. Today, this art has been brought to the height of perfection, to such an extent that most words in everyday language come to mean the opposite of what they express, without those who pronounce them even realizing it themselves. Anyone who has the misfortune of uttering a common-sense truth is considered a disrupter of public order: if you assert, for example, that the liberalization currently taking place in Russia is more dangerous for the West than the Stalinist dictatorship, for the supremely obvious reason that the Communist regime, relieved of its domestic worries and the use of its forces for internal purposes, can now turn its will to power more freely towards the outside world, it will be said of you, like a clergyman of myself, that you oppose the policy of conciliation, peace and understanding with Communism, advocated, it seems, by John XXIII. In speaking of the error mentis, the perversion of the spirit, Saint Pius X never imagined that false spirits, not knowing themselves to be false, as Pascal says, having even lost all possibility of knowing it, and persuaded to hold the liberating truth, would have occupied most of the sociologically influential positions in the Church, to the point of reducing, if not to silence, at least to a very restricted audience, the intelligences still concerned with realities that can be seen and touched, and stubborn in always judging the tree by its fruits. Even less would he have believed that bishops would have chosen these false, incurably false spirits as their advisors, and even brought them into the pulpit of truth to indoctrinate the faithful.
With the candor proper to holiness, and the peasant conviction that the visible consequences of an error force the offender to resign himself, St. Pius X did not believe that the false mind was incapable of correction, because it now transforms the world in its own image, and the disastrous consequences of its actions no longer even appear in history, however recent: all a free spirit, inoculated against the toxins of the century, has to do is cast a dispassionate eye over the narrative of events since around 1914, to see how the most obvious facts are warped, turned upside down, emptied of their obvie meaning by the propaganda machine. We are sociologically installed in a permanent lie. It takes a soul of iron and, in all likelihood, abundant help from Above, to resist the advertising pressures of current ideologies and contemplate things as they are in a direct, immediate and firm grasp of their essences. The operation of the agent intellect, which consists in grasping in the phantasm the intelligible of which it is fat, is today reserved for a few rare minds that have decided once and for all to stick to the simple, the elementary, the unrefined, so as to form, through accurate and strong grasp of reality, unshakeable judgments, and to restore the brilliance of common-sense truths, always forgotten by fools, utopians, sophists and, above all (it should be repeated indefinitely) those gnawed by the desire to impose their lies on others, so that the lie, now universal, is taken for the truth. We often misunderstand the role of the false mind in contemporary society: it is limited, we claim, and common sense always triumphs in the end. I don’t think so. The influence of the false mind is limitless, not only because it has at its disposal the means of dissemination generally denied to the mind eager for truth, but above all because it is currently equipped with an almost invincible weapon, first glimpsed by Nietzsche: the will to power.
Saint Pius X calls it, in his Christian vocabulary, pride, which exerts on the soul an action of unheard-of effectiveness: sed longe majorem ad obcaecandum animum et in errorem inducendum cohibet efficientiam superbia. “Pride! It’s at home in modernist doctrine; wherever it turns, everything feeds it, and it spreads out in all its forms. Pride, certainly, this self-confidence that makes them set themselves up as a universal rule. Pride, that vain glory which represents them in their own eyes as the only holders of wisdom, which makes them say, haughty and full of themselves: We are not like the rest of men; and which, so that they have no comparison with others, pushes them to the most absurd novelties. Pride, that spirit of insubordination which calls for a conciliation of authority with liberty. Pride, this pretension to reform others, while forgetting themselves; this absolute lack of respect for authority, without excluding the supreme authority. No, in truth, there’s no road to modernism straighter or faster than pride. Give us a Catholic layman, give us a priest, who has lost sight of the fundamental precept of the Christian life, namely that we must renounce ourselves if we wish to follow Jesus Christ, and who has not torn pride from his heart: this layman, this priest is ripe for all the errors of modernism. That is why, Venerable Brethren, your first duty is to go through these superb men, and apply them to tiny and obscure functions: let them be put all the lower as they seek to climb higher, and let their very abasement deprive them of the faculty to do harm.”
Since then, water has rapidly flowed under the bridge, like the majestic History itself. The Pharisee has become a publican, without losing any of his inner Phariseeism. He seized strategic positions in the sphere of communications. He took control of the levers of public opinion. It has made and broken reputations. It has inflated and deflated balloons. It has to be said: with unparalleled ease, thanks to a power of intimidation, a scientific use of catchwords, warnings and threats, of which previous ages offer few if any examples. Contemporary modernists have combined superbness with humility. They have made use of the humble, the small, the underprivileged, not to put them out of their misery (experience proves that this has worsened), but to make their overweening conception of man as master of his own destiny and of the universe triumph. They built the most arrogant edifice of intellectual and spiritual domination the world has ever known, on the evangelical love of neighbor. The empire of the Sorbonne denounced by Péguy was nothing compared to this pretension, for it did not penetrate to the very root of consciousness to warp it and make it perceive man in a demiurgic perspective. I could list here a thousand examples of this mental colonization of Catholicism by the “identity of man and God”, stigmatized by St. Pius X as the generative focus of modernism. Only recently, a religious friend of mine submitted to the Ordinary of the Diocese a work of mysticism of which he was the author, and in which he incidentally showed that love of one’s neighbor only had meaning and reality when bathed in love of God, the supreme form of charity. The censor, who was also a professor at the Grand Séminaire, asked him to delete this passage, on pain of having his imprimatur refused. Contemporary modernism has thus created a bad conscience in the souls of Christians, making them ready to fall prey to all kinds of revolutionary totalitarianism, so much so that it can be said, without exaggeration, that Christianity is sometimes or often the best preparation for the success of Marxism. It’s as clear as the sun at its zenith.
Immanentist subjectivism, common to all modernists of the 1910 or 1964 style, has nothing at the end of what we must call its “thought”, for want of another word, but an image, a phantasm, an “idea” of man: concrete man, of blood, flesh and bones, is merely the support for the “idea” of man. To love one’s neighbor is not to love the being who is close to you and who shares your daily life, or who actually bursts into it (like the foreigner for the pagan Greek, honored as if he were Zeus himself), it’s to love the “idea” that we have of man, in the immanence of consciousness itself. For such an abbé, the neighbor is not the Frenchman who succumbs to the blows of the Algerian, but the killer himself, or more precisely, the man who frees himself from the odious servitude of colonization. Under these conditions, “neighbor” in the dictionary sense no longer has any meaning. It is the distant that we must love, in the manner of the priests of I don’t know which French diocese, and at the invitation of today’s theologians. When we meet our neighbors in church on a Sunday, it’s to fall on their backs. Not long ago, I was in a middle-class parish church where circumstances had placed me in the front row. The preacher gave us a sermon that was one long cry of hatred against the bourgeoisie (always these abstract ideas). He ended by announcing a collection for the underdeveloped countries to which this same parish had sent two of its sons, who were massacred, and a nun who was raped. Stepping down from the pulpit he’d climbed up to (to demonstrate his superiority, no doubt, as it hadn’t been in use for some time), he began his collection with yours truly. I confess that no matter how many times he turned the tray in front of me to encourage me to set an example, I looked him straight in the eye and gave him a sign of denial. All things considered, I prefer the outright confiscation of all my material possessions by the Communist regime to this solicitation, which is based solely on insults in the name of Christ.
This anecdote isn’t the only one still buzzing in my memory. It reminds me of others, all of which make me sympathetic to this vilified “bourgeoisie” at the very moment when its political power and social prestige are declining. If there’s such a thing as a kick in the ass, it’s the one inflicted with impunity by a certain clergy, who believe themselves exempted from all the rules of elementary politeness by the habit they wear, because socialism in vogue encourages them to do so, on an audience frozen in respect.
Let’s just say it without beating about the bush: there’s something horrifying about this love that elevates an abstract idea of man to the pinnacle, when this idea coincides purely and simply with oneself, and is merely the reflection of the most closed subjectivity. The man who feels it proudly substitutes himself for God at the very moment when he bows before the neighbor” or before “the distant”. This type of superlative skillfully mimics love: he gives himself outwardly to the other, whereas it is to himself that he gives himself; he sacrifices himself to the other, whereas the other is only a pretext for loving himself; the other is everything, but he is only the idea that we make of him, and this idea is itself only ourselves. The proud classicist simply preferred the created good that is his being to the uncreated Good. He refused to acknowledge the absolute primacy of God. Such swelling implied character, grit, a kind of blind, hard, resolute, strained solidity. It’s no small thing to challenge God’s primacy and substitute one’s own excellence for the greatness of the Creator! As St Thomas points out, the other sins offend God through ignorance, weakness and concupiscence: superbness alone is directly, immediately contrary to God. In the case of these sins, distancing oneself from God is a consequence; in the case of pride, it is the constitutive principle. There’s something tragic about pride: the outcome is fixed in advance. Modernist pride has none of this stern, impavid certainty. It’s cunning. It is deceitful. It is deceitful. It doesn’t break away from the divine. It unravels it at the base.
What’s more, all the terms of Christian language are deprived of their reference to the transcendence of God, and now focus on the transcendence of Man. The operation is not brutal, as in Marxism. It is cautious, circumspect. “What you do to the least of these, you do to me. Only, these least of these are not those whom God designates as his own, but those whom the proud man himself chooses as his own, according to the idea he has of them, and which conforms to the immanent self, to the subjectivity from which he does not emerge, from which he does not want to emerge, any other criterion being null and void. The proud Samaritan now selects his wounded from the roadside.
He imposes his option on the pusillanimous faithful. The means of coercion, or rather clandestine persuasion, are not lacking. The whole political and social atmosphere has been saturated with them since the revolutions of the last two centuries. Socialism, with which the planet is soaked like a sponge, encourages humanitarianism, a love of the collective, and contempt for the individual, the only person with a soul to save. It’s all the more inclined because this humanitarianism demands no personal effort on the part of man: it’s institutions, structures and mechanisms that act, with the oil of public finances, and we know that in times of waste, taxes are never heavily felt. But when the social pressure of laws and morals is compounded by the influence of religion, which is distorted by the same caricatures of reality, in most cases, the weight of the environment becomes almost irresistible. Socialism has fully accomplished its social and political program. It triumphs everywhere in various forms. All that remains is to fulfill its religious program: the replacement of God by Man.
This is the purpose of the mixture of socialism and Christianity that is the New Theology, whose political leanings St. Pius X once again revealed in his Letter on the Sillon: “Yes, indeed, we can say that the Sillon convoys socialism, with its eye fixed on a chimera. We fear it could be worse. The result of this promiscuity in work, the beneficiary of this cosmopolitan social action, can only be a democracy that will be neither Catholic, nor Protestant, nor Jewish; a religion (for Sillonnisme, the leaders have said, is a religion) more universal than the Catholic Church, uniting all men who have finally become brothers and comrades in “the reign of God”. “We don’t work for the Church, we work for humanity...”. The Catholicism of the Sillon... has been captured in its march by the modern enemies of the Church, and from now on forms no more than a miserable tributary of the great movement of apostasy organized, in all countries, for the establishment of a universal Church which will have neither dogmas nor hierarchy, neither rules for the mind nor brakes for the passions, and which, under the pretext of freedom and human dignity, would bring back to the world, if it could triumph, the legal reign of cunning and force, and the oppression of the weak, of those who suffer and work. We know only too well the dark offices where these deleterious doctrines are elaborated, which should not seduce clear-sighted minds.” The sauce may be different, the spices changed, but the broth remains the same: the ecumenism of the religion of man as Alfred Loisy advocated it after his apostasy. St. Pius X’s insight extended far beyond August 25, 1910.
*
That clerics are particularly tempted by pride, and easily cloak their superbness in the mantle of humility, is well known. You don’t need to read the corrosive analyses in The Genealogy of Morals to know this. Common sense puts it simply: corruptio optimi pessima. Anyone who rises is threatened by vertigo. There is nothing here below that surpasses the priest and the indelible sacredness with which he is marked.
Modern times have undermined the sovereign, unquestioning authority of the man of the cloth, which once manifested itself in tangible signs in the social hierarchy. In many countries, the prestige of the priesthood has been stripped of its counterpart in “the world”. Every cloud has a silver lining: priests now have to rely solely on spirituality to establish their credibility and maintain their ascendancy. Nothing is more beautiful, or more magnetic, than the hold on souls that invisibly and invincibly emanates from holiness. But experience attests that nothing is rarer. Let’s just blame the heaviness of human nature, not the power of grace. More than ever, today’s priest is driven to holiness - as Saint Pius X once again clearly saw. He is denied the consolations or sensible compensations that a society with Christian institutions and spirit would offer him. How, then, can we act on the century if the century is no longer permeated by Christianity, and if the author of the action is not moved by an exceptional love of God? Once again, experience shows that the quickest way to succeed in the world is to adopt its fashions, and even to fall back on them. The temptation for the contemporary priest to conform to the century in order to evangelize the century is violent. It is all the more impetuous in that priests are easily inclined to believe themselves invulnerable, thanks to the sacred character that places them outside the sphere of the profane, and that they approach the world as apostles, as conquerors marked by the seal of Christ. This self-mystification reaches its peak when the priest becomes convinced that he must speak to the world in the language of the world in order to convert the world to God. Such a pruritus is, we believe, mainly modern. More and more clerics are itching to get out of what they call, following in the footsteps of Father Congar, “the Christian ghetto” and to “work in the dough of the world”. They have no previous role models, all the apostles having worked in societies that were already Christian and which they wanted to make more Christian, or in societies with a religious soul, such as mission countries.
This is the first time in the history of Christianity that the apostle is faced with a world where “God is dead”, in the presence of a secular, desacralized world, where the image of man has erased the image of God. There is indeed the solution of holiness, prescribed by St. Pius X. But sanctity, let us repeat, is not something you find in the streets. What’s more, it has no visible, immediate or massive effect. The supernatural quoad substandiam, to use the enlightening scholastic expression, which constitutes holiness, acts only slowly, often with delay, and shines its light only on a small number who are sensitive to its secret appeal. The supernatural quoad modum, miracles and prodigies, would undoubtedly do better, but Christ’s did not. That leaves the experimentally proven means employed by crowd controllers, politicians, demagogues, human puppet string pullers and conditioning specialists. There are priests who surpass the best Marxist technicians in this field. Flattering the masses, “the big animal” to lead them, leads to the most appalling sophistry, as Plato showed. Haven’t we reached this point with the so-called new theology, renewed by modernism?
However much this theology has filtered, decanted and extracted from modernismus redivivus, as well as from all the currents before and after it that flow into it as if in their natural place, the enterprise ends in failure: between immanentist subjectivism and the realism required by the Christian faith, there is no possible composition. The monster born of this attempt would be an inverted religion, separated from the atheistic religion of Marxism by the thickness of an amorphous sentiment on which the literary faconde of Christian “intellectuals” could embroider ad infinitum, but which the harsh Soviet or Chinese grip would soon confiscate for the benefit of the collectivity erected as a divinity.
All the religious tendencies, conscious or unconscious, of modern man, laid bare by the subjectivism that penetrates his profane life and which had not yet reached the depths of his Christian life, or what remains of it, except in a few so-called elites, have been diverted from the ego to the we, from the individual to the class, to the people, to the nation, to the race, to humanity, so that the new situation of contemporary man is worse than that of the “egoist” to whom he succeeds. Modern man is heading straight for the adoration of the state Leviathan, which is itself divinized: the state has become master in the place of God, with the fixation of humanity, in the “perfect and definitive anthill” that Valéry foresaw. Today’s slavery not only debases men to the point of making them love it, as Simone Weil thought after Vauvenargues, it also destroys in them any possibility of escaping it: the walls of the ergastula are those of the planet, and soon of the moon. Father Congar has left one ghetto to enter another.
*
This is the outcome of all pride, and particularly of ecclesiastical pride, which is its highest form: the fall. The overcoming of the human condition is “the final puncture of the frog”, as James Ensor sarcastically put it. St. Thomas plausibly asserts that Original Sin was a sin of superlatives. Man claimed to be self-sufficient, to rise above himself, to make himself, to modify his nature. He fully succeeded in liberating the powers of animality within himself, at the same time as he subtracted his reason and his being from God. We must never stop saying it: he who makes the angel, makes the beast. However intelligent we may have become (and Father Teilhard assures us that it’s nothing yet, and that we’ll soon be bathed in a cosmic intelligence that reminds me of Averroes’ unique intellect), we’re still letting the beast, and even the ferocious beast, get the better of us.
How many millions have died on the altars of modern Idols? Twenty, thirty, forty in the last fifty years? It can and must be said that intelligence (deprived of grace or even the memory of grace) is all the more brutal, all the more bestial, the more intelligent it is. And these corpses are still nothing compared to the millions of souls who have died under the sledgehammer of propaganda and advertising. The modern world, which fervently denies the existence of original sin, is the very proof of this sin: it rises only to fall.
How can our clerics, who want to embrace all that is worldly and modern, fail to realize that this world is atrocious? Saint Pius X tells us: because they are ignorant. It’s spelled out in the Encyclical Pascendi: “That if from moral causes we come to intellectual ones, the first that presents itself - and the principal one - is ignorance: prima ac potissima occurit ignorantia.” All these modernists of 1910 and 1964 “who pose as doctors of the Church” are scandalously ignorant: they don’t know, they don’t know anything, even if they know many things. They have lacked the necessary instrument to pierce confusion and dispel sophism: scholastic philosophy,” says St. Pius X, “and even more clearly, we would say today that confusion and sophism reign supreme, the natural philosophy of the human mind, common sense, which Christian philosophy, extending Greek philosophy, has established as the pivot of knowledge. Common sense is the sense of the real, common to all human intelligence, appropriate to its object, which is being. Many clerics no longer have the slightest dose of it, so dumbed down have they become by the nonsense they hear spouted around them. I’ve given up discussing the new liturgy he’s introduced in the parish with my parish priest ever since he gave me the most decisive argument: “You don’t come to Mass to pray”. He didn’t even hear my retort: “But what then, Monsieur le Curé, do all your oremus mean?” These clerics have broken all ties with reality: they don’t know what they’re saying, they don’t know what they’re doing, my dear Madiran!
I know of no precedent for this ignorance. It’s as if, over the last half-century, knowledge of the past (in what is eternal and everlasting) has suddenly dried up in the minds of men and, if rumor is to be believed, in the minds of the majority of the Council Fathers, who would have rejected an outline of revealed truth formulated in scholastic terms and according to the scholastic method, thus incurring the anticipatory rebuke of St. Pius X in Pascendi: “It is a fact that with the love of novelties always goes hatred of the scholastic method; and that there is no surer indication that the taste for modern doctrines is beginning to dawn in a mind, than to see there spring up a disgust for this method. Let the modernists and their supporters remember the proposition condemned by Pius IX: “The method and principles which served the ancient scholastic doctors in the cultivation of theology no longer meet the demands of our time or the progress of science”. We may have forgotten all about the scholastic teaching of the XIIIe century, but that of September 8, 1907, formulated with an insistence, a secret quiver, an incomparable force?
I’m not pleading the cause of my own philosophy here, if I dare say so, for there’s nothing scholastic about it, except for its unmistakably Aristotelian and Thomistic core. It is this very core, this natural philosophy of the human mind, that is called into question in favor of a dialectic that is nothing but lies, deception and juggling, where opposites coincide, so that at the very moment when one claims to be part of the Church, one detaches oneself from it, and between Christianity and its Marxist antipode there is a rebound from one to the other, a perpetual exchange. This makes it possible to say “what is not” in complete serenity.
Some ten or fifteen years ago, I was violently attacked in Témoignage Chrétien by a young abbot who made allegations that were very foreign to my thinking, even though he had been my student in the Faculty and passed his exams before me before entering the Seminary, where his brain was immediately turned inside out by the so-called pious readings. I wrote to my bishop about it, pointing out to His Excellency that I would read the eliacin libel and parallel extracts from my books to my students at my next moral philosophy class, showing them how the lad, who had meanwhile just been appointed professor of religion at a local school, knew how to read a text. Do you know what happened? I received, on purpose, the flattest letter of apology I’d ever read, accompanied by a Russian-style self-criticism. The anecdote serves to demonstrate what must have been the religious course professed by our eminent dialectician: he taught his listeners that black is white and that common sense truths no longer hold sway in the Church. In a review of one of my books, a very eminent Jesuit, jealous of Escobar, similarly made me say exactly the opposite of what I had written, to give himself the pleasure of virtuously condemning me in the name of the Gospel!
I’ll cut to the chase the long list of errors committed by these clerics who can neither read nor write, and who don’t hesitate to set themselves up against Saint Pius X: “Your Sarto, he’s dead and well dead”, one of them once told me. This brings me to the diagnosis of a disease that has taken on epidemic proportions, sometimes to the point of transforming the Catholic Church into a Tower of Babel resounding with “confusions” and “sophisms”. You don’t have to be a great cleric to make this diagnosis. The language of many ecclesiastics has become the language of the world and, as such, it participates in the lie that the manipulators of public opinion have penetrated to the very heart of every language spoken on the planet, at the instigation of most, almost all heads of state. Modern man has come to call good what is bad, true what is false, beautiful what is ugly, because he himself has become a lie. Worse than lying is no longer knowing that we are lying, lying in good faith, in all sincerity, because we no longer perceive the reality that does not tolerate the identity of being and non-being that constitutes lying.
But why do we no longer apprehend reality? I won’t repeat here what I’ve written in five or six books in which I’ve honed in on the answer to this mysterious question. Our fathers would have said quite simply: God blinds man to punish him for his pride. It’s true, tragically true, despite all the sarcasm of “modern” theologians, none of whom I bet would dare invoke such a cause, except to declare it “infantile”. Modern man no longer recognizes the Principle of Reality anywhere: is it strange, then, that he is no longer aware of the reality that depends on this Principle? But modern man still has to live (if we can call it living), to relate to nature, to his fellow human beings, to an unreal nature, to unreal, insubstantial fellow human beings. It therefore needs to fabricate an artificial nature and artificial men, the only ones it can recognize, to conceal what still remains here and there of real nature and real man. This is common practice: for example, homeland is no longer given by birth, but by adherence to an ideology; a profession is no longer given by vocation, but according to the advantages of money, prestige and leisure that it brings, or according to the needs of the community. The family still survives, but it shrinks in space and time: father, mother (until retirement age, when they go into hospice or grow old alone); brothers and sisters (until marriage). The rest of the family is almost nothing. Nature succumbs to artifice. Our entire civilization is made of plywood. We have squandered the unimaginable strength that submission to the natural order would give us. All we have left is our weakness, our devitalization, our rootlessness. We may even wonder whether we still cling to our flesh, whether we have lost our bodies, whether we still have senses that put us in immediate touch with the existence of beings and things.
Our senses are numb. Their coarseness is such that they need violent jolts to awaken them: what I have elsewhere called “neon sensation” is no longer even enough. Prolonged schooling puts us in the presence of books, printed matter and the written word, to the detriment of experience. The same prolonged schooling delays our assumption of the responsibilities that life entails. Education seeks to remove us from the painful forms of experience. The famous “lessons of things” are more academic and more fake than the textbooks themselves. Outside primary, secondary or higher education, the body and its anemic sensitive organs are assailed by a barrage of images and sounds that disturb them in other ways. Sex is traced back to the brain, which becomes the sexual organ par excellence, as one eminent Teilhardian proclaims. Under such conditions, how can modern man apprehend the outside world? The intermediary between reality and his intelligence - sensitivity - is almost entirely lacking. To “think”, he is reduced to fabricating phantasms that come from his imagination alone. Intelligence? The human mind generates it. Once separated from God, master of reality, and from reality itself, man is condemned to be a “creator”, an ape of God. This role of Prometheus, played by the perpetuated adolescents we have become today, is comical in the extreme. As for his thurifers, be they Dominicans, they are simply buffoons.
I believe that the disappearance of peasant civilization in favor of industrial civilization in Europe is one of the causes, if not the cause, of this “ignorance” that St. Pius X rightly reproaches modernism and, beyond modernism, we might add, its contemporary emulators. A foolish scholar is more foolish than an ignorant ground. “I hold the modern intellectual to be the last of the imbeciles until he has provided proof to the contrary”, roared Bernanos.
All this prodigious treasure trove of experience amassed by hundreds of generations of farmers in relation to the imperturbable order of nature, the rhythm of the seasons, the four constituent elements of the universe, man’s naïve, playful and frank reactions to his fellow man and to all the circumstances of life, has been wasted in less than a century by aliborons swollen like frogs. In today’s industrial and urban civilization, everything is done to ensure that the little bit of man who is about to grow up will never be able to repeat the experiences that the souls of his forebears distilled into realism, endurance and moral health, and which enabled them to overcome all catastrophes. It can never be said too often that in a peasant civilization, everything comes at a price. In today’s technical civilization, there are always palliatives, subterfuges and substitutes. If wheat runs out because of a mistake, we starve. If a state runs out of money, it unscrupulously issues counterfeit money, goes down the road of inflation and devaluation. There are a thousand and one ways to postpone the deadline. In a peasant civilization, the revenge of the offended reality is immediate.
Saint Pius X, the son of a farmer, knew this. That’s why he feared nothing so much for the priests entrusted to his direction as the unrealism of a disembodied, “immanent” spirituality that always makes the others, the later generations sacrificed, pay for the mistakes it crowns with victory laurels. His severity towards modernist dreamers stems from this: a clergy that combines “a false philosophy with faith”, as he puts it in Pascendi, is heretical. Hence his insistence on requiring the teaching of scholastic philosophy, which is a peasant philosophy, a philosophy regulated by experience of the order that exists in the world. Hence his support for traditional theology, which is a peasant theology based on the literal meaning of texts: rustic words always refer to things. Hence, finally, the cult he had for Saint Jean Vianney (today’s much-contested model of the cleric), this peasant in a frugal state, this uncultured country priest whose every word and deed is guided by his mystical experience of God.
St. Pius X’s thinking is astonishingly faithful to his rural origins. All experience is objective for the peasant, all conception of man and the world is rooted in extra-mental reality and, for him, “the supernatural is itself carnal”, on pain of death: material ruin, moral ruin, spiritual ruin. My personal experience as a university lecturer has convinced me that no progressive, cleric or layman, no matter how highly educated, understands these elementary truths: outside his field of specialization, no one is generally dumber than an “intellectual”. What can we say, then, of a priest who plays the modern “intellectual” - and there are many of them today who take to the stage on the theater of the world to recite what they’ve read in a newspaper or magazine, without checking their assertion by and in experience? These people, who claim to be “open”, are open about nothing except themselves, in their own subjective experience, which is unverifiable and which the most brazen call “the Holy Spirit”. In my opinion, almost all heresies, the modernism of 1907 and the modernism of our time, are specifically urban phenomena: superstitions are conceivable in a peasant civilization, but heresies will be rare there. The religious orders most affected by progressivism are based in cities. Urban secular clergy are more affected than rural ones. We could go on and on in the sociological direction we have just outlined.
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The conclusion of this study can only be brief: the failure of Saint Pius X is humanly patent. I could repeat here the solutions he prescribed in Pascendi to liquidate the crisis of modernism. We would see that his orders, after having undergone a semblance of execution, have been held to be null and void or have fallen into disuse. I don’t, because sadness and disgust overwhelm me.
More and more, I believe (and teach my children), in order to protect their faith, that there are two kinds of priests: those who believe in God and those who don’t, who pretend to, or who imagine they do. I won’t go into statistics here. I don’t have any, and if I did, it would be pointless. But I do believe that the second category is increasing in number. I have noticed not only that the Monitum of the Holy Office is considered non-existent in several colleges in my diocese, but above all that the priests who are followers of the famous Jesuit, conditioned by fashion and sociological pressures, believe more in Evolution than in God himself. There is only one priest in a thousand who is sufficiently familiar with biology to understand the work of Father Teilhard. There is one in a hundred thousand capable of judging it scientifically erroneous. Nonetheless, this incompetent clergy is spreading in young and old alike the new Gospel of our time, which, if you read twenty pages, you’ll see is no longer Christian or Catholic, because it is no longer natural, because it is the most vain mythology man has ever constructed to justify his own apotheosis. We could take up Teilhardian philosophy and theology point by point, and we’d have no difficulty in seeing that they are, under a pseudo-scientific whitewash, in line with the modernism condemned by Saint Pius X. If we add to this current the tributaries of new theologies, new pastorals and new liturgies, whose inspiration is the same, and if we don’t forget to mention the Communist infiltrations into the Catholic clergy and Press, we can only conclude that the holy Pope has been clearly defeated. Modernism has apparently emerged victorious from the struggle it has waged in the Church against the Church and by the Church, by a certain Church. Starting from the negation of the principle of identity, it has extended this to the seamless Tunic, reduced, by rejection of “triumphalism”, to an old rag:
According to the modernists, says the Encyclical, “religious authority must divest itself of all that external apparatus, of all those pompous ornaments by which it makes a spectacle of itself, in which they forget that religion, if it properly belongs to the soul, is nevertheless not confined to it, and that the honor given to authority reflects on Jesus Christ, who instituted it”.
There is much to ponder on this failure and on the mystery of the Church. All avenues of reflection will lead to the same point, masterfully clarified by St. Pius X in accordance with the tradition of the Church: the only effective means of salvation is holiness. There is no other. This is the path that Joseph Melchior Sarto chose, or rather that God imposed on him. There he truly triumphed. If we were less short-sighted, less eager for immediate and public success, less concerned with approval, we would see that modernism and progressivism, and all the nonsense that hurts us and has opted for the world, have already received their reward.
