And They Know It.
One of the most historically significant events of the last century was the fall of communism. In 1991, the Soviet Union ceased to exist. And yet the ideology sustaining Soviet communism had already collapsed under Brezhnev in the 1970s and had consolidated that collapse under Andropov beginning in 1982. By those years, no one believed in the Soviet paradise any longer — not even the apparatchiks. The machinery nonetheless kept running until 1991, operated by a committee of gerontocrats who resisted the inevitable. There were twenty years of lag between the death of legitimacy and the death of the machinery. This is a historical regularity: systems survive fifteen to twenty years beyond their own legitimacy. They advance like the light of a dead star.
The same thing is happening with progressivism within the Church — and, I would venture to say, in the West at large. It was an experiment that lasted less than the Soviet Union, but it is already dead, and we are now passing through a Brezhnevite period, waiting for the neo-modernist gerontocrats spawned by the worst of the conciliar spirit to pass on to a better life. The Boomers will die before long, and the light of that dead star — which is the Second Vatican Council — will cease to shine; it will go out and disappear from the Church's horizon. It will leave residues, to be sure, which will be costly to eradicate, but it will go out inevitably.
What I am saying is not a prophecy. "I am no prophet, nor a prophet's son" (Am 7:14); I am simply an observer of reality. And the signs of the regime's collapse seem clear to me. I will point to two of them, which are easily perceptible.
The first: the priesthood. The Catholic Church cannot do without priests; if they become extinct or if they are definitively transformed into something else, the Catholic Church ceases to exist as well. And this is the great danger toward which many bishops were leading us — and continue to lead us — through the formation they impart in their scrawny seminaries. The solution to this tragedy does not come through building a parallel structure; the solution comes through hope and patience, two fundamental virtues in times of crisis. Seminaries are emptying and priests are withering away in retirement homes because they themselves — fruits of the regime — refused to exercise the priesthood. And by this I mean that they refused to exercise their munera; they refused to sanctify, to teach, and to govern, and they wished to transform themselves into community animators and agents of social change, encouraged by the highest hierarchies. They despised the administration of the sacraments and turned them into a cheap, vulgar spectacle; they abandoned the teaching of Catholic doctrine in favor of sociology, and surrendered themselves to dialoguing synodality. They refused to be what they were. And they are dying, because nature is that implacable — and with them, their caste is dying too.
What kind of normal young man, with his neurons and hormones correctly aligned, would want to surrender his life and the pleasures the world lavishes upon him in abundance, in order to become a minor-league clown like the Boomer priests we see daily making fools of themselves on social media? These men are numbered; the future belongs to priests born in the warmth of the new millennium, who have a different vision and who, little by little, out of sheer institutional survival, will gradually change the situation. Archbishop Cordileone said it just a few days ago: "Young people love tradition, and this is an unstoppable movement." This year, twenty-six priests were ordained throughout all of Germany. And this year, the Priestly Fraternity of Saint Peter alone ordained the same number — and many more if one adds the rest of the traditional institutes, and far more still if one includes those one might call the "classical" clergy. For this very reason, the regurgitations of Cardinal Arthur Roche last week are nothing more than a swan song. As journalist Damian Thompson wrote: "I do not wish to be rude, but he is a bitter old toad, embittered because his influence has been declining since before Francis died." Reality speaks for itself, and they know it — but, like Brezhnev and Andropov, they will go on stretching the regime until death finally overtakes them.
We said that systems survive fifteen to twenty years beyond their own legitimacy. And here I see the other sign: the mitered Boomers know they are losing their legitimacy at an accelerating pace. And that is why they do what they do — at least in Argentina. Just a few days ago I noted that the bishops were worried, and the cause of their worry was the reality that is slowly taking shape before their eyes. The fact that the Archbishop of Buenos Aires instructed his diocesan education vicariate to open an investigation to determine which priest celebrated a Mass in Latin in one of the religious schools of the city is a crystal-clear sign of desperation — a measure worthy of the Soviet regime that was beginning to see its narrative crumbling, and that ordered the arrest or persecution of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, or Andrei Sinyavsky, or musicians Mstislav Rostropovich and Galina Vishnevskaya simply for giving shelter to Solzhenitsyn. The nuns who permitted the Mass will be punished by Archbishop García Cuerva just as the priest who celebrated it will be. The regime had lost its internal cohesion; the narrative had run out; the framework was coming apart. And so the only means it had left to sustain itself was the force of decrees and persecutions. This is precisely what bishops do with priests and groups of faithful who resist their modernist narrative: they persecute them with decrees and exiles. A system that feels legitimate has no need to issue decrees against priests for celebrating Mass in Latin or against laypeople for writing a blog. These are not signs of power. They are the reflexes of a body that knows it has lost its legitimacy and is approaching death. How else to explain the fact that the president of the Argentine Bishops' Conference — a synodalist among synodalists — has disabled comments on his X account, or that the press office of that body deletes any negative comment on its Instagram? Simply because they are gripped by terror that the faithful will eventually realize that, like the emperor in Andersen's tale, they are naked.
It is a matter of patience: it will take time, but nature is inexorable. I will most likely not live to see the fall of the progressive regime; I will have to content myself with having fought against it all my life, if God preserves in me the grace to do so — but the generations of those who are children today will see it.
Until not so long ago, I held a more apocalyptic vision — understandable both because of my age and because of the authors who shaped me, all of them witnesses to the last great decline of the West. Today I am no longer so certain that we do not stand at the threshold of a renaissance. And I look not forward, as a prophet would — which I am not — but backward.
When, after the triumph of the Cross in the early centuries, that world disappeared beneath the barbarian invasions and nascent Europe was reduced to ruins, two unexpected events changed everything: from the "far West" — as Toynbee called it — the small and forgotten island of Ireland poured missionaries onto the continent who rekindled the embers of Christianity, the peregrinatio pro Christo; and shortly afterward, Charlemagne succeeded in unifying politically and administratively the chaos left by the invaders. When the drowsy and sensual Catholicism of the sixteenth century was torn apart by Protestantism, the Council of Trent arose — which, with its lights and shadows, as with all things human, gave new life to the Church. And after the ravages of the French Revolution, and once its ideas had spread throughout Europe in the wake of Napoleon, an unforeseeable missionary impulse emerged, with the flourishing of a great number of religious institutes that revitalized what the revolutionaries believed already dead.
Why should we think that in our case it will be any different?
(Source, in Spanish)
