Revolution Revealed The Triumph of Modernism and the End of the Traditional Catholic Church (Part II)
Peter Crenshaw
Part II
The New Beginning of the Church
The Cardinal then outlines his vision of the “new evangelization” which involves the Church starting anew from the beginning. In doing so he makes several shocking statements. First he states:
The calling of the Church, in the likeness of Jesus, is to proclaim the Kingdom of God. Even Christ himself did not proclaim or preach Himself, but the Kingdom. The Church, as His disciple and His servant, ought to do the same. Her calling is to serve, not to rule: “Servant of Humanity,” called her Pope Paul VI. She must do this service living in the world, herself a part of the world and in solidarity with it, because “the world is the only subject that interests God.
This statement is problematic on several levels. First, is it true that “Christ Himself did not proclaim or preach Himself?” Is this not the same Christ who preached the following?
John 6:51: “I am the living bread which came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever;”
John 8:12: “I am the light of the world. He who follows Me shall not walk in darkness, but have the light of life.”
John 8:58: “Most assuredly, I say to you, before Abraham was, I AM.”
John 10:9: “I am the door. If anyone enters by Me, he will be saved, and will go in and out and find pasture.”
John 10:11: “I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd gives His life for the sheep.”
John 11:25: “I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in Me, though he may die, he shall live.”
John 14:6: “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me.”
Second, the mission of the Church is not to “proclaim the Kingdom of God” per se but in the words of Our Lord to “go… and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost.” Thus, Cardinal Maradiaga commands the Church to follow Jesus by advocating a different mission than the one Jesus Himself commanded the Church to carry out.
Third, the Cardinal then quotes Paul VI in support of the notions that the Church must serve the world, is a part of the world and in solidarity with it and that “the world is the only subject that interests God.” How different this naïve and disastrous worldview is from the words of Christ, who recognized that the world would always be at enmity against His Church:
If the world hates you, you know that it has hated Me before it hated you. If you were of the world, the world would love its own; but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, because of this the world hates you. Remember the word that I said to you, ‘A slave is not greater than his master.’ If they persecuted Me, they will also persecute you; if they kept My word, they will keep yours also.…
The admonitions of Cardinal Maradiaga unfortunately only get stranger from there. He then opines:
…there the Church, in humble company, helps making life intelligible and dignified, making it a community of equals, without castes or classes; without rich or poor; without impositions or anathemas. Her foremost goal is to care for the penultimate (hunger, housing, clothing, shoes, health, education…) to be then able to care for the ultimate, those problems that rob us of sleep after work (our finiteness, our solitude before death, the meaning of life, pain, and evil…).
Part of his vision seems to turn the Church into an instrument of socialism by somehow helping to eliminate all social classes and force a sort of totalitarian economic equality upon people. Furthermore, the Cardinal declares that this is the “foremost goal” of the Church and must be first accomplished before She gets around to what is supposed to be Her primary mission, namely saving souls, or as the Cardinal puts it, one of “those problems that rob us of sleep after our work.” Unfortunately for the Cardinal, Pope Leo XIII already condemned the notion that equality of goods is a praiseworthy goal:
…that ideal equality about which they entertain pleasant dreams would be in reality the leveling down of all to a like condition of misery and degradation. Hence, it is clear that the main tenet of socialism, community of goods, must be utterly rejected, since it only injures those whom it would seem meant to benefit, is directly contrary to the natural rights of mankind, and would introduce confusion and disorder into the commonweal.
The other part of the Cardinal’s vision implies that impositions or anathemas are somehow bad things. This is reminiscent of John XXIII speaking of the “medicine of mercy” being applied to heretics instead of excommunications and condemnations. The idea was to present the good and true to those in error and expect them to be attracted and convert to these ideas by positive example and presentation alone. Unfortunately it looks like Pope John and the good Cardinal forgot about a little thing called original sin, which causes men to incline towards error and evil and necessitated the “impositions and anathemas” for the good of these stubborn souls. And they say we are the Pelagians…
The Cardinal, at this point, lamented the fact that,“too many times [the Church] gives the impression of having too much certitude and too little doubt, freedom, dissension or dialogue…” Yet if the Church has no certitude and instead has doubt, what good is She to souls? Archbishop Lefebvre addressed this problem well:
A Catholic does not go to the priests or his bishop asking for suggestions to enable him to form his own idea about God, or the world, or the last things. He asks them he must believe and what he must do. If they reply a whole range of propositions and patterns for living, it only remains for him to make up his own personal religion: he becomes a Protestant. This catechesis is turning children into little Protestants.
The keynote of the reform is the drive against certainties. Catholics who have them are branded as misers guarding their treasures, as greedy egotists who should be ashamed of themselves. The important thing is to be open to contrary opinions, to admit diversity, to respect the ideas of Freemasons, Marxists, Muslims, even animists. The mark of a holy life is to join in dialogue with error.
The Church as “Communion”
In the next section of his speech, Cardinal Maradiaga doubles down on the themes of radical equality and of equating the lay state with the ordained priesthood. He also seems to lay the groundwork for an argument in favor of women priests, though he stops short of this conclusion:
In other words, making equality among the members of the Church a reality, because the People of God is one, “sharing a common dignity as members from their regeneration in Christ, having the same filial grace and the same vocation to perfection; possessing in common one salvation, one hope and one undivided charity. There is, therefore, in Christ and in the Church no inequality on the basis of race or nationality, social condition or sex, because “there is neither Jew nor Greek: there is neither bond nor free: there is neither male nor female. For you are all ‘one’ in Christ Jesus (Galatians 3: 28 gr.; Colossians 3: 11).” (LG 32) “All share a true equality with regard to the dignity and to the activity common to all the faithful for the building up of the Body of Christ.” (LG 32)
Since all of the members of the Church are already equal in dignity, what does the Cardinal mean by “making equality among members of the Church a reality” if not sharing the power of the ordained priesthood with the laity, including women? The Cardinal goes on to say:
The communion of the Church is vital for her to be able to acquire credibility in today’s society. But this is not mere democratization; it is working to achieve an authentic coexistence as brothers and equals. And this goal certainly cannot be attained through a hierarchic mindset, understanding the Ministerial Order as a superior presbyterium, privileged and exclusive, in the way that it appeared to be configured, with absolute power concentrated at the apex and delegated down to the rest of the tiers of the hierarchy.
Thus the Cardinal launches a full frontal attack on the hierarchical authority of the Church, proving Pius X once again correct when he stated of the Modernists, “they disdain all authority.” St. Pius X assists us in presenting the Modernist view of Church authority as follows:
….In past times it was a common error that authority came to the Church from without, that is to say directly from God; and it was then rightly held to be autocratic. But this conception has now grown obsolete. For in the same way as the Church is a vital emanation of the collectivity of consciences, so too authority emanates vitally from the Church itself. Authority, therefore, like the Church, has its origin in the religious conscience, and, that being so, is subject to it. Should it disown this dependence it becomes a tyranny. For we are living in an age when the sense of liberty has reached its highest development. In the civil order the public conscience has introduced popular government. Now there is in man only one conscience, just as there is only one life. It is for the ecclesiastical authority, therefore, to adopt a democratic form, unless it wishes to provoke and foment an intestine conflict in the consciences of mankind. The penalty of refusal is disaster. For it is madness to think that the sentiment of liberty, as it now obtains, can recede. Were it forcibly pent up and held in bonds, the more terrible would be its outburst, sweeping away at once both Church and religion. Such is the situation in the minds of the Modernists, and their one great anxiety is, in consequence, to find a way of conciliation between the authority of the Church and the liberty of the believers.
The Cardinal then lays out the plan for the priesthood by referring back to Jesus. In doing so, the Cardinal incredibly refers to Jesus Christ, our eternal High Priest as a “layman.” Nevertheless, the Cardinal concedes that Jesus lived a “priestly” life, but only in the following sense:
…that He became a man, was poor, fought for justice, criticized the vices of power, identified Himself with the most oppressed and defended them, treated women without discrimination, clashed with the ones who had a different image of God and of religion, and was forced by His own faithfulness to be prosecuted and to die crucified outside the city. This original priesthood of Jesus is the one that has to be continued in history.
Thus the “priesthood” of Jesus Christ that the Cardinal tells us “has to be continued” is not Christ’s priesthood at all. Instead it is a purely human view of Christ as a “layman.” In addition, Christ did indeed “discriminate” against women in the literal sense of the word, as He did not select women to be apostles and to participate in the ordained priesthood. Once again St. Pius X wonderfully sums up what the Cardinal is doing here in Pascendi:
We allude, Venerable Brethren, to many who belong to the Catholic laity, and, what is much more sad, to the ranks of the priesthood itself, who, animated by a false zeal for the Church, lacking the solid safeguards of philosophy and theology, nay more, thoroughly imbued with the poisonous doctrines taught by the enemies of the Church, and lost to all sense of modesty, put themselves forward as reformers of the Church; and, forming more boldly into line of attack, assail all that is most sacred in the work of Christ, not sparing even the Person of the Divine Redeemer, whom, with sacrilegious audacity, they degrade to the condition of a simple and ordinary man.
The Cardinal goes on to state:
Consequently, this is what Vatican II teaches: “The baptized… are consecrated as… a holy priesthood” (LG 10). As the Apostle Paul teaches, there is a diversity of functions within the Church, but none of them translates into rank, superiority or domination. All are brothers and sisters, and, as a consequence, equal.
While all of the baptized are equal in dignity, they are most certainly not equal in rank and superiority while on earth, or afterwards for that matter. For after their earthly lives, some of the baptized will be in Heaven and some will be in Hell. In Heaven, some souls will have greater glory than others, and in Hell some will have greater punishments than other. Indeed, no matter how much the progressives are sickened by authority and hierarchy, Our Lord seems very fond if it, choosing these principles as the mode of both His Church and the Kingdom of Heaven. In fact, to truly preach the “Kingdom” as the Cardinal earlier advocated is to preach a hierarchical structure where the just are rewarded and the wicked punished.
Then the Cardinal uses some very interesting words:
Certainly the Church is more than a democracy, since the religious experience of faith allows her to open herself to a dialogue in pluralism and to share in action the great common causes of life and of the whole being of the universe.
The key words here are “the religious experience of Faith.” This is pure Modernism. For the Modernist, Faith is merely a religious experience the believer has. For the Catholic, “Faith is a Divine virtue by which we firmly believe the truths, which God has revealed.” Pius X speaks at length about erroneously defining Faith as “experience” in Pascendi:
…For the Modernist believer…it is an established and certain fact that the reality of the divine does really exist in itself and quite independently of the person who believes in it. If you ask on what foundation this assertion of the believer rests, he answers: In the personal experience of the individual. On this head the Modernists differ from the Rationalists only to fall into the views of the Protestants and pseudo-mystics. The following is their manner of stating the question: In the religious sense one must recognize a kind of intuition of the heart which puts man in immediate contact with the reality of God, and infuses such a persuasion of God’s existence and His action both within and without man as far to exceed any scientific conviction. They assert, therefore, the existence of a real experience, and one of a kind that surpasses all rational experience. If this experience is denied by some, like the Rationalists, they say that this arises from the fact that such persons are unwilling to put themselves in the moral state necessary to produce it. It is this experience which makes the person who acquires it to be properly and truly a believer. How far this position is removed from that of Catholic teaching!
Return to a Church of the Poor
The Cardinal then lashes out against capitalism by authoritatively quoting author Jean Ziegler, who is a very odd man for a Catholic Cardinal to be quoting. Ziegler has been known to speak highly of Cuban Communism. He even once chauffeured Communist murderer Che Guevera around Geneva Switzerland.Joshua Muravchik of The Weekly Standard has the following to say about Ziegler:
The United States, according to Ziegler, is an “imperialist dictatorship” that is guilty, among other atrocities, of “genocide” against the people of Cuba by means of its trade embargo.
In 1989, Ziegler was one of a group of self-described “intellectuals and progressive militants” who gathered in Tripoli to announce the launching of the annual “Muammar Qaddafi Human Rights Prize,” awarded by the government of Libya. Ziegler explained that the purpose of the Qaddafi prize was to counterbalance the Nobel prize, which, he said, constituted a ‘perpetual humiliation to the Third World.’…
As for his work on the issue of food, the nongovernmental organization U.N. Watch has monitored Ziegler’s record as special rapporteur. It reports that Ziegler denounced the United States on such “food” issues as the embargo of Cuba on 34 occasions, but “never spoke out for the hungry or criticized any party in 15 of 17 countries deemed by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization to have a man-made food emergency.
The Cardinal then returns to the theme of poverty, quoting Vatican II for the proposition that “Christ was sent by the Father ‘to bring good news to the poor…” In reality, Christ was sent by the Fatherto save souls as John 3:16 clearly tells us. The Cardinal then has the temerity to change and reinterpret the very words of Christ stating: “If Jesus calls the poor ‘blessed’ is because he is assuring them that their situation is going to change, and consequently it is necessary to create a movement that can bring about such a thing…”
First, Christ said, “Blessed are the poor in spirit” not “the poor” per se. Secondly, and most importantly, Christ never promised the poor that their material condition would change in this life, nor did He commission His Church to ensure this end. If so, then the Church has failed in its commission and Our Lord apparently owes an apology to the many saints who died in poverty.
The Inhumane Pre-Conciliar Church?
After going on a political tirade against the evils and injustices of capitalism, and condemning “Eurocentric democracies,” the Cardinal finally focused his ire on the worst evil of all: the Catholic Church before Vatican II. The Cardinal titled this section, “Returning to a profoundly humane Church that will establish a new relationship with the world.” This clearly implies the pre-Vatican II Church was not humane, or at least not “profoundly” so.
The Cardinal then gives us some insight as to how he views Christ’s Church for the better part of Her history:
The Church could not continue posing as a reality facing the world, as a parallel “perfect society,” which pursued her own autonomous course, strengthening her walls against the errors and the influence of the world. This antithesis of centuries needed to be overcome.
Yes, astonishingly, the premiere Cardinal of our Church, previous candidate for the papacy, and advisor to the Pope actually said that Christ’s Church of 2,000 years was an “antithesis of centuries” that “needed to be overcome.” The Church “strengthening her walls against the errors and the influence of the world” is something, which “could not continue.” Those words in themselves are an indictment. Yet the Cardinal did not stop there. He went on:
The council intended to apply the renovation within the Church herself, because the Church was not the Gospel, nor was she a perfect follower of the Gospel; she was inhabited by men and women, who, same as everywhere else, and according to their limited, sinful condition, had established within her many customs, laws and structures that did not respond to the teachings or the practice of Jesus.
Here, at last revealed for the world to see, is the true opinion of the revolution towards Holy Tradition. Tradition, according to the most influential Cardinal at the Vatican, is nothing more than a set of “customs, laws, and structures that did not respond to the teachings or the practice of Jesus Christ” and that were concocted by men and women in the Church according to their “limited sinful condition.” It follows then, that these traditions should be eradicated for the good of the Church in order to return to an earlier more “human time.” This line of thought is in perfect keeping with the progressive push to “renovate” the Church by changing such outdated “customs laws and structures” as priestly celibacy, the all-male priesthood, condemnation of homosexual acts, the prohibition on Communion for non-Catholics, etc.
St. Pius X described this precise disdain of tradition among the Modernists over a hundred years ago:
They exercise all their ingenuity in an effort to weaken the force and falsify the character of tradition, so as to rob it of all its weight and authority. But for Catholics nothing will remove the authority of the second Council of Nicea, where it condemns those “who dare, after the impious fashion of heretics, to deride the ecclesiastical traditions, to invent novelties of some kind…or endeavor by malice or craft to overthrow any one of the legitimate traditions of the Catholic Church”; nor that of the declaration of the fourth Council of Constantinople: “We therefore profess to preserve and guard the rules bequeathed to the Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church, by the Holy and most illustrious Apostles, by the orthodox Councils, both general and local, and by every one of those divine interpreters, the Fathers and Doctors of the Church.” Wherefore the Roman Pontiffs, Pius IV and Pius IX, ordered the insertion in the profession of faith of the following declaration: “I most firmly admit and embrace the apostolic and ecclesiastical traditions and other observances and constitutions of the Church.’
The Cardinal then repeats, with praise, those fateful words of Paul VI, which should instead, stand as a living indictment to the cause for his canonization:
I am pleased to repeat these words from Pope Paul VI: “We call upon those who term themselves modern humanists… to recognize our own new type of humanism: we, too, in fact, we more than any others, honor mankind.” (Paul VI, 7-XII-1965, No. 8).
An Open Church in Constant Dialogue, In Search of the Truth
The Cardinal finally, towards the end of his speech, administers the last insult to Christ’s Church. He states:
The Church, bearer of the Gospel, knew that she could not close her doors to dialogue without annulling the truth that could spring forth from anywhere –since God Himself has generously planted it everywhere. The Church did not have a monopoly on truth anymore, nor could she pontificate on a thousand human matters, or hold stances denoting arrogance or superiority. Instead, she should go out into the common arena, plainly and humbly, and share in the common search for truth.
Once again, we must shockingly come to terms with the fact that the man who made this statement is the pope’s principal advisor and the chair of a commission of cardinals tasked with revising the Apostolic Constitution on the Roman Curia. The view that the Church of Christ, which possesses all Truth, has any need to “go out” and “share in the common search for truth” is quite simply heretical. In fact, the role of the Church is the exact opposite: to lead all men to the Truth, which She Herself possesses, being founded by Jesus Christ. St. Pius X, quoting Pope Gregory XVI, sums up the Cardinal’s view well:
A lamentable spectacle is that presented by the aberrations of human reason when it yields to the spirit of novelty, when against the warning of the Apostle it seeks to know beyond what it is meant to know, and when relying too much on itself it thinks it can find the truth outside the Catholic Church wherein truth is found without the slightest shadow of error.
This erroneous view of the Cardinal stands as the predictable rotten fruit of Modernism. For once Faith is no longer defined as our acceptance of divinely revealed Truth, and is instead redefined to mean our inner “religious experience,” we are doomed to a road to relativism and indifferentism. As St. Pius X prophetically explained:
…given this doctrine of experience united with that of symbolism, every religion, even that of paganism, must be held to be true. What is to prevent such experiences from being found in any religion? In fact, that they are so is maintained by not a few. On what grounds can Modernists deny the truth of an experience affirmed by a follower of Islam? Will they claim a monopoly of true experiences for Catholics alone? Indeed, Modernists do not deny, but actually maintain, some confusedly, others frankly, that all religions are true. That they cannot feel otherwise is obvious. For on what ground, according to their theories, could falsity be predicated of any religion whatsoever?… In the conflict between different religions, the most that Modernists can maintain is that the Catholic has more truth because it is more vivid, and that it deserves with more reason the name of Christian because it corresponds more fully with the origins of Christianity. No one will find it unreasonable that these consequences flow from the premises.
We Must Wake Up!
In the final analysis, it can be said that, with this speech, we have finally seen the true face of the Revolution. Previously, these sorts of openly contradictory views of Tradition were shunned by the Vatican and high-ranking Cardinals. The most we could previously see were cracks in the façade; candid words of a high-ranking prelate here or there, which the Neo-Catholics or Vatican spokesmen would quickly dismiss. Of course, we have always had to suffer certain leftist priests and bishops stating these views. However, Rome would never discipline them and they were typically ignored and not taken seriously by most Catholics.
In contrast, Cardinal Maradiaga’s speeches at the University of Dallas and Archdiocese of Miamihave exposed the game plan of the Revolution openly and plainly. Amazingly, what Traditionalists have been attempting to expose for decades as the true impetus behind Vatican II has finally been thrust out in the open by the top Cardinal in the world.Yet, what is the reaction of the mainstream Catholic press to this earthquake?
Indeed, lack of outrage at these speeches is the worst-case scenario for the Church. Previously, revolutionaries in the Church needed to lay low, to wear masks, to guard their words. Today, after fifty years of Rome refusing to discipline dissenters and having this inaction defended by so-called “conservatives,” we, as a collective Faithful, can no longer even recognize, much less form outrage towards a Cardinal of the Catholic Church openly preaching revolutionary doctrine.
Far from being met with rebuke, the Cardinal’s speech was instead welcomed with open arms and applauded, not at Notre Dame or Georgetown, but at none other than the University of Dallas; an institution lauded by “conservative” Catholics as a bastion of orthodoxy in Catholic education. To date there has been no vociferous reaction to speak of from University of Dallas faculty or staff, or any of their “conservative” counterparts in Catholic media. Furthermore, Neo-Catholic luminary George Weigel was even quoted approvingly by the Cardinal twice; thus demonstrating Weigel’s unwitting facilitation of theCardinal’s revolutionary views.
Sadly, if we as Catholics are not even able to recognize the bombshell that was just dropped in Dallas or Miami much less form a thorough and aggressive resistance to it, may God have mercy on our souls. For it is our duty as Catholics to resist public errors such as these, no matter who utters them. If we need inspiration, we only need look again to St. Pius X, who, quoting Pope Leo XIII gives us our marching orders:
Let them combat novelties of words, remembering the admonitions of Leo XIII: ‘It is impossible to approve in Catholic publications a style inspired by unsound novelty which seems to deride the piety of the faithful and dwells on the introduction of a new order of Christian life, on new directions of the Church, on new aspirations of the modern soul, on a new social vocation of the clergy, on a new Christian civilization, and many other things of the same kind.’ Language of the kind here indicated is not to be tolerated either in books or in lectures.
On the other hand, if condemned error is now preached openly by a premiere Cardinal of Christ’s Church and is not resisted, but instead applauded by “orthodox” Catholics, we can truly join Our Savior in asking: “When the Son of Man comes, will He find Faith on earth?”
