Heresies: Modernism; It's relative (Long pt 2)

[Padraic42]

Certain of the most acute modern observers in the last generation
and in this have used their intelligence to discover which way fate should
fall. One of the most intelligent of French Catholics, a converted
Jew, has written a work to prove (or suggest) that the first of these two
possible issues will be our fate. He envisages the last years of the
Church on this earth as lived apart. He sees a Church of the future
reduced to very few in numbers and left on one side in the general current
of the new Paganism. He sees a Church of the future within which there
will be intensity of devotion, indeed, but that devotion practised by one
small body, isolated and forgotten in the midst of its fellowmen.

The late Robert Hugh Benson wrote two books, each remarkable and
each envisaging one of the opposite possibilities. In the first, "The Lord
of the World," he presents the picture of the Church reduced to a little
wandering band, returning as it were to its origins, the Pope at the head
of the Twelve_and a conclusion on the Day of Judgement. In the second he
envisages the full restoration of the Catholic thing_our civilization
re-established, reinvigorated, once more seated and clothed in its right
mind; because in that new culture, though filled with human imperfection,
the Church will have recovered her leadership of men and will inform the
spirit of society with proportion and beauty once more.

What are the arguments to be advanced on either side? On what
grounds should we conclude for a tendency one way or the other?

For the first issue (the dwindling of Catholic influence, the
restriction of our numbers and political value to the edge of extinction)
there is to be noted the increasing ignorance of the world about us,
coupled with the loss of those faculties whereby men might appreciate what

Catholicism means and take advantage of their salvation. The level
of culture, including a sense of the past, sinks visibly. With each decade
the level is lower than the last. In that decline tradition is breaking
away and melting like a snow-drift at the end of winter. Great lumps of it

fall off at one moment and another, melt, and disappear.

Within our generation the supremacy of the classics has gone. You
find men upon every side possessed of power who have forgotten that from
which we all came; men, to whom Greek and Latin, the fundamental languages
of our civilization, are incomprehensible, or at best curiosities. Old men

now living can remember uneasy rebellion against tradition; but
young men only perceive for themselves how little there is left against
which to rebel, and many fear that before they die the body of tradition
will have disappeared.

That mood of faith has been largely ruined, ruined certainly for
the greater part of men, all will admit. So true is this that already a
majority (I should affirm it to be a very large majority) do not know what
the word faith means. For most men who hear it (in connection with
religion) it signifies either blind acceptance of irrational statements
and of legends which common experience condemns, or a mere inherited habit
of mental pictures which have never been tested and which at the first
touch of reality dissolve like the dreams they are. The whole vast body of

apologetics, the whole science of theology (the Queen exalted
above every other science) have for the mass of modern men ceased to be.
If you but mention their titles you give an effect of unreality and
insignificance.

We have already arrived at this strange pass_that while the
Catholic body (which is now already <in practice> a minority even in the
white civilization) understands its opponents, her opponents do not
understand the Catholic Church.

The historian might draw a parallel between the diminishing pagan
body of the fourth and fifth centuries, and the Catholic body of today.
The pagans, especially the educated and cultivated pagans, who then lived
on in smaller and smaller numbers, knew well the high traditions to which
they were attached and understood (although they hated) this new thing,
the Church, which had grown up among them and was about to disposses them.
But the Catholics who were to supplant the pagans understood less and less
of the pagan mood, neglected its great works of art, and took its gods for
demons. So today the ancient religion is respected but ignored.

Those nations which are by tradition anti-Catholic, which were
once Protestant and have now no fixed traditions, have been so long in the

ascendant that they regard their Catholic opponents as finally
beaten. Those nations which had retained the Catholic culture are now in
the third generation of anti-Catholic social education. Their institutions
may tolerate the Church, but are never in active alliance with it and
often in acute hostility.

Judged by all the parallels of history and by the general laws
which govern the rise and decay of organisms, one might conclude that the
active <role> of Catholicism in the things of the world was over; that in
the future, perhaps in the near future, Catholicism would perish.

The Catholic observer would deny the possibility of the Church's
complete extinction. But he must also follow historical parallels; he
also must accept the general laws governing the growth and decay of
organisms, and he must tend, in view of all the change that has passed in
the mind of man, to draw the tragic conclusion that our civilization,
which has already largely ceased to be Christian, will lose its general
Christian tone altogether. The future to envisage is a pagan future, and a
future pagan with a new and repulsive form of paganism, but none the less
powerful and omnipresent for all its repulsiveness.

Now on the other side there are considerations less obvious, but
appealing strongly to the thoughtful and learned in things past and in
experience of human nature.

First of all there is the fact that all through the centuries the
Church has reacted strongly towards her own resurrection in moments of
deepest peril.

The Mohammedan struggle was a very close thing; it nearly swamped
us; only the armed reaction in Spain, followed by the Crusades, prevented
the full triumph of Islam. The onslaught of the barbarian, of the northern
pirates, of the Mongol hordes, brought Christendom to within an ace of
destruction. Yet the northern pirates were tamed, defeated and baptized by
force. The barbarism of the eastern nomads was eventually defeated; very
tardily, but not too late to save what could be saved. The movement called
the Counter-Reformation met the hitherto triumphant advance of the
sixteenth-century heretics. Even the Rationalism of the eighteenth century
was, in its own place and time, checked and repelled. It is true that it
bred something worse than itself; something from which we now suffer. But
there was reaction against it; and that reaction was sufficient to keep
the Church alive and even to recover for it elements of power which had
been thought lost for ever.

Reaction there will always be; and there is about Catholic
reaction a certain vitality, a certain way of appearing with unexpected
force through new men and new organizations. History and the general law
of organic rise and decay lead on their largest lines to the first
conclusion, the rapid withering of Catholicism in the world; but
observation as applied to the particular case of the Catholic Church does
not lead to such a conclusion. The Church seems to have an organic, a
native, life quite unusual: a mode of being unique, and powers of
recrudescence peculiar to herself.

Next, let this very interesting point be noted: the more powerful,
the more acute, and the more sensitive minds of our time are clearly
inclining toward the Catholic side.

They are of course of their nature a small minority, but they are
a minority of a sort very powerful in human affairs. The future is not
decided for men by public vote; it is decided by the growth of ideas. When
the few men who can think best and feel most strongly and who have mastery
of expression begin to show a novel tendency towards this or that, then
this or that bids fair to dominate the future.

Of this new tendency to sympathize with Catholicism_and in the
case of strong characters to take the risk, to accept the Faith, and
proclaim themselves the defenders of it_there can be no doubt. Even in
England, where the traditional feeling against Catholicism is so
universal and so strong, and where the whole life of the nation is bound
up with hostility to the Faith, the conversions which strike the public
eye are continually the conversions of men who lead in thought; and note
that for one who openly admits conversion there are ten at least who turn
their faces toward the Catholic way, who prefer the Catholic philosophy
and its fruit to any others, but who shrink from accepting the heavy
sacrifices involved in a public avowal.

Lastly there is this very important and perhaps decisive
consideration: <though the social strength of Catholicism, in numbers
certainly, and in most other factors as well, is declining throughout the
world; the issue, as between Catholicism and the completely new pagan
thing (the destruction of all tradition, the breaking with our
inheritance), is now clearly marked.>

There is not, as there was even quite a short time ago, a confused
and heterogeneous margin or penumbra which could talk with confidence of
itself under the vague title of "Christian," and speak confidently of some
imaginary religion called "Christianity." No. There are today already
almost quite distinct and sharing the field between them, soon to be as
markedly exposed as black and white, the Catholic Church on one side, and
on the other opponents of what has hitherto been our civilization.

The ranks have lined up as for a battle; and though such clear
division does not mean that the one or the other antagonist will conquer,
it does mean that a plain issue is defined at last; and in plain issues a
good cause, like a bad one, has a better chance than in confusion.

Even the most misguided or the most ignorant of men, talking
vaguely of "Churches," are now using a language that rings hollow. The
last generation could talk, in Protestant countries at least, of "the
Churches." The present generation cannot. There are not many churches;
there is one. it is the Catholic Church on the one side and its mortal
enemy on the other. The lists are set.

Thus are we now in the presence of the most momentous question
that has yet been presented to the mind of man. Thus are we placed at a
dividing of the ways, upon which the whole future of our race will turn.

Pax Christi, Pat
"For the time will come when people will not tolerate sound doctrine, but,
following their own desires, will surround themselves with teachers who tickle
their ears." (1 Tim. 4:3)