Since the end of the 18th century, the Revolution infiltrated the Church with Romanticism. It changed this harmonic conviviance of the many different vocations and spiritual pathways in the Church to impose just one sentimental model. This Romanticism influenced piety, hagiography - the presentation of the lives of the Saints - art, and even moral and dogmatic doctrine.
According to this new dominating fashion, everything that did not correspond to its sweet, positive, merciful and soft spirit was set aside, “forgotten” or condemned. These criteria entered the seminaries, clergy, and manuals of piety, forming several generations of Catholics who were unaware of the previous richness of the Church. Thus they were raised in an environment of antipathy to militancy and turned only to this romantic religiosity.
Those great Saints, such as St. Jerome, with his counsels to Eustochium to be proud of her virginity and to be convinced that she is more than married ladies, were also “forgotten” or even hated, as you say, accused of being against humility. It is a product of this false piety.
Just as Romanticism was the cultural movement that prepared society for the French Revolution, so this romantic piety prepared the way for Progressivism in the Church and for Vatican II with its ecuмenism, pacifism and horror of Catholic militancy. This "sweet" religiosity is much more akin to Progressivism than to the Catholic Church as she always was. This explains why you feel as if it were a different religion.
I think the first part is okay, but without giving an example in the second, it's difficult to know what this person is talking about. I agree about the myopic tendency to rework the spiritual physiognomy of the Saints today, which is not to emphasize the wrong virtue, but to reinterpret their actions in a purely humanistic way. It is this naturalism which destroys their supernatural character. Romanticism, or a sentimental affectation for that which stirs human emotion, is the daughter of naturalism, but who is to say that TIA is not themselves reinterpreting the piety of the 18th century for their own purposes, for the Saints were indeed the sweetest, kindest and meekest of all men. But in the face of evil they were as terrible as an army in battle array. I think their overly-broad, sweeping generalization regarding the origin and nature of this phenomenon is so vague as to be virtually meaningless, thus they can associate it with anything or nothing at all, in this case, it was the foundation for all the evils of the modern reforms.
Regarding the militancy of the Saints, the same holds regarding my above observation. What is termed 'militancy' was in reference to the manifestation of virtue, principally fortitude, in the face of evil. We must be careful not to inject our own, peculiar, too human understanding of these notions, othewise we unwittingly do the very thing which we decry, that is, to mischaracterize the Saints.
Each Saint possessed all the virtues in an heroic degree, but they were known for one or two that stood out above the rest. This is the normal way of grace and how God chooses to manifest His goodness in his most beloved children. Each one expressed a particular characteristic or trait of Jesus Chirst, just as each religious order has a particular note, without destroying an essential unity with the rest.
Topic: Beware of Bitter Zeal (Read 1997 times)