DEADLY MODERNISM
June 3, 2023

Number DCCCXXIX (829)

If there is truth, I can’t always be tender.
I must make war. The Devil won’t surrender.

It may not seem so, but there is a thread running through the last five issues of these “Comments”:

624 (April 29) Modernist Rome’s “excommunicating” of all six bishops who took part in the ceremony of Consecration of four priests of the SSPX in Econe, Switzerland, in 1988, was intrinsically invalid.

625 (May 6) Archbishop Lefebvre saw this clearly. His successors do not see it so clearly.

626 (May 13) Rome pretends that a modernist accepted inside the SSPX can solve the problem,

627 (May 20) or that an ex-SSPX priest who is a close friend of the Pope can do so, but no compromises,

628 (May 27) however clever, can reconcile such irreconcilables as Tradition and Modernism.

Clearly, the whole sequence depends upon those “excommunications” of June 30,1988, being, by the nature of things, or by the nature of the Catholic
religion, “intrinsically invalid.” This was the position taken by the Archbishop on the grounds that for the Church to survive it must have bishops capable of defending the Traditional Faith (which he in no way invented) against the deadly error of Modernism, invented by churchmen whose excessive admiration for the modern world had corrupted their Catholic faith, and who imposed their corruption on almost the entire Church by means of their corruption being supported by the mass of the Universal Church’s bishops at the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965).

So, immediately after Vatican II the official Church had made itself virtually incapable of providing in the long term bishops capable of defending Catholic Tradition, which is why the Archbishop consecrated four such bishops against all the appearances of disapproval by Rome. Time has shown, after his death in 1991, that he was right. Without his action, where would Tradition and the true Church be today? But, for us to save our souls, we must grasp why Modernism is so deadly for Catholic Tradition. If the reason is not clear in our heads, we may tomorrow be tempted, like today’s successors of the Archbishop, to seek some false reconciliation with the modernists in Rome, or we may the day after tomorrow refuse an offer from God of the supreme gift of martyrdom at the hands of the ever more criminal nєω ωσrℓ∂ σr∂єr.

Now Modernism is the error of wanting to adapt the one and only true religion of the one true God to the world around us, which is essentially godless. What most deeply underlies Modernism is Protestantism, which, with Luther, threw off the one true religion. By throwing off the Catholic Church and a large part of its essential doctrine, the Protestants opened the door to Liberalism, because wherever they prevailed against Catholic resistance in the ensuing wars of religion, they broke the monopoly of Truth in people’s hearts and minds. As a result, untruth in religion was now established
and set up in significant parts of Christendom, formerly united in religion, in such a way as to be able to compete with the Catholic truth.

Thus arose the next major false religion, best known as Liberalism. The message of Liberalism to Catholics and Protestants alike was, “Stop the religious wars, stop fighting one another, stop taking religion so seriously. Peace on earth is better than peace in Heaven. Live and let live. Tolerance!” This message was popular. Embodied in Fɾҽҽmαsσɳɾყ, a secret society launched in London in 1717, it spread rapidly to the English colonies in America and to France, where it had a huge influence in the American and French Revolutions of 1776 and 1789 respectively. Both of these Revolutions played in turn a key part in removing the old Catholic order to make way for the nєω ωσrℓ∂ σr∂єr of today. This principle, of “religious liberty,” turns minds to mush, for if religious ideas are not serious, what ideas are serious?

Taken together, Protestantism and Liberalism had made a “brave new world,” against which the true Catholic Church fought a brave rearguard action, especially Pope St Pius X in the early 20th century, but in the end even Catholic churchmen blessed religious liberty at Vatican II with their Council docuмent “On Human Dignity.” Protestantism and Liberalism had generated Modernism. Modernism had conquered. But it is absolutely opposed to the Catholic Faith. The two are absolutely irreconcilable.

Kyrie eleison