The social fabric which unites a people has been torn. Customs, mores, and values have changed, none for the better. Courtesy has been abandoned; good manners, lost. Honor and respect are trampled underfoot. There is irritation and hostility in the air. Unthinkable behaviors are accepted; aberrant lifestyles, celebrated. Divorce, murder, infanticide, theft, and lies increase. Evil rises. Savagery looms in the dark places.
The psychological effects are profound. There is unrelieved sadness and disappointment among the people, a lack of purpose and despair. Stark emotional disturbances are manifest; narcissism and perversions go unchallenged and unresolved. Personality disorders, deep neuroses, and arrested development wreak havoc in families and society.
What is the cause? What has happened to everybody?
The answer is theological. The philosophical bedrock of Christian civilization has been jackhammered. The Ten Commandments are ignored; the legal structure is bent. There is no frame of reference, no moral standard at the base. Everything is up for reinterpretation.
People have been yanked up by the roots and caught in an electronic web. The real is replaced by the virtual—friends by Facebook, conversation by tweets. It’s become so pervasive that masses of people now live in an altered state of consciousness. An inner subjectivity replaces universal meaning.
A curious philosophy of imperative change has the world in its grip, a progressivism based on the lie of evolution and focused on human transcendence. Nothing is fixed, not even one’s identity. Everything is malleable. Everything is in process. Transhumanism beckons.
Catholics are stumbling along in this strange new world, buffeted by change they never sought and don’t understand. Without direction, they flounder in psychological disequilibrium. They’re forced to live in a fluid state of questions without answers.
That’s the crux of it. Catholics knew the answers once. They knew the truth. The Faith was given; Reality, unveiled. Everything else followed. Things made sense, but that certitude wasn’t allowed to remain.
Certainty wasn’t good enough for the mature Christians, the ones who seized the helm and rerouted the ship. It can’t be that simple, they say. These things should not be taken literally. We are called to discover the meaning behind the constructs of a more primitive age.
They sought something more sophisticated, more worthy of their advanced intellect. They embraced emptiness, fell in love with perpetual unknowing. Sick with unconscious angst, they are always searching, never finding.
Their minds have been flooded with a false epistemology, a counterfeit ontology, and a fabricated eschatology. What things mean, what things are, where things are heading—all those solid foundational understandings have been discarded. Logic has disappeared. Reason lies in the shadows.
They kept the name Catholic, but they abandoned the Faith. It’s not real to them. They accept its historical significance, but they give no intellectual assent to its Truth. It’s metaphor and symbol, they insist, nothing more. That’s why the Resistance falters. That’s why Tradition isn’t held sacred. That’s why the culture has died.
Don’t try to make sense of it, we’re told. Just go with the flow. Everything is changing. Don’t get in the way.
How did this happen? How have sharp minds become insipid?
This article appeared in the latest print edition of The Remnant -
To see what else you missed, subscribe today!
It’s been a long time building. The Protestant Revolt. The French Revolution. The Enlightenment and the Rise of the Illuminati. Modernism. Post-Modernism. Phenomenology. Deconstructionism. We’re going on five hundred years of systematic dissolution, with each outpouring of spiritual solvent more lethal than the one before. The last dose was concocted by one man: the Jesuit priest, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.
His thinking and false beliefs, his complicated new philosophy and ersatz spirituality captivated the minds of the intellectuals well before Vatican II. No longer fluent in Latin, the mid-century scholars were set adrift, unable to plumb the depths of Catholic thought. They couldn’t read the works of the early Church fathers in the original. They couldn’t understand the genius of the Summa. They couldn’t scale the heights of the Breviary. They couldn’t fly with the angels.
Tired of the rigors of scholasticism, tired of the fixed structure of magisterial teaching, they trudged through the muck of deconstructed doctrine and puerile translations. Nothing satisfied the yearning of their hearts. Something had to give. Something had to change. They couldn’t look back. That was unacceptable. They had to go forward, but they couldn’t go alone. Despite their brilliance, they were sheep, after all. They needed a guide.
Soon they found him, the wolf in sheep’s clothing: Teilhard de Chardin.
His poetry spoke to their emptiness. He was new. Exciting. The fact that his superiors tried to stop the publication of his revolutionary work was intriguing to jaded minds. What was the Church hiding? they asked among themselves. Undeterred by authority, they got out their mimeograph machines, and the clandestine campaign to change Catholic teaching began.
It worked. The idea of spiritual evolutionism took hold—a technical and scientific development in which Matter and Spirit, the individual and the society constitute a divinized collective, the protoplasm of the Cosmic Christ.
No one noticed the unspeakable blasphemy.
His theories spread. An amorphous spirit engulfed the colleges, the convents, the seminaries. Nuances of Teilhardian thought snaked through the Church from top to bottom. The thrust of the new intellectual construct was progress, unstoppable progress to the Divine.
No one heeded the Monitum, the warning against Teilhard’s work. Even the Vatican spokesman, Fr. Federico Lombardi, sees no problem with it: “By now, no one would dream of saying that [Teilhard] is a heterodox author who shouldn’t be studied.”2
So go ahead. Read the empty musings of the vapid Jesuit. Rome says it’s fine. Don’t be afraid of the big bad wolf. He won’t eat you. He’s not real, the Faith’s not real, the Truth’s not real. Nothing actually is. It’s all becoming.
This is not theoretical. The lies and distortions of Teilhardian spirituality have struck at the deepest psychological level, the level of Truth. Purpose, meaning, and identity have been turned inside out. People no longer believe explicitly in our religion. They have forgotten that Faith is not some private inner coziness, but an intellectual certainty, an assent of the mind to the truths revealed by God.
The language of Faith changed to fit the revolutionary paradigm. New words and terminology emerged. Old words were manipulated, mispronounced, and misused— all in service of the new understanding, all in the rush toward the Omega Point.
Definitions disappear; distinctions are disparaged. At least in Alice in Wonderland, the reader knew the Mad Hatter was mad. Now he is the teacher. Words mean what I say they mean. No one dare argue the point.
And that’s what has caused the craziness. Few assert openly now that all the things we were taught are actually true.
But they are.
All is not lost. If you are a Catholic, the remedy is not difficult. Forget the endless philosophical meanderings and the ridiculous reinterpretations. Go back to the old catechism, to the words memorized in your childhood, to truths resting forever in the depths of your mind.
Ponder the questions; recall the answers.
Who made me? What is man? Why did God make me? Did God actually create the world by a “single act of His all-powerful Will?”3 Is Heaven a place? Does Hell exist? Were Adam and Eve real people?
Ask yourself. Are the answers I was taught as a child true? Can you say yes! without hesitation?
If you equivocate, you’re in trouble.
Now turn to Sacred Scripture. Consider the Readings. Traditional Mass or Novus Ordo, you hear them every week. Can you assert that the Bible is the inerrant Word of God? Do you believe these things actually happened?
Was Moses real? Did he part the Red Sea? Did he write the first five books of the Bible? Did Job exist? Solomon? What about Jonah? Did he really spend three days in the belly of a whale?
Is this factual? If you feel a shudder of revulsion at thinking that it is--or even might be--then you’ve been infected. Think about it. There’s no proof it’s metaphorical. If the Old Testament isn’t true, how can you say the New Testament is? Why one and not the other? If neither is true, what have you got?
Nothing, that’s what.
We’ve been conditioned to understand the Holy Bible in the “light of higher criticism,” but that’s not how the Fathers of the Church understood it. That’s not how the saints read it. They knew the words meant at least what they said. They read Sacred Scripture at four levels: the literal, the allegorical, the moral, and the eschatological. Layer upon layer. Meaning derived from meaning. Truth opening like the blossoms of spring.
You can’t understand the depths if you jump over the manifest meaning—or what is contemptuously referred to as literal. (Don’t forget, the root of the word is letter. Just as a human being is composed of flesh and spirt, so the letter and spirit of the scriptures are indissolubly bound. Ignore the letter, you lose the spirit.)
So now go back. Read and think. Reject the sly whisperings of the destroyers. Reclaim your faith. Reclaim your intellectual equilibrium. Regain your sanity. Don’t fall into the hands of the crazies.
Read the Athanasian Creed and see what you’ve been missing.
Notes
1The author’s credentials: (1) Bachelor’s in French literature , (2) Master’s and doctorate in psychology, (3) Licensed in marriage and family counseling, (4) Attained diplomate status in the American Psychotherapy Association.
2 Tradition in Action
3 Baltimore Catechism 2, question 33.
