Credo in unum Deum?
There
is only one question confronting the Catholic Church in the western world today.
Do we believe in the one God? Do we accept the First of the Ten Commandments:
"I am the Lord thy God … Thou shalt not have strange gods before
me"?
What Oriens has in mind here is nothing so obvious as the spread of the new paganism
that stalks into our midst behind the mask of "Christian feminism".
No, this is but a symptom of a greater denial. To make way for dalliance
with the little gods, we must first deny the One.
Trap for reformers
The temptation we speak of is that of the reformers, most of whom start
out loving God, but who often end up falling in love with their own dreams of
what his Church might be. This is a great temptation; and into it Catholics of
every stamp and hue have fallen going back to the time before the Second Vatican
Council was called. Many are the great (and not so great) whose hearts have been
captured by an idea of "church" and how it might be knitted with
modernity. They range from liberal theologues to neoconservative propagandists;
from red-hot iconoclasts to cautious conservatives; from bitter anti-papalists
to bluff and blind ultramontanes. They have in common one thing. They judge
Catholics according to new criteria. The perennial criteria - faith in Jesus
Christ, love of His Church, and communion with His Saints - have ceased to count
for much. What really matters is style: the post-conciliar style.
There have always been "new" ways of being Catholic. They have
kept popping up throughout history. But the way we are considering here is
unprecedented. Not content with being just one among many – which is in the
nature of a way – the new way proposed since Vatican II has hijacked the whole
of Catholic life. It demands absolutely a new mode of worship, and with it
community structures, pastoral strategies, and missionary practices all of a
piece. To top it off, it has attempted to claim that all Western Catholics (at
least) are bound to the new way. Digging back through Church history will help
us only a little to understand what has happened. George Orwell’s Animal Farm would provide a
more useful analogy.
Catholic Farm
In "Catholic Farm" any kind of infidelity is permitted -
especially to the bosses - except failure to conform to Farmhouse style. You can
deny Christ, the Church, the Pope, the Sacraments, and the moral law - or, while
innocent of all such denials, either pretend that they do not happen or, what is
the same, do nothing about them - and still retain standing as a Farm Person in
full communion. But woe unto those that will not adopt Farmhouse style and yearn
for habits established before the new management swept in. They can be suspended
from office, driven from the farm - house, barn, pen and yard - and banished to
the back paddocks in winter and drought with no provisions.
Unhinged by the experience, some jump the fences and stray beyond the
pale, but still within range of the yells and jeers that issue from the
Farmhouse – and not a few from the back paddocks themselves.
One of the bitter things about life on Catholic Farm is how the tyranny
of the bosses unleashes explosive tensions among the banished livestock, so much
so that the hottest abuse, and sometimes punitive raids, are launched not by the
Farmhouse upon the back paddock, but between back paddock and pale.
Idolatry of the new
Analogies go only so far. The point is that that the refugees who trek
the outlands of the modern Catholic Church are not there because they have
denied the Lord Jesus Christ and his economy of salvation.
Those of us who say that we stand for Catholic tradition and would love
nothing better than to see idolatry cast down are not immune to its attractions.
It is striking that the Israelites, while in the desert, made a Golden Calf and
worshipped it. Many of us feel that we are in the desert too – and, in this
regard, we do not deceive ourselves. The desert, however, has its allure. Some
appear inclined to want to stay there, and they wander away into remoter places
each time a messenger, bearing news of a way out, attempts to make contact.
Others, who embrace the messenger when he comes, have shaped in the furnace of
the wilderness some flinty ideas of their own about how things should be when
they are they are back in the holy city with honour and credit.
Church not ours
Whether we are liberals or traditionalists, what we are proposing to do with our different plans for the Church is, for the most part, to manhandle the Mystical Body of Christ. Few possessed of a reforming zeal would baulk at mere sacrilege for the "good of the Church" – and from sacrilege to idolatry is no great leap, since the two are nearly related. What we forget is that the body, or "vine", is cultivated is a matter of His providence, not ours. A striking saying of the Lord, and a warning to all reformers, leaps from the Fifth Prophecy read at the Easter Vigil:
