Slippery Animal
“Modernism is necessarily, by its very nature, a uniquely slippery animal.” Modernism being the present deadly enemy of the Catholic Church, it can never be analysed enough. As enemy of the Church in particular, it can be defined as that movement of thought and belief which holds that the Church must be adapted to the modern world by the appearance of Catholicism being maintained while its substance is changed. It has infected Catholics without number since it gained official approval from the very top of the Church at Vatican II, and it has set many cardinals, bishops and priests on the road to eternal perdition, let alone laity, by undermining their Catholic faith. Let us see again why it is slippery, and uniquely slippery.
It is a slippery animal because like all heresies it had to disguise itself to seem acceptable to its target, believing Catholics. So it is constantly using ambiguous formulae of words interpretable in a Catholic or anti-catholic sense. The Catholics piously accept the Catholic sense and swallow the words, only to have the modernists turn them to poison by exploiting the anti-catholic sense. Vatican II is ambiguous from start to finish, choosing formulae of words that can slip and slide between the Church and the modern world, so as to hide the intrinsic mutual contradiction of these two. To Paul VI, believing profoundly in both Church and world (as he conceived them), such formulae came instinctively and abundantly. The documents of his Council, Vatican II, are shot through with ambiguity. Yet by these ambiguities Paul VI really thought he would save both Church and world, exactly as Bishop Fellay now hopes that by talking out of both sides of his mouth he will save both Catholic Tradition and the Council. Vain hope! God “detests the double tongue” (Prov. VIII, 13). It has always served to trick Catholics into abandoning their faith.
But more than just slippery, modernism is amongst all heresies uniquely slippery, because as Pius X said in “Pascendi,” it is the heresy of heresies, like a main sewer collecting in itself all the filth of all the minor sewers, or particular heresies. This is because it is the product (and producer) of minds that have slipped anchor from anchorage in any truth whatsoever, so that any counter-truth or heresy is entirely at home in modernism. And this is because its fundamental principle is philosophical, the human mind’s supposed inability to know anything whatsoever beyond what appears to men’s five external senses. Such a mind is like a dirty wine-bottle. It dirties anything poured into it, even the finest of wines or the sublimest of truths. For while any other heresy attacks a particular truth of the Faith, the philosophical error at the root of modernism undermines universal truth, even while it can pretend that it is not attacking any truth in particular. For instance Benedict XVI would no doubt be horrified if he were accused of disbelieving any Article of the Creed, but that does not stop him from being ready to “up-date” them all.
Now never have so many minds slipped all anchor in objective truth as today, such slipping being man’s final liberation, whereby reality can no longer impose itself on me, but I can impose myself on all reality. I have taken the place of God. Thus too many Catholics were infected by today’s world and welcomed modernism when it reared its head again at Vatican II, because here was the Pope himself giving the apparent seal of Catholic approval to their undermining of all Catholic Truth. They were free, and still Catholic. Cry freedom throughout the Church!
Then how deal with this “uniquely slippery animal”? Certainly not by going down to Rome to mix with its main victims and perpetrators, the present officials at the top of the Church. Satan himself might not have a long enough spoon to sup safely with these (objective) foxes and sharks and wolves, all the more dangerous for their possible (subjective) unawareness of their own condition. Pray the Rosary for Our Lady to build around your heads and hearts her own protective armour.
Kyrie eleison.