March 2006
First Step
THE EDITOR
You cannot begin to solve a problem until you admit you have a problem. That is the first step for every recovering alcoholic, for smokers inhaling two packs a day, for addicts of every stripe.
"This," wrote noted journalist Bernard Goldberg in setting out a twelve-step plan to eradicate the endemic liberal bias of the U.S. media, a bias ever denied by his liberal peers, "is what therapy is all about. You pay someone with a bunch of letters after his or her name a lot money; you yak and yak for weeks and weeks about your miserable mother and how she loved your sister more than you; you run up a huge tab; then you finally see the light. Suddenly, it’s as clear as can be, and for the first time, you acknowledge your problem - whatever it is - out loud.
"Once you experience that life-changing breakthrough, you’re on the road to recovery. Once you say that there really is something that needs to be fixed, you can finally go about fixing it. It’s not easy, but a thousand-mile journey begins with that single step, right?"
Right! And that goes double and treble for ecclesiastics, starting in Rome and working downwards and outwards across the Modernist-infested West.
Yes, the time has come not only for the media elites but our clerical elites to begin their own long journey to recovery. It’s time for them to say, "We humbly admit that we have a problem and we need help." For decades our hierarchies have lived in that dark world of denial. Someone says "Modernism" and they hiss and bristle like a cornered cat. "Modernism? What sort of irrelevant, passé notion is that, you right-wing reactionary!"
Never mind liberal bias in the media, it is now so embedded within the Roman curia and national episcopates that even the conservative minority who readily see heretical splinters in Modernist eyes do not perceive the liberal logs in their own.
This neo-conservative denial of having imbibed and assimilated liberal tenets is a foundational problem. It prevents the thorough uprooting of corrupt theological and philosophical presumptions which have held sway in our formative ecclesiastical institutions for nearly two generations. It stymies root and branch reform.
Why? Because the Modernist prelates smugly ensconced in the majority of Western sees will never recognise the spiritual and intellectual disorders which fuel their sins of omission and commission while their supposedly ‘conservative’ brethren are still fanning the Modernistic flames which forged the problematic documents of Vatican II in the first place.
The problem starts at the very top, of course, with our Holy Father’s renowned predilection for the chief liberal architects of the catastrophic Council. In March 2004, as Cardinal Ratzinger, he effectively rehabilitated the heretical ‘Father of Vatican II’, Karl Rahner, whose influence on aspects of his own thought is manifest. Yet his speech to the Roman Curia on 22 December 2005 was even more telling. In adopting the usual evolutionary agenda aimed at rescuing Vatican II from itself, the Pope articulated la nouvelle théologie i.e. constant flux involving endless redefinitions of "relationships", such as those between faith and science and between the Church and the modern state and world religions. He restated, in other words, the essential principles underlying that anti-Thomistic ‘programme’ of ‘renewal’ set forth by Hans Urs von Balthasar and Henri de Lubac and diffused via the Council.
The postconciliar Church of smoke and mirrors will surely persist with its illusory ‘New Pentecost’ rhetoric until influential neo-conservatives admit their own addiction to the nostrums of this dubious duo. It is my contention, therefore, that they must be brave, confront their denial of this corrosive liberal elephant in the Church and take that single first step. (They can thank me later.)
Having done so, we will see the flow-on effect in local Churches everywhere, as hierarchies enslaved by Liberalism begin the arduous process of getting over it. Picture the scene: The senior cleric of the conference slowly rises from his chair. He solemnly looks around the room. Understandably, he is nervous and so remains quiet for a few seconds. All eyes are on him. Then, in that familiar quavering brogue, he mouths the words that can change his life and, with a little help from a higher power, change the lives of all the other prelates in the room.
"Hello," he finally says, "My name is Cormac, and I’m a Modernist."