There are forces and currents of thought beyond the understanding of most people. Ideas govern the world, not people, because people are governed by ideas. The intellect is prior to the will in causality. In other words, our thoughts make us do things.
There were thoughts or ideas that were at the back of the Second Vatican Council. In particular Jacques Maritain’s idea that being should be subject to action, at least practically considered. In other words, pastoral considerations before doctrine.
Now to any normally formed mind this sounds ridiculous. And so it does. Of course one must get it right in his head what must be done before trying to do it. But this ridiculous notion is what caused the rift and rupture in the Catholic Church. And the reason for it is easy to say but hard to swallow.
The majority of mankind is in a cave of shadows and echoes, of appearances and speculations. Truth does not belong to most mankind, because most mankind cares nothing for philosophy. But the tragedy is, the world is governed by ideas, philosophical ideas. When the papacy is occupied by men without faith or distorted faith by a philosophical system they happen to cling to, in this case modernist humanism, the world reels in effect and has no clue why.
To most of us Home Alone Catholics, it is easy to say, Paul VI was just an apostate. Pure and simple. Perhaps. But apostasy has a cause. The cause in Paul VI’s case (his apostasy or just heresy, I am not arguing here), of his aberrant ideas of marrying the Church with the world, is a philosophical error before it is a doctrinal aberration.
Montini admired and even wanted to make Maritain a lay cardinal. His admiration for the French philosopher was world-known. What was perhaps not known widely then nor now is the fact that Maritain espoused a kind of Thomism that was less Thomistic and more pragmatic.
Integral Humanism, Maritain’s brainchild, is the gift to the the reformers in that it offered a rational framework to reconsider and reconstruct the Church from within. The idea is difficult to understand at first but the gist is this. The normal order of things is that being must pass through verbalization, then legislation, then practical application. We begin with an idea about something. Then we derive an ought or command from that idea. Then we say what needs to be done accordingly. Maritain’s idea does away with the operation of ideas and law and replaces them with individual conscience and prudence, which he fashions from culture and social expediency instead of the classical foundation of being.
The idea, then, that reshaped Catholicism is that how I am a Catholic in the world depends on what best witnesses to the Faith, what meets others where they are, instead of doctrinal insistence. Maritain believed that the pluralism in society was permanent and an obstacle not to be overcome by the age-old posture of an authoritative and doctrinarian Church.
The Church needed to lighten up a little and come down off Her pedestal to the where the masses were, the infidels, the schismatics, the heretics, and even Satanists apparently (all lost sheep, of course, but perhaps not all ignorant of Christ or His true Church–some like the dark, for their deeds are dark). The Church was to witness to the world and inspire conversion through conversation and mutual respect. À la Assisi prayer meetings.
Hence, the Church of accompaniment and encounter. The Church of dialogue and discernment. The Church of guitars and clowns and altar girls and communion in the hands and same-sex blessings, and a thousand other abominations of desolation that have disfigured the Bride of Christ into the Whore of Babylon.
All because an idea no one really took the time to check against reason and philosophical truth. I have not delved into that philosophy here but have only briefly mentioned it. The even harder truth, and the one truth important here to mention on CatholicAxis, is that not everyone is a philosopher or capable of sustained philosophical thought. Yet the crisis in the Church is not so much theological as philosophical. Until we learn to think rightly again, the Church will remain shrouded in this second Arianism where doctrine is no longer one in being with religious practice.
