Reviewed by Justyna Kluska

One Hundred Years of Modernism

Author: Fr. Dominique Bourmaud (Angelus Press, 2006)

Contemporary social and religious doctrines have been founded on deceit. One can wait endlessly for some brave new world to come, but the more one cogitates and goes back to common sense, the more likely one is prone to realize there is a whole propaganda about the phenomenon of modernity. For how many centuries will we still delude ourselves that we live at the threshold of a spring, if at most we are challenged by another revolution, infuriated with the past but often gently disguised?

In his One Hundred Years of Modernism, Fr. Dominique Bourmaud produced a compendium exposing philosophical traps that rendered so many priests, scientists, and ordinary people unable to understand the real meaning of what they say, they think, and incapable to recognize who does plant utopian views in their minds. From the intricate sentences formulated by the celebrities of ideas (Luther, Kant, Hegel, Sartre, Bergson, Teilhard de Chardin, von Balthasar, Rahner, de Lubac and, unfortunately, the popes since the second half of the 20th century, and many others), the book sketches the very essence of Modernism, which every time turns out to be not only something hackneyed but, above all, something absurdly stupid.

Fr. Bourmaud’s book is all the more noteworthy as it puts in order the exuberant conceptual chaos of the language of fashionable philosophy and theology. What seems to be rather unusual, it can be read by minds skilled and trained in humanities, as well by people who have no competence in philosophy. Both will find a genuine model for reasoning, which enables to penetrate and expose a large part of anti-Catholic manipulations. Readers will understand where the origin of the lamentable state of the Church lies and why the Second Vatican Council is like a pitfall for faith. They will notice (if they have not noticed it so far) that the highest form of philosophy and wisdom is God’s Revelation. They will not have to rely on someone’s private opinion, but on the sentences and doctrines that have been held always and everywhere as true in the Church because of God’s revealing authority. Furthermore, those dogmas and theological truths do form a perfect harmony, which can be observed even by an unbeliever with a logical mind.

It is not a good thing to stand halfway when one is ready to admit that there is something wrong with the world. Only minor symptoms of problems creep on the surface. Words striving to obscure the Word of God Himself are situated much deeper. As de Maistre wrote, “False opinions are . . . like false coins: first great villains mint them and then honest people spend them and perpetuate the crime itself, without knowing what they are doing.”

If I were asked to recommend the book that is worth reading to realize in one go what the history of philosophy is about and how to explain the nature of the contemporary crisis affecting the Catholic Church and, in consequence, the whole world, I would answer: “Read this one.”