Four Principles—One Foreordained Conclusion
“Wilson has his Fourteen Points,” Georges Clemenceau is reputed to have grumbled; “God only had ten.” Pope Francis is more humble than the irritatingly pedantic American President. In his writings he publicly offers us a less extensive diagram for achieving the peace that passes all understanding based upon four principles alone.
Unfortunately, the pope’s math seems to me to be faulty. To my mind, Francis’s four principles are rooted in a number of others that are required both to activate them, as well as to divert attention from their true consequence. Nevertheless, there is no need for us to quibble in this regard. For whether his teaching is built upon four or seven or ten pillars, they all lead to one, all too predictable, foreordained, and repeatedly rehashed progressive Catholic conclusion. This conclusion is the need for the Holy Spirit to clean up His act; to shape up or to ship out.
Let us give the pope his due and at least begin with the four principles. What are they? One is that the problems and conflicts of the particular spaces in which we think and live our limited lives are overcome and resolved through the passage of time, because “time is greater than space.” Resolution of the clashing forces of a limited space in historic time is aided mightily by his second maxim, the recognition that “unity is greater than conflict.” A third axiom tells us that the harmonious concord attained through a peace-giving unity must be achieved on an ever more global scale, since “the whole is greater than the parts.”
Still, if the mind of Francis is indeed entirely reflected in the four principles alone, surely the most significant among all of them, the one that clarifies their essential thrust, is that “reality is greater than ideas.” For those who would not adhere to this golden rule would be at war with what he sees to be the Holy Spirit’s final, historical goal of global “diversity in unity.” They would be fighting to keep mankind under the iron scepter of empty rhetorical guidelines, frozen in historical time and geographical space; dead formulae enshrining “angelic forms of purity,” “objectives that are more ideal than real,” various brands of “a-historical fundamentalism,” “ethical systems bereft of kindness,” and “intellectual discourses bereft of wisdom.”
Embracing “reality” over “ideas” ensures the “unity of the transcendentals”—the True, the Good, and the Beautiful. Solidifying that unity guarantees that a soul-killing commitment to an isolated, theoretical intellectual “truth” does not work against practical moral and aesthetic values. It allows for all that is valuable within contrasting forces of particular times and places—whose harmonization petty, rationalist, theoretical “truth” obsessed minds cannot conceive possible—to be reconciled on an ever higher plane through the impetus given by the Holy Spirit. But, once again, I insist that what this actually means is the impetus of a Third Person of the Blessed Trinity obedient to the commands of His mortal “betters.” And those “betters,” firmly tied to what Francis defines as “reality,” once again, operate with the “frozen” vision that the Progressive Catholic movement has always tried to foist upon Holy Church.
Casting its pestiferous net very widely, Progressive Catholicism, solidly “incarnated” in the history of the Church through the tragic work of the brilliant but complex figure of the Abbé Félicité de Lamennais (1782-1854) and his disciples, has ultimately dragged up and mobilized for its purposes everything utterly irrational, willful, and power-hungry in the centuries-long project of “modernity.” Moreover, it has done so by employing the unfailingly seductive “media” tools already forged by the Sophist enemies of the Socratics in pre-Christian times. These have always had the mission of nipping in the bud all serious ideas judging and correcting a “reality” which is nothing other than the stubborn, “business as usual” behavior of fallen, sinful man. The Church authorities have repeatedly tried to toss this unholy “catch” back into the abyss where it belongs since the 1830s. It has now been trawled up again by Pope Francis so as to complete more openly and more blatantly the “proper” education of an otherwise hopelessly obscurantist Holy Spirit.
To see how he accomplishes this task we must return to the other pillars of Francis’s thought intimated above; the necessary substructure requiring the invocation of Francis’s four principles. Anyone eager for a full knowledge of all of the historical and personal influences claimed as a pedigree for his oeuvre in this regard should subject himself to a reading of Massimo Borghese’s The Mind of Pope Francis: Jorge Maria Bergoglio’s Intellectual Journey (Liturgical Press, 2018), from which all of the citations found in this article have come, for further enlightenment—preferably in Lent. For brevity’s sake, allow me to plunge directly into this substructure itself, beginning with the pope’s call for “the redemption of modernity.”
Francis does not deny that there is a “bad modernity.” This is the modernity that he chastises for its “Promethean anthropocentrism”: its blasphemously man-centered, wickedly “self-referential,” limited earthly obsession with an isolated messianic “idea.” He sees one of the chief manifestations of this evil in that openly atheistic, dogmatic Marxism that is also promoted through Catholic Liberation Theology. Nevertheless, Francis argues that the danger to “the unity of the transcendentals” coming from that form of human, self-referential, intellectual arrogance has been surpassed since the collapse of the Soviet Bloc by the indirectly atheistic but equally doctrinaire Neo-Liberal form of individualist, consumption obsessed Liberation Theology preached globally from out of North America.
At first glance, this might not sound all that different from the Church’s traditional attack on a man-centered modernity. But Pope Francis warns us that it would be wrong to rummage through the musty documents of what amounts to an ecclesiastical form of “a-historical fundamentalism” to fight against it. Such an effort would smack of what he calls “Restorationism”: the attempt to revive a past now buried under the rubbish heap of history. That past was marred by “moralizing proclamations” relying on the puffed-up pseudo-knowledge of an idea-fixated clerical elite of a specific time and place. It is this self-referential elitism and all too human intellectual manacling of the divine journey through history—also guilty of limiting God’s vibrant, evolving interaction with the “real world”—that he condemns both as “Promethean Neo-Pelagianism” as well as “Theistic Gnosticism.”
Hence, our need to return to the redemption of that “good modernity” which the Holy Spirit seeks to bring to its perfection if only we would let Him do so. Francis praises recent Western European churchmen for their yeoman service in this pneumatic labor through their assimilation of the valuable aspects of the Reformation and Enlightenment, which were finally given entry into the City of God by the Fathers and periti of the Second Vatican Council. He says that Eastern Europe and Eastern Christianity also made their contribution to the great endeavor by means of John Paul II’s appeal to the Roman Church to welcome “breathing” with Christianity’s second, oriental lung alongside her own.
Now, however, the Holy Spirit had aroused Latin America to bring her own wider experience of redeeming modernity to the fore to complete the divine plan. This experience was closely connected to the Society of Jesus’ commitment to two projects involving the expanding union of things old and new. On the one hand, that commitment entailed an enthusiastic combination of Renaissance Greco-Roman Humanism with Catholicism responsible for creating Baroque Culture; on the other, it was reflected in the global Jesuit missionary work of harmonizing the good in newly encountered non-Classical native cultures with the Christian message.
Latin America had historically been the most successful center for the joint realization of both of these projects. But she was now central to its still further completion, as seen in the decisions of the post-conciliar meetings of the entire Latin American Episcopacy at Medellin in 1968 and at Puebla in 1979. Here, the Church, embracing and running with Second Vatican Council’s activation of the role of the laity, made a special point of seeking to grasp its evangelical wisdom, combining it with a preferential option for learning the needs of its poorer members. All of this signaled the nurturing of an exciting new “Theology of the People,” whose full mobilization would be the key to a comprehensive, global defeat of the limiting forces of Promethean Anthropomorphism—Marxism and Neo-Liberalism—along with the backward looking threats of Promethean Neo-Pelagianism and Theistic Gnosticism as well.
Now Francis does not say that this redemption of modernity will destroy the Magisterium. He seems to accept the fact that lip service will always have to be paid to that dead weight, while basically ignoring its practical significance. What really counts for the forward movement of the Holy Spirit is not an emphasis upon this heavy, moralizing, historical baggage, but, rather, the energizing, truly spiritual theological fuel that can only be pumped into the ecclesiastical tank by observing how the lowly People of God lives its Faith through its daily “reality.” God had become man to have hands to touch His People. He had taken a body to live in solidarity with them. Catholics “do not want a God without a Church, a Church without Christ, a Christ without people” (p. 190-191). Plumbing the depths of the Theology of the People would give the People of God what they want and need.
Alas, “The People” cannot be expected to yield its true theological message without some serious assistance. Yes, The People must be heard—and, hence, the central role of the Synodal Way in giving it its voice from the smallest local level to the universal stage. However, we have already seen that the Christian People, composed as it is of individuals and varied groups in their limited places and times, experiences growing pains involving clashes that must be overcome in order for its teaching to mature and become truly “real.” Forces seeking to keep that message in its adolescence—limited, Promethean Anthropocentric, Promethean Neo-Pelagian, and Theistic Gnostic forces—lurk everywhere. They must be uncovered, discredited, and rejected so that the People is not led astray and the true goal of the Holy Spirit is achieved.
Hence, the People serving as the conduit for that divine goal has to be “accompanied” by the self-sacrificing work of those who have already learned how to observe, weigh, measure, and, most importantly of all, spiritually “discern” exactly what is forward-looking in its experience and what is hindering its maturation and perfection. Such discerning helpers must provide this accompaniment in a spirit of openness to all the valid, though often totally contradictory elements, rooted in the secular lives of The People reaching out towards God for perfection—many of which seem sinful to Catholics burdened by a dead past. Such discerning spirits can go about their labor confidently, avoiding destructive “self-referential” flaws, when their task of accompaniment is accomplished under the direction of the four principles.
Unfortunately, these four principles force the discerning accompaniers to render the Truth utterly meaningless, thereby robbing it of any ability to understand, define, and promote that unity with the Good and the Beautiful—Truth’s “transcendental” partners—which Francis claims to be essential to the entire project. And, in fact, this has always been the “Original Sin” of the entire Progressive Catholic movement. Always and everywhere, that movement has worked to create a “reality” dominated by the triumph of the most irrational, sinful, human wills, seeking to prevent its victims from recognizing this awful truth by mobilizing all of the immortal Sophist tools designed to crush the influence of critical “ideas” that would enlighten them.
Lamennais seems to have at first merely unwittingly fallen into this trap through his sudden ascent to apologetic rock star renown without possessing the theological training required to separate the chaff from the wheat in his argument. Nevertheless, his equation of Catholic Truth with the presence of “energy” alone caused him to begin to cultivate this Original Sin, seeing in his own prophetic dynamism the clear voice of the Holy Spirit. His twentieth century disciples have carried that equation of Truth with a prophetic “energy” arousing popular enthusiasm that is still further dismissive of doctrinal principles and rational thought. Francis now appears openly and fully to revel in the sacrifice of the Truth to a will power hostile to any and all competition from the Deposit of Faith and the human brain.
His “Holy Spirit” does not merely want a Christian People and Church to be guided by something more than mere Reason, using “a language that touches the heart”. His Spirit wants them to reach conclusions that entirely contradict all logic, along with the Faith that once worked in unison with it. For the pope, a loving Faith does not simply “never define its edges” or “complete its thought” (pp. 57-253, passim). Constantly in mystical dialogue with the clashing currents of the world, all battling one another in a “calm chaos”, his “Faith” is filled with a “merciful” appreciation for all opposing positions; all “antinomies,” even those that run counter to the teachings of Christ as followed by His People in the dead and surpassed past. His Spirit’s job is to teach us to “live poised between each individual moment and the greater, lighter horizon of the utopian future as the formal cause which draws us to itself”; to lead us to “go beyond”; “to grasp the greatness of God, the opening of God within the immanence of the world”; to accept Divine Surprises as we move to “the ever greater, always elusive Mystery,” towards “the greater God”.
Francis claims that the message of the Faith that emerges in this manner “is simplified while losing nothing of its depth and truth, and thus becomes all the more forceful and convincing.” But what actually emerges through his cutting loose of the moorings of the Faith from any practical, continuous, substantive contact with the Magisterium, as well as from any respect for Reason and Logic, is the abandonment of the “truth,” “depth,” and “simplicity” of this supposed voice of the Holy Spirit to the whim of the accompanying “discerners” alone.
That means that the Petrine power, doctrinally defined—and thereby limited—by the First Vatican Council, fades away to be replaced by the omnipotent, personal whim of the current discerning pontiff. It means that both the episcopal authority more recently clarified by the Second Vatican Council, as well as that of the post-conciliar “Theology of the People” heard through the pursuit of the Synodal Way, also disappear, as Sacred Tradition becomes literally whatever the purifying labor of the discerning allies of the discerning pope declare it to be.
Would that the story ended there, but it does not! Francis Bacon already made it crystal clear at the beginning of the scientific phase of the current era that modernity has always been about using knowledge for gaining power. But in the hunt for power it is always the strongest energetic will that wins, defining Faith, Reason, and “Reality” as a whole as it sees fit. In this hunt, Francis & the Catholic Discerners do not stand a chance. They themselves must be dumped onto the rubbish heap of history.
The serious “convincing force” that is already standing behind Francis’s “deeper, more truthful, and simpler” pseudo-Faith comes from the ever more tyrannical secular powers that obviously dominate our ever more nihilist Global Motherland. These are already instructing their Catholic chaplains regarding what the Holy Spirit commands them to preach. And under their guidance, Catholicism can become literally anything whatsoever; anything, that is to say, except what it always has been, and must be until the end of time; the Catholicism whose continued missionary propagation the successor of Peter now labels “solemn nonsense.”
Francis uses such denigrating language against his opponents because he is a Sophist, and Sophism, since its birth in Ancient Greece, has proven itself to be an all too powerful tool in the fight against a real unity of the True, the Good, and the Beautiful. As Plato said, it teaches its practitioners a rhetorical “knack” for appealing to everything that keeps people trapped in their uncritical, undiscerning, “business as usual” caves, cultivating whatever passions help to make them slaves of the existing, stupid, but all too mighty order of things. While the secular Sophist media, serving its global puppet masters, does everything in its power to keep these slaves enchained, the Catholic Chaplaincy of the Global Motherland echoes and expands upon its message with is own pseudo-spiritual twist. It gives to anyone who is not brain-dead, anyone with a critical mind, anyone clinging to the doctrines of the Faith and to the cause of Reason and Logic that always gains from their triumph, the all too successful Sophist treatment: a mixture of ridicule and denigration of personal motive. Hence, the general assault on traditional believers who question the Holy Spirit’s guidelines as uncovered by the four principles the self-referential Argentinian. As Borghesi summarizes him: “They are like those ‘doctors of the Law’ who wondered if anything good could come out of Nazareth, from a ‘carpenter’s son’. In this case, Nazareth indicates the southern end of the world’” (p. xi).
How long, O Lord? How long!
Picture Sources
TITLE IMAGE: commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Kiosk_of_Qertassi,_a_small_but_elegant_Roman_kiosk_…,_Lake_Nasser,_Egypt_-_51882188384.jpg (Following Hadrian)
POPE FRANCIS: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pope_Francis_Papal_Mass_in_UAE.jpg (Anthony Sajdler)
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