We Insist: “An Enemy Hath Done This!”
When we see the rotten fruits of modernist aggiornamento we cannot but insist “an enemy, the most pernicious of the adversaries of the Church, hath done this”! Prologue: A Crucial Distinction Missed To-day There is a lesson from the history of heresies that we can’t fail to notice. It is that, that the gravest theological errors often begin, not with an outright denial of the Faith, but with an incautious expression. A single letter. A single word. A phrase. A misplaced distinction. An ambiguous formula. The Arian crisis revolved around a single letter, an iota. The Protestant revolt redefined words such as faith , grace , and Church . It has been characteristic of Modernist crisis likewise to advance by changing language before changing doctrine. Recently, I shared a pictographic thumbnail I found to be picturesque and arresting. It portrays two opposing explanations of the crisis that has engulfed the visible structures of the Catholic Church. One conclusion, tagged “Lef...