The Cardinal Meteorologist

Listen to him: “The history of the Church at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century left us with a bitter lesson which we should not forget, in order not to repeat the error from which it originated. I am talking about the delay or rather the refusal to take note of the changes that had taken place in society, and of the crisis of modernism which was the consequence.”

He added, “What damage has this done to each of them, both to the Church and to the so-called ‘modernists.’ The lack of dialogue, on the one hand has pushed some of the most notorious modernists towards increasingly extreme and ultimately clearly heretical positions.”

“On the other hand, it has deprived the Church of enormous energies, causing endless heartbreak and suffering within her, leading her to withdraw ever more into herself and causing her to lag behind the times.”

Cardinal Raniero Cantalamessa has been the preacher of the Pontifical Household since 1980. As such, he preaches Lent every year to members of the Roman Curia. The introduction to the first sermon, given on March 3, clearly shows that he is preaching for his parish

Clearly, St. Pius X was wrong to condemn modernism in the encyclical Pascendi in 1907. He deprived the Church of “enormous energies,” and precipitated the modernists into heresy, when they wanted to “take note of the changes that have taken place in society.”

And the pontifical preacher adds: “The Second Vatican Council was the prophetic initiative to make up for lost time. It ha led to a renewal that it is certainly not necessary to illustrate here. More than its content, what interests us today is the method it inaugurated, which consists of walking through history, alongside humanity, seeking to discern the signs of the times.”

However, for Cardinal Cantalamessa, “the history and the life of the Church did not stop with Vatican II. Let us be careful not to make of it what was attempted with the Council of Trent, that is, a finish line and an immovable objective. If the life of the Church were to stop, it would be for her like a river arriving at a dam: it inevitably turns into a quagmire or a marsh.… Now we have to go a step further.”

In other words, the pastoral dynamics of Vatican II corrected the static dogmatism of the Council of Trent. But when you are on the edge of the precipice – with an abysmal lack of vocations and religious practice in freefall – to propose “one more step” in the direction of conciliar reforms is sheer madness.

At the Council of Trent, alongside the Bible, there was the Summa Theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas; the council fathers drew from these references what they needed to define truths and condemn errors. Cardinal Cantalamessa would gladly replace them with a weather vane to see from which direction the wind is blowing, with an anemometer, a thermometer, and a barometer to “discern the signs of the times.” It is no longer a council, but a weather station.