When ideologies come in for a landing...

Father Joseph de Tonquédec, S.J., wrote in the last century, in his Critique of Knowledge: “It is extremely naive to believe that useful theses are held up in mid-air, all by themselves.” By this he meant that these useful theses, which are helpful and even necessary for life in society—moral and political ideas—need solid metaphysical foundations.

Today most Catholics are naive in the opposite way, believing that the critique of the Second Vatican Council, which wanted to open the Church up to the modern ideas of religious liberty, interreligious dialogue, the secular State..., is floating in an ethereal world in which there is no place for social, economic and political realities—the only ones that count. This perspective changes when you notice that these ideologies come in for a landing, that they become embodied in concrete behaviors, with momentous social and political consequences.

For 50 years, in the name of interreligious dialogue, they have celebrated the values of other religions and expressed repentance about our own; in the name of religious liberty, they act as though all religions were equivalent; in the name of secular society, they put their light under a bushel basket and let the salt lose its flavor. Chesterton spoke about Christian ideas gone mad; now they have gone soft. Soft ideas for hard times, and so the landing is bound to be painful. For the naive souls who believe in the modern ideologies are being confronted by those who do not believe in them but know how to exploit them cleverly in order to impose their belief on a West that is scarcely Christian any more.

The remedy for this disarming naïveté—in the literal sense of the word: one that disarms intellects and demobilizes wills—is a militant lucidity.

Father Alain Lorans

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