The crisis of our times is not causeless, the chaos we inhabit is no mystery, and there is a remedy to the state of emergency we inhabit in its every aspect.
This is the lesson of the luminous wisdom of the Catholic Church, whose power to restore our civilisation will further be explored in this and the following posts.
This post is an introduction to a series on modernism, which will show you some of the books and encyclicals we will examine to better understand the state we are in today - and how we can best get out of it.
It will examine some major ideas and my aim is to equip the reader with the solution to the problem of the replacement of our Christian civilisation with a counterfeit culture.
CONTENTS
The Syllabus of modern errors
The Liberal Project
The Liberal Current in the Late 19th Century
TS Eliot and Matthew Arnold
Pascendi - Feeding the Flock
“Authority is nothing else but numbers and the sum total of material forces” -
Maxima Quodem - Pope Pius IX
This is one of the errors of the modern world as stated by Blessed Pope Pius IX in his 1862 allocution, Maxima Quodem.
Two years later, Blessed Pope Pius IX would publish his 1864 “Syllabus of Errors” - as an appendix to his encyclical Quanta Cura.
The Syllabus Errorum as it is titled in Latin also contained the above line about power.
Stated with deceptive simplicity, this error when examined unfolds the conflict between the natural law defended by the Church - and the reduction of all meaning to the limits and desires of Man under the banner of “progress”.
This series also presents a brief history of the subtraction of Christ from Christendom, and His replacement with the political beliefs of liberalism.
Today, the Vatican is seeking to transform the Church into a democratic liberal entity by way of the synodal path.
This is to refashion the Church in the image of Man’s institutions - patterned on the European Union and the United Nations - so that the Church itself will resemble a liberal democracy.
THE LIBERAL PROJECT
As I have explained in my Brief History of Liberal Democracy, this system is merely presented as one offering universal empowerment.
In reality it is the realisation of Isaiah Berlin’s second type of liberal government: the rule by an elite which decides what the ruled shall believe and desire through the manufacture of consent.
Of course, liberal democracy presents its authority as legitimised by majority opinion. In reality, public opinion is made by the ruling elite, in a soft despotism whose power is secured by the making and marketing of belief. This is how the sacred majority of democratic rule is contrived, and its legitimacy - claimed by the “sum of numbers” - is a falsehood.
The power of liberal democracy is secured in fact by the “sum total of material forces” as explained by Pope Pius IX. These forces are the control of positions of power, of patronage, partnership with NGOs and sinecures - and of course in the domination of media messaging.
I attempt here to explain a wider context showing how we came to have a modern Vatican which preaches the political religion of climate, migration, feminism and the rainbow flag.
The broader liberal current has resolved into a project, political and religious, to replace everything with itself in Church as in State, in imagination as in reality.
It is the replacement of reality with a tragedy of errors. This series will show these errors, and how they are to be corrected.
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