About Christian Progressivism. 5

About Christian Progressivism

Part 5

By Father Julio Meinvielle

Translated from the Spanish by Roberto Hope

Progressivism and the Second Vatican Council

To formulate a definitive judgment on this topic it would be necessary to await the final conclusions to which the Council should arrive. Because a Council is the work of the Holy Spirit and the Spirit does not really manifest Himself other than in the conclusions to which the unanimity of the Council Fathers should arrive under the direction of the Roman Pontiff.

However, from the start, we have to say the following:

1. The Council, in the mind of the Church, is a great act of charity of the Church itself, which seeks now to save the world and unite all men in the faith and in the charity of Christ.

2. This great act of charity of the Church, to save the modern world from the state of spiritual poverty in which it finds itself, takes place in the precise moment in which the world, proudly gets overexcited with his scientific and technical conquests, in which it is moved to reorganize itself, rejecting God and asserting a militant atheism of a global scale, with which it does nothing but bring the ruin and destruction of the human species, because a world without God, having at its disposal an immense technical apparatus, will use it for nothing other that the destruction of man. This is why the Church intends to put this modern world in contact with the vivifying and permanent energies of the Gospel. It is the world which needs to be saved by the Church; not, as the progressivists imagine, the Church to be saved by the modern world.

3. This great act of charity of the Church presupposes the keeping of the Truth of the Church, intact and complete because, in the Church, charity flows from Truth. The Holy Spirit proceeds from the Word who is the Truth.

4. This great act of charity of the Church coincides with a great confusion which has been stirring the Catholic world for over 30 years and with an anxiety, not always legitimate, of making changes and attaining progress.

5. The progressivist movement to which we have referred in the preceding talks has been operating in organized blocs all over the world, but especially in France, Belgium, Holland, and Germany, and wants to make use of the Conciliar Assembly to impose their dangerous progressivist views.

6. Communism is not absent from this sinister purpose. In the Spring of 1963, the Cardinal Secretary of State of the Roman Pontiff has made known to the nuncio in Paris, for him, in turn, to make it known to the episcopate and to the top superiors of religious orders residing in France, of the sinister purposes of the Pax movement, which operates in Poland and is led by Piasecki, a Polish progressive Catholic; a movement which has as its purpose to spread progressivism in France, and, in this moment, to take advantage of the Conciliar Assembly to exercise dialectics among the Conciliar Fathers themselves. This Pax Communist movement has inexhaustible means to exert influence on the world communications media. With that influence, it has been able to put dialectics in practice, making the Council Fathers appear divided into two opposing camps, good and evil, progressivists and integrists, open and closed in attitude, innovators and reactionaries. In reality, in an assembly of almost 3,000 people, many are the groups and hues, and these, very flexible; so, it is not fair to divide them precisely into two, and only two, antagonistic tendencies, such as Communist dialectics demands. This has been the result of world propaganda which in that manner has made all Catholics in the World appear to be divided into two adversarial groups, of progressivists and integrists.

7. This psychological war being waged with a display of the world propaganda apparatus has the effect of creating in many a fear complex for the fact that they may be labeled reactionary, troglodytes, narrow and integrists.

8. Catholics should not let themselves be given a complex, but instead, should keep their faithfulness to the Magisterium of the human Cathedra, since this is the condition of the authentic fidelity to the faith in Christ.

Go to Part 4