Posted on 06/13/2002 8:00:29 PM PDT by cathway
In the solemn season of Lent, in the year 1976, Cardinal Karol Wojtyla was invited by Pope Paul VI to preach the annual Retreat made by the Pope, Paul VI, and his closest aids. Few could have predicted at that time with any certainty that this Polish Cardinal would be Pope in less than two years. In the course of those Lenten refllections, the future John Paul II would elaborate the themes which he would develop in greater depth during his long Pontificate.
One of those themes, arguably one of the most important of them, had to do with the tension between the optimistic joy rooted in the theological virtue of Hope and the sober realism about man and his need for healing and redemption vis a vis his temptation toward radical autonomy from God. This tension is intrinsic to the eschatology of the New Testament.
Cardinal Wojtyla spoke of Satan's primordial inducing of man towards "a terrain of rebellion" wherein man "turns towards the world" and "strays progressively in a direction opposed to the destiny to which he has been called," (Sign of Contradiction, 4:3) rather than accept the invitation to that other terrain, of "collaboration with his Creator".
The "terrain of rebellion," according to Wojtyla, is that "terrain where human pride seeks not the glory of God but its own greater satisfaction"; and the Cardinal speaks of "the world as [that] terrain for struggle between man and God," with the Evil One who holds out the illusory temptation of "the created being's defiance of the Creator." Illusory because, "Without the Creator the creature vanishes". (ibid.)
"Without the Creator the creature vanishes..."! What a profound and yet simple statement! And the Cardinal knew that if this was true for Adam in the beginning, how much more is it true for man and for human civilizations today, consequent to man's fall into Original Sin.
Karol Wojtyla in 1976 was not naive about the fate of man apart from God, nor, certainly, is John Paul II today. No man who stands before the powers of the world today and dares to speak continually of a "Culture of Death" can be called a giddy optimist. Rather, the man who became John Paul II has always maintained the Biblical eschatological tension between sober realism and Hope, and no statement of Christian theology can be called Catholic which tries to eliminate this tension.
The Cardinal from Cracow stood before a weary Paul VI in 1976 and dared to raise the question whether the the Church and world were not in the very "last lap" of human history leading to the "man of sin" of whom St. Paul warned, considering the worldwide rejection of the Faith, the apostasy of liberalism which by 1976 was aggressively seeking to interpret the Second Vatican Council in a way never intended by the fathers who attended it.
Quoting the humanist philosopher Feuerbach, Karol Wojtyla spoke of the teachings of liberalism which was threatening the Church and all of human civilization, echoing the temptation of the Serpent:
"In place of love of God," the new religion says, "we ought to acknoweldge love of man as the only true religion; in place of belief in God we ought to expand man's belief in himself, in his own strength, the belief that humanity's destiny is dependent not on a being higher than humanity, but on humanity itself, that man's only demon is man himself---primitive man, superstitious, egoistic, evil---that similarly man's only god is man himself." (ibid).
The Pope refers to this temptation toward transgressive autonomy as "laicist anthropocentrism," or secular humanism. Then he goes on to utter the ominous words:
"We may now be wondering if this is the last lap along that way of denial which started out from around the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. To us, who know the whole bible from Genesis to revelation, no stretch of that route can come as a surprise. We accept with trepidation but also with hope the inspired words of the Apostle Paul, "Let no man deceive you in any way, because first it is necessary for the rebellion to come, and for the man of sin, the son of perdition to reveal himself" (2 Thess 2,3)
Note the tension: "with trepidation but also with hope". Here the future Pope was both consoling and reminding the Pope at that time of the "signs of the times" which might account for the sudden widespread dissidence which entered the Church like the smoke of Satan when Pope Paul uttered his unambiguous Credo of the People of God (see below), preemptively subverting modernist interpretations of the Council just past, and when he reaffirmed the Church's teachings against artificial contraception in Humanae Vitae. In those two acts Paul VI unambiguously upheld the Church's traditional doctrine and morality and held out for all the hermeneutical key to the interpretation of the Council's documents. The liberals never forgave him and proceeded to ridicule and disobey him before a bewildered world and the Faithful.
Karol Wojtyla, arguably, used the most incendiary eschatological passage in the New Testament, warning of the "rebellion" or apostasy, and the "son of perdition, " who would---whether as a man or as a metaphor of a system---lead the world away from the Church and into a humanistic Brave New World grounded soley in man who seeks a knowlege of good and evil apart from his Creator.
More recently Cardinal Giacomo Biffi, 71, the Archbishop of Bologna, spoke similarly when, in lecturing on Soloviev's teachings regarding the Antichrist, he said, as reported by The Times, that the Antichrist---or Antichristic system--- seems to pervade the world today, and that it promotes
"vague and fashionable spiritual values" rather than the Scriptures.... advocates ecumenical dialogue between the Roman Catholic Church and other Christian denominations.... This appeared to be a worthy aim, but was in fact being used by the Antichrist in an attempt to water down and undermine Catholicism to the point where it collapsed. The cardinal did not say whether he had any particular world figure in mind, and his real target seemed to be the substitution of "feel-good" causes, such as ecology and humanitarian aid, for "true religion". "
Thus the perrenial warning is being trumpeted. It is interesting that Cardinal Biffi today distinguishes between a Catholic and an anti-Catholic ecumenism, the latter being based on liberal indifferentism and compromise of the Faith, whereas the former is based on the strictly delineated teachings of the Council. What is clear is that liberalism is based on a transgressive concept of man's autonomy and dovetails perfectly with and synergistically works towards secular humanism. This is why liberals seek to justify their actions and unbelief on the basis of an amorphous "spirit of" Vatican II, and deplore the actual texts of the Council which, de fide, were infallibly protected from error by the Holy Spirit. Thus we must not follow those Integrists either who, in interpreting apostasy, seek to attribute error and heresy to the magisterium rather than to decadent theological and cultural liberalism. In so doing they would undermine the very foundations of the Catholic Faith. The Church takes the meat and leaves the bones of cultural truths, just as St. Thomas Aquinas took the meat and left the errors of the pagan Aristotle. That has ever been the way of the Church! One can never point superficially to certain select points of convergence and extrapolate to magisterial heresy! That way is Luther! It is the differences which are of consequence.
The "last times", according to the Scriptures and the Council, began with the Life, Ministry, Death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ, and all revelation closed with the death of the last Apostle, John. Today we see like never before a fight for the very soul of the world going on: a war between the thoroughly Christic humanism of the Gospel---transcendent and immanent at once--- and a secular humanism which seeks to co-opt the prerogative of our Maker Who alone can declare to man what is good and what is evil. John Paul II has stood up to the Battle, under the banner of the cross, against all such attempts to "free" man from God, for "Without the Creator the creature vanishes..."
We cannot know for certain what hour of earths history we are in. The eschatological events regarding the telos or goal of history may be near or far off. But we do know (great) apostasy when we see it (primarily Christological heresies today and all that follows from it) and we must maintain our readiness to "fight the good fight" with--- and never against--- the magisterium and visible, divinely constituted Church --- until that Parousia---be it near or far----which is the Coming again, the parousia, of Our Lord Jesus Christ who will utterly destroy the Antichristic works which seek to "free" man from His Creator.
675 Before Christ's second coming the Church must pass through a final trial that will shake the faith of many believers. The persecution that accompanies her pilgrimage on earth will unveil the "mystery of iniquity" in the form of a religious deception offering men an apparent solution to their problems at the price of apostasy from the truth. The supreme religious deception is that of the Antichrist, a pseudo-messianism by which man glorifies himself in place of God and of his Messiah come in the flesh.
676 The Antichrist's deception already begins to take shape in the world every time the claim is made to realize within history that messianic hope which can only be realized beyond history through the eschatological judgment. The Church has rejected even modified forms of this falsification of the kingdom to come under the name of millenarianism, especially the "intrinsically perverse" political form of a secular messianism.---Catechism of the Catholic Church
Over the past six months Stephen Hand, who once contributed regularly to these pages, has been devoting a large portion of his hobbyist Web site to sniping at former friends and others he now derides as “integrists,” a term he equates with “extreme traditionalists.”
Hand has been launching a new anti-“integrist” screed into cyber-space almost daily, with the evident aim of provoking confrontations with those he once called his friends and collaborators. Hand’s Web site now features innumerable references to “integrism” and “integrist,” including separate hyper-links to ‘“Integrists” and “Integrism 2” through “Integrism 8.” There are far more references to “integrism” on Hand’s Web site than to any other single subject.
It seems that Mr. Hand is very concerned about Integrism....
The first order of business is to make an effort to determine what exactly Hand means by the term “integrist.” In attempting a definition, as I have already noted, Hand equates integrists with “extreme traditionalists.” [See: www.geocities.com /Athens/Ithaca/3251/integrist.html]
It scarcely clarifies matters to define a term by reference to another term which itself is undefined.
An anonymous article about “Integrism” on Hand’s Web site is, however, helpful in this regard—although not to Hand’s position. The article notes that the word “integrist” was coined by French theologians during the pontificate of Saint Pius X to describe those who (in reaction to the rise of Modernism) tended to believe that certain long-standing theological opinions in the Church should be regarded as binding Catholic doctrine in areas where the Church allowed free discussion. For example, an integrist might hold that since Thomistic philosophy is the perennial philosophy of the Catholic Church, it is heresy to disparage the Thomistic system. While it would be imprudent and wrong to disparage the Thomistic system, and a clear sign of Modernist tendencies (as St. Pius X taught in Pascendi), to do so is not heresy, properly speaking. An integrist, therefore, is someone who makes too great a claim for an otherwise legitimate theological opinion.
None of this is to suggest that either the Remnant or Michael Matt is “integrist.” Rather, the point here is that the very article Hand provides for a definition of the key term at issue undermines his position that “integrism” is some sort of grave threat to the good order of the Church and that “integrists” are not orthodox Catholics.
That integrists are neither heretics nor schismatics was affirmed by none other than Dietrich von Hildebrand, whom Hand rightly praises as an “exemplary Churchman.” Hand seems unaware that it was von Hildebrand who observed in The Devastated Vineyard that while an “integrist” may be unduly narrow-minded about certain things, his views “are also in no way incompatible with Christian Revelation.” (p. 16) (my emphasis) In other words, the term “integrist,” rightly understood, refers to people who are Roman Catholics in good standing. As von Hildebrand put it: “The narrowness of the integrists may be regrettable, but it is not heretical.” In fact, integrists are “pious, orthodox men.”
Is this what Hand means by “integrist”? Clearly it is not. An examination of his Web site shows that he employs the word as an epithet, applicable to any Traditionalist holding an opinion on the postconciliar crisis which Hand does not like—even if Hand himself was expressing the same opinion only months ago in various “integrist” writings, including books published by The Remnant Press, such as Hand’s recent effort—Crisis of Faith: Essays on traditional Catholicism in an age of unbelief (Published in 1999 by The Remnant and still available from The Remnant Bookstore).
1) The reply to Ferrara is at http://www.geocities.com/romcath1/genferrara.html specifically
2) and re Integrism generally at http://www.geocities.com/romcath1/controversy.html
3. Von Hildebraand rejected the Integrist option and was speaking to motives. Of course the Integrist has a good motive, like the Pharisee: Zeal for God (but, St. Paul says, "not according to knowledge"). That is better than the sometimes crass motives of the atheist."
The New book, Faith, Liturgy and Scoail Justice also deals with these issues. See TCR"
---SHand
Another good link written by a former Integrist can be found here
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