Pope Leo XIII used Locke so was he a Modernist?: 1P5 - Against Right-Wing Modernism..."Right-Modernism, like the Left-Modernists, seek to fuse the Catholic faith with Enlightenment ideology. However, unlike the Left-Modernists, their champions are not Marx, Spinoza, and Kant, but instead Adam Smith, John Locke
The Church is in the midst of a serious crisis, the crisis of Modernism. Modernism is a deadly and insidious heresy, but what is not often stated is how it arises. It is a fact that Modernism, like an evolving disease, has many forms. While Modernism has many components, it all boils down to trying to do the impossible, the fusing of the Catholic faith with the demonic ideologies of the so-called Enlightenment. The Enlightenment itself is what spawned classical Liberalism, a truly evil and insidious ideology that was given infallible papal condemnations in Quanta Cura, the Syllabus of Errors, Rerum Novarum, Immortale Dei, Mirari vos, and Pascendi Dominici gregis. Modernism takes two forms, Left-Modernism and Right-Modernism.
Left-Modernism is much more noticeable, and its proponents usually operate under the guise of “Liberal” or “Progressive” Catholicism. Main proponents of Left-Modernism include the German Synodal Way, National Catholic Reporter, Outreach, New Ways Ministry, “Catholics for Choice,” and the Irish Association of Catholic Priests. These Left-Modernists are blatant about their plans. They are essentially nothing more than godless, amoral relativistic Atheists who seek the annihilation of the faith by forcing it to conform completely to the Enlightenment and accept every sin that cries to heaven for vengeance (such as sodomy, birth control, and abortion). They are social liberals who often take their cues not from Church teaching, but from Karl Marx, Baruch Spinoza, and Immanuel Kant.
The Right-Modernists (who are going to be the main subject of this paper), are much more secretive about their heresy. They are often socially conservative, and will often side with the Church on actual Catholic causes like banning abortion. However, their devotion to Catholicism is only skin-deep, and they reveal themselves to be just as insidious as the Left-Modernists. Right-Modernism, like the Left-Modernists, seek to fuse the Catholic faith with Enlightenment ideology. However, unlike the Left-Modernists, their champions are not Marx, Spinoza, and Kant, but instead Adam Smith, John Locke, the Austrian School, and the American Founding. The main institutions that are a hub for Right-Modernism in the Church include Acton Institute, National Review, the American Catholic, Public Discourse, Law & Liberty, and The Stream. The Right-Modernist usually call themselves “Classical Liberal,” “Libertarian,” “Americanist,” “Neoconservative,” or “Conservative” Catholics.
While they try to portray themselves as infallible defenders of Church doctrine, like the Left-Modernists they adopt a hermetic of discontinuity regarding Vatican II. They believe that the Masonic, anti-Catholic, and classically Liberal American experiment was somehow validated at Vatican II. They spread this lie by falsely claiming that notorious heretic John Courtney Murray had a major influence on Dignitatis Humanae. Despite the fact that Dignitatis literally says that it leaves “untouched” the traditional teachings of Church and state, the Right-Modernists still persist in their Murray myth. However, David Wemhoff’s work punched a hole in such efforts of the Right-Modernists with his text on Murray (which exposes John Courtney Murray not only as a heretic who had no influence on Dignitatis, but also exposed him as a CIA asset who was trying to help the US government subvert and “Americanize” the Church). Murray was a Modernist heretic to boot, who (like the Modernists) believed the Social Kingship of Christ was a mere “historical circumstance” that should be ignored.
Like the Left-Modernists, the Right- Modernists behave in a very Protestant way, adopting a heretical view of papal infallibility. They will adopt a papal minimalist view on infallible documents like Quanta Cura, the Syllabus of Errors, and Unam Sanctam claiming that those documents are somehow not infallible. But as Dr John P. Joy has pointed out in his iron-clad response to Robert P. Miller, these documents meet all the requirements of papal infallibility.[1] Unironically, the Right-Modernists defend their classical Liberal claims by granting papal maximalism to either off the cuff comments made by Pope Francis, John Paul II, and Benedict XVI, interviews and speeches these popes made, works these popes did before they became pope, or in a highly-tortured, heretical, and erroneous reading of Centesimus annus.
The Right-Modernists try to defend a classically Liberal definition of religious freedom (as freedom from government coercion on religious matters and promotion of a secular government, instead of the actual version of religious freedom promoted in Dignitatis as pointed out by David L. Schindler).[2] This leads to them openly admitting their form of religious freedom is the Liberal conception of Atheist states like France and the US, like Robert T Miller does.[3]This also leads them to defend the religious rights of literal Satanists to hold a Black Mass, which Miller also unironically does.[4]
Others who are open about this are men like John Zmirak (who openly denounces Church history, promotes Liberal Catholicism, basically states the Church’s enemies are right, and that “Catholicism minus the Enlightenment equals Inquisition”).[5] These Right-Modernists are also proud supporters of the Americanist error, which Cardinal Pie of Poitiers rightfully identified as a form of Modernism.[6] The Americanist error involves a Protestantization, Liberalization, and ultimate individualization of the Catholic faith, rendering it helpless in the face of the world. The Americanist error, instead of leading to a flourishing of the Catholic Church, has led to a near-annihilation of the faith in America. Biden, Pelosi, Ferguson and all the other Catholic Democrats are all faithful followers of Americanism, putting their American identity over their Catholic faith. So, contrary to the Right-Modernists, Americanism will not save the Church, it will destroy it.
Another area the Right-Modernists are subversive in is the realm of economics. They reject the condemnations of neoliberal, free-market capitalism denounced in Rerum Novarum and Quadragesimo anno. Both these encyclicals provided a Catholic Corporatist remedy in the form of a revival of the guild system, and contrary to the statements of Right-Modernist neoliberals like Samuel Gregg, the Catholic corporatist spirit did not disappear from Church teachings.[7]
Pope St. John Paull II explicitly mentions that the Church not only does not accept capitalism as the only system compatible with the faith, but he also states that his recommendation in Centesimus annus cannot be called true capitalism. There are two unironic things to be mentioned. The first is that Pope St. John Paul II, beloved by the Right-Modernists, openly condemned the neoliberal ideology these Right-Modernists openly hold (which he denounced in a section titled “social sins which cry to heaven”).[8]The second is that the highly capitalist economy they promote inevitably leads to the socially Liberal society that they despise (as Stanley G. Payne points out in Franco, economic Liberalism led to the social liberalization of Spanish society).[9] This matters little to the Right-Modernists, who promote a highly tortured version of Centesimus annus. They warp and twist the encyclical into a complete break with Church teaching on the evils of capitalism and a full-on endorsement for free-market capitalism. The only time they will treat Rerum Novarum and Quadragesimo anno as authoritative is in its limited support for private property and its condemnation of Socialism and Communism.
Another major factor that Right-Modernists share with Left-Modernists is their shared disdain of us Catholic Integralists. The Right-Modernists fear us Integralists because we are the only ones defending the perennial and unchanging teachings of the Catholic faith against the evils of classical Liberalism. When they undoubtedly fail to defend their heretical positions theologically, they will end up stooping to two different responses. The first is for them to point out that once majorly Catholic places like Ireland, Portugal, Spain, and Quebec are now antireligious. This can easily be debunked. Portugal under Salazar was never integralist because Salazar not only kept secular law on the books but also kept the Church and State separate. Ireland was never formerly a confessional state (as Fianna Fail under Valera was undoubtedly a Christian Democratic party), and the integralist old guard like Fahey and Cahill were replaced by Jansenist heretics who inflicted the horrors of the Magdalene laundries.[10] The Irish church also switched from Jansenist puritanism to Left-Modernism in the wake of Vatican II. Ireland was not a failure of integralism, but instead the failure of Christian Democracy. Franco’s status as an integralist is debatable, as his own ideology was simply a mix of integral nationalism and Falangist ideology, not integralism. For Quebec, as the great Fr. Edmund Waldstein pointed out, the massive antireligious secularism and the rise of anti-Catholic progressive parties in Quebec was due to the fact that they adopted Jacques Maritain’s ideology in the wake of Vatican II.[11] To have a state be counted as an Integralist state, it has to do more than have Catholicism the religion of the state. It also must follow the Catholic faith in its laws and society.
The second response that Right-Modernists do is to present a false history of integralism then level the false charges of “reactionary,” “ultramontane,” or “antisemitic” at us integralists. A notable Right-Modernist who does this is James M. Patterson. The number of times he has purposely lied about integralists, slandered integralists with false charges of antisemitism or fascism, or falsely accused them of being somehow against or contradicting Church teachings (despite literally being the teaching of the Faith for thousands of years) could fill an entire book. But as Gabriel Sanchez points out, such attempts are futile if you only do a little research on what Integralists actually say, instead of purposeful misinterpretations that people like Timothy Trounter and Kevin Vallier say (which were debunked by both Edward Feser and Alan Fimister).[12]
The irony here is that Right-Modernists do not understand the ridiculousness of their beliefs. They shrug and say that is not “true Liberalism” when faced with the massive secularization and anti-Catholicism that was undoubtedly created by the Liberal system that they convinced formerly Catholic countries to adopt. They do not understand that their position is simply a form of radical rupture with Church Tradition. Like the Left-Modernists, they denounce Church history and past infallible papal teachings while unironically calling themselves defenders of Tradition. These Right-Modernists cause the destruction of the Social Kingship of Christ the King. They do not understand that if the Church was somehow wrong in its religious teachings on church-state relations, politics, religious freedom, and economics; who is to say the Church is right at all? If the Social Kingship of Christ and the establishment of Catholicism as the religion to guide the state is somehow just mere “historical coincidences,” what about the Church’s teaching on abortion, same-sex marriage, and birth control? Are those “mere historical coincidences” too? They fail to ponder on this. However, in the end, we integralists have been validated. There will be no mythical “great springtime,” where the Church somehow attracts millions of converts by embracing the Satanic monstrosity of classical Liberalism. Instead, as Our Lady of Fatima has pointed out, the Immaculate Heart will triumph over secularism. That means the restoration of the Social Reign of Christ the King over classical Liberalism, the absolute destruction of secularism (including anti-Catholic American secularism).
I will end this article with a quote from the great integralist thinker Cardinal Pie of Poitiers:
To say Jesus Christ is the God of individuals and of families, but not the God of peoples and of societies, is to say that He is not God. To say that Christianity is the law of individual man and is not the law of collective man, is to say that Christianity is not divine. To say the Church is the judge of private morality, but has nothing to do with public and political morality, is to say that the Church is not divine. Christianity would not be divine if it were to have existence within individuals but not with regard to societies.[13]
Photo by Andrea Cau on Unsplash
[1] Joy, John P., “The Teaching of Quanta cura is Definitive: A Reply to Robert T. Miller” at Dialogos Institute, at www.dialogos-institute.org.
[2] Schindler, David L., Heart of the World, Center of the Church: Communio Ecclesiology, Liberalism, and Liberation (United States, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1996) 73, 74.
[3] Miller, Robert T., “The Mortara Case and the Limits of State Power: First Things Should Disavow Fr. Cessario’s Defense of Pius IX in the Mortara Case” at Public Discourse (January 11, 2018).
[4] Miller, Robert T., “Why Harvard Was Right Not to Ban the Black Mass” at Public Discourse (May 22, 2014).
[5] Zmirak, John “Illiberal Catholicism” at Aleteia, (December, 31, 2013).
[6] Cardinal Pie, Selected Writings of Cardinal Pie of Poitiers, (Orlando, Florida: CTC Books,
October, 2007) 15, 16.
[7] Sanchez, Gabriel, “Gregg Contra Corporatism,” at Opus Publicum, (October 20, 2022).
[8] John Paul II, Ecclesia in America (January 22, 1999), 56.
[9] Payne, G. Stanley, Palacios, Jesús, Franco: A Personal and Political Biography, (London, United Kingdom: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2014) 432, 433.
[10] Kollmorgen, Gregor, “Jansenism, the Liturgy and Ireland” at the New Liturgical Movement (January 19, 2010).
[11] Waldstein, Fr. Edmund “All We Need Is Everything” at First Things, (June 1, 2022).
[12] Sanchez, Gabriel, “Dubium: Is Integralism Essentially Bound Up with Racism, Nationalism, and Totalitarianism?” at The Josias (January 31, 2015).
[13] Cardinal Pie, Selected Writings of Cardinal Pie of Poitiers, (Orlando, Florida: CTC Books, October, 2007) 21.
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