A Renewed Apologetics for a Church in Crisis
Fr. Alain Lorans, FSSPX
The French District’s 2010 Summer University focused on the Church, its nature, divine constitution, notes and properties. It also aimed at equipping Catholics to rebut the accusations leveled against the Church over some historical episodes: its treatment of women, the Crusades, the Inquisition, the Galileo Affair, and the alleged silence of Pope Pius XII. Fr. Alain Lorans delivered the final talk, which set the stage for the 2011 summer session.
The question we shall address is the following: Doesn’t the current crisis cast doubt on or even destroy apologetics, the defense of the Church, as it is traditionally studied? More precisely, doesn’t the current crisis ruin the apologetical argument from the four marks of the Church? for the facts are there, and as we well know: contra factum non fit argumentum–there is no arguing against the facts. We may well say that the Church is one, holy, catholic, and apostolic, but what do we see today? Let us take a look at some of these facts.
Unity. We may well wonder whether the Church’s unity exists today at the liturgical level. Every priest has more or less his Mass, his liturgy, for a Mass of Paul VI does not exist; rather, we have the Mass of Paul VI reviewed and corrected in accordance with each celebrant’s taste: it’s “the Mass of Paul VI according to so and so.” Everyone displays his inventiveness and creativity… Where is the unity in that? This is a fact of life that everyone who practices in the Conciliar Church can observe: they go from church to church and see that it is not quite the same Mass, depending on whether the rubrics are faithfully observed or freely revised. We cannot fail to see this lack of unity; not to look at the facts as they are would amount to culpable, willful blindness.
Holiness. Of course, it is necessary to distinguish between the Church, which is holy, and members of the Church, who are not always so. This distinction notwithstanding, there is still the crying fact that after the Council tens of thousands of priests abandoned the priesthood and took up with a woman. One may legitimately ask the question: What has become of the observance of chastity; where is fidelity to the code to which they had freely pledged themselves?
Apostolicity. One could ask similar questions concerning the Church’s apostolic character. At the level of jurisdiction, these conciliar priests and bishops can always assert: “We are the official Church, we are officially attached to our dioceses, we are incardinated, therefore we have authority.” Surely. But what connection is there between Cardinal Pie [1815-1880] and his current successor on the see of Poitiers? How can the latter lay claim to this filiation? Isn’t he rather inclined, on the contrary, to disavow such a paternity because it bothers him? In reality, all the new bishops scarcely desire to hear about their pre-conciliar predecessors.
Fr. Calmel, a Son of the Church in Trying Times
These are the questions we shall examine during our sixth Summer University. But I would like to give you right now, if not some elements of a reply, at least some avenues of reflection. Firstly, the questions we are asking today were formulated before us by the priests who were at the forefront of the battle for Tradition. I am thinking in particular of Fr. Calmel in his Short Apologia for the Church of All Time [Brève apologie pour l’Église de toujours]. It is a collection of articles he wrote for the review Itinéraires during the 1970s. Their prophetic character is striking; one wonders how he could have foreseen everything at the very beginning of the crisis in the Church. We in 2010 need not make projections for the future–we are experiencing the full effects of this crisis hic et nunc, but he foresaw them 40 years ago. He wrote what was going to happen, which unfortunately did happen. To show you how current–and how keen–his analyses are, here is a passage from an article entitled “Two Inseparable Aspects of the Mystery of the Church”:
Fr. Calmel continues: “Insofar as we shall prove to be faithful watchers, impervious to worldly fear and discouragement, we shall come to know that the holy Catholic Church is a mystery of supernatural strength and divine peace.” We find here recognition of both the supernatural strength and of the divine peace of the Church, and the affirmation that this Church has been widely betrayed, is in agony, a state of passion. And we must not sleep as did the apostles who accompanied Jesus to the garden of olives, but keep watch.
In the same work, Fr. Calmel makes an even more precise observation. He writes:
The counterfeit Church that has cropped up since the strange Second Vatican Council perceptibly departs year after year from the Church founded by Jesus Christ. The counterfeit post-conciliar Church has been breaking away–that is to say, opposing–more and more from the holy Church that has been saving souls for twenty centuries (and also enlightening and sustaining the City). The pseudo-Church under construction is separating itself more and more from the true Church, the one Church of Christ, by the strangest innovations in its hierarchical constitution as well as in its teaching and morals. (p. 48)
Some might ask whether he does not go too far. That would be to forget that a Roman prelate writing in 1976 to Archbishop Lefebvre dared to speak of “the Conciliar Church.” It was Archbishop Giovanni Benelli, substitute at the Secretariat of State. When we were speaking about the notes of unity, sanctity, and apostolicity, we were not envisaging the Conciliar Church, but the Catholic Church. Can a Conciliar Church exist? Archbishop Benelli did not hesitate to say it and even to write it.
These quotations from Fr. Calmel show us that the investigation we shall undertake during the next Summer University originates at the beginning of the crisis gripping the Church. In the appendixes of his Brève apologie pour l’Église de toujours we find an article entitled “A Son of the Church in Trying Times” from January 1975; then “Of the Church and the Pope,” May 1973; also “The Fog of Revelationism and the Light of Faith,” March 1974… Once again, we are not making anything up. We need only appropriate these doctrinal studies bequeathed to us by our elders in the fight for the Faith–no more and no less.
Here is a final passage, taken from the article “The Church’s Regime and Sanctification”:
Rousseauesque democracy is a political regime conceived and applied in such a way that number overrules right, and those who are actually in charge, those who in fact exercise authority, ordinarily have a way to shirk their duty or dodge responsibility or escape observation….
Archbishop Lefebvre’s Comparison of Christ’s Passion to the Passion of the Church Today
After this lucid assessment of the state of the Church, it is appropriate to see if our predecessors in the good fight, in particular the chief among them, Archbishop Lefebvre, left us some teaching to guide our steps through the general confusion in which we find ourselves. There is in fact a sermon Archbishop Lefebvre gave on June 29, 1982, at the ordinations at Ecône: in it he establishes a comparison between the Passion of Christ and that of the Church, and points out two temptations to which we must not succumb. In it he affirms what position we ought to hold. The Founder of the Society of St. Pius X recalls that confronted with the scandal of the Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, some said, We’ve lost, it’s over. Others believed that it was not possible, that it was only a matter of appearances, that it wasn’t real. But it was real, and yet nothing was lost. Archbishop Lefebvre explains to us what happened during the Passion of Christ, which can be applied to the present situation of the Church:
Briefly, I would like to try to explain what it seems to me our course of action should be in the face of these sad developments taking place in the Church. It seems to me that we can compare this agony the Church is suffering today to the Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ. You see how astonished the Apostles themselves were when Our Lord was taken and bound—after the kiss of Judas. He is taken away. He is clothed in a scarlet robe, mocked, beaten, weighed down with the Cross. And the Apostles run away; they are scandalized. It is not possible that He—whom Peter proclaimed: “Thou art the Christ, the Son of God”–can be reduced to this plight, this humiliation, this destruction. It cannot be. They run away.
Only the Virgin Mary, with St. John and some women remain with Our Lord and keep the faith. They will not abandon Him. They know that Our Lord is truly God, but they also know that He is man. It is precisely this union of the divinity with the humanity of Our Lord that poses extraordinary difficulties. Our Lord in fact did not want to be merely man; He wanted to be a man like us, with all the results of sin–yet without sin, apart from sin; but He wanted to accept all the consequences: sadness, fatigue, suffering, thirst, hunger, death. Yes, right up to His death, Our Lord embodied this extraordinary thing that so scandalized the Apostles, as it indeed scandalized many others who turned their backs on Our Lord and did not believe in the divinity of Our Lord.
Throughout the history of the Church, one comes across these people who are so surprised at the weakness of Our Lord that they cannot believe He is God. This was the case with Arius. Arius said no, it won’t do, that man cannot be God, because He said He was less than His Father, that His Father was greater than He. He is therefore less than His Father. He is therefore not God. And then Our Lord said that astonishing thing, “My soul is sorrowful, even unto death.” How could He, with the Beatific Vision, seeing God in His human soul, and thus far more glorious than weak, far more eternal than temporal–His soul already in eternity and blessed–yet here He is saying, “My soul is sorrowful, even unto death,” and goes on to utter those astonishing words we could never imagine on the lips of Our Lord, “My God, my God, why hast Thou abandoned Me?” Hence the scandal, alas, which spreads among weak souls. Arius takes practically the entire Church with him in saying this Man is not God.
Others, on the other hand, go the other way and say that perhaps everything Our Lord endured, spilling blood, the wounds, the Cross, all that was imaginary. They were external phenomena but not real. Rather like the archangel Raphael, when he went with Tobias and later revealed to him, “You thought I was eating when I had dinner with you, but I am nourished with a spiritual nourishment.” The archangel Raphael did not have a body like that of Our Lord Jesus Christ. He was not born of an earthly mother, as Our Lord was born of the Virgin Mary. Was Our Lord an illusion like that and only appeared to eat, but did not really eat, or appear to suffer but did not really suffer? There were those who denied the human nature of Our Lord Jesus Christ: the Monophysites, the Monothelites, who denied the human nature and the human will of Our Lord Jesus Christ. Everything about Him was God (they claimed), and everything that seemed to happen was only an illusion.
So you see what happens to those who are scandalized by reality and truth.
Then Archbishop Lefebvre switches from the Passion of Jesus Christ to that of His Mystical Body, the Church.
Let me make a comparison with the Church of today. We thought the Church was truly divine, that she could never deceive herself or deceive us.
Well, it is true, the Church is divine; she cannot lose the truth. The Church will always be the guardian of truth. But she is also human. The Church is human and indeed more human than Our Lord Jesus Christ was. Our Lord could not sin. He is the Holy One, the Just One par excellence.
The Church, if she is divine and truly divine, transmits to us all the things of God–especially the Holy Eucharist–eternal things which can never change and which will be the glory of our souls in heaven. Yes, the Church is divine, but she is human too. She is made up of men who may be sinners, indeed, who are sinners, and yet who share somehow in the divinity of the Church, to a certain extent–like the Pope, for example, by his infallibility; by the charism of infallibility he shares in the divinity of the Church and yet remains human. They all remain sinners. Except in those instances where the Pope makes use of his charism of infallibility, he can err, he can sin.
Why be scandalized and say, like some people following the example of Arius, that he is not pope? He is not Pope, as Arius said Christ was not God, it cannot be, Our Lord cannot be God. We ourselves may be tempted to say that it cannot be, he cannot be Pope and do what he is doing.
On the other hand, others would divinize the Church to the point that everything in it becomes perfect. So everything in the Church being perfect, we could say there is no question of our doing anything whatever to oppose anything coming out of Rome; we must accept everything coming out of Rome. Those who talk this way are like those who say that Our Lord was God to such an extent that He could not suffer, that He gave only the illusion of suffering, but in reality did not suffer; in reality it was not His blood that flowed. Those around Him had only illusions in their eyes–not reality. There are some of these today who go on saying there can be nothing human, nothing imperfect in the Church. They too are mistaken. They do not see the reality of things. How far can imperfection in the Church go, how high can sin go, if I may say it, in the Church, sin in the intellect, sin in the soul, sin in the heart and in the will? The facts tell us.1
I leave it to you to read the rest of this very important sermon, which will no doubt inform our reflections next year on “The Church in Crisis.” Now I would like to give you the broad outlines of a form of proactive apologetics in the manner of Chesterton, whose spirit enlightened our 2010 summer university; an offensive, as opposed to defensive, apologetics on the question that has occupied us from the start: has the Church’s traditional apologetics been called in question by the crisis?
For a Chestertonian Apologetics
We have seen that the Church’s unity has been seriously battered, and that its universality has been challenged. But we also meet with an unavoidable objection that is leveled directly against us, which amounts to saying, “You have a lot of nerve to be talking about divisions when you yourselves are responsible for them by your schismatic mentality and your parallel church.” You get this from your conciliar relatives and friends. They add: “You talk about obedience to Tradition, but you people disobey the Pope! Clean your own house! Before looking at the mote in your neighbor’s eye, get rid of the beam in yours!”
These kinds of accusations call for a proactive apologetics. A defensive apologetics is when our traditionalist assumes a low profile, shoulders hunched and head tucked, who murmurs an apology for being Catholic and attached to Tradition. A jovial, proactive apologetics is what Chesterton gives us, and what, in a way, Bishop Fellay deploys when he answers the Roman authorities:
You reproach us for being sowers of division and of responsibility for the crisis in the Church. But we are not the cause; rather, we are just the thermometer that discloses the crisis. In your feverish state you may break the thermometer, but that is not a solution. That is no way to resolve the problem. Look at the thermometer and see how high the fever has risen, but do not hold us responsible.
Such are the remarks of the Superior General of the Society of St. Pius X, if not literally, at least in spirit…
Using this kind of answer with your progressive cousins, you will feel a bit better. You will stand a little taller. Having thus become less fearful, you may wonder what you can do next to take it to the next level. Here is an outline of what you might say.
Firstly, do not hesitate to grant momentarily the objections the conciliarists may make. They see us a bit like Montesquieu in his Persian Letters. They wonder with surprise how one can be a Persian, or, in our day, a traditionalist. Because in their eyes, we are straight out of Jurassic Park; we’re dinosaurs. Or else we are fixated and obsessed about the liturgy; we have a neurotic need to cling to the minutiae of ritual; we are not intellectually equipped to accept progress; we are not conceptually competent to meet modernity, etc., etc.
Let’s take these objections as they come, and reassure our interlocutor that we are not against them, at least not right away, as in judo, where the fighter adapts to his antagonist’s movements only to turn them to his advantage… For, as you know, all traditional priests are “black belts”!
Then answer your interlocutor with the following: I get the impression that you need to bolster yourself with a caricature of us, which allows you to keep your positions. But the question is to know whether this picture is genuine or not. Would you be willing to examine why you need these reassuring caricatures? Are you really so sure of yourself, and why? You wonder how someone can be a traditionalist in 2010. And I ask you how you can be a progressive today. When I look at the situation, and not at caricatures, I see that what characterizes conciliar progressives is dispersion, disintegration–anything but unity. There is division in the Church without any traditionalist involvement whatsoever. There are as many modern Masses as there are priests, and perhaps as many creeds as parishes. And this is not without connection to the state of contemporary society in which we find a growing absence of social unity since there is no longer any common good that transcends individual selfishness. It is everyone for himself. The individual-king is a perfect, and solitary, totality, as conceived by Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
At this stage, it is important to help the progressive realize what the state of the modern world to which the Church should continually adapt itself is. Tell him frankly that modernity is anemic. This fact is easily verified in the Church: in France, for example, the clergy will comprise just 6,000 or 7,000 priests, where there used to be 36,000 parishes. There are still about 18,000 diocesan priests, but their average age is 70 to 75 years old. Vocations have also dried up. Every year, from either death or retirement, the church loses about 600 priests, and they are hardly being replaced by the scant 100 new priests per year. The attrition is thus about 500 priests a year. These are the facts. Numbers are not traditionalist, still less “Lefebvrist.” Faced with statistics like these, traditionalists should stand up and be done with the defensive apologetics sketched above, because Tradition is the youth of the Church. And the progressives know it. That is why they are so attached to their caricatures and slogans against us. They have a genuine need to reassure themselves. But our apologetics is there to prevent them from anesthetizing themselves.
A Buoy for the Castaways
The third stage of our Chestertonian apologetic is to ask the question that logically comes at this point: how can you still be a progressive, still aboard the good ship modernity that is sinking. At bottom what characterizes the modern mentality is autonomy, freedom, the refusal of anything transcendent. It is man who takes the place of God, but it has to be obvious today that modernity is in a state of full-blown decadence. People nowadays talk about late modernity and post-modernity the way they have about the conciliar Church, then the post-conciliar Church, and now para-conciliar–and why not meta-conciliar!
To persist in clinging to this modern world while it is collapsing from exhaustion is literally suicidal. Several books written by non-Catholics observe this collapse without daring to assume a genuinely detached critical view of the observed phenomena. I could mention an author I have spoken about previously, the sociologist Marcel Gauchet, hardly a traditionalist, who describes the “exit of the religious” and the “disenchantment with the world,” marked by the disaggregation of society–a dissociety– as it was termed by [the Belgian Catholic Thomistic philosopher] Marcel De Corte. They may resort to euphemisms like “incivility” or “wild children,” but daily life is marred by real crimes committed by real hoodlums. A psychiatrist like Alain Ehrenberg, also someone who cannot be accused of Catholic traditionalism, observes a “self-weariness,” an incapacity for assuming the burden of one’s own existence, the human condition, the status of a creature before its Creator. The modernity to which Vatican II wanted to rally the Church cuts man off from all transcendence, from God and from the reality He created. Modern man has the illusion of living autonomously, without dependence on any superior, exterior authority, but this illusion is fatal. And Rousseau’s perfect individualist is a chimera. Marcel De Corte spoke of “the intellect in danger of death”–it is no longer a danger, it’s a reality.
From this standpoint, apologetics is exciting. Cracking the books and taking notes is not tedious. We find ourselves today in a critical situation that imposes on us a duty to go to the aid of people in danger. Apologetics today needs enthusiasts, and not anesthetists. Minds and wills have to be awakened. Practically, to do this will require demonstrating that its attachment to absolute freedom, which is the characteristic of modernity, is what is destroying it. That is the heart of the problem. I often give the example of the poet’s “drunken ship” that has no anchorage in reality. This state of affairs has a name, and it’s called shipwreck. The post-moderns and the post-conciliarists are in that situation. You can throw them a life-buoy.
In the next step, the next-to-the last, you will tell why you are traditionalist in 2010: precisely because you are attached to the natural order and to the supernatural order; because you are linked to the One who created the natural and supernatural orders. Then you’ll see that the way your interlocutor looks at you has changed. Where are the backward, the maladjusted, the sick, now? At the beginning of your conversation with this conciliar progressive, it was you, obviously, and you provisionally accepted this caricature he needed to bolster his fragile positions. But now it’s different. He begins to notice that it is perhaps he who is in an untenable position, because he sees that health, equilibrium, and order are on the side of Tradition. At this point he can begin to envisage Tradition, not as a vexation or refuge in the past, but as a solution, a remedy. It is no longer a question of breaking the thermometer, but of finding the medicine. Such an intellectual conversion, such a change of mind, is what you must try to obtain.
At the conclusion of this friendly joust, the time comes to say to our interlocutor: You were asking at the beginning of our conversation how I could be a traditionalist. Now I can give you a plain answer: by being a dissident; that is to say, by not bleating with the majority of the herd [of Panurge’s sheep]. I don’t mean the dissidence of “resident expatriots”–the sort of people who try to establish an enclave where they can enjoy the strange satisfaction of being the last of the Mohicans! No, I mean a vertical dissidence in the midst of a world immersed in itself. This kind of dissidence in which the mind adheres to God, the author of the natural and supernatural orders, results in our being in the world but not of the world. This is how one can be the “leaven in the dough.” Of course, as you may surmise, this profession of faith must be accompanied by prayer and self-denial. And it often involves trampling human respect not only in words, but in deeds.
Let’s be lucid: let us see things as they are today, but let us also see what we can contribute. You have a treasure at your disposal. The Tradition you’ve inherited is a treasure. It is a remedy adapted to the current situation; it is the solution to the crisis affecting us. An inheritance is not meant to be simply received, but to be handed on. This is the reason for this summer session. We must, in the footsteps of Chesterton, do apologetics with a lot of friendliness, common sense, and a touch of humor. Correction goes over much better with a smile (castigare ridendo mores). There is no place for mockery or mordant irony. No, we laugh to lighten things a bit and to help those who do not yet have the faith to see that there is a solution, that there is a glimmer of hope, that they are not doomed to the shadow of darkness. They can hope if they accept the light.
The Compass and the Magnet, or The Council and the Modern World
To finish up, I would like to give you an example from an editorial published in DICI a few months ago entitled “The Compass and the Magnet.” It was about the Council. It starts with a fact, because you must always start with a fact. The fact is that at the end of August several clerics, former students of the Pope from when he was a professor in Germany, got together at Castel Gandolfo to pore over the hermeneutic of Vatican II; in other words, to discuss the correct way of interpreting the documents of that Council. It also happens that the Council was introduced by Pope John XXIII as a compass for the Church, and Benedict XVI adopted this metaphor by saying that Vatican II would be the compass of his pontificate. It is immediately clear what they both wanted to indicate by using this word. A compass is what shows direction, points to the north. If you lose the north, you become disoriented.
Another fact: last March, the Lenten conferences at Notre Dame in Paris also described Vatican II as a compass for our times. The concern of the Church’s authorities nowadays to defend the Council at all costs is notable. They seem to be on the defensive, which can only be an encouragement to us to go on the offensive…
So let’s take this assertion as it comes: the Council is a compass. Then let’s ask a naïve question: Can one interpret the direction a compass points to? If it points north, as every good compass does, what commentary is needed? What is a hermeneutic of a compass? That is the question. A compass furnishes precise information that should silence all discussion: here is the north, and all the rest is superfluous.
In our naivety, let’s push it a little further: Why, for almost 50 years, has the Second Vatican Council been the object of so many divergent or even contradictory readings and re-readings? They talk about discontinuity and rupture, about renewal in continuity and continuity in change… Opinions clash and disoriented minds seem to be all over the map!
Our object here is to get our interlocutor off-balance, as I mentioned earlier. Our interlocutor is camped in an unstable equilibrium based on false certitudes, and the goal is to lead him to genuine certitudes grounded in reality. Let’s understand well that Tradition is not a return to the past, but a return to reality–whence this preliminary act of putting our interlocutor off-balance, as Socrates would do with the Sophists of his time. Getting back to my ingenuous query, I’ll outline a response: If opinions clash, and if minds are disoriented, it is because the needle of the compass is no longer pointing north, which means that it is undergoing an extraneous attraction. A magnet can make it deviate or even cause it to behave crazily. If need be, you might even suggest a practical demonstration: bring a compass and a magnet and put them under your progressive interlocutor’s nose: Here you have the Council-compass. It should point north, you say, but you still want to interpret the direction it shows. If you want to work out a hermeneutic, it is because it does not point north with certainty; you recognize that you are a bit disoriented. In such a case, you have to look for the extraneous influence, the magnet, that is making the needle of this compass deviate.
Might we not suggest the following explication? While intending to be open to the spirit of the modern world, the Second Vatican Council subjected itself to the force of an attraction extraneous to the Church. In order to find north again, which we all desire, one would have to be freed from the influence of that magnet–which is to say, modernity, post-modernity, para-modernity or even meta-modernity… And if we accept that, there will no longer be any need of a hermeneutic, and we shall understand St. Paul, who reminds us with biblical simplicity: “Do not be conformed to this world” (Rom. 12:2).
By means of this little example, I wanted to show you that every convinced Catholic can engage in an apologetics that is within everyone’s reach. It is simply a matter of trying to adapt the argumentation studied during our summer session to particular members of your social circle. Your argumentation should be inspired by charity, by the love of souls. It is understood that you are going to destabilize your interlocutor, that for a moment you are going to make him anxious or uneasy, but solely to be able to give him the certitude he no longer has, the landmarks he is currently lacking.
1 English version: “The 1982 Ordination Sermon,” in Apologia pro Marcel Lefebvre: Part III, 1979-1982 (Angelus Press, 1988), pp. 411-14.
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