The Twist of the Modern Mind
by Pauly Fongemie
March 8, 2015

In an earlier column of some years past I wrote:

In "The Screwtape Letters" by C.S. Lewis, Screwtape, one of the higher up Devils, writes to his nephew, Wormwood, whom he is instructing in the best methods of ensuring the damnation of an earthly man, known only as "the Patient." This is an excerpt:

The trouble about argument is that it moves the whole struggle onto the Enemy's own ground. He can argue too; whereas in really practical propaganda of the kind I am suggesting He has been shown for centuries to be greatly the inferior of Our Father Below. By the very act of arguing, you awake the patient's reason; and once it is awake, who can foresee the result? Even if a particular train of thought can be twisted so as to end in our favour, you will find that you have been strengthening in your patient the fatal habit of attending to universal issues and withdrawing his attention from the stream of immediate sense experiences. Your business is to fix his attention on the stream. Teach him to call it "real life" and don't let him ask what he means by "real".

Precisely.

Don't let him ask any question that might illicit the hidden meaning behind infernal lies---or the "fatal habit of attending to universal issues".

Wormwood, which is a vile, poisonous plant that refers to the Book of Revelation, chapter 8, verses 10-11, wherein we are told that a third of the waters became bitter and before this a great star called Wormwood fell from heaven into a third of the waters. A third of waters or stars in Scripture end times is held to be a reference to the apostasy of a third of the clergy.

Wormwood strikes again in our local parish. The retired cleric, is a modernist without any doubt and known for his search-and-destroy missions to root out any holdouts on Tradition, by damning them with ridicule. This time his tactic was the false comparison between the proverbial apples and oranges. The pretext was the Gospel account of Christ's cleansing of the Temple.

Father "W" asserted that because Christ drastically changed some of the Jewish "traditions" that this kind of change now is legitimate.

Don't let him ask any question that might illicit the hidden meaning behind infernal lies---or the "fatal habit of attending to universal issues".

Like Screwtape's instruction to his nephew demon, Wormwood, Father is counting on the man in the pew to be unable to attend to universal issues, such as that which simple logic might elicit.

In other words, he is banking on us not realizing that the old law and the old covenant ceased with the coming of Christ, therefore the changes that He made were necessary and binding. Since the new law and the covenant are here to stay as there is no third law or covenant to be forthcoming, any changes in the Church's Traditions must by definition be organic and always understood to signify in the same context and meaning as before - that is, no rupture as Father Louis Bouyer, a modern theologian indicated was what the New Mass of Pope Paul VI was, a rupture, which is forbidden.

The change by Christ is not equivalent to the disastrous, ill-advised, rash changes stemming for Vatican II experts.

Father "W" went on to castigate a la Francis, Bishop of Rome, those who hold with Tradition, including skewering those who express disagreement with Francis. He apparently thinks we are so ignorant that we do not know that many a Saint disagreed strongly with Pontiffs of their day, not on doctrine, but on policy and unfortunate speeches, etc. One was Saint Bruno and another the great Saint Athanasius. Their Pontiffs are still not held to be Saints, while these Saints surely are!

It is unfortunate that Father "W" does not make the necessary distinctions between disagreeing with policy and speeches and the perennial doctrine of the Church and those traditional practices that uphold them in their entirety without blemish, embarrassment, or nuance. But, then, if he did his arguments for modernist ideas would fall flat into the hellish pit where they deservedly belong.

The trouble about argument is that it moves the whole struggle onto the Enemy's own ground. He can argue too; whereas in really practical propaganda of the kind I am suggesting He has been shown for centuries to be greatly the inferior of Our Father Below. By the very act of arguing, you awake the patient's reason; and once it is awake, who can foresee the result? Even if a particular train of thought can be twisted so as to end in our favour, you will find that you have been strengthening in your patient the fatal habit of attending to universal issues and withdrawing his attention from the stream of immediate sense experiences. Your business is to fix his attention on the stream. Teach him to call it "real life" and don't let him ask what he means by "real".

By all means, Father is afraid that we might get really real about reality and the ineluctable first things that can never ever change without incurring the wrath of God!

He requires derision from the pulpit to discourage any budding Traditionalist. We old blooms, are long past the prime time when such mutterings have any effect except to spur us on in defense of Holy Mother Church and her Sacred Tradition ...




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