The Progressives Have Lost and They Know It

Napoleon’s Retreat from Russia by Adolf Northen, 1854

By Caminante Wanderer*

One of the most significant historical events of the past century was the collapse of Communism. In 1991 the Soviet Union ceased to exist. Yet the ideology on which Soviet Communism rested had already collapsed in the 1970s under Brezhnev and had definitively sealed that decline under Andropov from 1982 onward. In those years no one still believed in the Soviet paradise—not even the apparatchiks. Nevertheless the machinery continued to run until 1991, directed by a committee of highly aged functionaries who resisted the inevitability of reality. Between the death of legitimacy and the death of the system lay twenty years. That is a historical regularity: systems survive their own legitimacy by roughly fifteen to twenty years. They continue to move like the light of a star that has long since gone out.

Exactly the same thing is happening today with progressivism inside the Church—and, in my view, in the West as a whole. It was an experiment that lasted a shorter time than the Soviet Union, yet it has already failed. We now find ourselves in a kind of Brezhnev phase, waiting for the neo-modernist old men, products of the most unedifying manifestations of the spirit of the Council, to leave the stage. The baby boomers will die in the not-too-distant future, and the light of that extinguished star, the Second Vatican Council, will cease to shine. It will go out and disappear from the horizon of the Church. Of course residues will remain, and their removal will be laborious, yet the light will inevitably be extinguished.

What I am saying here is not a prophecy. “I am no prophet, nor a prophet’s son” (Amos 7:14). I am merely an observer of reality. And the signs of the decline of this system appear to me unmistakable. I wish to name two of them that are easy to recognize.

The first concerns the priesthood. The Catholic Church cannot do without priests. If they disappear or are finally transformed into something else, the Catholic Church itself ceases to exist. Precisely into this danger many bishops have led the Church—and continue to lead it—through the formation they impart in their depleted seminaries. The solution to this tragedy does not consist in building parallel structures. The solution is called hope and patience—two fundamental virtues in times of crisis.

The seminaries are emptying, and the priests are aging in nursing homes because they themselves, as children of this system, refused to be priests. By that I mean that they refused to exercise their munera, their priestly offices. They refused to sanctify, to teach, and to govern. Instead they wanted to be community animators and agents of social change—encouraged in this by the highest ecclesiastical authorities. They despised the dignified celebration of the sacraments and turned them into a cheap and vulgar spectacles. They stopped proclaiming Catholic doctrine and taught sociology instead. They devoted themselves to a dialogue-oriented synodality. They refused to be what they were. Now they are dying—for nature is relentless—and with them their caste dies as well.

What normal young man, whose intellect and whose drives are in balance, would want to give up his life and all the pleasures the world offers in abundance in order to become an insignificant clown—like those boomer priests we encounter daily when they make fools of themselves on social networks? Their days are numbered. The future belongs to the priests who grew up in the new millennium. They have a different view of things and will gradually change the situation—if only for reasons of institutional survival.

Only a few days ago Archbishop Cordileone said: “Young people love tradition, and that is a movement that can no longer be stopped.” This year only 26 priests were ordained in the entire Federal Republic of Germany. The Priestly Fraternity of St. Peter alone ordained just as many priests in the same year; if one adds the other traditional institutes, the number is significantly higher. And it becomes still substantially higher if one includes those who can be described as “classical.”

Precisely for that reason the outbursts of Cardinal Arthur Roche last week are nothing other than the swan song of a dying system. As the journalist Damian Thompson wrote: “I don’t want to be rude, but he is an old, poisonous toad, bitter that his influence had already begun to wane before the death of Francis.” Reality speaks an all-too-clear language, and they know that reality. Yet like Brezhnev and Andropov they will continue to keep the system artificially alive until death finally carries them off.

We have said that systems survive their legitimacy by fifteen to twenty years. Here I recognize the second sign: the mitred boomers know that they are losing their legitimacy at a rapid pace. That is why they act as they do—at least in Argentina.

A few days ago we pointed out that the bishops are worried. The reason for their worry is the reality that is becoming ever clearer before their eyes. That the Archbishop of Buenos Aires instructed his education department to investigate which priest had celebrated a Mass in Latin at a Catholic school in the city is an unmistakable sign of desperation. It is a measure typical of the Soviet regime when it realized that its narrative was beginning to crack and therefore persecuted Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Andrei Sinyavsky, or the musicians Mstislav Rostropovich and Galina Vishnevskaya—solely because they had given Solzhenitsyn refuge. (The religious sisters who made the Mass possible will no doubt be punished by Archbishop García Cuerva just as the priest who celebrated it will be.)

The regime had lost its inner cohesion. Its narrative was exhausted, its framework was collapsing. Therefore all that remained to it was the violence of decrees and persecutions in order to maintain itself. Exactly that is what the bishops are doing today toward priests and groups of the faithful who resist their modernist narrative: they persecute them with decrees and banishments.

A system that is sure of its legitimacy does not need to issue decrees against priests because they celebrate the Mass in Latin, or against laypeople because they write a blog. These are not signs of strength. They are the reflexes of a body that knows it has lost its legitimacy and that death awaits it.

How else is one to explain that the president of the Argentine Bishops’ Conference—synodal among the synodals—has locked the comments on his X account? Or that the press office of the same institution deletes every critical comment on its Instagram account? Quite simply because they are dominated by the fear that the faithful might realize that they—like the king in Andersen’s fairy tale—are naked.

It is only a matter of patience. It will take time, yet nature is relentless. I myself will probably not live to see the collapse of the progressive system. I shall have to content myself with having fought against it all my life—provided God grants me the grace to be able to do so to the end. But the generation of today’s children will experience it.

Not so very long ago I held a far more apocalyptic view. That was due both to my age and to the authors who formed me—all of them witnesses to the decline of the West. Today I am no longer so certain that we are not free rather standing on the threshold of a new flowering. And in this I do not look forward, as a prophet would—which I am not—but backward.

When after the victory of the Cross in the first centuries that world collapsed under the barbarian invasions and the emerging Europe lay in ruins, two unexpected events changed everything. From the “far West,” as Toynbee called it, missionaries streamed from the small and forgotten island of Ireland onto the continent and rekindled the embers of Christianity—the peregrinatio pro Christo. A little later Charlemagne succeeded in ordering the political and administrative chaos left behind by the invaders.

When the sleepy and sensual Catholicism of the sixteenth century was torn apart by the Reformation, the Council of Trent came onto the scene, which—with all its lights and shadows, like everything human—breathed new life into the Church. And after the devastations of the French Revolution, after its ideas had spread across all of Europe under Napoleon, an unexpected missionary awakening arose. Numerous new religious communities were founded and revived what the revolutionaries had long considered dead.

Why, then, should we assume that it will be different in our time?

*Caminante Wanderer is an Argentine philosopher and blogger.

Translation: Giuseppe Nardi

Image: Wikicommons

Trans: Tancred vekron99@hotmail.com

AMDG