Revolution in the Church: It's Nothing New!

The revolution against the Church began in the Garden of Eden. Of course, the Church existed only in the mind of God then. But Satan's strategy to seduce man was already well underway under the banner of "progress". 

Yes, Satan is a progressive, tickling man's desire for novelty and change with his diabolical temptations. When you hear that term "progressive", look for Satan hiding behind his human helpers. They're really not hard to identify and they are basically the same over the millennia. Only the fashions change.

I'm slowly reading Pio Nono by E.E.Y. Hales published in 1954. The blurb on the cover calls it, "A Masterful Study of Pius IX and his role in Nineteenth-Century European Politics and Religion." It also illustrates well the politics of hell against the Church, the same strategies and plots we see today. As they say, "The more things change, the more they stay the same."

Pius IX began his papacy as a liberal progressive. But he also loved the Church and the faith and, as the movement of liberalism advanced, he gradually shed his naïveté and idealism about a Church of the people. He ended up having to flee Rome after the assassination of his prime minister during the wars of Italian nationalism and unification. The papal states which encompassed most of Italy disappeared as progressives took over the government and named Rome as the capitol. Imperial Rome has such an ambiance.

One of the primary movers and shakers opposing the pope was Giuseppe Mazinni who would have fit nicely with all the champions of synodality. He wanted a church of the people. As a boy Mazinni developed the idea of the "inevitability of human progress.":

Humanity was the interpreter of God's Law, and God's Law was Progress....He had been nursing Italy for this supreme role of Prophet-People.

Reading Hales chapter on The Revolution was a fascinating deja vu experience. Today's revolution is mirrored in the past. In a letter to Fr. Félicité Robert de La Mennais, Mazinni wrote:

The condemnation of the Papacy is decreed, not by me, but by God; by God who now calls upon the People to arise and found a new unity, embracing the two spheres of temporal and spiritual power...In our epoch humanity will forsake the Pope, and have recourse to a General Council of the Church -- that is to say, of all believers -- a council which will be alike Council of the Church and Constituent Assembly. 

Giuseppe Mazinni

Lammenais is considered a forerunner of liberal Catholicism and modernism. I think we can call both him and Mazinni early architects of the Synodal process. Replace the words Constituent Assembly with Synodal Assembly and you get the picture.

Hales goes on:

Constituent Assembly. That was what a Constituent Assembly meant to Mazzini -- no mere constitution-mongering body, but a General Council, capable of giving birth to a new faith, a Declaration, not this time only of the Rights of Man, as in 1780, but of the Duties of Man as well. How, he asked, could a Constituent Assembly, held at Rome, mean less than this?

Mazinni had tried to interest Lamennais in calling an "Oecomenical [sic] Council of Precursors of the New Religion". Then in 1846, they tried together to establish a European Democratic Committee, which was intended to give moral and political guidance to revolutionary movements throughout Europe.

Does this all not sound familiar? It's deja vu all over again -- that man may be like unto God. The serpent's voice echoes down through the ages. We hear it today in the same call to turn the Church into a democratic assembly: women priests, gay marriage, contraception and abortion, transgenderism, etc. The goals of liberal 21st century Catholics echo the 19th century revolutionaries who would probably be shocked at the logical "progress" of their ideology and the extent of its insanity.

The Constituent Synodal Assembly "giving birth to a new faith"?

There is some comfort in recognizing the reality that Chrisitians have always had to face these problems. Faithful Catholics survived the revolutions of the 19th and 20th centuries. Our challenge is always to keep the faith despite the constant plots of Satan and his minions. That's why the return to tradition is so important. The apostles, the fathers of the Church, the saints and martyrs, they all tread in the muddy waters of a sinful world. What was their life preserver? The faith: Scripture and Holy Tradition. We can do it too by the grace of God, always clinging to the authentic dogma and the unchangeable revelation of Christ.

Never, never, never give up. Pray and sacrifice, cling to Christ and the Blessed Mother. Frequent the Sacraments. Be always ready to hear those words, "Well done, good and faithful servant. Enter thou into the joy of thy Lord."