TRIBUNE. The Church of the Saints and that of the "shitty saints": the neoconservatives and decadence

The Christendom was a period of maximum flourishing in which the European continent, thanks to the Church, reached the zenith of civilization. Christendom was, according to Leo XIII, the time when “the Gospel governed the States”. 

In this sense, then, Christendom does not necessarily belong exclusively to the past, but can arise again. That is why Dom Gérard Calvet, founder of the Benedictine abbey of Le Barroux, spoke of “the Christendom of tomorrow”. 

Christendom is the Christian civilization in which there is no separation between Church and State. There is distinction, because each attends to its own affairs: the Church to the supernatural and the State to the affairs of the material world; according to Christian criteria, of course. This is what Pius XI spoke of in his encyclical Quas Primas, published in 1925, which teaches that Christ has the right to reign in society and that the laws of society must submit to Him, because both divine and natural laws come from God. Through this encyclical the Pope instituted the feast of Christ the King. 

In that same year of 1925, a young José María Escrivá was ordained a priest. And only three years later, in 1928, this young priest (born in 1902) founded Opus Dei. For more than ten years, according to his own words, he had been pondering the way in which the world had to be converted. He thought that Opus Dei should be like leaven in the dough, so that everyone could attain holiness in ordinary life through work. The “dough,” it is understood, was it not already Christian? That is why, from the 1930s onward, his language was ambiguous, since his vision of a non-Christian society clashed head-on with the doctrine of Christ the King, and for that reason he was accused before ecclesiastical courts on various occasions of being liberal and even a heretic. 

His disciple Álvaro del Portillo, who participated in the Second Vatican Council as an expert and secretary of the Commission on the Discipline of the Clergy, said to him: “on how many occasions, during the approval of the Council documents, it would have been just to speak with the founder of Opus Dei and repeat to him: ‘congratulations,’ because what he has in his soul, what he has tirelessly taught since 1928, has been solemnly proclaimed by the Magisterium of the Church”. Saint Josemaría himself affirmed: “We must be content, now that this Council has ended: thirty years ago I was accused of heresy for preaching things of our spirit that the Council has now solemnly recognized in the dogmatic constitution De Ecclesia. It is clear that we have moved forward.”

In fact, this is the aspect that most surprises when one approaches the history of Opus Dei: how “ahead of their time” they were, since the other realities that happily embraced the separation of Church and State, religious freedom, and other liberal postulates appeared in the Church only after the Second Vatican Council: the Charismatic Renewal, Regnum Christi / Legionaries of Christ, the Neocatechumenal Way, and others.

It seemed to me that this extensive preliminary explanation was necessary to enter into the subject, because it clearly shows the difference between a traditional Catholic, who is simply a Catholic, and a conservative Catholic like Saint Josemaría Escrivá and his work and other conservative institutes, which are liberal and modernist. Because, apart from the outdated progressives in the Roman Curia and the episcopate, the “Church that is moving,” which seems alive—as we have already said on other occasions—is this neo-conservative Church.

And this produces great unease. I do not at all agree with those who say “better Hakuna or Emaús than nothing.” I believe that it is better nothing than Hakuna or Emaús; because, although it is true that these focal points of first proclamation are necessary, afterward the Church should come to the rescue of these converts and form them in the true Catholic faith, doctrine, liturgy, and morality, because, when people remain in these liberal and neo-conservative movements (which are truly legion in the Church today) they run the risk of ending up sliding toward a sentimentalist, anthropocentric, and worldly religion that is not Catholic. 

Many years ago, when I returned to the Church, one of the things that most caught my attention was the superiority of Christian thought over any kind of philosophical system and the perfect coherence with which it explained everything. The depth, breadth, and height of Catholic thought fascinated me and continues to fascinate me. God is the Truth, a Truth that is Love, and that is logical and supra-rational, because it contains mysteries that our minds will never be able to fully comprehend or explain.

Studying the history of the Church, I was fascinated by the boldness of the medieval mendicant friars. How they set out to proclaim, baptize, and teach, as our Lord Jesus Christ commanded. The first Franciscans arrived in Spain with the intention of crossing into North Africa to convert the Moors and die as martyrs if necessary. For his part, Saint Dominic of Guzmán fought tirelessly against the Albigensian heretics, and it is well known how, before allowing his friars to go out to preach, they received an exquisite formation. From this arose not only the genius of Saint Thomas Aquinas, but also a laywoman in the middle of the fourteenth century, a Dominican tertiary, Saint Catherine of Siena, who was not afraid to rebuke the popes and urge them to put an end to the scandal of the Western Schism.

Those were other times. They were the times of Christendom. The Church was not ashamed of the Truth. She knew herself to be the possessor of the great responsibility of proclaiming it in order to save souls. She did not yield before pagans or heretics, offering dialogue or updating herself, from the Supreme Pontiff to the simplest peasant. 

When Luther broke Christendom with his heresy, some of the greatest saints the Church has given were born in Spain, such as Saint Teresa of Jesus and Saint John of the Cross, Saint Ignatius of Loyola and Saint Francis Xavier, who evangelized half the world and were a beacon of the West. The Pope has referred to them on some occasion during his recent visit to Spain. That is why it is interesting to hold up the current Spanish Catholicism, the one that has been so media-focused on the visit of Leo XIV, to the mirror of Christendom. It is also interesting to confront the current Supreme Pontiff with the image of some of his medieval predecessors. 

Regarding this visit to Spain, there is nothing to say about the hundreds of thousands of Catholics who have attended the events organized for the Holy Father: their good will, their faith, their devotion. The ecclesiastical hierarchy and its transmission belt of the prefabricated narrative deserve separate mention, however: the influencers, digital missionaries or digital mercenaries, whom we discussed last week and who have carried out a shameful exercise of papalotry, in general. 

This is not the first time we have dealt with the phenomenon of Catholic influencers turned into “digital missionaries” in an official way and, finally, into digital mercenaries. It is a subject that interests me greatly because, more and more, they become simple propaganda for the regime and the official narrative of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, at least in the case of Spain and, very specifically, of the Archdiocese of Madrid. And they are all neo-conservatives. During this papal visit, the influencers have replaced the classic journalists specialized in Church matters. They have tirelessly broadcast every detail of the Pope’s visit not only on their personal social networks, but also on generalist media outlets on TV, and some, such as the popular CR30 and a former Carmelite friar turned into a horrendous online theology professor, have been working for El Debate, the newspaper of the ACdP (capable, on the other hand, of both the best and the worst). 

But digital missionaries, like good mercenaries (and unlike good journalists), are interested in topics in a blatantly selective way: always in line with what the bishops are interested in promoting and what they prefer to ignore or conceal. 

And this question is important when one asks what the selection criteria of these influencers are on the part of, for example, the Cardinal of Madrid or the ACdP and its endogamous CEU talks. Is the criterion the number of followers on their social networks? It strikes me as curious, if that is the case, that the Cardinal does not, for example, invite Fr. Jorge González Guadalix, who writes the most widely read priest’s blog in Spain, to his meetings with influencers. In terms of number of readers, impact, and credibility, I do not think many digital missionaries surpass him.

Perhaps—and I do not wish to be ill-intentioned—the number of followers is not the only criterion for selection and recruitment, but also the degree of “apesedebramiento”; the desire many of these influencers have not to work and to live by selectively showing their lives and messages on social networks; to accept paid collaborations with brands and the capacity to be willing to silence the faith and controversial issues in order to secure the chickpeas provided by the CEE and the cheap fame of social networks, which allows them to be invited and feted wherever they go. And that, in a very un-Catholic way, feeds the ego and narcissism. 

Again, in this regard, the Holy Father’s visit this past week has left various examples. The first, so striking: the complete omission of any reference to the whitewashing of the Islamic invasion in Spain that centered the Pope’s first messages. The digital mercenaries only began to have material on Saturday night, when the Pope encouraged the formation of families, and especially on Monday, with the Pope’s speech in the Congress of Deputies and the defense of life from conception to natural death. It is sad, however, to see how we have settled for the minimum. How a pope saying what a pope is supposed to say seems to us a heroic act.

The matter of the Canary Islands, the Mass with the cayucos, and the selective meetings, as the culmination of the initial whitewashing messages of the Muslim invasion, would deserve separate mention. 

But it does seem noteworthy to mention, regarding the papal visit in particular and the neo-con Church in general, continuing the comparison between the saintly preachers and apologists of other centuries and the current influencers, the low doctrinal level and the emotivist superficiality of this neo-con missionary Catholicism. Can you imagine CR30 or the evangelization company of KM preaching about consubstantiality, about the filioque, or about the Theotokos? Or correcting the pro-immigration Spanish bishops on the order of Christian charity? Or defending the Valley of the Fallen against the connivance of those same bishops with the extreme-left government? Can Scholasticism or the Church of the Spanish Golden Age be compared, for example, to the contributions of the Theology of the Body, to the books of Manglano / Hakuna, or to the neo-con pornography of Fabrice Hadjadj? In short, can the mendicant friars of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries be compared to the digital missionaries?