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A Unified Theory of “Backwardism”

What was so awful about the pre-Vatican II Church that its memory needs to be obliterated and those who hold to doctrines that are ancient in provenance must be labeled as “rigid” and psychologically damaged?

By Darrick Taylor.

Pope Francis has presented many of his key initiatives as pope as efforts to “move the Church forward,” as the saying goes. As you probably also know by now, he is vehemently opposed to anything that takes the Church “backward.”

In recent months, he started using an Italian neologism—“indietrismo” or “backwardism”—to describe those Catholics who are opposed to progress in the Church. Francis’ torrent of abuse and invective has been quite consistent, and it matches up increasingly with his actions, especially since the crackdown on the Latin Mass began in 2021.

This verbal onslaught is aimed at those who “reject Vatican II,” though he never fully clarifies who is rejecting what precisely. There are certainly those around Francis who view the existence of the old liturgy as a symbol of the pre-Vatican II Church, which the postconciliar Church has left behind. Given his choice of appointments to the Pontifical Academy for Life, this likely includes those who do not want the Church’s doctrine on contraception to “develop.” Apparently, he sees things the same way, or at least wants to signal that he does.

But the question remains: Why? What was so awful about the pre-Vatican II Church that its memory needs to be obliterated and those who hold to doctrines that are ancient in provenance must be labeled as “rigid” and psychologically damaged? I should be clear, I don’t think there are any good reasons for this, and some of this must be attributed to ill feeling on his part. Francis clearly sees people who are somehow “backward” as opponents, and he clearly wishes they would go away.

However naive it may be, I am not willing to leave it at that. It may be that there is no rationality at all in this attack on the Catholic past, but somehow I doubt it. In part, it is because this attack is selective. Only parts of the past come in for this sort of treatment and not others. Because there are so many different parts of Catholic teaching and tradition that “progressive” Catholics call into question, it is difficult to pin down one set of motives; but I think the motivation is political, in the broadest sense of that term.

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17 Comments

  1. TonyO says:

    Great article, it’s realy helpful see some of the motivational background of the progressive people in the hierarchy.

    Fr. Antonio Spadaro’s 2017 article in L’Osservatore Romano that decried a putative “ecumenism of hate” practiced by Evangelicals and “Catholic Integralists” in America and proclaimed that “Francis wants to break the organic link between culture, politics, institutions, and the Church” is redolent of this way of thinking.

    This notion, of breaking “the organic link” between culture, politics, institutions, and the Church, is not only complete idiocy (as every rational Catholic must realize if he thinks about it for 10 seconds), but it is also contradictory to what they themselves advocate and practice: when they are in power and making things hum along in their direction, they want the Church’s progressive ideas and the culture’s progressive ideas to be organically linked. Why else, for example, would Francis point to the culture’s movement away from capital punishment to constitute a reason for trying to make Church teaching also move away from capital punishment? I can’t figure out if it’s just mind-numbing hypocrisy by the pseudo-intelligentsia, (properly: the stupidigentsia, because sin – especially sexual sin – makes you stupid), or if it’s something else.

  2. TheCavalierHatherly says:

    Forward=Good, Backward=Bad.

    Perhaps when I leave the parking lot after work, in a smoking vehicle amidst the wake of twisted metal, I can invoke this clealry infallible precept in my subsequent explanation to law enforcement as to my course of action.

  3. WVC says:

    Old men with warped ideas exercising tyranny to defend their nostalgia. They have become and embrace that which is so much worse than what they feared, but they are too blind with pride and self-righteousness to see it. The parable of the mote in the other’s eye while the plank is in one’s own eye comes to mind. May Catholics of good faith open their eyes, sooner than later, to the fact that these men will DESTROY the Church if they are not opposed. Hurry up and oppose them already! Stop “asking permission” to oppose the destruction of the Church, just DO IT!

  4. BeatifyStickler says:

    Why does Francis want to keep us looking backward to Vatican 2? I was born in the 80’s, why does he want me going backwards to something that predates my birth? He’s a traditionalist from the sixties and this backwardism must stop. I’m an indult kid and Summorum Pontificum was in my early twenties. I’m tired of Francis imposing his backwardism of Vatican 2 onto me. He should be a Summorum Pontificum progressive.

  5. jaykay says:

    “Francis wants to break the organic link between culture, politics, institutions, and the Church” is redolent of this way of thinking”.

    TonyO: thanks for recalling that quote. Yet, organic links to certain types of culture, politics, institutions, and to a certain type of the Church, seem to be quite the thing.

    I must be an indietrismato. Si dice? Non so.

  6. jaykay says:

    On second thought, let us not go to Indietrismo -lot. It is a silly place.

  7. ex seaxe says:

    I think Darrick Taylor is probably correct in seeing a connection in the minds of those who were adult in the 40s &50s between fascism and the general suspicion of rational inquiry which persisted in the Church at that time. As a 13 year-old in 1951 I was shown, with pride, a copy of his newly published “A Catholic Commentary on Holy Scripture” by my headmaster Dom Bernard Orchard. Mysteriously, this never became available for general sale. My father said that Cardinal Griffin Archbishop of Westminster had suppressed it. I now think that the Cardinal had agreed it (it would not have been printed without his authorization) but Rome had expressed displeasure and Griffin had asked for it to be withheld from sale. It was not until 1969 that “A New Catholic Commentary on Holy Scripture” was published, again under Dom Bernard’s editorship, based now on the Jerusalem Bible rather than Douay-Reims.
    It was about that time that Fr Bouyer records that his teenage pupils were not issued with Bibles, so he encouraged them to buy their own. While he was away giving a retreat the deputy headmaster confiscated them, although they were the pupils own property.
    I think that “What does the prayer really say?”, with its use of non-catholic sources like Lewis & Short would have come under suspicion in the 50s as I remember them. That is not a Church to which I wish to return, I stayed Catholic because my father and some of my teachers encouraged me to think, most of my classmates eventually drifted away.
    Of course it is wrong to conflate that with the TLM.

  8. Lurker 59 says:

    I often recommend Fr. Schall’s The Mind That is Catholic.

    It is too simple to view the answer to why “backwardsism” to be “because politics”, even though it is politics, just politics as Mr. Taylor writes. While the tradition=bad because the Church authority of the time hurt my feelings and they supported fascists has a kernel of truth to it (and the petty vindictive spitefulness of it fits the personalities involved) it is more so because they have reduced everything to politics having abandoned any genuine faith in the supernatural.

    For all the talk of “the spirit of Vatican II”^tm, “the mercy”^tm, “the spirit”^tm there really is nothing spiritual or supernatural about these concepts. If anything, VII brought about a crisis in pneumenology as well as exacerbated a crisis in metaphysics/epistemology. The issue is that too many in Catholic academia (and high places in the Church) don’t have a Catholic mind (or even a good pagan mind). If they talk about the spiritual, it is at best a spiritualism that while it may be preternatural, is not supernatural.

    The “they supported the nazis” is way too trite of an explanation. It is just the wedge to get people to go along with the rejecting of tradition and accepting the new custodians of thought.

    Keeping things within political theory the issue is that the Catholic Faith is more “liberal” than their political ideology. In Catholicism, politics, the state, the sovereign, is truncated – it is not the highest good and it is not the highest good to establish a just society. The Catholic Faith says that the highest goods are things such as religion, piety, serving God, contemplation, the rejection of sin, the growth of the virtues, and ultimately Mystical Marriage between the individual soul and Christ. Politics, the things of this earthly life, the ordering of the city of man are temporary things, and ultimately distractions from the higher things of God.

    Bacon, Locke, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Marx — these have much more to do with why the Catholic Faith must be replaced by “the spirit of VII”^tm because they call man’s soul to higher things than the things of this world.

    The higher things are not real to them — they are backward fairy tales that prevent man from progressing, from establishing earthly justice, from preventing the horrors of war, from seeing fellow humans as aliens and outsiders, etc.

    If the higher things are the real things, then politics is not everything, it is not the purpose of life to build a just society, and there is no such thing as the steady march of history — all that matters is conformity to Christ and the politics of earthly things take on a certain pragmatic liberty and lose a sense of all-encompassing earnestness.

    But if you think that politics is everything, then you have to stamp out anything that calls the mind to look upward to the heavens.

    They are just a bunch of spurned Alcibiadeses intent on killing Socrates for daring to suggest that they are higher things.

  9. The Astronomer says:

    Brilliant. This anti-Traditional Catholicism, too will pass. The ‘ol biological solution.

  10. Lurker 59 says:

    @ex seaxe

    The attitude of episcopal controlling/suspicion of non-approved works that you speak of never left the Church — it is part of the rationale behind Inter Mirifica, the USCCB’s litigiousness regarding the usage of the NAB in the early days of the internet, Pope Francis’ recent talks regarding media/internet, and the general need to keep one’s breviary hidden (still!) in certain seminaries. I also have it on good authority that it takes a certain amount of episcopal red tape to access a book at the Vatican Library. The attitude is still there, it is just that who is doing the authorizing has changed.

    When we look at the issues regarding the various works that were being suppressed prior to VII, it is not because they are rational (Neo-Thomism is eminently rational) it is in their rationalism that rejects the supernatural and the order of grace, a hallmark of the various modern critical theories. Biblical criticism is a highly repressive field — one of my undergraduate profs was an archeologist who had to teach source theory even though the prof’s own hands-on research indicated that it wasn’t real (this came from a discussion in office hours). So much of modern scholarship is held in place due to a priori philosophical presuppositions back by raw authoritative power. Most people don’t see this but it is also ever has been the case. Poking at things and showing that the world runs not on wisdom but “because I say so” is what got Socrates killed. Returning to the ’50s isn’t an issue because we never left them.

    Now when we look the various suppression of works prior to VII it is a fair point that the Neo-Thomists can be a bit myopic and zealous in clamping down on anything not Neo-Thomist, but it is also a fair point that a lot of “modern scholarship” of that time was neither scholarship nor modern being just repackaged ideology cloaked in academic authority. It is a fair point that the convert Fr. Bouyer’s inclinations of “just get a bible” should so give rise to his instructions. Likewise, it is also a fair point that non-Catholic bibles of that time had non-Catholic stuff in them (they still do! and so do many Catholic translations) and children are not intellectually equipped to ferret out the poison.

    If one looks at things in terms of the exercise of authority to squash alternative ideas, the Church of the 1950s is still the Church of the 2020s — try to teach St. John Paul IIs theology in certain institutions — though one can argue that the last 10 years has brought about a more centralization and more raw authoritarian exercise of that squashing.

    The post VII Church isn’t about “no one gets squashed” it just changed who was doing the squashing. Now do I think we need to move towards a true “no one gets squashed” position? In my youth, having loved Fahrenheit 451, I thought that the greatest sin was to burn a book. I am no longer young.

  11. JonPatrick says:

    Like @Lurker59 I too find this simplistic to blame the movement against “backwardism” in the modern Church on politics. I think of it more a culmination of 5 centuries of development that started with the Protestant “reformation” and began to substitute Man for God.

    It is ironic that the post V2 Church in rejecting the preconciliar church’s alleged embracing of Fascism, is moving to a rapprochement with the “New World Order” that seems to be constructing a global totalitarian government in which “you will own nothing and be happy”. Oops, it’s time to go get my 7th COVID booster so I can get the permit to travel to see my relatives.

  12. The Masked Chicken says:

    No. The theory Darrick Taylor outlines simply does not comport with the facts. I am sure that there are political analogies that can be made to the acts of authority and suppression that were made against La Nouvelle Theologie developers (who were contemptuous of the Neo-Thomists) and political pogroms in the 1900’s in which dissenting ideas were suppressed, but La Nouvelle Theologie was a restorationist/resourcement movement that simply vastly overreached its arguments.

    To be clear, neo-Thomism got started in the Nineteenth century, almost 100 years before the rise of Fascism. The real conflict was between an axiomatic, systematic, rational mode of Thomistic thought, and an intuitive, creative, interpretive mode of Modernistic thought. This may resemble, per accidens, the political struggle between liberal and conservative political regimes, but the point that Taylor missed is that the conflict in Catholic circles was not a political, but an epistemological conflict – how shall we learn about God?

    Not to be too blunt or to grossly over-simplify things, but the Thomistic side was concerned about the immaterial, the things of the soul, first and foremost, whereas the New Theologians, were interested in the material, the things of the body. Thomists derived their insights from first principles, from beyond human sources; the New Theologians derived their insights from societies and their reactions, from human sources. The desire for resourcement that haunted La Nouvelle Theologie, was not from a desire to go back to the original sources (after all, who could really know in all cases what the original sources meant in the original context, being at a distance of 2000 years), but a desire to re-write history so as to favor winds of current society. The New Theologians were suppressed in the 1950’s (not, so much, the 1930’s and 1940’s, as Taylor suggests) not because of politics, but because they were wrong. The underlying epistemology of La Nouvelle Theologie was condemned starting 70 years earlier with Leo XIII’s, Aeterni Patris, which enshrined Thomism as the way forward in Catholic theology. Any grievances the New Theologians might have had with 19th-century interpretations of Thomism should have confined themselves to finding out where they think the interpretation went wrong and moving forward from there, much as one corrects an error in a proof, but they wanted to throw out the baby with the bath water and, essentially, re-interprete Catholicism an initio, without actually proving that the base axioms of Aquinas were wrong, in themselves.

    Garrigou-Lagrange was not interested in politics. He was not using politics as a reason for suppressing the New Theology. He had seen the onrush of Modernism, first-hand, and was doing what any good guardian of the Faith would do – act to suppress heresy. In my opinion (and, certainly that of the pre-Vatican II hierarchy), La Nouvelle Theology is an heretical movement. Is Taylor asserting that the methods used to stamp out Arianism were, likewise, tantamount to political suppression? Is it not an act of wisdom to suppress the phlogiston theory once it had been proven wrong, just as properly as suppressing Monothelitism?

    Ultimately, casting the divisions in the Church of today in terms of politics is missing the fundamental issue driving them – how does God speak to His Church. It is clear that each side sees God differently. Sadly, these issues were resolved centuries ago, but if certain people do not believe that God is the same, yesterday, today, and forever, then they will never understand the nature of true unity within the Catholic Church. Sadly, they have not learned that Catholic means universal both in geography, but also in time. There is one universal Church and this means that people of every age should be able to recognize the Church as the reflection of the Unchanging Christ, who is His bride.

    I wonder if St. Thomas would recognize his Divine Spouse in most of the Church, today.

    The Chicken

  13. TonyO says:

    in seeing a connection in the minds of those who were adult in the 40s &50s between fascism and the general suspicion of rational inquiry which persisted in the Church at that time. As a 13 year-old in 1951 I was shown, with pride, a copy of his newly published “A Catholic Commentary on Holy Scripture” by my headmaster Dom Bernard Orchard. Mysteriously, this never became available for general sale. My father said that Cardinal Griffin Archbishop of Westminster had suppressed it. I now think that the Cardinal had agreed it (it would not have been printed without his authorization) but Rome had expressed displeasure and Griffin had asked for it to be withheld from sale.

    If there was resistance in the Church to “rational inquiry” in the Church in the 40’s and 50’s, it was probably either resistance to that overzealous “rationalism” that excludes faith altogether (the “rationalism” of Rousseau and the French Terrorism), or the resistance of the burgeoning modernism’s resistance, specifically, to intelligent and disciplined reasoned inquiry, preferring instead anything weird that the new spirits of the age wanted to propose as a possible matter for inquiry. The fact that the Cardinal or Rome requested a halt to general publication doesn’t even SUGGEST that the authorities objected to rational inquiry: if there was even a single new idea that had the appearance of being incompatible with Catholic traditional teaching, they had the obligation to hold up approval for general publication until that new idea could establish its compatibility. Having the name “Catholic” in it should have meant a pretty solid guarantee that everything in it was, in fact, Catholic, and that just plain means review by magisterial authorities. A Catholic teacher trying to publish something as large and fundamental in scope as a “A Catholic Commentary on the Holy Scripture” without having approval by the Catholic Church is quite odd indeed.

  14. TheCavalierHatherly says:

    @ex seaxe & TonyO

    There is a whole untold saga of Biblical scholarship, especially Catholic Biblical scholarship, that spans the twentieth century. The snippets of it that I’ve found in my reading have painted an interesting picture. Basically, it starts with the modernists (adhering to 19th century german criticism) facing off with the Sulpicians (adhering to a strict and, I would argue, obdurate interpretation of OT texts), and then the Dominican Ecole Biblique in Jerusalem come “running down the middle.” The Ecole did some great work (decoding Ugaritic at record speed), but they were always suspect. This is probably the animus towards “rational enquiry” in question. The Ecole managed to run afoul of those in authority a number of times on points that were open to debate.

    A good deal of this archeological scholarship, however, has not worked out well for ‘zee higher critizizm…’ And yet all the outdated silliness got swallowed whole by many after V2. To my knowledge, it was protestant types like Kenneth Kitchen who mounted the “archeological defence” post V2… until recently.

  15. Fr. Reader says:

    @Lurker 59
    “In my youth, having loved Fahrenheit 451, I thought that the greatest sin was to burn a book. I am no longer young.”
    You should not burn books. They can.

  16. TonyO says:

    Basically, it starts with the modernists (adhering to 19th century german criticism) facing off with the Sulpicians (adhering to a strict and, I would argue, obdurate interpretation of OT texts), and then the Dominican Ecole Biblique in Jerusalem come “running down the middle.”

    Fair enough: there may well have been unnecessarily high antipathy in certain Church circles to attempts to resolve difficulties legitimately open to scholarly dispute by reasoned and disciplined inquiry. This attitude was probably present in all eras, and not special to the 1940-1950s: the Church’s formal and reliance on Tradition necessitates an attitude of caution toward new proposals, and this can easily flow into an excess of caution toward new ideas. It is the excess that is to be disapproved, not the basic caution itself.

    It can be admitted that there will typically be more delay to and slower recognition of worthy new proposals when submitting them to appropriate magisterial oversight and its appropriately cautious approach than would occur in secular academia that doesn’t have such a constraint, without any reason to claim this represents “repression” in the harmful sense. (Although even in secular academia there is certainly its own stodgy resistance to new ideas, and nobody argues that this is the result of “medieval oppression”.) The need to have a Magisterium that decides what is and what is not “Catholic” implies just this.

    In a practical way, the appropriate caution (and its delaying effect) can be discerned as the difference between the proposed solutions to difficulties or proposed ways of interpreting a scriptural passage that attempts to resolve existing discordant elements with Traditional principles, written up in a technical monograph and submitted to one’s superiors / authorities for discernment, versus the publishing of an entire biblical theory that either explicitly contradicts some Traditional position, or ignores such a into oblivion, without waiting for any approval by superiors, and representing the result as a “Catholic” position.

    If you come up with a new idea for biblical exegesis, and it’s true, then it isn’t really “yours” so much as God’s (both because all truth is God’s, and because He is the author of Scripture). And if God wants it to spread out and be noticed, He can make it happen with or without you getting it into first publication or getting you first credit. It is prudent to be cautious in pushing a new idea on the Bible, and even more so before attaching the name “Catholic” to it.

  17. philosophicallyfrank says:

    I don’t know; but, it seems like the problems in the church and in the world are very similar. We have the first anti-American President in our history and the first ant-Catholic Pope in church history. Washington, D. C. is an American political “Swamp” and Rome is a Catholic political Swamp. Both need to be badly cleansed. However, perhaps the real problem is us. We have 60 +/- years of billions of abortions with no end in sight. And with every abortion, all the descendants of each baby are also illuminated; so, we’re talking about trillions of lives being wiped out. Those lives may not be in our sights; being throughout the future; Jesus being above all time; sees each life disappearing with each abortion.
    There is also our allowing the removing of God from our society and culture over the same 60 +/- years to pay for. Our future may be on the brink of becoming very bleak.

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