Fr. Z's Blog

Do you remember all the way back to the dark year of 2023?    Newly minted Cardinal Fernandez of the DDF vowed in an interview that he was not a “Soros spy infiltrated in the Church.”

Hamlet 3.2.245

According to Crux:

[Fernandez] also emphasized the importance of another charge given him by Francis, which is to ensure that all Vatican departments are in alignment with the “recent magisterium.”

“It can happen that answers are given to certain theological issues without accepting what Francis has said that is new on those issues,” Fernández said. “It’s not only inserting a phrase from Pope Francis, but allowing thought to be transfigured with his criteria. This is particularly true for moral and pastoral theology.”

[…]

I must ensure that both the documents of the dicastery and those of others ‘accept the recent Magisterium.

The “recent magisterium”?

“thought… transfigured with (Francis’) criteria”?

I was immediately reminded of Mao Thought which stressed the importance of contradictions.  That is, if there is a goal, there are contradictions.  But there will always be contradictions, which means that revolution must be continuous.

Continuous revolution is slightly different from the other side of the Communist horror of Marxist-Leninism which had the principle of “permanent revolution”.  What might be an example of Mao Thought, translated into the “current magisterium” which is transfigured by new criteria?  For example, as resulted from Amoris laetitia the defense that “lived experience” shows that requiring sexual continence in an adulterous marriage as the basis for possible reception of Communion (scandal being avoided) is really just an impossible ideal that people can’t be expected to attain.  Hence, we have to transform the teaching about reception of Communion in light of today’s lived experience.   This is like the Mao Thought idea of “from the masses, to the masses,” namely, drawing from their experiences, and leading us to new understanding.

If you go to wiki and look for a definition of the Marxist concept of “permanent revolution” the long article opens with this distilled passage:

Permanent revolution is the strategy of a revolutionary class pursuing its own interests independently and without compromise or alliance with opposing sections of society.

Let’s replace some terms.

1. revolutionary class = progressivist promoters of discontinuity who require a positivistic reinterpretation of all doctrine, worship and praxis in light of their particular “spirit of Vatican II” ideology.
2. opposing sections of society = those who maintain continuity with tradition in worship, doctrine and praxis.

Permanent revolution is the strategy of  _1.__ pursuing its own interests independently and without compromise or alliance with _2.__.

A main point of “permanent revolution” as well as Maoist “continuous revolution” is that there is no compromise with those whom you have designated as the opposition (whether they are actively opposing or not).  Once you have targeted them as standing in the way, you pursue your goal relentlessly and with no possibility of compromise.

Everyone on both sides suffers in this scenario.   Trotsky, who was a proponent (not the first) of permanent revolution, is said to have said: “You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you”.  Even if you desire peace, the pervasive nature of conflict driven by others means it will eventually involve or affect you.   Ask the faithful in Charlotte.

In this time of seeming permanent revolution no one can be a bystander.

The concept of permanent revolution provides a useful interpretive lens for understanding the internal logic of the The Roche Report, even though the term itself is never used.

The Roche Report (HERE) portrays liturgical history as a process of continual reform. Stability is treated as inherently suspect. Hijacking Ratzinger, by defining tradition primarily as movement (“a living river”) that must keep flowing, it disqualifies settled liturgical forms from enjoying lasting normative authority. What results is a functional analogue to permanent revolution. Reform is not ordered toward consolidation, reception, and repose.  Reform is presented as an ongoing necessity intrinsic to fidelity to the “spirit” of the Council.  Those are my “”, because it is impossible to express that sort of reform as intrinsic fidelity to the letter of the Council.

Within this framework, resistance to further change is recast as pathology.  In the Roche Report the equivalent is “if you disagree or have questions, you don’t have the correct ecclesiology“.   If you cling to your outdated liturgy, you are against the current magisterium and the new ecclesiology which is imbued with the spirit of Vatican II  and transformed by Francis’ criteria.

In the former Soviet Union and in some sectors of the Church today, resistance to the official line coming down from The Whatever High Atop The Thing is tantamount to mental illness.  The Soviets called it “sluggish schizophrenia”.  You would be institutionalized.   After all, the Soviet system was clearly the best possible and quite simply flawless. To resist it was a sign that you were mentally ill.  Today, anyone who resists what is clearly the most incredible and miraculous Second Pentecost for the Church must be a dissident who, for the sake of unity, must be dealt with by being pastorally “un-personed”, to borrow a notion of Rawls.   Rawls wasn’t a Marxist, but his ideas about consensus tangentially intersect.

Once you eliminate the naysayers, you have consensus.

Solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.

Because language needs to be fluent – fluent faster than language usually flows – they had to get rid of non-evolving Latin.  Now, as the East Germans did with their dictionaries, they can freely start redefining terms.  For example “sound tradition” is allowed to exist only insofar as it authorizes new reform, while “legitimate progress” becomes the criterion by which tradition is judged. The logic is circular: tradition must change in order to remain tradition, and any appeal to continuity that limits reform is dismissed as backwardism and ossification. As in permanent revolution, stability appears not as an achievement but as a failure of nerve.

This helps explain why the Roche Report – and those whom it echoes – cannot admit the possibility that the post-Conciliar reform itself might be subject to critique.

If reform is structurally ongoing, then to question a reform is not to engage in discernment, but to resist the revolution.

Hence the move to redefine disagreement as an ecclesiological defect rather than a theological or historical argument.

Unity, in this schema, is secured not by shared inheritance, but by universal submission to the latest authorized stage of reform.

Hence, force.

Read this way, Traditionis custodes functions not as a truly pastoral intervention than as a consolidation measure via brute force. It suppresses traditional liturgical forms because they represent a counter-principle, namely, that the liturgy can reach a state of normative maturity and stability.

In that sense, the Roche Report reflects the same logic as permanent revolution: reform must be permanent, critique must flow in only one direction, and the possibility of a stable tradition standing in dialogue with the post-Conciliar reform is excluded in advance.

Hence, the overturning of Summorum Pontificum.

Hence, the need to restore something like Summorum Pontificum.

Hence, the mad scramble to prevent anything like Summorum Pontificum.

Hence, The Roche Report put into the hands of all the cardinals: dezinformatsiya.