The Need for Supernatural Perspective

George Santayana of 'Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it' fame predicted the modernist crisis in the Church.

From Les Femmes

By Susan Matthiesen

Seek ye first the kingdom of heaven earth

As is immediately evident, our world is absorbed by political and secular concerns which seek as an ultimate goal a human utopia on earth, failing to recognize that this life is merely a way-station to eternal life and supernatural happiness in the next. This warped perspective ignores the character of God and the nature of ultimate reality professed by the Roman Catholic Church. It gives scant recognition to the divine and spiritual life. Implicit is a lost vision of Christ, extraordinary naivete, and a complete lack of logic. 

A true Catholic perspective comprehends that our current natural, physical and material existence is only a part of reality, and a minor part at that. The essence of reality lies in the supernatural realm. As our Roman Catholic Church constantly emphasizes, we are on earth "to know, love and serve God in this world so that we may be happy with Him forever in heaven." We are human beings destined for eternal life.

The loss of the essence of Christianity, namely its supernatural perspective, by Modernist Christians was clearly identified 90 years ago by the famous philosopher, George Santayana of Harvard University, in his book Winds of Doctrine (1913) which made a trenchant critique of the Modernism of his day. It applies even more aptly to Modernist/Liberal Catholics today. He wrote:

Modernism is the love of all Christianity in those who perceive that it is all a fable. It is the historic attachment to his Church of a Catholic who has discovered that he is a pagan. Modernists are pagan and pantheistic in their profounder sentiments, to whom the hard and narrow realism of official Christianity is offensive just because it supposes that Christianity is true.

As for Modernism, it is suicide. It is the last of those concessions to the spirit of the world which half-believers and double-minded prophets have always been found making; but it is a mortal concession for it concedes that everything in Christianity, as Christians hold it, is an illusion.

Remarking further on the Modernists' opposition to Rome, Santayana continues: The Modernist Catholic feels himself full of love for everybody - except the pope. This was in 1913 when St Pius X was Pope. Today Liberal Catholics seem filled with hatred for everybody - except the current Modernist pope, Francis.

Santayana makes clear that Modernist Catholics have lost belief in the supernatural. They do not believe in sin, nor in salvation, nor in Revelation. To them Christianity has become a myth which they wish to keep in its entirety precisely because they regard it as a convention, like a language, modern art or a Santa Claus legend. Thus they have been exerting all their efforts since the Second Vatican Council into transforming the Church into an institution for charitable and social work rather than the worship of God, in direct violation of Christ's command to "seek first the Kingdom of Heaven."