A number of Catholic commentators responded to the blasphemous parody of the Last Supper during the opening ceremonies for the Olympics by denying it was what it was. Others were outraged by Catholic outrage. After all, they said, shouldn’t the Church be more concerned about human suffering, and her own failures, than culture war battles? And how could a tableau hurt Jesus or a Catholic strong in his faith?
The point seemed to be that outraged Catholics were uncultured rubes and bad Christians. The Bible may include expressions like “hallowed be thy name” and “thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain,” but genuine followers of Jesus believe he cares far more about migrants and victims of abuse than personal affronts or pious sensibilities.
Such views provide an example of progressive Christian thought. But what is that? People believe a variety of things, and accommodate their various beliefs to each other in many ways. So it is impossible to say what progressive Christianity is in a way that describes the actual beliefs of all progressive Christians.
Even so, it exists as a recognizable tendency that influences many people. Man is a rational animal and basic lines of thought matter. The assumptions people accept push them in directions they never intended to go. So I will try to summarize its main themes as simply and clearly as I can, without denying variation and nuance among individuals.
At bottom, then, progressive Christianity involves greatly reduced concern for the transcendent aspects of the Faith and revelation as specific, substantive, and unchanging. Instead, it is concerned with the things of this world, an open-ended spirituality, and the evolving moral consciousness of humanity. A sense of piety remains, but love of God is radically downplayed in favor of—or reinterpreted as—love of neighbor.
Such views explain reactions to the Eucharistic Congress, and to the blasphemy at the Olympics. We are formed in the image and likeness of God. When we lose sight of Him, and pay attention only to ourselves, we mistake the divine likeness for the divine original, and each of us becomes a god. In such a setting, Christ in the Eucharist and images of the Last Supper can seem distractions from the true divinity of individual Man, and thus a kind of idol.
So it is natural for a Eucharistic Congress to make progressives queasy and a sexually disordered parody of Leonardo’s painting to seem an act of liberation. The congress and painting divert attention from what is thought truly holy: the fight against the boundaries and inequalities, exemplified by restrictions on migration and traditional sexual and gender norms, that limit the divinity of each individual human being.
This merging of the sacred into the secular means that love of neighbor becomes basically a matter of promoting social progress as secular progressives understand it. The Kingdom becomes indistinguishable from a secular utopia. Adherents of progressive Christianity thus are difficult to distinguish from other progressives.
They are therefore likely to feel more at home with secular progressives than with their more traditionally minded coreligionists. So Cardinal Cupich tells us that “some of the greatest Christians I know are people who don’t actually have a kind of faith system that they believe in.”
In addition, the tendencies that have affected religion have affected secular thought. Understandings of the secular human good have lost their concreteness no less than revelation. The human good has thus become defined by the preferences of individuals, so that it becomes a matter of giving everyone what he wants, as much and equally as possible.
So people say “kindness is everything,” with kindness interpreted in accordance with aspirations like equality, openness, tolerance, inclusion, and choice. Under such circumstances, concern for everyday duties, along with social support for the virtues that enable people, families, and communities to make good lives for themselves, drop out of sight.
Ordinary sexual morality is an example. Progressive Christians truly believe that standards that support family life have nothing to do with social justice. “Pelvic sins” thus become a purely personal matter with no connection to the commandment to love our neighbor.
In these circumstances, the Kingdom of God—now understood as a secular utopia—becomes identified with an egalitarian technocracy that administers world society in such a way that everyone is fed, clothed, housed, and otherwise cared for, given something to do he finds rewarding, and granted an equal share of respect and emotional support.
That ideal has moral prestige among many Catholics. They find it a modern rendition of the Gospel, with the State playing the role of Providence. As Pope Francis put it, “Communists say that [the Biblical injunction to help the poor, sick and needy] is communism. Sure, twenty centuries later.”
But the goal doesn’t work. The more you pursue it, the more it recedes. What appeared the straightforward pursuit of liberty, equality, and fraternity by ambitious socialists, an effort that inspired progressives everywhere, led repeatedly to slavery, poverty, and cynicism. Initiatives here in America, like the recent drive for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, have also backfired.
The problem is that human beings have agency and cannot be micromanaged. The attempt destroys everyday social responsibility and cooperation. Also, a life worth living can’t simply be provided for us. We have to live it, and the support all of us need is support for doing things we find difficult. Success can’t be guaranteed, failure is frequent, and politics cannot save us.
In the end, the effective disappearance of God means that progressivism ends in nihilism. The need for an absolute standard survives His disappearance, but nothing this-worldly can be absolute. A secularized Kingdom of God must therefore involve something without substantive content and impossible to realize—comprehensive equality. And since everything that exists violates equality, if only because it suppresses alternatives that some people prefer, everything that exists must be destroyed.
Social order must be destroyed, because it involves hierarchy. Hence “Defund the Police.” The Good, Beautiful, and True must be destroyed, because they denigrate my good, beauty, and truth, which must be made equal to the versions traditionally treated as objective. Culture must therefore debunk culture, and education destroy—rather than transmit—the heritage of the past.
Such is woke ideology, and that is what progressive Christianity tends toward by its basic logic. The past is bad, the future is glorious, and its glory consists in the divinization of man, the perfection of the social order, and the abolition of boundaries and distinctions.
There can be few Catholics who hold such views clearly and completely: the statements cited from His Eminence and His Holiness indicate nothing close to that. Even so, the influence of such views explains a lot of what we see in the Church, from the denunciations of “backwardism,” to the Synthesis Report of the First Session of the Synod on Synodality to the sexual mysticism put forward by such progressive favorites as Fr. Marko Rupnik and (in his suppressed book on spirituality and sensuality) the current Prefect of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith.
The lesson from all this is that without specific emphasis on God—not as symbol or manner of speaking or unknowable mystery but as reality and indeed the Most Real Being—Catholicism, along ultimately with thought and social life in general, goes mad and falls apart. God cannot be subordinated: if He could, He would not be God. Jesus made the command to love God the first and greatest commandment for a reason. To follow Jesus is first of all to follow him on that point.
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Christians ought to realize that secular humanism is the ploy Satan uses to denigrate God by elevating man in God’s rightful place. Put simply, Satan would have us worship man and not God.
Let’s face it: Satan hates God because the Son of God came to this world adopting a human nature and God willed man’s redemption.
Be very wary of what underlies secular humanistic motives.
ADDENDUM TO THE FIRST: You cannot love your neighbor (the poor, migrants, homeless, illegal aliens, apostate Cardinals, etc) unless you first love God (and your life demonstrates that you mean it and it’s not just empty words).
“Social order must be destroyed, because it involves hierarchy…. such is woke ideology, and that is what progressive Christianity tends toward by its basic logic. The past is bad, the future is glorious, and its glory consists in the divinization of man, the perfection of the social order, and the abolition of boundaries and distinctions.” The author observes.
The Paris Olympics Parody and debasement of The Holy Eucharist was but a brief head surfacing of what goes on not just underneath in a pagan culture, but re-paganisation of Christianity. If God cannot serve man’s anxiously perveted needs and outlook, man has been recreating the Golden Calf and later living a Pharasiic outlook that worship can subsist with sinful inclinations and a sardonic outlook. This is the spirit of the age and not so much of progressive Christianity.
I for one have been silently concerned that major feasts such as of Doctors of the Church are only fleetingly noted- allowed to pass by without the Spirit and the Lives of the Saints- being passed down on the faithful and popular culture to redirect true devotion. St. Augustine for one says in De Vera Religion that true worship serves God, not man. Along with his feast not being celebrated well enough and the wisdom not passed down it is almost like saying men and women – the faithful are on their own, accommodate “progressives” who are actually revisionists and scatters of the flock.
Yes it will take a lot to properly enliven and replant the wisdom of the Saints. The degeneracy of cultures however requires such focus, School of Saints in every dioscesce for each Catholic to learn one by one communally what each Saint absorbed of the Holy Spirit and replanted in the Church and popular culture to save it from paganism or Pharasiism if we can call progressivism and its intrusion in the Church.
Consider the following reflections from the Gospel readings of the 22Week Ordinary Time, to today 7th Saturday ’24.
1. Pharasees failed to recognise Jesus Christ and accept His works because they themselves living externally, could only see and interact externally and shirked – avoided the inner truths of Jesus’ message. When He healed, they thought like us someone is behind it or anyone else can do it. When He loved and mixed all people without reserve, He must have been one of them. He was, except by sin.
2. When Jesus Christ preached repentance, it was a mere religious ceremony – a feel good, look good and do good for acclaim and renown, rather than getting down to their fallen nature and duplicitous selves, and then rise with Him Godman who had stopped to their level.
3. They could only hear Jesus Christ at their own level, not in the totality of His Ministry to set the Captives Free and proclaim A Year of Favour for the Lord forgiveness of sins. As a result they missed him day in day out, forsook healing while sick inside and in their relations, forsook the light to pursue the darkness of their pleasures. They thought they have direct access to God, but mocked, sneered at Him, wanted to kill Him and eventually did when He was in their presence and asked them to renounced sin and earthly gods. We have no king other than Ceaser, it is said today as well.
Annual Eucharist Congress are an awesome start. Reactivation of and training in lay Ministries is another further step. As Hildegard of Bingen said- “we cannot live in a culture that is not our own”. We cannot be sentimental either about the past or dersive of the present. It is occasion to wake up from a multigenerational slumber
Thank you. I appreciate the School of Saints idea in every parish. Was it Aristotle or Aquinas who said the best way to virtue is to find and then follow a virtuous man. Of course Jesus was the first and foremost, Mary His Mother the second, and the saints follow them closely.
Yes, the culture is pagan and Christianity is following to become paganized Christianity.
Finally, that idea that progressives are the true pharisees is indeed glorious. They are today’s true backwardists! Let us lay down the welcome mat to Francis, his cronies, and all secular-progressive-humanist-‘Catholic’-Christians. Let their entree and belonging in the BackWard Club be less than anything they could ever have imagined. Then may they turn to their Lord and their God, begging His Mercy.
Complexity underlies the essence of progressives, which is why Aquinas said to identify the essence of something is extremely difficult. Illuminati antiCatholic artist intellectuals used the old trick of reverse psychology to demean Catholics. Presumed to expose Catholic hypocrisy, the apotheosis mentality of self glorification presumes vindication.
Kalb underscores this Woke ideology in the Paris Olympic Last Supper parody. And its identification with the self glorification of progressive Catholicism that has taken hold at the Vatican. This writer perceives the aura of fake humility worn by the protagonists at the Vatican as a cloak of authenticity. Deception at its finest, messaging the Church at large of a wonderful mystical revelation [it finds its roots in Karl Rahner’s mystical self revelation of God by faith], that love of self glorifies God replacing the ancient, dormant belief of a personal love of the person Christ, revealed to us as the exclusive truth for our salvation. The love of the true God revealed to us in the true Man.
True, Father, as we can know through both Faith and reason that “some of the greatest Christians I know are people who don’t actually have a kind of faith system that they believe in”, cannot possibly be true because one cannot be a follower of The Christ, if they do not believe He Is “The Way, And The Truth, And The Life”, Of Perfect Life-Affirming And Life-Sustaining Salvational Love, And “No one comes to My Father, except Through Me”, rules out a “kind of Faith system”, that is not grounded in The Word Of Perfect Love Incarnate, Jesus The Christ.
“Self glorification of progressive Catholicism “, is, in essence, an oxymoron.
Self glorification is grounded in pride. We need look further then the Bad Thief, who mocks and rejects The Sacrifice Of The Cross, to The Words Of The Good Thief, “…we have been condemned justly, for the sentence we receive corresponds to our crimes, but this man has done nothing criminal.” – (Luke 23)
“Jesus, Remember me, when You Come Into Your Kingdom”.
About monotheism and “coexistence”—connecting the one Golden Calf to the pluralism of pink calves floated at the Parish Olympics…
Mr. Kalb has distilled the pathology of “progressive-political-religious-ideology.”
It’s doorway drug is “sexual revolution,” the true “opium of the masses.”
It’s end-state conclusion is, as Mr. Kalb points out, that “Everything must be destroyed.”
In order to live under the tyranny of this long-march-over-the-cliff, “the establishment” exists to groom all people to voluntarily pretend that “reality isn’t happening.” And anyone who refuses to pretend must be punished as “enemies of the people.”
The problem for self-deceitful-Man is that Man isn’t God, and Man preferring to be what he is not, resents God.
The primordial lie echoes to this very day: “You surely shall not die.”
Here is a statement by a leading figure in “progressive-Christian-ideology,” (a man held in highest esteem by The Pontiff Francis), and a man we all know:
“The God who sits enthroned over the world and history as a changeless being is an offense to Man…this God must be opposed….”
Q: Who is the man who wrote and published this?
Cardinal Kasper.
http://www.ncregister.com/news/understanding-cardinal-walter-kasper
https://crisismagazine.com/opinion/the-magisterium-of-the-iphone-church
Meiron:
Yes…Kasper, 1967, his work “God in History.”
I will post a reference link in next comment.
Kasper is one of the hierarchs of “the apostasy-church-decapitate-The-Body-of-Christ.” The chief high priests of this apostate-church are the sociopath-liar-pederast McCarrick, the queer-ideologists Cardinals Hollerich SJ and McElroy, and the sycophant-personality-cultists like Scicluna of Malta and Tagle of Phillipines. These men understand fir themselves that Jesus is not the Son of the Living God…he is nothing more than the antiquated hood ornament for the “scientific-queer-church-of-the-decapitated-Body-of-Christ,” of which they are the law-givers, not “this mythical Jesus” of the stone age “gospels,” per their guru Kasper.
They understand themselves in “their role in history” as the substitute clerical-god-head, the Sadducee-Priestly-Caste.
Regarding what Professor Stark voiced, while I understand his reluctance to “use strong words,” shying away from saying “apostasy” and “apostate” when describing Kasper (etc), Professor Stark’s posture, while understandable, is not edifying for the faithful, especially for the young (that is, it does not strengthen their faith). Unfortunately, Professor Stark is prioritizing deferential respect for persons ordained as hierarchs, over the faith of the young, even when such hierarchs outright deny the Gospel and the Apostles, and the testimony they gave, at the cost of their very lives. And there is no question that Kasper is an apostate. He explicitly denies the bodily resurrection of Jesus, a belief which he labelled as “grotesque” in his 1974 book “Jesus the Christ,” when he declared that the only thing he believes is that “the disciples saw Jesus in their hearts” when Jesus “obtruded in the spirit.” This, along with outright denying a ling list of specifically listed miracles, and summarizing “his teaching” about the “New Testament mythology” by telling his young readers: “we probably don’t need to believe these things.”
The egregious mistake and naivety and resultant dereliction of duty by Pope John XXIII when he launched “his vision” for the Second Vatican Council is declaring that the Church is so confident in its power to evangelize, and is so convinced that people everywhere are progressing to the truth, that “the Church no longer believes in condemning error.”
Yes Pope John, you not only don’t correct error, you now ordain apostates like Walter Kasper to be bishops and Cardinals, and these apostates now elect their preferred candidates to be pope, in the person of Pontiff Francis.
The Church establishment has now reached the pinnacle of unseriousness, and they have reduced themselves to a circus run by apostate hierarchs in royal court costume.
Whoever he is, he practices the same ideology of he who claims, “ If there is a union of a private nature, there is neither a third party, nor is society affected”, denying sin done in private relationships, is not sin, which denies God’s Universal Call To Holiness, To Be, In Essence, “Temples Of The Holy Ghost”, Jorge Bergoglio, who was not validly elected to The Papacy, due to the fact that prior to his election, he had defected from The Catholic Church.
Canon 188 §4 states that among the actions which automatically (ipso facto) cause any cleric to lose his office, even without any declaration on the part of a superior, is that of “defect[ing] publicly from the Catholic faith” (” A fide catholica publice defecerit“).
The argument that Jorge Bergoglio cannot be judged because he is Pope is a nonsequitur, as he defected from The Catholic Faith prior to his election to The Papacy, and the election is thus null and void.
We can know through our Catholic Faith grounded in The Deposit of Faith, that the denial of The Unity Of The Holy Ghost Is The Source Of All Heresy.
“It is not possible to have Sacramental Communion without Ecclesiastical Communion, due to The Unity Of The Holy Ghost”, For It Is” Through Christ, With Christ, And In Christ, In The Unity Of The Holy Ghost” (Filioque) that Holy Mother Church, outside of which, there is no Salvation, due to The Unity Of The Holy Ghost (Filioque) exists.
Jorge Bergoglio, having defected from The Catholic Church, The One Body Of Christ, prior to his election, could not possibly have the ability or the desire to accept The MUNUS, and thus the Ministerial Office , and thus, could not possibly be a Vicar of Christ.
“The merging of the sacred into the secular” by post-conciliar modernist Apostasy is well described herein, and has a clear solution described in Matthew 5.13:
“There is no more to be done…but throw it out of doors for men to tread it under foot.”