Chapter 8

The New Catechisms

Among Catholics, I have often heard and continue to hear the remark,

They want to impose a new religion on us.

Is this an exaggeration?

The modernists, who have infiltrated themselves everywhere in the church and lead the

dance sought at first to reassure us. You simply have that impression because old obsolete ways

have been changed, but for compelling reasons. We cannot pray now exactly as people used to pray.

We've had to sweep away the dust, adopt a language that can be understood by our contemporaries, and open ourselves up to our separated brethren.

But nothing has really changed, of course. But then they began to take fewer precautions,

and the bolder ones among them began to make admissions. and the bolder ones among them began to make

admissions, in little groups of like-minded people, and even publicly.

One, Father Cardonell, went round preaching a new Christianity, in which,

that precious transcendence that makes God into a universal monarch would

be challenged. He openly adopted Lozzi's modernism by saying, if you were born into a

Christian family, the catechisms you learnt are mere skeletons of the faith,

and our Christianity would seem to be neo-capitalist at best.

And Cardinal Sunens, after reconstructing the church to his own liking, called for an opening up to the widest theological pluralism,

and for the setting up of a hierarchy of truths, with some that must be strongly believed,

others that must be believed in a little, and others of no importance. In 1973, on the premises of the Archbishop's

house at Paris, Father Bernard gave a course of lectures of a thoroughly official kind

under the banner of adult Christian formation. In it, he repeatedly affirmed, Christ did not conquer death.

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