I have recently published a book entitled, The Church and the Culture of Modernity, which is available through Amazon.com.   My book is an attempt to disabuse the Catholic reader of the illusion that the Church's teaching can and should accomdate modern thought in order to more effectively communicate with the modern world and  that modernity at its best --namely democtratic liberalism -- is really neutral toward the Church and her divine mission and authority.

What follows in the book's Introduction:

Since the Second Vatican Council and the promulgation of Gaudium et Spes, it has been supposed that the Church is to be guided toward a fresh understanding of the modern world and to a rapprochement with its triumphant order by which the Church can speak meaningfully to modern man. At the time of the Council, it seemed to many in the Church that the modern world was a remarkable success. Certainly, it had succeeded in changing profoundly everything – a true novus ordo saeculorum.  The Church, it was feared, represented the old order that had passed away and become irrelevant in every aspect of civilized life, politics, economics, social organization, for the philosophical principles which were the intellectual foundation of that older civilized order had long since been cast off.  It was understood that the problems of the modern world were many, but there was an unshakeable confidence that the solutions could be found only within the scope of modern thought.

Yet in these forty-some years since the Council, both the Church and the modern world have suffered an unprecedented decline.  The promised "springtime" for the Church never came, instead she has suffered a winter of discontent that has exceeded her natural capacities to endure it; and the world has sunk morally and spiritually into a seemingly apocalyptic state. Although the generation of the much-vaunted Council will not likely see the renewal that the Council was supposed to precipitate, there are now unmistakable signs that the next generation may enjoy it. But the renewal will not be the fruit of Vatican II. That troubled council can, in my view, be little more                                                        than the catalyst for a more prosperous reconsideration of the issues it so wisely took up but less wisely deliberated.  But any reconsideration of the issues, the Sacred Liturgy, religious freedom, ecumenism, etc., cannot afford to ignore the counsels of Vatican II, for its success will depend upon a reinterpretation of what the Council declared, which will in turn depend on what Pope Benedict XVI has called the “hermeneutic of continuity".  Those who might wish to cannot simply make the Second Vatican Council go away any more than others could make Trent do likewise. By its own admission to being a strictly pastoral council and by its failure to clarify important matters for the Church Vatican II has not merited the tremendous importance attributed to it. But because the council is an historical reality in the Church and because it has been for forty years wrongfully regarded as having almost dogmatic status, it cannot, however much one wishes, be swept under the rug or relegated to the attic. Rather, let us, as is Pope Benedict's intent, welcome the prodigal home. It is my hope that in its very small and oblique way this book will help that effort.

The concern of this book is the relation of the Church to modernity. I do not say to the "modern world" because, in the first place, it is not my intent to try to "fix" the Second Vatican Council's declaration on that matter in Gaudium et Spes; and, second, because the Church's fundamental relation to the modern world is the same as it is in every age, that is, the relation of the City of God to the City of Man. Prudential considerations of how exactly to conduct that relationship is a matter for the Church's perennial wisdom.  I am only concerned with modernity as distinct from that which is merely modern or up-to-date. The Church does not regard what is modern as inherently bad or necessarily suspect. The Church is necessarily a traditionary institution but she has no animus against innovation as such or against what is new. Modernity is something different. Despite its obsession with the novel and its hostility to tradition, it is itself not of recent vintage. The roots of modernity go back as far as the 14^th century, but it is the child of the modern world (historically speaking) brought forth in its peculiar intellectual, social, political, and economic conditions. Those conditions obtained throughout European and American civilization and were given increasingly free reign by the event of, as well as the principles that informed, the French Revolution. While every great historical development needs a catalyst; the French Revolution was the catalyst for the development of modernity, but it was not its formal cause or source. It was rather a nascent modernity that caused the French Revolution.

Every deliberate action begins in thought and, as Pascal said, "to think well is the principle of morality." The source of modernity was bad thinking. And the source of that bad thinking was the abandonment of Aristotelian-Thomistic metaphysics.  The profound philosophical errors became the "DNA" that determined the character of the modern world.  Metaphysics asks (and answers) questions of the ultimate reasons for existence, of being itself. From the answers to such questions are formed our notions of truth, goodness, and the beautiful. And because metaphysics is the highest wisdom, it makes the most profound mistakes. This book is principally concerned with those mistakes and the inability of the prevailing opinion in the Church (despite Pope Benedict’s clarion calls) to take them fully into account in assessing the dangers of modernity to fundamental Catholic principles and all that depends upon the Church's adherence to them.

The failure among Catholics to understand the danger of modernity is primarily the result of two fundamental assumptions about modern civilization; that it is at once superior to all previous civilizations and that the culture of modernity can, like any culture, be Christianized in the same way that classical pagan culture was.   The first assumption is hubristic and is based on purely material and technological criteria; it presumes too a moral superiority, a presumption due to an inability to judge fairly and accurately both its own colossal moral and intellectual weakness and the moral and intellectual strengths of its classical and medieval progenitors. The second assumption follows from a failure to understand the nature of culture, that it is fundamentally the expression of man’s religious nature and that a secular culture can only be well ordered if it recognizes its religious foundation. Classical pagan culture, for all its hostility to and incomprehension of Christianity, was fundamentally religious and as such had a fundamental affinity to Christianity that modernity lacks. Classical paganism had also through the philosophical tradition of the Platonic and Aristotelian schools a profound metaphysical affinity to Christian theology. Modern philosophy’s abandonment of what became known as the realist tradition in metaphysics uprooted western thought from that deep affinity. Behind both assumptions lay a still more fundamental failure to understand the culture of modernity as historically and intellectually apostate, that its historical and intellectual development was an ever-deepening rejection of and estrangement from Christianity and Catholicism.  These assumptions are not innocent of a deep prejudice in favor of modernity; they reveal an unwillingness as well as an inability to think outside of a modern framework of thought.

The Church's relation to the modern world can only be correctly understood as being at a profound level and in certain unavoidable ways antagonistic. The antagonism is fundamentally not a conflict between nature and grace or the sacred and the profane, but a conflict between a spiritual order devoted to transcendent realities and a temporal order devoted exclusively to the mundane realities of material existence. That is to say, it is the perennial conflict between, as St. Augustine conceived them, the City of God and the City of Man. But because modern civilization is a corruption of a Christian one, the conflict between modernity and the Church is more complex and problematic than the conflict between the two “Cities” in Augustine’s doctrine. For the Church’s evangelical mission to all that was once Christendom is not a perfect stranger to Christianity but a prodigal son. So, now it is a question of the Church’s relation to a temporal order in the modern world that is not, as it was in Augustine’s time, still virgin soil, that is, still unaffected by Christian influence but one which has for a long, long time progressively effaced, distorted, and opposed that influence. This rejection of grace makes by the modern world make a tremendous difference in the Church’s relation to it. The Christianization of the Empire and (eventually) the civilization it encompassed, meant the infusion of grace into the temporal order has been infused with the grace (actual not sanctifying) of Christian truth.  With the death of Christian culture, what was a cooperative relationship between the spiritual and the temporal orders is now a hostile one.

Even in a Christian civilization the temporal order, so far as it is necessarily determined by original sin, is in need of grace. Now that the specifically Christian culture of old Europe is largely dead that grace no longer obtains in the temporal order. Still it nevertheless operates; otherwise, the Church's mission would be impossible except by miraculous interventions. Modernity, if we understand it as the rejection or exclusion of Christian truth, is neither inevitable nor natural to the temporal order, since modernity often violates the natural order of goods, claiming that no such objective order exists. While the temporal order may recognize the transcendent, it is not naturally oriented to it; hence, the perennial conflict even when there is a formal wish to cooperate as in the conflicts between Church and State in the Middle Ages. Modernity, on the other hand, does not recognize the transcendent order; it does not acknowledge its existence whose reality is independent of man and which lays claim to his devout attention in all that he does. In so far as the first principle of modernity is man's autonomy from any authority above his own, it and Catholicism are not merely in conflict; they are mutually exclusive views of reality. For the first lesson of Christian (or any realist) metaphysics is that man is a contingent being.  Catholicism and modernity differ in the same way as do a teacher of Thomist metaphysics and a lunatic who thinks he is God.

There are those who reject modernity intellectually, at least in its most discernable tenets, but accept it at the level of culture, insisting that enculturation is the principal means by which the Church can communicate the Gospel. But there is a subtle mistake in this position. It tacitly and uncritically supposes that intellectual ideas have little or no effect on culture or that by the time intellectual ideas filter down to cultural experience they become merely ethical problems which cannot be dealt with intellectually, because they have become part of our subjective experience of reality and must be dealt with as such. Hence, evangelism is more concerned with moral, social, and cultural problems than with the intellectual source of those problems. This is a great mistake because the Church cannot communicate the Gospel to those whose subjective experience of reality is out of kilter with objective reality. It is then not only a question of moral behavior, for example, ending abortion and the social conditions that foster it.  More importantly, it is a question of the intellectual principles that make such evils acceptable and commonplace. I do not suggest that evangelism can afford to ignore the subjective experience of the unbeliever, still less his cultural perceptions of reality, nor do I deny that love, as opposed to mere rational argument, is the modus operandi of evangelism. But the end to which evangelism aims is not, as in therapeutic psychology, to help the person feel good about himself, but to bring him to an understanding and acceptance of certain objective and eternal truths. To do that one has to disabuse the modern man of his profound misapprehensions of reality, especially the spiritual realities that determine his eternal welfare.

While the prospects are dim, for the culture of western civilization has been all but swallowed up by modernity, there remains, for now at least, some distinction between modernity and western culture in so far as the intellectual, moral, and social traditions of the old western culture have not been utterly forgotten or rendered irrelevant. Those traditions, however, grow more tenuous by the day.  In so far as the Christian culture that once obtained in the west is still active in Catholic thought and imagination (at very least) and can be articulated in the intellectual disciplines and in art and literature, it need not become a dead letter and may yet be a great attraction to a generation whose culture, they perhaps are beginning to realize, is morally and spiritually starving them. 

Many would insist that it is a fear of change that makes one adhere to tradition and that tradition is a kind of worship of the past, which is dead. It is rather the obverse that is true: those who eschew tradition worship the present or, what is worse, the future, which does not exist.  The worship of the present is the worship of change; it is the worship of mere sensation. Tradition alone is what makes the past live in the present. To deny the past’s participation in the present or refuse to recognize it and have its play in the present is to be scarcely half conscious. Modernity denies the role of tradition because tradition receives, preserves, and passes on what it receives; modernity receives nothing that it does not remake in its own image. Whatever is processed through the modern consciousness, that is what passes the scrutiny of modern thought, always comes out a different thing from what it is.  

Nevertheless, it is necessary to make a distinction between modernity and modern. All that is modern is not modernity. As mentioned already, not everything modern is hostile to Christian truth. This is true of technologies, forms of government, social habits, etc.  But in so far as these elements of modern civilization are subsumed by the culture of modernity they become dangerous, if not actively corrupting. Though they are not things which the Christian must forswear, in the cultural environment in which they flourish, they are somewhat “wild” because modernity places no serious moral boundaries round them. So, the Christian must be wary of their influence and is obliged to condemn their perversion or abuse.

It is then imperative that the Church be, especially in conjunction with her message of hope, extremely critical of the culture of modernity and its distortions of the temporal and natural orders ordained by God for the good of man. Even at her most critical, the Church always bears in mind the distinction between what is merely modern and secular in the innocent sense of those words and what belongs to the culture of modernity which secularizes – turns to its own material ends -- everything it touches.

While the culture of any advanced civilization must allow for the secular, the secular does not have its own rights against the sacred, as though man's natural and spiritual proclivities are irrelevant to or exclusive of each other. They cannot be inherently at odds because they are both ordained by God, Who has ordered man to both. While an advanced culture cannot, like a primitive one, render all of its actions sacred, it can allow for man's spiritual proclivities to show themselves symbolically in sign and in public acts which signify the transcendent realities to which man's spiritual proclivities are ordered. It is, of course, an unhappy fact that regnant democratic liberalism with its pluralist public orthodoxy is scarcely tolerant – despite "tolerance" being liberal orthodoxy’s chief tenet – of any public displays of especially Catholic religiosity and is absolutely opposed to the confessional state. It is, nevertheless, imperative that the Church and her theologians insist, if only quietly, on her proper role as the supreme moral and spiritual authority in society and, in principle at least, on the confessional state as the most advantageous to her mission and, concomitantly, to the good of the members of a given society. Prudence may bid the Church speak sotto voce on the subject of the confessional state given a hostile democratic milieu ready to misconstrue the slightest word suggesting political authoritarianism, which to its mind is virtually totalitarianism.   The nineteenth-century popes were not shy to condemn liberal principles, which, as they manifested themselves in European society and politics, denied the supreme moral authority of the Church.  Catholics must heed, aside from that found in Gaudium et Spes and Dignitatis Humanae, the clearer and more emphatic teaching of earlier exhortations: the Syllabus of Errors (Pius IX), Immortale Dei and Longinqua (Leo XIII), as well as Quas Primas (Pius XI) in the 20th century, in which these popes condemned in principle the purely secular state. If those popes were bolder, it is in part at least because totalitarianism had not yet arisen in Europe and liberal democracy thus had not yet become by a fiat of liberal dogmatism an amendment to the natural law and something like a fundamental principle of human existence.

Vatican II's Declaration on the Church on the Modern World, Gaudium et Spes, underestimates the danger of modernity to Catholic thought and Catholicity in general; for the Council fathers seemed to be unaware of the considerable influence of modern thought on Catholic scholars and intellectuals and especially on themselves. Certainly, there were those in Rome and on the Council who were very much aware of the dangers of modern thought and warned of its influence on the Council, but it was not their political influence that prevailed in the end.

The influence of modernity upon the Catholic mind in the 19^th century was subtle and insidious and has its roots as far back as the nominalism of William of Ockham in the 14^th century. Among those most susceptible to its siren call were, curiously, apologists for the faith who wanted, as did the apologists of the early Church (like St. Augustine) to challenge the prevailing grounds for unbelief of the modern world. But these later apologists made the serious mistake of defending the Faith on modern philosophy's (viz., Kant and Hegel) own ground, arguing their conclusions to be wrong, while assuming uncritically their presuppositions to be correct.  Still later apologists, like Maurice Blondel, wanted not merely to defend the Faith but to bring Catholic thought up to date by conforming to philosophical principles, which they were convinced would make Catholic belief relevant and thus appealing to modern man. The odd and ironic thing is that Blondel et al. were reacting in part to what they considered the desiccated rationalism of their scholastic predecessors. Leo XIII's call to arms against modernity and modernism (as its manifestations in Catholic thought were called) under the banner of St. Thomas Aquinas was the Church's response to the challenge of modern thought to Catholic truth. But even the Pope's effort, by promulgating his encyclical, Aeterni Patris, to clarify the true foundations of Catholic thought, was in some degree compromised by the way in which St. Thomas was understood by Catholic theologians who had received their Thomism from certain dominant Thomists, like Josef Kleutgen. These Thomists had been misdirected by modern thought to extract from St. Thomas a theory of knowledge with which to answer the questions posed by modern epistemology. The unintended result was a distortion of Thomism into a form of thought that was uniquely modern and alien to the scholastic tradition, rendering Thomism one more contending player in the dysfunctional, open-ended game that is modern thought. This may suggest how difficult and intricate the influence of modern thought had become.  By the time of the Council a number of contending Thomisms had developed, which had complicated and impeded the good intentions of Aeterni Patris.

After Vatican II, the theological modernism which the Church had fought steadfastly for the first sixty years of the 20^th century had, it seemed, finally prevailed. The "spirit of Vatican II", the wind of change that would at last bring the Church fully into the modern world, had in a very short time succeeded in leveling every tradition in its path, making every accommodation to modernity it could bureaucratically manage. Gaudium et Spes did not explicitly call for this accommodation or, better, capitulation, to modernity; but neither did it provide any unambiguous and declarative principle that could silence those who would use it to that end.

The Church's fight against theological modernism as well as its critique of modernity was, as it turned out, only superficially successful. The disciplines she imposed on the study of theology and philosophy in the seminaries and Catholic centers of study to give precedence to the study of St. Thomas were only effective in driving the most radically disaffected with traditional Thomism underground. And many of those who were not yet disaffected found the rote and mechanical way St. Thomas was all too often taught, unengaging and awkwardly unintelligible or unpalatable to the intellectual milieu they knew outside the seminary or Catholic university. This problem was not necessarily the fault of either those who failed to make the Thomism they taught viable or of their students who rejected it. It was rather a misappropriation of St Thomas on both sides of the widening divide in the intellectual community of the Church. What seemed more useful to the students and scholars who rejected Thomism were the works of those Catholic intellectuals and theologians who recklessly, it seems now, accommodated modern thought and thereby rendered a fresh and "relevant" interpretation of St. Thomas and of Catholicism itself. Few of those so taken in by the new theologians and persuaded to give over the ancient traditions of Catholic thought for modern forms had ever considered how it was they came to be presented with such a choice nor what was the pedigree of errors that produced their new Catholicism.

This pedigree, well know among the critics of modernity, is long and distinguished, extending from as early as the 14^th century's William of Ockham to Descartes in the 17^th century and then to Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Hegel in the 18^th and 19^th centuries. The brightest light in all of philosophy of those four hundred and more years of growing skepticism and confusion was -- before it all began -- St. Thomas Aquinas, whose work marks the apogee and, perhaps too, the perfection of the scholastic tradition in theology and philosophy. In that period of the decline of philosophy and the growth of skepticism, whose culmination was the nihilism of Nietzsche, Thomism was obscured under the ashes of a scholasticism which in the larger intellectual community of Europe had been burned in effigy. The Thomistic school of the great Jesuit and Dominican commentators, like Suarez and Cajetan, kept Thomism alive in Catholic thought while Europe was rapidly ceasing to be Catholic.  But these Jesuit and Dominican commentators also compromised Thomism in subtle ways that have only recently come to clearest light in the work of Alasdair MacIntyre and Ralph McInerny, though observed earlier by Etienne Gilson and Henri de Lubac. Although admittedly controversial, their critique of the Thomistic tradition was not intended to eradicate it but to correct and strengthen it.  If the Church is to speak convincingly to the modern world, she must disabuse herself of the effects of modernity in her own house. But the solution is less like housecleaning than like physical rehabilitation. It is my contention in this book that she must begin to exercise again the great scholastic tradition and (especially) the Thomism that belongs to it which have been largely in desuetude for over half a century. The scholastic tradition and Thomism have not been discredited only impugned by its enemies and confounded by its friends. I argue that without the scholastic tradition, Thomism cannot remain itself, nor can the tangle of truth and falsehood in modern Catholic theology ever be sorted out.

I insist throughout this book that at the heart of the modern mistake has been a rejection of realist metaphysics. Until modern man is “converted” at the ground floor of his thinking, he will never see straight, but, like the dipsomaniac, will stumble and stammer his way to perdition. Man’s profoundly cock-eyed vision of reality is not primarily a matter of morality which is in the order of the will, but is primarily a matter of thought, of deepest habits of understanding, to which morality is intrinsically bound. That is a matter of the intellectual order of things. There is no love without truth.