The Revolution of 1968

Infiltrated into the Church in France

Confession of a Dominican of Avrillé (Convent of the Bonshommes)

 

Father P.-M., theologian and writer at the convent of the Dominicans of Avrillé, a community that walks in unison with the Society of Saint Pius X, one day made me this confession during a walk: “We are the generation of the revolution of 1968, a generation of corrupted minds.” I then said to myself: “Oh dear ! In what state must he himself be?” Nevertheless, one must acknowledge that he had been honest.

 

I did indeed complete a year of novitiate in that convent, but I left it because of grave abuses on the intellectual, canonical and liturgical planes. Moreover, these religious profess the so-called “R&R” position (recognize and resist): recognizing the antipopes as popes, while resisting them.

 

I have always resisted this corruption of the mind, which I had already encountered at the University of Antwerp. There I had first abandoned my philosophy studies out of disgust for modern and decadent philosophy, and later my law studies, in order to answer my priestly vocation.

 

What is meant by “the revolution of 1968”?

 

The expression primarily designates the ideological and cultural upheaval known as “May 68” in France, whose influence rapidly spread to all of Western Europe and the university world. It was not a political revolution in the classical sense of the term, but a profound moral, intellectual and cultural subversion.

 

At its heart, the corruption introduced in 1968 was a corruption of the intelligence and of moral judgment. It consisted in a systematic rejection of objective truth, of authority, of hierarchy and of tradition. Reason was no longer understood as ordered to truth, but as an instrument of emancipation from every norm. The result was the exaltation of subjectivism, of relativism and of permanent contestation.

 

In the intellectual domain, particularly in the universities and seminaries, this revolution favoured ideologies hostile to classical philosophy and theology: Marxism, Freudianism, structuralism, and later radical relativism. Truth was replaced by “critical consciousness,” that is, by an attitude of suspicion toward every received doctrine. The very notions of nature, of finality and of objective moral law were denied or held up to ridicule.

 

The consequences in the seminaries and novitiates

 

It was young men of that era, believing themselves to have a vocation, who entered our seminaries and our novitiates.

 

On the canonical and institutional plane, this mentality engendered contempt for law and discipline. Authority was presented as oppression, obedience as alienation. Consequently, canonical norms were ignored, religious life desacralized and formation weakened. Personal opinion took the place of the rule, and experimentation that of fidelity.

 

On the liturgical plane, the same spirit manifested itself by an aversion for the sacred, for the rite and for the objective sense of worship. The liturgy was no longer regarded as a received heritage, but as a matter to be reinvented at the whim of the community or of the celebrant. Reverence yielded to spontaneity, and symbolism was reduced to a horizontal and sociological expression.

 

An intelligence to be set right

 

When Father P.-M. described his generation as a generation “of corrupted minds,” he spoke truly, in that he recognized that this generation had been profoundly marked by an intellectual deformation: the loss of the sense of truth, of order and of the primacy of God. The tragedy, however, is that many of those who recognized this corruption nevertheless remained shaped by it, often without their knowledge, including within religious and university institutions.

 

This is precisely what he was admitting. He, at least, was aware of it; but he gave me the impression that the straightening of his intelligence was far from achieved. How, indeed, can one repair from top to bottom a deformation of the intelligence?

 

Father P.-M. made this confession to me just after answering the question I had put to him: Is not Vatican II heretical, since Dignitatis humanae rejects the kingship of Christ, which is a dogma? The contradiction between this document and the kingship of Christ had in fact been clearly established by Archbishop Lefebvre in his work They Have Uncrowned Him. He replied to me: “The kingship of Christ is not a dogma.” I did not insist: he was the great theologian, and I the little novice.

 

According to him, therefore, Vatican II is not heretical, and one must consequently continue to recognize the present popes.

 

Later I established that it is indeed a dogma. He ought to have known it; but he himself spoke of the “corruption” of the intelligence, and that does not seem to me a coincidence.

 

Saint Pius X teaches in the encyclical Pascendi Dominici gregis that the root of modernism is pride, and that it is a disease of the intelligence.

 

Prevention is better than cure

 

To resist the “corruption of the mind” therefore means to refuse relativism and to remain faithful to objective truth, to classical reason, to a sound philosophy and to authentic doctrine, even when the prevailing intellectual climate spreads confusion in the name of liberty.

 

Abbé Éric Jacqmin +

Editor of this site

 

N.B. Subsequently, this same Dominican father published in their review Le Sel de la terre an article summarizing the opinion of John of St. Thomas on the case of a heretical pope: according to that author, a council of bishops would be necessary to depose a heretical pope. Yet this thesis is expressly refuted by St. Robert Bellarmine, cardinal and Doctor of the Church.

 

Be that as it may, he now seems to admit that he who sits in Rome under the title of pope is a public, manifest and notorious heretic. That is already a step forward.