Fatal mistake of the Council and the post-Conciliar years. Now we have a Crisis Conclave.

Conclave and Aggiornamento (bringing up to date- implying an openness to the world)

There was a time when Councils were convened to defend the truth. But then came the time when one was convened to apologize for having defended it.

This desire to reset tradition was called aggiornamento, and today there are still legion of cardinals who persevere in it. In a recent interview with COPE, for example, Cardinal Omella, Archbishop of Barcelona, ​​stated that "Fidelity to the Gospel was incarnated in modern times, through the Second Vatican Council, with aggiornamento."

These are difficult words to understand. We could even call them a display of confusion, a desire to change the meaning of terms. Doesn't fidelity consist in adhering to a truth that neither ages nor withers, and not in adapting to the times? Are we to understand that Christ became incarnate to negotiate with the Pharisees, to catch up with Herod, to dialogue with the merchants of the Temple?

But this is not just a semantic confusion; in this phrase, the very concept of "fidelity" is falsified, passing off as its exact negation. While fidelity implies the steadfastness of one who remains faithful to the eternal Truth, aggiornamento supposes the opposite: a tireless search for consensus, that is, for what Gómez Dávila so aptly described when he said, "Consensus is the meeting place of men without principles."

By equating aggiornamento with the Incarnation, the essential Christian fact becomes an act of cultural mimicry. Christ did not become flesh to discreetly integrate into the moral landscape of his time, but to raise a banner of contradiction. The order of factors alters the product, Cardinal: it is the Church that elevates the world toward the light of the Gospel, not the world that adapts the evangelical message to its whims.

If instead of transforming the world, we rely on the world to transform the faith, are we aware that we are inverting the logic of the Gospel? The historical implication is also disturbing: if true fidelity began with aggiornamento, should we conclude that nineteen centuries of Christianity were mistaken or incomplete? An astonishing forgetfulness of the Holy Spirit.

However, it must be said that Omella is right in pointing out the origin of this nonsense, reminding us that since the Second Vatican Council, all the Popes, with greater or lesser conviction, have followed this path.

We said that each council had been an act of combat, an uprising in defense of the Truth: Nicaea against Arianism; Lateran IV against Albigensian Gnosticism; Trent against Protestantism, etc. But in dramatic contrast, Vatican II did not condemn the then-dominant heresy, modernism, but rather made it the new orthodoxy, paradoxically leaving outside the walls that which until then had impeded its unfolding: the tradition of the Church. Aggiornamento was born as a surrender dressed in courtesy, a liberal adaptation of religion to the taste of the century.

Let's grant that some promoter of the idea once harbored some sound intentions, and that he believed in good faith that, by surrendering the Church to the world, the world would fall at its feet. But today, with the perspective of six decades, the evidence to the contrary is overwhelming: aggiornamento has been to the Church what progressive pedagogy is to the educational system: a beautiful suicide with a smile on its lips. So it is extraordinarily difficult to understand how so many cardinals can continue to uphold this fiction.

In the disenchanted world warned of by Max Weber, aggiornamento has prevented the Church from standing as the bearer of Truth, the custodian of the revealed Mystery, transforming her into a gentle echo of secular society. From a theological perspective, the gravity of this act should not escape us: aggiornamento practically entails the surrender of the Church to one of the three enemies of the soul: the World. From a philosophical perspective, it entails placid integration into what Giorgio Agamben called "bare life": a merely biological existence, lacking spiritual density, reduced to its animal survival. A Church that renounces the transcendent to make itself friendly to a disenchanted world does not save souls: it trains them for the gilded cage of a zoological life, while forgetting that its mission was not to foster the "good life," but to point the way to the "good life." This path of openness is no longer just a pastoral strategy: it is a theology of demolition. It's no longer about "accompanying" the modern world: it's about dissolving into it like sugar in lukewarm coffee.

But Omella is right: during these sixty years, no Pope, not even those considered "conservative," has wanted, known, or been able to say out loud that the aggiornamento was a mistake. Saint John Paul II, Benedict XVI, even they opted for a strategy of melancholic management of the disaster. Certainly, Pope Francis, a Jesuit citizen, Jorge Mario Bergoglio, did not cause the illness; he only brought it to its climax.

And after his death, the crucial moment arrives, the next Conclave. It will decide whether the Church can—in both senses of the verb "can"—recover its essence in the face of a world that denies it. Or whether, on the contrary, it will continue digging its own grave, convinced that success will come, this time, with more Synodical meetings, more speeches about listening, more creative liturgies with colorful balloons.

History teaches us that good intentions are not enough. The aggiornamento sought to transform faith into a "religious experience" mouldable to the consumer's taste. A grave error: the moment faith is reduced to subjective experience, it ceases to be an act of assent to revealed Truth. As Romano Guardini wrote in The Essence of Christianity: "Faith is not an experience, but an obedience to the reality that precedes and transcends us."

Faced with disenchanted modernity, the Second Vatican Council also sought to disenchant the Church; in a world losing its sense of the sacred, the Church chose to blend in by renouncing its ultimate treasure: the guardianship of the Sacred.

But this aggiornamento, in which Omella perseveres, has already left too many lukewarm souls, too many cold churches, too many silent altars. It is vital to abandon this perverse idea. The Church cannot continue to deny its foundation.

When you are in a hole, the English say, the first thing you must do is stop digging. The question is whether the Church still has a free hand, in the broadest sense of the term, to lay down the shovel.

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