remnantnewspaper | By: Bishop Rob Mutsaerts
The Church's most dangerous revolution is the one that never admits it is happening. Bishop Rob Mutsaerts exposes how pastoral ambiguity, progressive reforms, and local experiments erode Catholic teaching while claiming to leave doctrine untouched.
The Deceptive Tactics of the Quiet Revolution
Over the course of two thousand years, the Catholic Church has endured just about everything that can happen to an institution: bad popes, corrupt bishops, heresies, schisms, revolutions, persecutions, decadent monasteries, dissolute clergy, and theologians so determined to be original that, in the end, they were the only ones who still understood what they meant.
And yet the Church is still here. Not because Catholics have always been sensible. That would be a rather daring historical hypothesis. The Church survived because, time and again, one remarkable phenomenon occurred: once the smoke had cleared, the quarrels subsided, and the intellectual acrobatics exhausted themselves, Catholic orthodoxy proved to have extraordinary staying power. Arius disappeared; Nicaea remained. The Cathars disappeared; the Creed remained. Jansenism, Modernism, and dozens of other fashions arrived proclaiming themselves the future and ended up as footnotes. Catholicism has a fairly simple litmus test: continuity. Hence the importance of Tradition, of the faith handed down to us.
"That is the Quiet Revolution. Not the denial of dogma, but its evaporation."
That does not mean that nothing may ever change. The liturgy has developed, canon law has changed, ecclesiastical disciplines have been modified, and theological formulations have been refined. An oak tree looks different after five hundred years than it did when it was an acorn. But when a tulip suddenly grows out of that acorn, “development” is no longer the right word.
And that is precisely the problem at the heart of the present crisis in the Church. There is no spectacular storming of the Vatican. First, the doctrine remains unchanged. The modern ecclesiastical formula runs more or less as follows: “Of course the teaching does not change, but our pastoral approach must change.” That sounds reassuring—until pastoral practice spends years communicating precisely the opposite of the teaching that supposedly remained unchanged.
Take Germany. The German Synodal Way has not merely discussed administrative reforms or better oversight of episcopal authority. Its official agenda included sexuality, homosexuality, the role of women in ecclesiastical offices, and the structure of authority within the Church. In 2023 ...
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