In preaching the Papal retreat for 1976, Cardinal Wojtyla warned of “rebellion,” i.e., the apostasy of the present age, the source for the present crisis of faith facing the Church. I believe it is consistent with Church teaching on spiritual warfare to see in St. Paul’s “son of perdition” one who would lead humanity away from the Church toward a humanist, man-centered world-view claiming the right of authorship of the moral law. This also explains why those who dissent from Church doctrine and the authority of the magisterium claim an amorphous “spirit of Vatican II” (an “anti-word?”) as their authority for what amounts to unbelief. In our own time the reader perhaps has experienced the war for the soul of men waged between the authentic Christian humanism of the Gospel, which permeates the teaching of John Paul the Great, and the “new humanism” which violates the rights of God as true Author of all that is good. John Paul II had it just right: “Without the Creator, the creature vanishes.”
MONDAY last I posted that Pope Francis might not be all that the secular media consider him to be, recommending a First Things piece on the matter. Today we read of Archbishop Chaput's interview with John Allen of the National Catholic (?) Reporter , in Rio for WYD. What caught my attention was the Archbishops's comment that alienated, non-serious Catholics perhaps interpret the Pope's openness as being less concerned than his predecessors with doctrine, and that it is already true that "the right wing of the Church" has not been happy with his election. As I argued in The Smoke of Satan , and as George Weigel has eloquently posited in Evangelical Catholicism , the political terms left and right are woefully inadequate as measurements of one's standing in the Body of Christ. There are only the orthodox, and the heterodox.
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