Point 32. Against the Universalism of Maritain

Impatience with the world’s religious divisions and with the Church’s too narrow confines, produces damaging effects that are comparable to the progressivists’ impatience with the slowness of history and the Church’s longstanding imperfections.

1. To certain large-hearted moderns, of whom Jacques Maritain is typical, the unity and catholicity of mediaeval and classical Christendom – still as yet obscured and damaged by the Protestant Reformation – appeared too narrow, too intolerant, and ultimately unworthy of the Holy Spirit, who cannot be confined to such a ghetto nor stopped by any barrier! They therefore advocated “ a new Christendom ”, one which would have greater breadth, openness, and universality by not being “ sacral ” but “ profane ”. Instead of being the King of kings and the Lord of glory, Jesus Christ would be the servant of the world, and that incognito. Instead of presiding over the world as its “ mother and mistress ”, the Church would merely be its servant, offering her Gospel as a discreet leaven, anonymous and invisible, in the dough of a pagan world.

2. This immense mutation – willed by the Spirit, announced by the signs of the times, and demanded by the modern world – would be accomplished by a “ quiet revolution ”. Instead of being founded on faith in God and subject to the Roman Church, this new Christendom would be founded on faith in man, the basis of modern civilisation, and governed by a world democratic assembly. Christ’s Gospel, transposed into neutral terms, would correspond to the common denominator of all the ideologies and beliefs, formerly in competition but now convergent: the Declaration of the Rights of Man. Declericalised and secularised, Christendom would become the universal organisation of peoples, yesterday’s League of Nations and today’s United Nations Organisation, galvanising the peoples’ energies and their feeling of solidarity through the ideal of a world democracy, respectful of the dignity, liberty and equality of all men.

3. The Phalangist rejects this fantasy straightaway. He smells the blasphemy in it. He sees a very thinly disguised apostasy in this bold substitution of the cult of man for the cult of God at the centre and summit of this so-called new Christendom. The Church is dragged down by the dethronement of her Spouse. As the soul of sacred Christendom, we behold her violently despoiled of her social historical body and prostituted to new masters, amongst whom international judaeo-freemasonry can be recognised in the front line.

Maritain’s Integral Humanism is a truly dark and satanic adventure which, together with Father Congar’s reformism, has become the second driving force of the conciliar and postconciliar subversion of Pope Paul VI and the Second Vatican Council.