Reporting of Roman correspondence
Of Giovanni Tortelli
In the previous article «Maggio ‘68», the revolution of nothing I insisted onessentiality of the cultural revolution character of the '68 protest as a vehicle of a new totalizing system of knowledge that was suddenly replaced, antithetical and manifest to the previous one.
The nullifying thought of Sartre and the new philosophers – which clearly constituted thearché within which the entire alleged pedagogical renewal of the student protest moved - it was very current in 1968, but it was nothing other than the latest updated version of that postmodern philosophy from Kant onwards, starting from the French Revolution, had closed the doors of supernatural life to man, he had reduced religion to a personal matter at best and reduced the Church in its values ​​and universal teaching.
But for the Church – which, must be remembered, carries out its educational action both in civil society schools through agreements reached with the States, both directly through Catholic schools – that skeptical philosophical thought, an atheist and agnostic was to be considered an overall less insidious danger, because external, compared to modernism, which instead smoldered inside and insinuated itself both into the teaching method of Catholic teachers and into the way of learning of Catholic disciples, future teaching class.
Just the day after the Feeding, modernism showed that it had not given up its fight against faith at all, dogmas and tradition, according to the sinister wish of the heretic Ernesto Buonaiuti: «Day will come when our intimate faith, overflowing from our souls, and asking for official recognition in the chorus of solidarity that it will have been able to earn, it will break the limited barriers of Catholic orthodoxy and will gather within its fold those who religiously do good among men. That day, the theocracy of the Vatican, as the High Priesthood of Jerusalem, will have accomplished, and not gloriously, his mission in the world».
Gherardini taught, in his master's degree And I delivered it to you, that the sole aim of modernism has always been to overturn the principle of «perfect union of thought and intent» ("the same sensuous sentence": I Cor. 1,10) of the members of the Church.
That day hoped for by Buonaiuti began to dawn with the Second Vatican Council which, you are, renewed the Church inside and outside, making it become «pastoral», «not dogmatic», «ideological», «merciful», «open», «collegial», «friendly», «sensitive to needs», «understanding», «ecumenical», «to the service», «democratic, social and supportive».
A whole system of motivations and functions and a new terminology came to supplant and assert itself over its original Catholic nature, dogmatic, hierarchical, legal, of the priest, romana, curial, so "old and immobilized" as - it was accused - far from everyday life.
This time modernism had been let in through the front door of a “Catholic” council and had struck internal body of the Church with a very simple operation: thanks to appropriate hermeneutic variations, the ecclesial axis had been rotated in a historicist sense, disconnecting Scripture and Tradition from the Magisterium, that is, separating the two sources of Revelation from their apostolic dependence to instead connect them to the historical development in correspondence with events, facts, expectations, completely emergent and contingent pressures and situations.
Roberto de Mattei is right, in his history of the Council, talks about «correlation» between the Council and the student Sixty-eight and demonstrates that «the conciliar turning point» – which cannot be assumed as the cause of the dispute – however «in turn favored the explosion of the student revolt».
It is correct to speak of a "correlation" between the two events which, just a few years apart, determined the twentieth century like few others., because the correlation, which excludes consequentiality, always reveals a common ground between two elements.
Who, the ground of correlation consisted in the common background that the secular school and the Church involved in education found behind each other and from which both one and the other had to draw on in their respective educational actions: this common ground had been abundantly fertilized both by that nihilistic philosophy, sia da quel neoterismo modernista, in such a way that the secular student and the Catholic one ended up learning the same things.
The two educational models, the secular one and the Catholic one, in fact they presented the same characteristic of obeying the cultural pluralism e all’autonomy of teaching. In short, it was the educational and cultural element that provided the glue to "correlate" the Council and the '68 movement, and which produced on the one hand a clergy increasingly intolerant of the formal and merit controls of the Church, and on the other a protesting generation in the name of nothingness.
The common product was a heterogeneous culture, not selected, qualitatively poor and uncontrolled, a disobedient and rebellious culture, easily susceptible to error. Don Milani's words on his teaching method at the Barbiana school would have been just as good on the lips of any Lotta Continua leader or boss: «We need to have clear ideas when it comes to social and political problems.We must not be interclassists but aligned».
Father Ernesto Balducci, great admirer of Don Milani, wrote that the priest of Barbiana «he did not convey a religious announcement to the children, but a prophetic-messianic announcement whose decisive point is the transition from the state of inertia to the state of freedom, from the state of subordination to the state of autonomy».
It makes you wonder: but both Don Milani and Fr. didn't realize it. Balducci to move, to the utmost, in the context of civic education and not Christianity? Characters like Don Lorenzo Milani, Don Primo Mazzolari, p. Ernesto Balducci, p. David M. Turoldo, Don Enzo Mazzi, don Zeno Saltini, Don Giovanni Franzoni, Don Andrea Gallo and the many others who tried to combine the Gospel with communist practice and who interpreted their life as a mission for the redemption of the least, they are united by a fundamental misunderstanding: they have always shown that they believe the truth, especially the evangelical one, is the result of personal creativity, of the experience, and not instead a lumen which the intellect finds by faith and does not create.
They were champions of the modernist ideal in that they followed the main path traced by modernism, that is, the “feeling”, believing that the religious soul draws only from itself, and not by others, the object and reason of one's faith. And on that personal idea (feeling) of faith have conducted their action by accusing the Church of not being able to align itself with their particular point of view (feeling).
All of them, in the role of educators in various capacities, and on a par with the protesting generation of '68 who fought against a study model defined as oppressive, they believed that the purpose of teaching was only to create experiences, relegating to notional knowledge any type of knowledge that was extraneous to experience.
Corollary: the modernist pedagogical deviation, since it ascribes to knowledge only what is experience or lived, it also has harmful effects on the cognition of good and evil. If the knowledge of neoterics consists only in experience, then the Catholic distinction between the real order that responds to experience falls away, and ideal order that responds to the intellect and thus - according to the modernist error - evil would only be what is experienced while there would no longer be any intentional evil, or imagined.
But this is not knowledge, because it is knowledge when evil is present in the mind and the actual experience of evil is knowledge: the value of chastity, for example, the more you know it, the less you experience it. The development of the modernist error in the field of morality would take the discussion much further to the point of involving, and completely naturally, the truth.