Against Modernism, by David Warren

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*Image: Pope Pius X by Liborio Prosperi [Vanity Fair magazine, 10 December 1903]

By David Warren, The Catholic Thing, Nov. 17, 2023

David Warren is a former editor of the Idler magazine and columnist in Canadian newspapers. He has extensive experience in the Near and Far East. His blog, Essays in Idleness, is now to be found at: davidwarrenonline.com.

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Perhaps my criticism of the Instrumentum Laboris, and the various documents that follow from it through the Synod on Synodality, is trivial. This is because I find them trivial. Doctrines are suggested without any argument besides the implication that they are modern and up-to-date.

To start narrowly and personally, I did not become a Catholic in order to be modern and up-to-date. I did have to choose. Indeed, I was fleeing the intellectual, spiritual, emotional and sometimes physical fashions of my time, by signing up to the Church. Had I been born a Catholic, I do not see how I would not have had to pass through a similar revulsion. For I cannot imagine an upbringing, anywhere in the modern world, where this could be avoided. …

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