The counterfactual optimism of heretics keeps them in the Church while working to destroy it.
By Jennifer Bryson, Crisis Magazine, March 24, 2023
Jennifer S. Bryson, Ph.D., is a Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, DC and a Visiting Researcher at Hochschule Heiligenkreuz. She lives in Austria.
Fifty years ago, then-Fr. Joseph Ratzinger and Ida Friederike Görres were watching their era’s equivalent of a livestream of the implosion of the Church in Europe. And they were asking the same questions about the “reformers” in the Church that many of us are asking today:
Why are they so optimistic about their efforts that are patently leading to a decline in the Church? And why do these people remain in a Church they so clearly despise? And, daring to utter the s-word, when will the powers that be finally pull out a red card and declare, “schism”? …