Progressivism and Modernism
True progress is a passage from good to better — not from good to evil
Since the post-conciliar years, it has become common in the Church to distinguish between two opposing currents or tendencies: the so-called “conservatives” and the so-called “progressives”. The authors of this distinction were above all—though not exclusively—those who presumptuously referred to themselves as progressivists, imagining themselves as interpreters, protagonists, and promoters of the doctrinal, moral, and ecclesial progress ushered in by the Council, as heralds of the apertures, changes, reforms, and innovations it had introduced.
How was this deception by the modernists possible? How could that modernism, which seemed to have been defeated by Saint Pius X, be reborn with renewed allure? The fact is that the Pascendi encyclical was certainly an effective condemnation of modernist errors. Yet Pius X did not consider adopting the one legitimate intuition of the modernists: namely, that the time had come for the Church to assume the values of modern thought, rather than merely condemning its errors. Indeed, the modernists believed that it was the Church itself that needed to revise certain of its doctrinal judgments on modernity. And in this, they were mistaken—even though no one denies that, over the centuries, the Church has made mistakes in the pastoral sphere.
However, the request in itself was legitimate. But Saint Pius X did not undertake this discernment and recovery of the good present within modernity. On the other hand, even if the modernists had a valid intuition, they were also infected by the errors of modernity, especially those deriving from Luther, Descartes, and Kant. Thus, since the Church was not carrying out this work of critical appropriation, they attempted to do it themselves, without recognising that they were confronting a task beyond their strength—a task in which they could have succeeded only with the aid of the Church. But at that moment, that assistance was not forthcoming. They tried alone—and therefore failed.
Yet the failure was due above all to the fact that the modernists did not employ the right method. Instead of using the principles of St Thomas Aquinas, as recommended by the Church as a criterion of discernment and evaluation, they relied on the erroneous principles of modernity itself. As a result, they remained trapped within modernity, all the while presuming that they had completed a decisive work—one that the entire Church ought to adopt, lest it fall behind the tide of history and find itself isolated from the progress of humanity.
It was thus, by divine inspiration, that the idea of convening the Second Vatican Council arose in Saint John XXIII—a Council which, for the first time in the history of ecumenical Councils, did not present itself as restorative, conservative, corrective, or refutative, but as a Council aimed at promoting progress, growth, and advancement in truth, goodness, and holiness. It was a Council that, rather than concentrating on the still valid need for penance, for the sacrifice of the Cross, and the correction of vices and errors—rather than insisting on a return to the observance of some already known norm or truth, or advocating a recovery of former austerity after a period of laxity and decadence—sought instead to awaken in us the joyful and consoling presence of the Risen and merciful Christ, through His Spirit and as a foretaste of the last times.
It was therefore logical that progressives should lead a progressive Council. Even the conservatives, if they wished to remain faithful to the Council, found themselves obliged to become progressive—since the imperative and watchword of the time was this: we must progress and renew ourselves; we must take a step forward.
Conservation began to appear, in some quarters, as conservatism in the pejorative sense—a spirit of backwardness, an unhealthy resistance to the Council, and thus a culpable and anti-conciliar stance. Yet this was a serious and unfortunate misunderstanding, from which we still suffer today. The desire to safeguard the treasures of Tradition and to faithfully guard the deposit of faith came to be interpreted by some as a kind of sterile attachment to a past now considered obsolete—a dangerous resurgence of reactionary forces opposed to progress and modernity.
Who, then, had—and still has—an interest in fomenting such a grave and pernicious misunderstanding? Without doubt, it was—and continues to be—the modernists who, true to their style, seek to persuade us to abandon the very essence of the faith and of Christian morality, presenting them as mere residues of a bygone mentality, now supposedly surpassed by a transcendental, athematic experience of the Absolute Mystery.
Thus, immediately after the Council, among the progressives, two opposing tendencies began to emerge: one that embodied authentic progress, faithful to both the true teachings of the Council and to Tradition, and another that, under the guise of progress, actually smuggled in modernism. It is this second tendency that was—and remains—represented by the Rahnerians.
The trick of the modernists is well known: to present as good, true, right, modern, new, advanced, progressed, that which in reality stands in opposition to good morals, moral law, human dignity, logic, sound reason, Sacred Scripture, Sacred Tradition, dogma, and the doctrine of the Church.
I recall that when I taught theology in Bologna, some of my eminent colleagues judged my teaching as “useless, non-evolutionary, and too polemical.” And in truth, from their point of view, it was so: useless, because I called to mind forgotten values; non-evolutionary, because I did not follow Teilhard de Chardin and rejected dogmatic evolutionism; and too polemical, because I unmasked the errors of modernism—a typically modernist judgment.
(Translator’s Note: Teilhard de Chardin (1881–1955) was a French Jesuit priest, scientist, and theologian whose writings attempted to synthesize Christian theology with evolutionary theory. He proposed a vision of cosmic evolution culminating in the “Omega Point,” a concept he identified with Christ. His works were controversial and were censored by the Holy Office during his lifetime for ambiguous and heterodox theological positions, particularly concerning original sin and the nature of Christ. Nonetheless, he later gained wide popularity in progressive theological circles.)
A further trick of the modernists, still active today, is to reject as outdated the metaphysical categories employed by dogma and the Church's doctrine, under the pretext of the certainly undisputable need to renew theological language and use terms and concepts understandable to modern man.
Under this specious pretext, the modernists maintain that Christian truth—interpreted as a “transcendental, athematic experience”—ought to be expressed either in the “Semitic categories” presumed proper to the Bible or, preferably, by abandoning the “Greek categories” (that is, metaphysical ones) in favour of the language of “modern philosophy”: the concepts and principles of Luther, Descartes, Spinoza, Locke, Hume, Leibniz, Kant, Fichte, Schleiermacher, Schelling, Hegel, Marx, Comte, Carnap, Bertrand Russell, Gentile, Husserl, Heidegger, Severino—and why not? Even Nietzsche.
Translator’s Note:
Rahnerians: Followers of Karl Rahner (1904–1984), a German Jesuit theologian whose attempt to reconcile Catholic theology with modern philosophy profoundly shaped post-conciliar thought. His transcendental method, rooted in Kantian and Heideggerian frameworks, is criticised—especially by the Author—for allegedly obscuring the clarity and objectivity of classical dogma.
Severino: Emanuele Severino (1929–2020), a major Italian philosopher and frequent interlocutor of the Author. He rejected the classical notion of becoming, insisting on the eternal immutability of being, thereby opposing both Aristotelian metaphysics and Christian revelation.
Dogmatic evolutionism: The idea that Church dogma can evolve in substance over time, rather than develop organically in continuity with revealed truth. This position was condemned by Dei Filius (Vatican I) and Lamentabili Sane (Pius X), which affirm the essential immutability of dogma.
Transcendental, athematic experience: A term often associated with Rahner’s theology, denoting an implicit, pre-conceptual encounter with God. While it aims to articulate the universality of grace, it risks marginalising the objective content and defined truths of the Catholic faith.
The listed philosophers—from Luther to Nietzsche—represent key figures in modern and postmodern thought. Most advanced positions incompatible with Christian metaphysics, rejecting such foundational elements as objective truth, divine revelation, natural law, and the immortality of the soul.
Thoughts on Progress
Progress means to grow, to increase, to develop, to move forward, and to advance toward perfection or a final goal. It has many dimensions: technological, scientific, moral, cultural, historical, and spiritual. In all these, it is understood as a movement from good to better.
Progress pertains to the realm of life, and above all to spiritual life, for what is alive tends toward its full unfolding, and if it is spiritual, it expands in knowledge and refines action, without limit. In contrast, natural, physical, or cosmic phenomena—the workings of inanimate matter, forces, or energies—do indeed evolve, but only in repetitive cycles governed by natural law.
The so-called evolution of matter into spirit, of which Teilhard de Chardin speaks—that upward movement from the lowest material state to the highest spiritual—is a fiction. For Teilhard denies the primacy of spirit over matter, and of God over the world. He collapses spirit into matter, and thus makes creation ex nihilo (creation from nothing) impossible, replacing it with an immanentist evolutionism. In truth, God may indeed have allowed physical life to arise gradually over time, but human life, as the life of a rational and spiritual being, remains a unique act of divine creation.
Those who truly love progress know that it demands continual advance. To progress is not to stand still or go backwards. Those who love progress do not succumb to a nostalgic longing for a bygone past. Yet, they do seek to recover and reintegrate lost truths and virtues. Authentic progress is the perfection of traditional and immutable values, not their replacement. Their faithful conservation is assumed, not opposed.
Spiritual progress consists in growing in the knowledge and practice of unchanging values. To progress is to break with error, not with truth. It is to move forward in continuity with enduring truths. We must discern, within the heritage of Christian life, what is mutable and what is permanent.
God Himself commands progress: “Be fruitful and multiply.” We are called to bring to perfection what is still imperfect; to elevate what is already good, so that it may become excellent. There is such a thing as endless progress, but it ends—necessarily—with the attainment of the goal.
For progress is progress towards an end. One of the defining errors of modernist progressivism is that it fails to articulate the final goal of progress, or else it substitutes goals that are transient and perishable. If we do not know where we are going, then why are we walking at all? We do not walk for the sake of walking, but to reach a destination. Every agent acts for an end; if this end is not clear, firm, and definite, then for what purpose does one act?
It is possible to imagine a kind of infinite progress, and in a certain qualified sense, such progress can occur within the realm of the contingent and the relative. But even this presumes the possession—or at least the existence—of an absolute good and an ultimate final cause. Indeed, the finite, even when infinitely multiplied in succession, ultimately depends upon the perfect Infinite. Without this transcendent reference point, even the concept of progress collapses into incoherence.
Progress is directed towards the future. The fullness of perfection lies ahead. Hence, the intrinsic bond between progress and hope, which always looks forward. In the past, we may have glimpsed the promise of what we are called to attain in the future. Even the state of original innocence is inferior to the final state of glory. The Christian journey is thus not a circle but a pilgrimage—from promise to fulfilment. It is imperative to distinguish between true and false progress. Modernism is a form of false progress because it arises from an idolatry of modernity—embracing the present age uncritically, as if it were the absolute measure of truth.
(Translator’s note: Modernism, condemned notably in Pascendi Dominici Gregis (Pius X, 1907), is not merely a stylistic preference for the new but a systemic relativisation of dogma, authority, and truth, seeking to reinterpret faith through the shifting categories of contemporary thought rather than the enduring principles of natural reason and divine revelation.)
The Perfect Does Not Progress but Remains What It Is
“Ex ente non fit ens,” as the Ancients taught—quia iam est ens: from being, no new being comes to be, for it already is.
Progress presupposes imperfection; it makes no sense to suppose a perfect and complete being that could progress. If something is truly perfect, what could be added to it? To attempt such an addition would only diminish or corrupt it.
If the perfect has a beginning, it must either derive from the imperfect or—ultimately—from nothing, by an act of divine creation.
It is not the perfect that progresses, but the imperfect, which has not yet attained perfection. This is the true justification of progress.
In the hierarchy of beings, there are indeed varying degrees of perfection, culminating in the supreme being—God. But the perfect as such does not change, does not progress, because it does not need to. If it needed change, it would not be perfect. Cognitive truth is, by nature, immutable. Once truth is grasped and verified, it endures—even if the concrete, contingent reality to which it refers may change. Likewise, the definition of the essence of a thing remains unalterable. Individual beings may come into being and pass away, but their essence—what they are in se—does not change.
Progress is bound to becoming; becoming is tied to time; and time is inseparable from matter. Progress does not pertain to those abstract realities that are the products of the intellect, such as the possible, the universal, the concept, the idea, or the intelligible orders of the physical, mathematical, metaphysical, or logical. These are not subject to time and do not partake in becoming. What progresses is that which is real, factual, existent, tangible, historical, and concrete—in short, what is individual, material, or spiritual, and situated within time.
[Translator’s note:
The Latin aphorism ex ente non fit ens reflects a classical metaphysical axiom: being does not come from being, for what already is cannot originate as something new from itself. This supports the Author's distinction between a perfect being (which does not progress) and an imperfect or contingent being (which does).
The statement that the essence of a thing is immutable refers to the Aristotelian-Thomist conception that, while individuals come into and go out of existence, essences remain intellectually stable and definable.
The list of abstract objects that “do not progress” echoes Platonist and Scholastic distinctions between the eternal (e.g., universals, mathematical truths) and the temporal (e.g., historical agents and acts).]
The person as such, in their identity as essence or substance, does not progress, but remains always identical to themselves. Yet, as a created agent, the person does change and progress through their powers and accidents. The person as a metaphysical entity is immutable, supratemporal, and immortal.
Physical action evolves: it has duration, it unfolds in time, and it changes and progresses. Spiritual action, by contrast, is instantaneous and supratemporal and, as such, does not progress—it is immutable. Yet even spiritual action, though supratemporal in itself, produces effects in time. Moral conduct progresses as a succession of acts of the will. The essence of the person is supratemporal and immutable, but the acting person, engaged in time, has a history and thus progresses. The mathematical entity, being abstract, is motionless and atemporal, and therefore does not progress.
Matter belongs to time and becoming; spirit, by contrast, is in the realm of the eternal, the immutable, the incorruptible, and the immortal. The human spirit, in its knowing and acting, changes, progresses, and even regresses; it exists within time, becoming, and history, but not because it is spirit, rather because it governs a body.
The truth of material and mutable things changes as those things change. But the moral values that ground, justify, and fulfil human dignity are universal, absolute, immutable, non-negotiable, irrepressible, categorical imperatives, indispensable, and inviolable—though always more fully knowable and realisable, and arranged in a hierarchical order of greater or lesser importance: the spiritual over the material, the inner voice of conscience over external considerations, the personal over the social, the religious over the merely human, and the supernatural over the natural.
“Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away” (Mt 24:35). The dogmas, the formulas, the articles, and the concepts of faith do not change in meaning [1], but always retain the same meaning throughout history—though they may be better expressed in new terms and ever more fully clarified, deepened, made explicit, and explained.
Not everything new is necessarily good. Updating is indeed a duty, in order not to lose contact with the present. But among new or modern things and ideas, there must be discernment and a judgment made in the light of sound, well-grounded, and living tradition, of the dogmas of the faith, and of right reason.
[Translator’s note:
The phrase categorical imperatives is drawn from Kantian moral philosophy, but in this context, it refers more broadly to absolute moral norms—commandments that admit no exceptions—rooted in natural and divine law, not merely autonomous reason.]
The modern is not always good or superior simply by virtue of being modern. It is good only if it represents a truer or more advanced value than what came before. Conversely, what is ancient ought to be preserved if it is still good—or, above all, if it is absolutely good. Indeed, certain values inherited from the past or tradition are incorruptible, immutable, and perennial—and as such, they are always relevant, never obsolete. To abandon them would be both folly and misfortune.
Let us beware of conservatism in its inert or uncritical forms. We must certainly preserve what is still good, or what we recognise to be good, but even these must be presented or implemented in a new form, such that they may be received by people today. The way of presenting or enacting these values that was once suited to the men of yesterday must now be left behind—or at least reformulated more fittingly than before. We must learn how to change the language while preserving the content. Indeed, we must be able to express the same truths more effectively, with more expressive concepts and more apt terms. Wherever possible, we must strive for greater precision and clarity.
We must leave behind that which is no longer useful, that which has exhausted its historical function, completed its task, or addressed needs that no longer exist today—or which may even have been misguided, though we failed to perceive it at the time. Traditionalism is sound only if it remains open to progress. We must not cling to, nor seek to restore, what has become obsolete. Firmness is not rigidity, and moral rigour is not rigorism. Respect for the law is not legalism, and respect for the right is not juridism.
[Translator’s note:
The term juridism (from Lat. iuridismus) is occasionally used in academic, theological, and ecclesiastical contexts to designate an excessive formalisation of justice, or the reduction of moral or spiritual truth to legal norms or procedures. Though rare in standard English usage, it is retained here for fidelity to the Author’s meaning and to maintain continuity with the original Latin-derived vocabulary.]
Progressivism and Traditionalism: A Necessary Complementarity
The question of progress and conservation ultimately reduces to a metaphysical problem. If we fail to resolve this, we shall never truly understand what progress is, nor what conservation is—nor, for that matter, the distinction between the mutable and the immutable, between being and becoming, between matter and spirit, between time and eternity, between history and metaphysics.
Even great philosophers have been misled on this point, for here the intellect is deceived by the imagination. They rightly affirm that the highest reality is spirit and life—but they wrongly associate this reality with movement and becoming, rather than with stability and immutability. Yet Sacred Scripture speaks plainly: “I am God and I do not change” (Mal 3:6). The highest form of life consists precisely in immutability. Such thinkers fix their gaze on images of rigidity: the corpse, the mathematical entity, the stone, the statue—things that remain motionless. In contrast, they observe that human beings, birds, and fish move. And thus they fail to perceive that the act of being is greater than any entity that merely passes from potency to act.
As a result, they draw the false conclusion that the mark of life is not what remains unchanging, always identical to itself, but what changes, varies, and becomes. They do not grasp the deeply perilous implications of this confusion: for if change is the sign of vitality, then God changes, truth changes, good changes, concepts change, dogma changes, meaning changes, human nature changes, and morality changes. This is the very heart of modernism.
How can anything be incorruptible or immortal if it cannot remain in what it is according to its essence? How do they not understand that if a thing changes in essence, it is no longer itself? Or that if I change the concept of a thing, I no longer perceive the same thing, but something else entirely?
On the other hand, however, some confuse the immutable with the rigid, who equate fidelity with a refusal to update, who reject the new simply because it is new. Some refuse to progress or change because they already believe themselves to be perfect; who imagine there is nothing more to learn because they think they already know everything; who cling to things no longer useful—and now even harmful; who, out of laziness, prefer to preserve old habits; who complacently say: “It has always been done this way for two thousand years—why change now?” And here we find ourselves in full-blown conservatism.
We must therefore reject a progressivism which, in truth, is merely modernism—a movement that, appealing to the Council, seeks to exalt progress at the expense of the immutable, of dogma, of tradition, of conservation, of the abstract, of the universal, of the essential. To preserve and to make grow, to maintain and to renew, to exercise both firmness and elasticity, both intransigence and flexibility, both change and fidelity, both concreteness and universality—these are all necessary operations of the spirit. Each has its place, its measure, its time, and its proper mode—so that the life of the spirit may flourish, that man may attain moral perfection, and that he may achieve beatitude.
Fr. Giovanni Cavalcoli OP
Fontanellato, May 24, 2025
Source:
https://padrecavalcoli.blogspot.com/p/progressismo-e-modernismo.html
Note:
[1] An important treatise on the immutability and development of dogma is that of the Dominican Francisco Marín-Sola, La evolución homogénea del dogma católico, Valencia-Madrid, 1963.
[Translator’s note: Marín-Sola (1873–1932) was a Spanish Dominican theologian who defended the idea of a homogeneous, organic development of Catholic dogma—a development that preserves identity of meaning while allowing for growth in expression and understanding. His work anticipates themes later echoed in Vatican II and remains a significant reference in debates over doctrinal continuity.]