Insights - Hilaire Belloc - The Modern Attack # 1

INSIGHTS - Hilaire Belloc – “The Modern Attack” # 1
Sunday, July 29th, 2007

“Journalism is meaningful only when it helps us to learn the truth. It can be a genuine calling only when there is a truth that is good. Then it is right and necessary to help this truth to find its proper expression. The fundamental certainty that Good does exist and that we are created for it is not an obstacle to the work of the journalist, but rather makes it possible. It must be the first pillar of genuine journalistic ethics.” (1984), July 26th, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Co-Workers of the Truth, Meditations for every day of the Year, Ignatius, 1990,

In his book, The Great Heresies, Hilaire Belloc has a chapter on The Modern Phase. First published in 1938. Published in 1987 by Trinity Communications. VA.

“The enemy which the Faith now has to meet, and which may be called “The Modern Attack.” is a wholesome assault upon the fundamentals of the Faith – upon the very existence of the Faith. And the enemy now advancing against us is increasingly conscious of the fact that there can be no question of neutrality. The forces now opposed to Faith design to destroy….

“Whether we call it “The Modern Attack” or “anti-Christ’ it is all one; there is a clear issue now joined between the retention of Catholic morals, tradition, and authority on the one side and the active forces to destroy them on the other. The modern attack will not tolerate us. It will attempt to destroy us. Nor can we tolerate it. We must attempt to destroy it as being the fully equipped and ardent enemy of the Truth by which men live. The duel is to the death.

“Men sometimes call the modern attack “a return to Paganism.” That definition is true if we means by paganism a denial of Catholic truth: if we mean by paganism a denial of the Incarnation, of human immortality, of the unity and personality of God, of man’s direct responsibility to God, and all that body of thought, feeling, doctrine and culture which is summed up in the word “Catholic,” then, and in that sense, the modern attack is a return to Paganism….

“We find, to begin with, that it is at once materialistic and superstitious.
“There is here a contradiction in reason, but the modern phase, the anti-Christian advance, has abandoned reason. It is concerned with the destruction of the Catholic Church and the civilization preceding there from. It is not troubled by apparent contradictions within its own body so long as the general alliance is one for the ending of all and by which we have hitherto lived. The modern attack is materialistic because in its philosophy it considers only material causes. It is superstitious only as a by-product of this state of mind. It nourishes on its surface the silly vagaries of spiritualism, the vulgar nonsense of “Christian Science,” and heaven knows how many other fantasies. But these follies are bred, not from the hunger for religion, but from the same root as that which has made the world materialist – from an inability to understand the prime truth that faith is at the root of knowledge; from thinking that no truth is appreciable except through direct experience….

“… It has been well remarked that nothing is more striking than the way in which all the modern quasi-religious practices are agreed upon this – that Revelation is to be denied.”
George H. Kubeck, http://wwwcinopsbegone.blogspot.com