Nicolás Gómez Dávila and the Church of the Council: Aphorisms

I offer a selection of scholia (glosses) on the current state of the Church by Nicolás Gómez Dávila, (1913-1994), that remarkable Columbian thinker. His “Scholia to an Implicit Text” (1979) is a principal monument of reactionary thought in the twentieth century. It is a vast compendium of aphorisms on faith, history, philosophy, literature, art and contemporary ideological deformations. Little known in the English-speaking world, Dávila has been influential in Germany and elsewhere in Europe. (Martin Mosebach is a particular fan of his.)

What follows is a small selection of his observations on the era of the Second Vatican Council. I believe that no complete edition of this work exists in English. For these translations I worked from the complete German translation Scholien zu einem inbegriffenen Text (Karolingerverlag, Vienna, 2006). Unfortunately, a translation from a translation! (Last year a bilingual edition of part of the Scholia appeared, available on Amazon, which I was unable to consult.)

The phenomena of the decay of Catholicism are entertaining; those of Protestantism dull. (p. 191)

The clamor set off by the Second Vatican Council has demonstrated the hygienic usefulness of the inquisition.
As we experienced the “free expression of Catholic thought” we recognized that the intolerance of the old Roman papacy was not so much an imperial limes against heresy but against sleaziness and simplemindedness. (p. 241)

Tongues of fire didn’t descend upon the Second Vatican Council, as they did upon the first assembly of the apostles, but a stream of fire – a Feuerbach. (p. 245)

A single council is nothing more than a single voice in the real ecumenical council of the Church: her complete history. (p. 265)

Popular Catholicism is the target of all progressive anger.
Popular faith, popular hope, popular charity exasperate a clergy of petit bourgeois origin. (p. 266)

For the left-wing Catholic Catholicism is the great sin of the Catholic. (p. 248)

Catholics have lost that sympathetic capacity of sinning without arguing that sin doesn’t exist. (p. 274)

The problems of man can be neither exactly defined nor even remotely solved.
Whoever hopes that Christianity can solve them ceases to be a Christian. (p. 285)

The progressive Catholic is only active in zealously seeking for whatever he can still hand over to the world.

Better a small church with Catholics than a numerous one with Rotarians. (p. 334)

Today’s Church is so nice as to exclude everything from the revealed traditions which public opinion condemns. (p. 319)

The current pope prays for that progress which Bury – its historian – called the “substitute for Providence.” (p. 319)

The thing that exasperates today’s Christian about the Middle Ages is Christianity. (p. 319)

The new liturgists have abolished the sacred pulpits in order that no scoundrel can assert that the Church intends to compete with the secular ones. (p. 319)

Catholics don’t have the slightest idea that the world feels betrayed by the concessions made to it by Catholicism. (p. 325)

The progressive clergy crowns the towers of the church of today not with a cross but with a weathervane. (p. 325)

Only the Catholic on the brink of losing his faith is outraged by the Church’s dazed state, sent by Providence.

St. Thomas Aquinas: an Orleaniste of theology? (p. 350)

Aggiornamento is the sellout of the Church. (p. 363)

The progressive Catholic collects his theology from the garbage can of Protestant theology. (p. 363)

Intending to open her arms to the world the Church instead opened her legs. (p. 363)

Instead of a theology of the mystical body the theologians of today teach a theology of the mystical masses. (p. 363)

Today it is impossible to respect the Christians.
Out of respect for Christianity. (p. 379)

For a second installment of aphorisms of Nicolás Gómez Dávila on the contemporary Church see HERE.