"Something infinitely more disastrous"

Henri de Lubac, SJ

The following observations on the Church are taken from Fr. Henri de Lubac, SJ's "The Splendour of the Church:"

"The-Church-as-Mother is never at the end of her labour to deliver us to the life of the Spirit, and the greatest temptation to the Church which we constitute - the most subversive, the ever-recurrent, reappearing insidiously when all the rest are overcome, and even strengthened by those victories - is what Abbot Vonier called the temptation to "worldiness of the mind . . .  the practical relinquishing of other-worldliness, so that moral and even spiritual standards should be based, not on the glory of the Lord, but on what is the profit of man; an entirely anthropocentric outlook would be exactly what we mean by worldliness.  Even if men were filled with every spiritual perfection, but if such perfections were not referred to God (suppose this hypothesis to be possible) it would be unredeemed worldliness."

If this worldliness of the spirit were to invade the Church and set to work to corrupt her by attacking her very principle, it would be something infinitely more disastrous than any worldliness of the purely moral order."

Many in the Church have succumbed to the temptation Fr. de Lubac calls "wordliness of the mind."   Among the Jesuits, Fr. de Lubac's own religious order, this "worldliness of the mind" has becoming especially dominant.  As Fr. de Lubac predicted, the results have certainly been disastrous for both the Jesuits and the Church.

St. Ignatius Loyola, pray for us.