On April 2, 2025, several progressive academics joined together in a symposium to celebrate the new book, Catholic Fundamentalism in America (Oxford University Press, 2025), by Father Mark S. Massa, SJ. (Two historians and an ethicist extolled the merits of this “wonderful” book that supposedly exposes the vanishing world of the pre-conciliar Church. Fr. Massa is the director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College, where I am also a faculty member. From his perch in the clouds, Fr. Massa seeks to explain the dynamic of Catholic fundamentalism, which, unlike Protestant fundamentalism, has not been the subject of much critical scrutiny.
According to Massa, the Catholic version of fundamentalism accounts for some of the deep intellectual fissures within the modern Church. It is exemplified by institutions such as EWTN (founded by Mother Angelica) and Christendom College, along with individuals like Fr. Gommar DePauw, a champion of the Latin Mass, and Eric Sammons, the editor of Crisis. [Editor’s note: Mr. Sammons has written a response to Fr. Massa’s book.]
The author’s polemical discourse can be quite severe at times, and his reflexive hostility to avatars of Catholic orthodoxy—including Cardinal Burke, Bishop Paprocki, and EWTN’s famous “papal posse”—is on full display. Fr. Massa is particularly unyielding in his unwarranted rebuke of Mother Angelica (“the nun”) and her attempt to fashion “an alternative ‘authentic magisterium.’” He chastises the popular television network for “propagating an understanding of the Christian tradition that [is] Catholic on the outside but something else on the inside.” The millions of viewers who receive spiritual sustenance from EWTN on a daily basis will surely find this shrill indictment a bitter pill to swallow.
What, precisely, is Catholic fundamentalism? According to Fr. Massa, this phenomenon manifests as a sectarian aversion to dialogue and cooperation, the frequent use of extreme and militant rhetoric to denounce one’s opponents, and an ahistorical understanding of Catholic doctrine and tradition. The author argues that there has been a paradigm change within the Catholic Church that emphasizes dialogue, inclusion, and the primacy of historical consciousness. In his view, EWTN, Christendom, and too many others remain hopelessly trapped within the antiquated pre-Vatican II paradigm. Unlike the rest of the Church, they have stubbornly refused to advance into the bright light of reason. According to Fr. Massa, this great paradigm shift received “official status” in the years after 1965, when the Second Vatican Council’s teachings were promulgated and implemented throughout the Church.
A crucial element of this revolutionary paradigm change is the emergence of a more pronounced historical consciousness within the Church and an appreciation that theological and moral truths are not objective and transcendent, but historical. To support his thesis that Catholic doctrine is largely mutable, Fr. Massa refers to an essay by Bernard Lonergan titled “The Transition from a Classicist Worldview to Historical Mindedness.” Lonergan maintains that the classicist sees truth as eternal and permanent, virtually untouched by history’s irresistible march forward. But historical mindedness regards the contours of truth as shaped by the “changing circumstances of history.” Lonergan himself declared that these two discrepant worldviews “differ in their apprehension of man, in their account of the good, and in the role they ascribe to the Church in the world.”
The underlying problem with admitting a historical correlation to truth is that history becomes the primary criterion by which truth and falsehood will be judged. In the words of the Italian philosopher Augusto Del Noce, classicism favors the “primacy of the immutable and the reality of an eternal world,” while historicism prioritizes becoming and the temporal process. Historicism, however, comes with many troubling ramifications. Sociology and psychology, which interpret cultural transitions, begin to assume a supreme importance. The essential metaphysical principles of Catholicism, which came about during an epoch of history, are dethroned by what Del Noce calls sociologism. And theological principles are altered according to the determinations of history. As a result, cultural fads and ideological enthusiasms are sometimes misconstrued as promptings of the Holy Spirit, beckoning the Church to move forward.
Thus, this decisive paradigm shift from classicism to historical-mindedness has far-reaching implications for Catholic theology and most especially for moral theology. Fr. Massa explains that theologians such as Josef Fuchs, S.J., and Fr. Bernard Häring initiated a revolution in moral theology by demonstrating that “static, propositional theology” was no longer effective. These theologians and several others at the time had little use for absolute norms such as “adultery is always wrong” because those norms disregarded a person’s lived experience. Moral compromises are sometimes necessary within an imperfect world pervaded by sin. The Second Vatican Council ushered in a historically sensitive understanding of moral doctrine that better fits within a morally pluralistic society.
As a consequence, what surfaced after the Council were more flexible theories, including proportionalism, which disavowed absolute norms and proposed instead the weighing of the benefits and harms of certain actions. But proportionalism and related theories that emphasized personal experience were never “officially” ratified by the Catholic hierarchy. Critics rightly claimed that proportionalism privileged utility and sentimentalism over moral truth. Fr. Massa is not shy about chiding the fundamentalists for refusing to submit to the teachings of the Magisterium. But when Pope John Paul II, in Veritatis Splendor, reaffirmed the traditional natural law morality and exposed proportionalism’s glaring deficiencies, these moral theologians refused to abandon their dissident vision.
John Paul II was on firm ground because there never was a radical paradigm shift at the Second Vatican Council displacing classicism in favor of historicism. For example, a close look at the Council documents like Dignitatis Humanae reveals instead a striking reaffirmation of a universal and unchanging natural law: “The supreme norm of human life is the divine law itself, eternal, objective, and universal” (par. 3). To reinforce this statement there is a reference to Part I-II, Question 93 of Aquinas’ Summa which explains that “the eternal law is the unchangeable truth, and everyone knows this truth in some sense … the general principles of the natural law.”
For the authors of Dignitatis Humanae, there was no doubt that this divine, eternal law included the morally binding precepts of the natural law. People grasp those precepts using their conscience and are bound to “form for themselves right and true (recta et vera) moral judgements” in accordance with that law (par. 3). Similarly, Gaudium et Spes (par. 74) speaks of “the natural and Gospel law” (lex naturalis and evangelica), and it also refers to how that natural or divine law provides “objective criteria derived from the nature of the person” (par. 50-1).
These documents unambiguously confirm the Church’s traditional teaching on morality based on the natural law that cannot be modified, at least in its first principles. And the natural law (as understood by Aquinas and the Magisterium) includes several key moral absolutes, such as the prohibition against adultery, which protect fundamental goods like marriage, which constitute a major pillar of morality.
Finally, how should we assess the claim that human nature changes throughout the flux of history, and so too must the principles of morality? Many historically minded progressive theologians like Karl Rahner have endorsed this thesis. To be sure, there are changes in human culture, and there are many consequential inflection points in history affecting humanity for better or worse. But as John Finnis points out, these theologians cannot provide any concrete examples that illustrate the mutability of human nature such that its very identity changes over time. The reason is that human nature, understood in terms of basic human possibilities or forms of fulfillment, has never changed. We cannot find throughout human history any persons who were not bodily, intelligent beings, for whom the fundamental goods of life and health, knowledge, friendship, marriage, and so on, were not the source of their fulfilment and hence their most basic reasons for action.
It is all well and good, of course, to have a historical consciousness, to pay attention to the world’s progress and growth, and how certain trends affect the Church and its people. But the Christian understanding of history should differ from the common secular view. According to Fr. Massa, “history only moves in one direction, and it’s not backward.” However, from a Christian perspective, history must be understood as distinctly non-linear because Jesus’ words and deeds endure throughout all historical transitions.
As John Paul II proclaimed at the beginning of Redemptor Hominis, “The Redeemer of man, Jesus Christ, is the center of the universe and of history” (par. 1).
This is why the Council Fathers could declare that “underlying so many changes there are some things which do not change, and which have their ultimate foundation in Christ who is the same yesterday, today, and forever” (Gaudium et Spes, par. 10). Fidelity to those many transcendent truths of the Faith, which do not change, can reassure skeptical believers and begin to restore the Church’s lost coherence.
(Editor’s note: CWR will be posting a full review of Fr. Massa’s book in the near future.)
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#1. It goes without saying that Massa has an “S.J.” after his name. The Jesuits are corrupted and corrupting and no young man considering a priestly vocation ought to have anything to do with them.
“2. The very use of the term “fundamentalism” by Jesuit Massa is divisive, inflammatory and slanderous. The book ought to go into the dustbin of history along with the Bergoglian Papacy.
DiogenesRedux,
Re your first comment, I believe it goes way too far. There clearly are some good Jesuits faithful to the true Magesterium. Two I especially admire are the polymath Fr Robert Spitzer and Fr Mitch Pacwa and I believe there are many others.
Yes, the majority of Jesuits today are probably in the camp of the Mark Massas and James Martins who want, in effect, to push the Church in the direction of the U.S. Episcopal Church which has replaced the Crucifix with rainbow flags and has a relativistic magisterium so progressive and purposeless that is dying on the vine (Episcopalan priest reportedly predicts that by 2040 The number of US Episcopalians will reach zero). The meaningless, rudderless church promoted and advocated for by Mark Massa would see the same fate. Who needs a magisterium you can get from The NY Times?
“Sammons may have indeed swum the Tiber, but he did so in a Protestant wetsuit that left him untouched by Catholic holy water.”
I’m sure Massa thinks this is clever, because Jesuits value cleverness. (Witness Pope Francis calling Walter Kasper “clever” as a compliment) but as derogatory dismissals go, it has more in common with middle school rhetoric than one of Winston Churchill’s scalding rejoinders. That’s the danger of the pervasive Jesuit affliction of intellectual narcissism, they can’t seem to punch against any opponent other than a wet paper bag.
I’m not even a big fan of Sammons as I think he ruined Crisis by removing the comments section, but Massa’s comment is at best vapid.
I am tempted to say Massa’s comments are “religious appropriation”. I don’t really want to be lectured on authentic orthodoxy by members of a pseudo-Catholic gnostic cult.
As for his comment on Mother Angelica, let me describe that as sexist depersonalization.
IF…historical mindedness regards the contours of truth as shaped by the “changing circumstances of history.” THEN…it cannot be true since the transcendent nature of its very premise contradicts itself. THEREFORE…the entire argument must be rejected as self-contradictory.
Where to begin..? In sum, this is a book by “protestants” seeking to make the Catholic Church Protestant in practice because they know that without the fundamental Truth of the Catholic Church they will fail.
This immodest effort is already out of fashion – so 60’s revolutionary, so Franciscus. Pope Leo is the mellow music of the 70’s. Get with the program. It’s about unity now. Take a chill pill or just the pill. Either way, these Modernist movements are dying away. Who would give their life to a lie?
Thank you Professor Spinello for your fortitude in publicly disagreeing with one of your faculty members.
I wish more Bishops and priests had your courage to speak out. Whenever I hear or see Jesuit I go into alert mode.
The author argues that there has been a paradigm change within the Catholic Church that emphasizes dialogue, inclusion, and the primacy of historical consciousness …
This is wish-casting.
A crucial element of this revolutionary paradigm change is the emergence of a more pronounced historical consciousness within the Church and an appreciation that theological and moral truths are not objective and transcendent, but historical.
And this is heresy.
Didn’t Massa once frequent “fundamentalist” blogs like Amy Welborn’s during the blogging heyday in the aughts?
In any event, thanks for the thorough and measured rebuke, Prof. Spinello.
Hello Rich,
Didn’t Massa once frequent “fundamentalist” blogs like Amy Welborn’s during the blogging heyday in the aughts?
I recall that, too. One wonders if this has really been in his thinking *all along*, or if a dozen years the Francis pontificate simply drove him back to the Jesuit mean.
Here, here! Thank you Dr. Spinello. I agree that Father Massa’s book presents a misguided view of Catholic fundamentalism, equating fidelity to tradition with resistance to progress. His premise that theological and moral truths evolve with history undermines the Church’s foundation in objective truth. Vatican II did not abandon natural law or moral absolutes—it reaffirmed them. The Church’s teachings are not subject to cultural trends but rooted in eternal principles. Dismissing institutions like EWTN and Christendom College as relics of the past ignores their vital role in preserving authentic Catholic doctrine. True dialogue requires engagement with tradition, not its rejection.
I’m slightly confused by the terminology here.
The term, “Catholic fundamentalism,” I think, actually means Catholicism.
I.e., the faith taught by Jesus Christ.
An old/new adage of some relevance: “The dogs bark, but the caravan moves on…” Massa is a bit out of step, historically. His timing for selling his thin swill is a bit off.
Wondering here how he’s going to market his book (Massa wrote a book!), today, after the recent and conscious conclave…and whether any breathing students will even sign up for his classes.
“From his perch in the clouds” indeed. An ethereal fowl tweeting wisdom down to us surly mortals. As Spinello points out all truth is centered in Christ, the Rock, the center of the universe that doesn’t shift positions.
High perched Jesuit fowls there are like black ravens shifting, flurrying, cawing within the Church [perhaps the new Vicar presents a scarecrow]. At any rate the great Jesuit intellects of recent past and present admonish us to get with the intellectualist program preached by sage Lonergan [who can ignore Fuchs’ soteriological Christ’s marvelous advance from the creator Christ and natural law?] of the changing contours of truth in historical context, the many other advances, the sciences and human nature, new findings reshaping our perception of human nature – I boldly add Queerdom a center of their common interest, interest bordering on cultic worship.
What motivates these great Jesuit minds, if not evidence that there is moment to their existence. The lasting mark. Book sales are that measure. Ruin the effect.
What is truth but a foil for the advancement of the creative mind? Abandon Christ as both rule and measure and we abandon all truth, all that is holy and good, all that has beauty and draws veneration. All that gives life.
The difficulty for Fr Massa is that…pretty much every pope who reigned before the 1960’s would, by his criteria, qualify as a “fundamentalist,” too.
And we could go on in the same vein with Doctors of the Church, confessor saints…
But is it really a surprise if the considered posture of a modern Jesuit academic is contempt for nearly the entire lived history of the Catholic Church?
It’s funny, I was trying to think of a word earlier this morning that described some of the stranger goings on I’ve witnessed lately & “Catholic Fundamentalism” occurred to me. And then here’s this article…
🙂
I love EWTN, Mother Angelica, the TLM, & one of my children graduated from Christendom, praise God. But perhaps as an overreaction to Pope Francis’s papacy & the suppression of the TLM, I’ve been hearing some weird stuff, especially from recent Catholic converts. Feeneyism & anti Semitism aren’t fundamental to Church teaching. Just the opposite.
I’m good with all the fundamentals of Catholicism but not with add on pathologies.
Anti-Semitism is a charge that often made in response to everything.
Christophobia is a much bigger issue
Fr. Massa is clearly a modernist.
Modernism is heresy (infallibly proclaimed by several popes).
Therefore Fr. Massa is a material heretic.
And he teaches at a so-called “Catholic” college.
Terrifying.
He’s not a modernist; he’s a progressive. That’s much worse.
I’ve also read Fr. Massa’s book and found it appalling. No, he’s not trying to “protestantize” the Church. He’s arguing that Mother Angelica et al. are the real protestantizers. Wraps your heads around that one, gentle readers!
I wish Mother A. was here to comment on that.
🙂
No, this is a cowardly and crude attempt to “protestantize” the Catholic Faith. They are using “mirror accusation” to promote their ideologies, falsely attributing their own intentions to their adversaries. This gaslighting technique was made infamous by another apostate Katholic, Joseph Goebbels. It’s easier to find an honest brokers on Wall on Wall Street than a Jesuit campus.
There is really only one reason why progressives want to move moral questions from an absolute framework to a historical one, and that is, quite plainly, disobedience. If morality changes over time, then issues like abortion, assisted suicide, the grooming, sexual exploitation, and mutilation of children in service to the LGBTLMNOP agenda, and homosexuality all become acceptable and normative. Traditionalists must hold firm and make the church so orthodox and so spiritually uncomfortable that progressives will have no choice but to leave. If Dante was writing the Inferno today, I wonder what level of hell progressives would be assigned to?
Wouldn’t a conversion of hearts be better than leaving?
“…theological and moral truths are not objective and transcendent, but historical.
Yikes!
Now this is our Sacred Historical Heritage, The Sacred Historical Heritage of all persons:
*The Sacred Heritage of all human persons, from the moment of conception to our death:
“Salvation Is Of The Jews” , From The Father, Through , With, And In His Only Begotten Son, Jesus The Christ, In The Unity Of The Holy Ghost, The Perfect Divine Eternal Love Between The Father And His Only Begotten Son, Jesus The Christ, Who Proceeds From Both The Father And His Only Begotten Son, In The Ordered Communion Of Perfect Complementary Divine Eternal Love, The Most Holy Blessed Trinity, The Author Of Love, Of Life, And Of Marriage and thus The Author of our Unalienable Right to Life, Liberty, And The Pursuit Of Happiness, The Purpose of which can only Be what God intended, and this Truth Of Love remains fundamental, even to those who have been Baptized Catholic but desire to worship false idols.
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=John%204%3A21-23&version=DRA
Only Catholic progressives could praise the virtue of dialogue while consistently refusing to engage with those who hold opposing views. During my graduate studies in theology in the late 1990s and early 2000s, I witnessed this firsthand. The faculty was dominated by so-called progressives who claimed to champion openness and inclusivity, yet routinely spoke at conservatives rather than with them—often resorting to gross caricature and insult. There is a striking lack of self-awareness among progressives, as they operate within the insular bubble that only academia can create. Tellingly, that top tier faculty of theology eventually had to close and merge with another liberal Catholic theology college that is also struggling. Even to their last day they were still proclaiming themselves the future of of the Church.
“Fr. Bernard Häring initiated a revolution in moral theology by demonstrating that “static, propositional theology” was no longer effective. These theologians and several others at the time had little use for absolute norms such as “adultery is always wrong” because those norms disregarded a person’s lived experience.”
If Charles Manson discovered Haring, he would have been proud.
“Lived experience.” How far on the pathway to perfecting human stupidity does a mind have to be to ignore the most common of human experiences, right up there with breathing. We all lie to ourselves in our “lived experience,” and frequently, not only to deny our sinfulness but to protect our vanities and sense of superiority to others, although they are much the same.
After overcoming the atheism of my youth, and trying to read my way into the Church, I constantly came across these “theologians” who repeated their own fundamentalist bromides, a tyranny of clichés, the most popular being “lived experience.” It really delayed my eventual conversion. I wondered how a Church affirming its immutable truths before the world could also breed such idiots for theologians. Theologians so idiotic that they fail to grasp the fact that in insisting on the fungibility of truth, they implicitly project their idiocy onto God, for having abandoned the peoples of the past with inadequate capacity to live lives of decency.
Thankfully, a grace was provided to me to find my way to the “classicists.”
Did the ‘book-selling’ symposium garner more than 50 attendees?
Jesuits own and operate BC. Jesuits Lonergan and Rahner have their own progressive transcendental theological influence on Jesuit universities. As did Francis.
Re the panelists at the book-advert symposium, you may find the Dartmouth prof in one online forum, preaching from his bedroom (post Covid, 2023), on race, the religious right, and the politicization of evangelicals by way of their views on abortion. Prof. Kaveny in one online article makes herself so bold as to advise a new Pope Benedict: In drawing people to the faith, he should consider people’s experience as more significant than their knowledge of doctrine, he should show that he has the gift of the Holy Spirit’s love in addition to wisdom, he should keep in mind that men and women have similar gifts, he should learn to say ‘yes’ rather than ‘no’ (with respect to theological views “inconsistent with Catholic doctrine.”
As a young adult in the late 1980s to early 1990s, I lived and worked in Boston. Among my acquaintances I counted many Catholics who studied at BC. Without exception, I found each and every one to be audaciously un-orthodox in belief and behavior while professing the Catholic faith at Mass, when they found time to attend.
P.S.: The BC campus grounds and buildings are beautiful, expansive, well kept. Then again, I read that some property was lately being considered for sale.