✝️ In De la Cábala al Progresismo (1962), Father Julio Meinvielle, an Argentine priest and intellectual, proposes an ideological genealogy that explains how principles foreign to Christian Revelation slowly penetrated the Church, deforming not only theological reflection but also pastoral action itself. The core of the problem, according to the author, is naturalism—the view that reduces human and social life to purely earthly principles, effectively excluding the supernatural order of grace.
📜 Meinvielle's narrative begins with Jewish Kabbalah and with ancient and medieval Gnostic currents. For him, these esoteric systems introduce a disguised pantheism and an immanentist reading of history, in which salvation ceases to be a supernatural gift granted by God and comes to be conceived as an internal process within the world, of a collective and historical nature. This change of focus—from the transcendent to the immanent—is the seed of all subsequent transformations.💡 In the modern period, these ideas find philosophical expression in rationalism and the Enlightenment. Cartesianism inaugurates an absolute confidence in reason as the supreme criterion of truth, and deism reduces God to a distant legislator, without intervention in human life. Thinkers like Voltaire, Rousseau, and the Encyclopedists radicalize the process, establishing that morality and social organization can and should be constructed without reference to grace or divine authority.
🇫🇷 The French Revolution (1789) marks, for Meinvielle, the transition from the philosophical to the political plane. Its slogans—liberty, equality, and fraternity—become, in practice, earthly absolutes that claim to be universal, detached from any supernatural foundation. Freemasonry, according to the author, acts as the main vehicle for the dissemination of these ideals, functioning as a parallel system of values and objectives that seeks to reshape all of society and, ultimately, religion itself.
⛪ The next and most worrying stage is the penetration of these ideas within the Church itself. This phenomenon takes the form of Catholic progressivism, in which an attempt is made to reinterpret the mission and pastoral care in terms compatible with the spirit of the modern world. The result is an inversion of priorities: the central goal—the eternal salvation of souls—gives way to predominantly temporal objectives, such as the improvement of social conditions, the promotion of a universal fraternity on a humanitarian basis, and engagement in political causes. Although Christian vocabulary and symbolism are preserved, the content is gradually adapted to an immanentist horizon.
⛓️ Meinvielle describes the mechanism of this infiltration in three interconnected movements. First, there is the theological inversion, where supernatural categories like sin, grace, and redemption give way to the centrality of socio-political and economic problems. Then comes doctrinal dilution, which relativizes dogmatic truths under the pretext of dialogue and openness to the modern world. Finally, a horizontalist pastoral approach is established, planned according to methods and objectives of sociological inspiration, where evangelization is confused with social reform programs.
⚠️ The consequences of this transformation are severe: a weakening of the supernatural dimension of Christian life, the relativization of dogma, an indifferentist ecumenism, and the assimilation of secular categories to think about the Church's mission. The final result, the author warns, is a religion that is formally Christian but materially conformed to the principles of naturalism.
🛡️ As a remedy, Meinvielle proposes three lines of action: a return to Thomistic theology, capable of integrating reason and Revelation without reductionism; a reaffirmation of the centrality of grace and the sacraments as indispensable means of salvation; and intellectual and pastoral resistance to all camouflaged forms of naturalism, even when disguised as pastoral renewal or service to humanity.
⚔️ Thus, De la Cábala al Progresismo is not just a historical study but also a combat manifesto. Its strength lies in showing that Catholic progressivism is not an isolated novelty of the 20th century, but the final stage of a centuries-long process of ideological infiltration, which can only be reversed by the full recovery of the supernatural meaning of faith and the Church's mission.