¶11 What we have just said relates properly to the possibilities that Catholicism, by its principle, carries within itself in a constant and unalterable way; here, consequently, the influence of the modern spirit is forcibly limited to preventing, for a more or less long period, certain things from being effectively understood. On the other hand, if one wanted, in speaking of the present state of Catholicism, to understand thereby the manner in which it is envisaged by the great majority of its own adherents, one would be obliged to note a more positive action of the modern spirit, if this expression can be employed for something that, in reality, is essentially negative. What we have in view in this regard are not only fairly clearly defined movements, such as that to which precisely the name ‘modernism’¹ was given, and which was nothing other than an attempt, fortunately thwarted, at the infiltration of the Protestant spirit inside the Catholic Church itself; it is above all a much more general, more diffuse and more difficultly graspable state of mind, therefore more dangerous still, all the more dangerous even because it is often quite unconscious in those affected by it: one can believe oneself sincerely religious and not be so at all at bottom, one can even call oneself ‘traditionalist’ without having the least notion of the true traditional spirit, and this is again one of the symptoms of the mental disorder of our epoch. The state of mind to which we allude is, first of all, that which consists, so to speak, in ‘minimising’ religion, in making it something that one sets apart, to which one is content to assign a well-delimited and as narrow a place as possible, something that has no real influence on the rest of existence, that is isolated from it by a kind of watertight partition; are there today many Catholics who, in everyday life, have ways of thinking and acting noticeably different from those of their most ‘areligious’ contemporaries? It is also the almost complete ignorance from the doctrinal point of view, the very indifference with regard to everything that relates to it; for many, religion is simply a matter of ‘practice’, of habit, not to say routine, and one carefully refrains from seeking to understand anything about it, one even comes to think that it is useless to understand, or perhaps that there is nothing to understand; moreover, if one truly understood religion, could one assign it such a mediocre place among one’s concerns? Doctrine thus finds itself, in fact, forgotten or reduced to almost nothing, which singularly approaches the Protestant conception, because it is an effect of the same modern tendencies, opposed to all intellectuality;² and what is most deplorable is that the teaching that is generally given, instead of reacting against this state of mind, on the contrary favours it by adapting itself only too well to it: one always speaks of morality, one almost never speaks of doctrine, on the pretext that one would not be understood; religion, now, is no more than ‘moralism’, or at least it seems that no one wants any longer to see what it really is, which is something quite different. If one nevertheless ends up sometimes speaking of doctrine, it is only too often to lower it by discussing with adversaries on their own ‘profane’ ground,³ which inevitably leads to making the most unjustified concessions to them; this is how, in particular, one believes oneself obliged to take into account, to a greater or lesser extent, the alleged results of modern ‘criticism’, whereas nothing would be easier, by placing oneself at another point of view, than to show all its inanity; under these conditions, what can effectively remain of the true traditional spirit?