E.         Ecclesiastical Tribalism and Pentecostalism

            Obviously, it is not only the temporal realm that the Fourth Revolution wants to reduce to tribalism. It wants to do the same with the spiritual realm. How this is to be done can already be clearly seen in the currents of theologians and canonists who intend to transform the noble, bone-like rigidity of the ecclesiastical structure – as Our Lord Jesus Christ instituted it and twenty centuries of religious life molded it – into a cartilaginous, soft, and amorphous texture of dioceses and parishes without territories and of religious groups in which the firm canonical authority is gradually replaced by the ascendancy of Pentecostalist "prophets," the counterparts of the structuralist-tribalist witch doctors. Eventually, these prophets will be indistinguishable from witch doctors. The same goes for the progressivist-Pentecostalist parish or diocese, which will take on the appearances of the cell-tribe of structuralism.

COMMENTARY

The “Demonarchization” of the Ecclesiastical Authorities

            In this historical/conjectural perspective, certain modifications in themselves alien to this process could be seen as steps in a transition between the pre-Conciliar status quo and the extreme opposite indicated here.

            An example of this would be the trend toward a collegiality viewed as (1) the only acceptable means for exercising power inside the Church and (2) an expression of a “demonarchization” of ecclesiastical authority, whose different levels would become ipso facto much more conditioned by the levels immediately below them.

            All this taken to its last consequences could tend toward the stable and universal establishment of popular suffrage inside the Church – not that on occasion she did not use it to fill certain hierarchical offices. In keeping with the dream of the advocates of tribalism, it could eventually result in an indefensible dependence of the whole hierarchy on the laity, as supposedly the only voice of God. Of God? Or of some witch doctor, whether a Pentecostalist guru or a sorcerer, who feeds his “mystical revelation” to a tribalistic laity? Would it be by obeying this laity that the Church hierarchy would fulfill its mission of obeying the will of God Himself?