B. The Pseudo-Reformation and the Renaissance

            This new state of soul contained a powerful although more or less unacknowledged desire for an order of things fundamentally different from that which had reached its heights in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

            An exaggerated and often delirious admiration for antiquity served as a means for the expression of this desire. In order to avoid direct confrontations with the old medieval tradition, humanism and the Renaissance frequently sought to relegate the Church, the supernatural, and the moral values of religion to a secondary plane. At the same time, the human type inspired by the pagan moralists was introduced by these movements as an ideal in Europe. This human type and the culture and civilization consistent with it were truly the precursors of the greedy, sensual, secularist, and pragmatic man of our days and of the materialistic culture and civilization into

which we are sinking deeper and deeper. Efforts to effect a Christian Renaissance did not manage to crush in the germinal stage the factors that led to the gradual triumph of neopaganism.

            In some parts of Europe, this neopaganism developed without leading to formal apostasy. It found significant resistance. Even when it became established within souls, it did not dare ask them - at least in the beginning - to formally break with the Faith.

            However, in other countries, it openly attacked the Church. Pride and sensuality, whose satisfaction is the pleasure of pagan life, gave rise to Protestantism.

            Pride begot the spirit of doubt, free examination, and naturalistic interpretation of Scripture. It produced insurrection against ecclesiastical authority, expressed in all sects by the denial of the monarchical character of the Universal Church, that is to say, by a revolt against the

Papacy. Some of the more radical sects also denied what could be called the higher aristocracy of the Church, namely, the bishops, her princes. Others even denied the hierarchical character of the priesthood itself by reducing it to a mere delegation of the people, lauded as the only true holder of priestly power.

            On the moral plane, the triumph of sensuality in Protestantism was affirmed by the suppression of ecclesiastical celibacy and by the introduction of divorce.