“Hello, this is your captain. To update you, we are traveling at 25,000 feet and moving at 500 miles per hour. We do not expect any turbulence. However, we are lost!”

Or, in the words of G.K. Chesterton, “As enunciated today, progress is a comparative of which we have not settled the superlative.” Long before he became president, actor Ronald Reagan served as a pitchman for General Electric. He reminded his audience that, “At General Electric, you know, progress is our most important product.”

Progress is slippery. Nonetheless, it has become the unofficial motto of the modern world. Progress is seemingly everywhere: in the automobile industry, in medicine, in communications, in travel, in food production and in the exploration of space. Inevitably, the question arises: Should the Catholic Church also be progressive?

Not being progressive invites unattractive labels: static, stagnant, rigid, conservative and not being up-to-date. In the 1970s there was much talk about a Catholic/Marxist synthesis. It was said that the Church has the love and Marxism has the structure. Further investigation, however, revealed that Marxism did not have the “structure” and that Catholicism and Marxism were entirely disjunctive belief systems.

Pope St. Paul VI’s Humanae Vitae disappointed many Catholics who thought that accepting contraception would be a liberal idea and bring the Church more fully into the modern world. Some Catholics left the Church over the contraception issue, believing that it had become “outdated.” The rejection of the ordination of women was also seen as a refusal to be “progressive.”

Vatican II stated that abortion is an “abominable crime.” Nancy Pelosi, a self-described Catholic, inverted the phrase and insisted that withholding access to abortion is an “abominable crime.” Viewing the Church as anything but progressive, Ginette Paris wrote The Sacrament of Abortion, making the case that the decision to abort may spring from a religious feeling that it is the right thing to do. But far from appeasing feminists by instituting abortion as its eighth sacrament, the Church stubbornly holds the number of sacraments to seven — it is a great blessing that the Church has from its inception an intrinsic integrity that refuses to kowtow to the world.

The Catholic Church is not progressive, because God already gave it everything it needs to accomplish its mission. But some of its members, rather than struggling to change and advance in holiness, have found it more attractive to demand that the Church change its own nature.

But if the Church made all the concessions that the “liberals” demanded, there would be no more Church. It would coincide perfectly with the secular world and render itself entirely irrelevant.

In his book, Principles of Catholic Theology, Building Stones for a Fundamental Theology, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI) criticizes, “That all-too-guileless progressivism ... which happily proclaimed its solidarity with everything modern, with everything that promised progress, and strove with the self-conscious zeal of a model schoolboy to prove the compatibility of what is Christian with all that is modern ...”

The irony here is so many Christians professed a stronger religious fervor for modernism than they did for Christianity. It was as if such people were saying, “If the Church won’t come to me, I will not go to the Church.” Ratzinger had in mind something more fundamental, something that serves as a building block. The Church is built on a “rock,” not a trend. And that is why the Catholic Church has lasted for more than 2,000 years.

Charles Péguy wrote wisely when he penned the following: “Christianity is in no way and by no means a religion-in-progress: nor (perhaps even less, so if that is possible) is it a religion of progress. It is the religion of salvation.” If the word “progress” has any significance here, it is in the sense of the word used by John Bunyan in his classic, Pilgrim’s Progress (1678). 

For the author, the bedrock is the Bible, which inspires the pilgrim to a life of virtue. Progress, therefore, is through virtue anchored to a source that does not change with the times. For a period in history, Bunyan’s allegory was the second most-read book after the Bible.

“In a world of fugitives,” wrote T.S. Eliot, “the person taking the opposite direction will appear to run away.” So much attention has been devoted to the dissidents fleeing from the Church that the faithful appear to be, to cite a popular aphorism, on the wrong side of history. The problem concerning progress in the wrong direction has a long history. Pope Pius X alluded to it in a 1914 rather strong address: “Oh! How many navigators, how many pilots, and — God forbid! — how many captains, trusting in profane novelties and in the deceitful science of the age, have been shipwrecked instead of reaching port!”

The Church will continue to survive because our Lord instituted it to last. The attacks, turmoil, doubts and deceptions serve only to prove that Christ’s mystical body is more powerful than Christ’s adversaries. If the Church is not progressive, it is because the Church is indestructible.