The Pillar portal publishes a paid column by Simcha Fisher (May 29, 2026) in which the author confesses her pessimistic temperament but claims to possess a “bedrock belief that everything is going to turn out okay” — a conviction she attributes not to supernatural faith, not to the theological virtues infused at baptism, not to the promises of Our Lord Jesus Christ, but to **the music of Johann Sebastian Bach**. This is the reduction of Christian hope to a purely natural, aesthetic sentiment — a Pelagian optimism divorced from grace, sacraments, and the supernatural order. It is, in miniature, the entire modernist project: replacing the theological virtue of hope with human feeling, and substituting the Creator with the creature.
The Theological Virtue of Hope vs. Natural Sentiment
The Catholic Church teaches with absolute clarity that hope is not a personality trait, not a disposition of temperament, and certainly not a vague feeling induced by baroque music. Hope is a **theological virtue**, infused by God at baptism, by which we trust with certain confidence that God will grant us eternal life and the means to obtain it, **not on the basis of our own strength, but on the promise and merits of Our Lord Jesus Christ** (Council of Trent, Session VI, Chapter 7; Catechism of the Council of Trent, Part III).
Simcha Fisher writes:
Way down at the bottom of my heart, underneath many, many layers of grousing and complaining, there is an unshakeable, bedrock belief that everything is going to turn out okay.
This is not hope. This is **natural optimism dressed in the language of faith**. The virtue of hope does not say “everything will turn out okay” — it says that **God will keep His promises to those who remain in His grace**, that the Church will endure until the end of time, that Christ has conquered death and hell, and that the elect will be saved. It is a virtue directed toward **eternal, supernatural goods**, not temporal comfort. St. Paul himself wrote: “If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable” (1 Cor. 15:19). The very essence of Christian hope is that it transcends this world entirely — it is not a feeling that “things will work out” but a **supernatural certitude grounded in divine revelation and sustained by grace**.
To attribute this conviction to Bach is to commit the error condemned by Pius IX in the Syllabus of Errors, Proposition 3: “Human reason, without any reference whatsoever to God, is the sole arbiter of truth and falsehood, and of good and evil; it is law to itself, and suffices, by its natural force, to secure the welfare of men and of nations.” Fisher’s “bedrock belief” is not grounded in revelation, in the Church’s teaching, in the sacraments, or in the life of prayer — it is grounded in **an aesthetic experience**, a purely natural phenomenon. This is rationalism applied to the interior life.
The Omission of the Supernatural Order
What is most striking about this brief column is not what it says, but what it **completely omits**. There is no mention of:
- God
- Christ
- The Church
- The sacraments
- Prayer
- Grace
- Merit
- The virtues
- Heaven, hell, or purgatory
- The moral law
- Sin and repentance
- The intercession of the Blessed Virgin Mary or the saints
The entire column operates on a **purely natural plane**. The author’s “belief that everything will turn out okay” floats in a theological vacuum — it is unattached to any supernatural reality. This is precisely the kind of **naturalistic humanism** that Pius XI condemned in Quas Primas (1925):
It began with the denial of Christ the Lord’s reign over all nations; the Church’s authority to teach men, to issue laws, to govern nations, which authority she received from Christ the Lord to lead men to eternal happiness, was denied. And then, slowly, the Christian religion began to be equated with other false religions and shamelessly placed in the same category.
When a Catholic writer speaks of “everything turning out okay” without any reference to the supernatural order, she implicitly **equates Christian hope with secular optimism**. This is indifferentism — the error condemned in Proposition 15 of the Syllabus: “Every man is free to embrace and profess that religion which, guided by the light of reason, he shall consider true.” If Bach can produce the same “bedrock belief” as the sacraments, then the sacraments are unnecessary — and the entire supernatural economy of salvation is reduced to a decorative addition to human experience.
Bach as Substitute for God
The author states plainly: “I attribute this belief to Bach.”
Let us be precise about what this means. Johann Sebastian Bach was a Lutheran — a member of a heretical sect that denies the propitiatory sacrifice of the Mass, the sacramental system, the papacy, meritorious works, purgatory, and the intercession of the saints. His theology was **heretical**. That his music is beautiful is not in question — God can work even through those in error, and beauty is transcendental and not the exclusive property of Catholics. But to **attribute a theological conviction to the music of a heretic**, rather than to the grace of God operating through His Church, is to invert the order of creation.
St. Pius X, in Lamentabili sane exitu (1907), condemned Proposition 19: “Non-Catholic exegetes have grasped the true sense of Holy Scripture better than Catholic exegetes.” The same logic applies here: to suggest that a Lutheran composer provides a surer foundation for “bedrock belief” than the sacraments, the Magisterium, and the theological virtues is to place the heretic above the Church.
Moreover, this attribution reveals the **subjectivist and sentimentalist** epistemology that underlies modernist Catholicism. Truth is not received from the authoritative teaching of the Church; it is felt through aesthetic experience. This is the very error that St. Pius X identified as the foundation of Modernism in Pascendi Dominici gregis (1907): the replacement of objective revelation with subjective religious experience. Fisher does not say “I believe because God has revealed it through His Church” — she says “I believe because Bach makes me feel it.” This is not Catholicism; it is **sentimental Protestantism with a Catholic veneer**.
The Heresy of Universalism
Fisher writes:
Everything! EVERYTHING. Maybe not right now, maybe not even during my lifetime, maybe not until the whole world had burned, perished, and wafted away, but eventually. It will work out.
This is not merely optimism — it is **implicit universalism**, the heretical belief that all things will ultimately be reconciled and “work out” regardless of sin, repentance, or the moral order. The Church teaches that the world will not simply “burn away” into a happy ending — it teaches the **Last Judgment**, the eternal damnation of the reprobate, the reality of hell, and the necessity of repentance in this life. Our Lord Himself warned: “Enter ye in at the strait gate: for wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat” (Matt. 7:13).
The idea that “everything will eventually work out” **regardless of whether men repent, regardless of whether they die in the state of grace, regardless of the final judgment** is a denial of the most fundamental truths of the faith. It is the error of Origen condemned by the Church, dressed in contemporary American sentimentalism. It is the logical endpoint of the modernist project: if there is no objective supernatural order, no final judgment, no hell, then of course “everything will work out” — because there is nothing to be saved from.
The Symptom of Conciliar Apostasy
This column is not an isolated incident — it is a **symptom of the systemic apostasy** that has consumed the conciliar sect since the death of the true Magisterium in 1958. When Catholic writers can publish columns in “Catholic” media that contain no reference to God, Christ, the Church, the sacraments, grace, sin, repentance, heaven, or hell — and instead ground their “hope” in the music of a Lutheran composer — we see the full fruit of the conciliar revolution.
Pius XI warned in Quas Primas:
We therefore have strong hope that the feast of Christ the King, which we shall henceforth celebrate annually, will bring society back to our most beloved Savior. It would, of course, be the task of Catholics to prepare and hasten this return through their work and activity; however, many of them do not hold the position in so-called social life, nor do they have the significance that those who carry the torch of truth should have. This unfavorable situation may perhaps be attributed to the laziness and timidity of the good, who do not want to oppose or resist too gently, as a result of which the enemies of the Church act with greater audacity and hardness.
Simcha Fisher’s column is the product of this laziness and timidity. It is the voice of a Catholicism that has been so thoroughly naturalized that it no longer recognizes the supernatural. It is a Catholicism without Christ, without the Church, without grace — a Catholicism that finds its “bedrock” not in the Rock of Peter, but in the fugues of a heretic.
The faithful who profess the integral Catholic faith must reject this naturalistic sentimentalism with the same firmness with which the Church has always rejected Pelagianism, rationalism, indifferentism, and Modernism. Our hope is not in Bach, not in our own temperament, not in the vague sense that “things will work out.” Our hope is in **Jesus Christ, true God and true Man, who reigns from the throne of the Cross, whose Church teaches with infallible authority, whose sacraments confer grace, and whose promises are eternal and unchangeable**.
Spes non confundit — hope does not confound. But that hope must be the theological virtue, not the aesthetic sentiment of a Catholic who has forgotten what she hopes for.
Source:
Bach, and beer bread (pillarcatholic.com)
Date: 29.05.2026