"why we have no trouble in being kind to heretics, and no repugnance in rubbing shoulders with them"

     "If heretics no longer horrify us today, as they once did our forefathers, is it certain that it is because there is more charity in our hearts?  Or would it not too often be, perhaps, without our daring to say so, because the bone of contention, that is to say, the very substance of our faith, no longer interests us?  Men of too familiar and too passive a faith, perhaps for us dogmas are no longer the Mystery on which we live, the Mystery which is to be accomplished in us.  Consequently, then, heresy no longer shocks us; at least, it no longer convulses us like something trying to tear the soul of our souls away from us. . . . And that is why we have no trouble in being kind to heretics, and no repugnance in rubbing shoulders with them.
     "In reality, bias against 'heretics' is felt today just as it used to be.  Many give way to it as much as their forefathers used to do.  Only, they have turned it against political adversaries.  Those are the only ones that horrify them.  Those are the only ones with whom they refuse to mix.  Sectarianism has only changed its object and taken other forms, because the vital interest has shifted.  Should we dare to say that this shifting is progress?
     "It is not always charity, alas, which has grown greater, or which has become more enlightened:  it is often faith, the taste for the things of eternity, which has grown less."

     Henri de Lubac, S.J., Further paradoxes, trans. from Nouveaux paradoxes (1955) by Ernest Beaumont (London:  Longmans, Green; Westminster, MD:  The Newman Press, 1958), 118-119.
     That last paragraph continues and concludes with the words:  "Injustice and violence are still reigning; but they are now in the service of degraded passions."  So were our "forefathers" who "refuse[d] to mix" with heretics, then, guilty of "bias", "Injustice and violence"?  Is that how, contra some, this passage should really be read?  Or is the conservative reading correct after all, since the "passions" of our "forefathers" were apparently not then "degraded"?  I have made no attempt to read around this in context, and am no expert on de Lubac, who, I believe, suffered himself from some censure, and could therefore be saying something somewhat more nuanced here.