See also 100th Anniversary of Pascendi
Rev. Fr. Charles T. Brusca
9 November AD 2010
Asked to define “Modernism” many
Catholics are able only to point to its symptoms. They will say that
Modernism is clown Masses, prelates wearing American Indian war bonnets or
carrying balloons at Mass. Others will point to bare breasted woman
reading the Epistle, child rapists, or priests cruising around Australia with
embezzled parish funds. But , at the root, Modernism is an erroneous
theory about the nature of truth.
For anyone who admits the existence of
an omniscient and unchanging God, the concept of objective truth is obvious.
Mankind may have difficulty in knowing a particular truth, may disagree over the
truth of a particular matter, and may be incapable of discovering the truth in
matters requiring divine revelation. Nonetheless, objective truth exists
necessarily, at least in the mind of God—and exists with reasonable frequency
in the minds of men.
An early blow at objective truth came
with Martin Luther’s claim that each individual was to interpret the
Scriptures for himself. Perhaps Luther naively expected the Holy Ghost to
infuse the truth in the mind of each private interpreter, but real world
experience has demonstrated that private interpretation will generate nearly as
many “truths” as there are interpreters. Protestantism gave way to the
“positivism” or agnosticism of the so-called “Enlightenment.”
Pius X was Pope long enough after
the mistaken philosophical ideas of the “Enlightenment” and Freemasonry
poisoned the thinking of Western Civilization, and these false
philosophies began even to sneak their way into the intelligentsia of the
Church. It may be Pope Saint Pius’ most memorable deed, that he
condemned this collection of contemporary errors under the collective title of
“Modernism,” which he called “the synthesis of all heresies.”
In the encyclical, Pascendi Dominici
gregis, Pope Pius uses three terms to describe the Modernists:
“agnostic,” “immanentist,” and “evolutionist.”
By “agnostic,” he means that the Modernist is one who believes
in nothing other than the experiences of the senses—if something cannot be
seen, touched, tasted, or smelled, it is simply unreal. There is no
spirit, no soul, no supernatural. There can be no miracles, no divine
grace. “Vice” and “virtue,” “good” and “evil” are nothing
but labels to describe human feelings about things. Indeed,
all abstractions—words like “mankind” and “human nature” even the
“nature of a cat or a dog”—are merely labels used in speech to
group the phenomena observed by the senses.
Everything is ambiguous. The
Modernist has no qualms about stating both truth and falsity about the same
things, in the same document, sermon, or speech.
Man, the “acting person” defines
himself by what he does and whom he influences—there is no “essence,” no
“human nature,” and certainly no “soul infused by God.” Theology,
philosophy, biblical criticism, and history must exclude anything and everything
not detectable by the senses. There is no such thing as truth—not just
that it is difficult to know the truth, but that there is no such thing, even in
the mind of God—for according to Modernism, “God is not real.”
By “immanentist,” Pope Pius
meant that the Modernist refused all transcendent concepts—there is no God, no
divine providence, no eternal will of God, no afterlife—no nothing “over and
above” the natural world. Everything that is real is bound up in the
material world of the senses. If man has a concept of spirit, or a belief
in God, or a concept of good and evil, these are mere psychological sentiments
in the material mind of a material person. If a society (even the Church)
has a set of religious beliefs, these are nothing more than collective
psychology or sociology—a “consensus” expressed in symbols that
religious people call dogmas or doctrines.
To the Modernist, the religious
sentiments of one man are as good as those of any other; the beliefs of
one society are as good as those of any other; the dogmas and doctrines of
one religion are as good as those of any other. After all, religious
sentiments, beliefs, dogmas and doctrines are merely the psychological products
of material minds—there can be no “right,” “wrong,” “better,” or
“worse.”
Finally, Pope Pius described Modernism
as “evolutionist.” The world is constantly changing, and along
with it change those abstract concepts and beliefs held in the material minds of
persons and societies. Over time, people view things differently and adopt
different sentiments and develop sentiments about new things. As the
population changes over time, the “consensus” changes, and what are called
“dogmas” or “doctrines” must also change in order to reflect what
society and its people believe at the present moment. The Modernist speaks
of “living tradition,” which means a constantly changing tradition, with no
relationship to objective truth.
The Modernist accepts the idea that in
any society there will be people who wish to change more slowly or to change not
at all—the so-called “conservatives” or “traditionalists” who tend to
identify with institutions like the Church. As well, there will be
“progressives” among those who are more closely in contact with the “real
problems” of life. “Change and advances” in the consensus will come
about “by covenant and compromise between these two forces of conservation and
progress.”
Pope Pius doesn’t identify it as such,
but this continual “change and advance” brought about by the interaction of
the “two forces of conservation and progress” is the “dialectic”
of Hegel and Marx. Indeed, without anything supernatural or transcendent,
it corresponds well to the “dialectic materialism” of the latter.
“Thesis” + “Antithesis”→ ”Synthesis.” It is at the root
of the endless “dialogue” of which the post-Vatican II Modernists are
so boastfully proud.
Rightly, this is “the synthesis of all
heresies” in that Modernism denies us the ability to ever know God who is
unchanging, or to properly relate to our neighbor through God’s never changing
moral law. Pope Saint Pius’ ideas are even more important today, in
our world, for Modernism has spread like wildfire through our political society
and even through the Catholic Church.
Modern critics accuse Saint Pius of
seeing conspiracies where none existed—in reality, if anything is missing from
the encyclical, it is an even stronger warning that the secret societies of the
devil were penetrating more and more deeply into the Church and up to the
highest levels of the hierarchy. He might have quoted the words of his
predecessor, the saintly Pope Leo XIII:
"In the Holy Place itself, where has been set up
the See of the most holy Peter and the Chair of Truth for the light of the
world, they have raised the throne of their abominable impiety, with the
iniquitous design that when the Pastor has been struck, the sheep may be
scattered."
The encyclical Pascendi Dominici
gregis is as worth reading today as it was a hundred years ago. It is
in print in that wonderful book from TAN, The Popes Against Modern Errors,
from TAN.
The encyclical is on the Internet on a number of websites.
And you may find it in pamphlet form.
