Pius X to Francis: From Modernism Expelled to Modernism Enthroned (Part 3: Conclusion)
Examples of Ratzingerian dialectics and Bergoglian evolutionism
In Part 1, I looked at the origins of Modernism and formulated a definition, with the help of Cardinal Mercier. In Part 2, I traced its fundamental problem back to a false philosophy that undermines supernatural faith in a definite divine revelation and discussed how the Oath Against Modernism was dismantled by a pope, Paul VI, who seemed suspiciously eager to embrace at least some of the ideas condemned by it. In this concluding part, I will look at some examples of how the evolutionism characteristic of the Modernist view plays out in the current pope and in his predecessor. Lastly, I will connect the dots between what I shall call Black, Scarlet, and Lavender Modernisms.
Francis as doctrinal evolutionist
One of the characteristic features of Modernism is its reliance on an evolutionary model of thought, in which truth is not static but dynamic: the Church does not possess the Truth at any given moment, but is ever searching for it, and ever stumbling upon new aspects of Truth that can even amount to a reversal of what the Church used to hold as true.1
We can see this approach vividly in Pope Francis, who maintains that the Church was actually wrong for 2,000 years in her support of the use of the death penalty, since we “now know” that the death penalty is contrary to human dignity, and therefore always and everywhere inadmissible (but this can be true only if it is per se malum, something evil in and of itself; for if it were not, it would sometimes be admissible). Or rather, it is perhaps more accurate to say that for a Modernist, the Church at a more primitive period of the development of human consciousness was right to promote the death penalty — it was bound to look legitimate to culturally immature people — but now in our stage of higher consciousness, which involves the apprehension of universal human rights, the brotherhood of all men, the non-divine source of political authority, and the universal benevolence of the Creator-God, we can see that the death penalty is wrong. Or so it may be for our particular phase of consciousness; evolution could lead us once more in a surprising direction, you never know.
Another example is the false teaching of the eighth chapter of Amoris Laetitia, which overturns the hitherto unbroken exclusion from reception of the sacraments of Catholics who are living in an objective state of adultery. The Modernist, however, would say that notions of mortal sin, objective sinfulness, worthiness, preconditions for sacramental reception, have all “evolved” under the influence of an ever-more comprehensive grasp of God’s merciful love, which “stops at nothing” (as they would say) and “is never earned or lost by our actions,” etc. Note that there is always a grain of truth in the midst of these errors, for otherwise they would have not the slightest plausibility for any intellect, however dim.
The universalism espoused by Francis in Abu Dhabi, in Singapore, and in many other places is yet another example: the Church once taught that it alone possesses and teaches the true religion given to us by God for our salvation, but “now we know” that God speaks to man through all religions and goes beyond them all, so each is a path to salvation for those who follow it sincerely. At best, Jesus is the “privileged path” of salvation, as Bishop Robert Barron said.2 One can detect here the influence of the subjective, emotional, and pragmatic theory of religion Pius X diagnosed in Pascendi.
One could multiply such examples of modern teachings, present already before the Council but emerging into the open afterwards, that bear this evolutionary stamp. Br. André-Marie writes:
Where Kant made all things static, Hegel introduced a dynamic element into his metaphysics (like Heraclitus). For Hegel, all things evolve in the dialectic of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. History, truth, thought, indeed all reality is explained by this principle. In the history of thought, the Hegelian dialectic gives rise to “Historical Consciousness,” an acute awareness of change as a constant, describing all reality as in continual development. It further produces “Historicism,” the theory in which general laws of historical development are the determinant of events. In this theory, all things are subject to progressive evolutionary processes.3
Hegelian dialectic in Ratzinger
Indeed, we can see how even Benedict XVI’s theory of the “hermeneutic of continuity” imports or retains an element of Hegelianism. In the famous address he gave to the Roman Curia on December 22, 2005, he spoke not of a “hermeneutic of continuity” (although he used that expression at other times),4 but of a “hermeneutic of reform, of renewal in the continuity of the one subject-Church which the Lord has given to us.”
As Brian McCall explains, this is not quite as promising as it might sound:
Benedict XVI is arguing that the object of belief can change over time as long as the Church remains the same subject proposing those developing beliefs. It seeks revisions of teaching over time through a process that keeps the structure of the Church in place.5
So, although Benedict in the same speech rejects what he calls the “hermeneutic of rupture” that makes of the Church during and after the Council a totally different entity with totally different beliefs from the Church before the Council, he goes on to say that in regard to more contingent matters such as the Church’s relationship with the modern world, there is in fact a blend of rupture and continuity — certain ruptures are necessary in order to secure a deeper continuity, as it were. Or in his words: “It is precisely in this combination of continuity and discontinuity at different levels that the very nature of true reform consists.”
Let me give some examples of how this Hegelian dialectic works in Ratzinger.
1. In his book Principles of Catholic Theology, Ratzinger called the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, Gaudium et Spes, a “countersyllabus” to Pius IX’s Syllabus of Errors.6 The Thesis is Pius IX’s Anti-Liberalism; the Antithesis is modern Liberalism; the dialectical process is the struggle to integrate modernity into Catholicism; the resulting Synthesis is a Higher Liberalism that is somehow also Catholic.
2. In the motu proprio Summorum Pontificum and the accompanying letter to bishops, Con Grande Fiducia, we have a Thesis: the Tridentine Roman rite; an Antithesis: the Novus Ordo; a dialectical process: “mutual enrichment”; and an eventual Synthesis: a future Roman rite that is both old and new, with the supposed “best qualities” of each.7
3. In the position Benedict XVI takes about heaven, hell, and purgatory in the encyclical letter Spe Salvi, we can reconstruct the latent structure this way. Thesis: the historically dominant view that the human race is a “massa damnata,” in other words, a race justly destined for perdition due to original and actual sin, from which a minority is saved. Antithesis: the universalism of Origen, David Bentley Hart, Hans Urs von Balthasar, and Bishop Barron: either everyone will be saved, or at least it’s reasonable to hope that that will be the case. The dialectical process is the ever-widening inclusiveness of salvific grace. The final Synthesis: most people are saved, though the few who are terribly wicked, like Hitler and Stalin, are lost; they cannot sit at the same heavenly banquet.8
4. Regarding human evolution, the Thesis is that man was created directly by God and woman by God from the first man, and the whole human race takes its origin from this pair. The Antithesis is that human beings are nothing but a cosmic accident, the unplanned outcome of material particles interacting by chance. The Synthesis is theistic evolution, where God somehow upholds and directs the random material process until at some point He intervenes to establish “first humans,” whose parents were non-humans.
We see this kind of dialectical pattern throughout Joseph Ratzinger’s writings; it is very true that as different as he is from Cardinal Walter Kasper, they share a profound core of Germanic philosophy but apply it in different ways. Kasper, for example, describes the shift from the apostolic period to the post-apostolic period of the early Church councils as a “continuity in discontinuity,” where the original kerygma or message of salvation was translated into Greek categories of thought in order to be “adapted to the mentality of the day”; and he says that this is what every age must do: translate the Gospel into a new language, discarding no longer relevant or meaningful concepts and adopting novel ones to fit the requirements of the times.
Now, I have spent a good deal of time talking about the history, personalities, and philosophical method of Modernism because if we do not see these things clearly, we will not be able to recognize the wide range of forms — at times, sophisticated and subtle — that Modernism assumes in our own day. There are out-and-out Modernists like Kasper, but there are also many who have been influenced or formed by Modernism perhaps without even realizing it, or who believe they can somehow “salvage” or “rehabilitate” its “positive aspects” while still maintaining Catholic orthodoxy and tradition (Ratzinger, I think, would fall into this category, as would most so-called Catholic conservatives).
As I have been at pains to show, Modernism is not a tidy, closed system that must be held or rejected in full; rather, it is a mish-mash of ideas about how faith and religion operate, how salvation occurs, how Scripture is formed, how dogmatic definitions emerge and are refined, how the law of development of thought — the expansion and refinement of the moral conscience — compels the modernization of human beings and their institutions, including the Church. It’s unlikely that one will find all of these views equally in all who might be called Modernists or semi-Modernists; it’s even more unlikely that everyone who holds such views will be aware of their origins and their implications.
Three waves of Modernists
Nevertheless, there are those individuals who are very well aware of what they are doing and how they intend to determine the future of the Church. I suggest we think of them in three categories: the Black Modernists of 120 years ago; the Scarlet Modernists of 60 years ago; and the Lavender Modernists of today.
The Black Modernists of 120 years ago were men of the cloth, like Alfred Loisy and George Tyrrell, who embraced rationalism, scientism, historicism, revisionism, and relativism. These men and their writings and conferences made it possible for an attitude of distrust, suspicion, and contempt toward tradition to make headway in the Church. Their views prompted a growing restlessness for Church reform and often for liturgical reform — a movement that Pius XI and Pius XII tried to moderate and placate in their pontificates, with mixed results.9
It was John XXIII who, though personally of a more traditional piety, made the fatal mistake of convening an ecumenical council at a time when the neo-Modernist agenda had picked up steam once again (we can see this by examining mid-twentieth-century theologians like Rahner, Congar, Chenu, Küng, Schillebeeckx, Häring, De Lubac, and Ratzinger, among many others), and then compounded his error by allowing these periti and their bishops to cancel out the preparatory documents of the Council, staging a “coup” that determined its fundamental direction and cast of mind.
At this point, sixty years out from the end of Vatican II, we could speak of Scarlet Modernists, in the sense of bishops and cardinals of that period who, usually of impeccable personal morality and a strong sense of duty, were sympathetic to more progressive or liberal points of view at the Council — and even more can we speak of bishops and cardinals consecrated or created in the decades immediately after the Council, who would most fully implement its vision, normalizing milder forms of the ideas condemned in Pius X’s Pascendi — a version that might be called “soft Modernism,” which is the theological soundtrack to “beige Catholicism” (to use a phrase of Bishop Barron’s).
This Modernism is, in fact, nothing less than the Creed of the Anti-Church, the operative principles of the churchmen and ecclesiastical structures that are masquerading as the Church of Christ and living parasitically off of her historical capital and financial assets. We can recognize the Anti-Church by its self-contradictory traits: the dogmatic undogmatism, the rigid laxism, the exclusive inclusiveness, the systematic antischolasticism and eclecticism, the anti-traditional spirit that has by now practically become a substitute tradition, since it has been around long enough to win a certain veneer of respectability (note that the politicized canonizations of several Vatican II popes were a crucial step in transmitting the pretense of divine approval).
Intellectual errors followed by ecclesiastical restructuring — including the episcopate-destroying pursuit of “collegiality” and “synodality” — and the betrayal of the sacred liturgy have led to the moral vacuum, or worse, the demon-infested vacuum, that we now know as the clerical sexual abuse scandal, which it would be more proper to call the “abuse pandemic.” The sexual abuse epitomized in former Cardinal McCarrick and now sustained by his well-placed collaborators in the USCCB and at the Vatican is of course bound up with the vice of sodomy, which has always flared up in the worst periods of Church history: times when knowledge, virtue, and commitment to Christ had dissipated, when the Faith was like a tiny spark nurtured by a faithful remnant, out of which reform and renewal eventually came by God’s great mercy.
This is why I speak of today’s “Lavender Modernists”: they have much in common with the two preceding types, the Black and the Scarlet, but they are altogether worse, for they combine intellectual infidelity, institutional ambition, liturgical corruption, and moral depravity. And in this way, they are the promulgators and precipitants of the Great Apostasy.
The response of faithful Catholics
How, then, do we combat this multi-generational parasite of Modernism? In a time of such confusion and wickedness, one thing is absolutely clear: we must hold fast to the settled and articulate tradition of the Church:
in her doctrine, which we find in all of the ecumenical Councils that taught dogmatically and in the Catechism of Trent and all the good catechisms of the past;
in our moral life, according to the constant teaching and example of the saints;
above all, in the Church’s authentic age-old rites of worship, be they Eastern or Western.
This is what we are asked to do: remain faithful to the inheritance we have received, prior to the period of anarchy. The one and only safe path is to stick to what we know to be certainly true; to implore God’s help and intervention daily; to entrust ourselves to the Virgin Mary; and never to abandon the Church of Christ for imaginary greener pastures elsewhere. What good could any move away from the Catholic Church accomplish? It would only remove good people from what they need the most and where they are most needed — the visible Body of Christ — and would only contribute to the growing anarchy.
What is needed is steadfast attachment to the Bride of Christ in spite of her marred countenance on earth, unswerving loyalty to her eternal Head, total acceptance of the doctrine He entrusted to her in its integrity. In short, we need to do what St. Pius X taught us to do over a hundred years ago. Truth is perpetually youthful, with a radiant countenance of beauty and delight; it is error that grows prematurely old, gnarled, and hideous.
There is more need than ever for the counterwitness of Catholics who speak the truth with love, and live it with joy. These will be the torchbearers who bring the light of the Faith into the remaining decades of the twenty-first century and beyond, while the Modernist sect (for that it what it is) implodes upon itself. After all, as our Lord said in no uncertain terms: Veritas liberabit vos, the truth will set you free (Jn 8:32). He Himself is that truth — Ego sum via, et veritas, et vita (Jn 14:6) — and His Church is the “pillar and bulwark of the truth” (1 Tim. 3:15).
Because of the flight from God that began with Adam’s rebellion and worms its way into the children of Eve, we will not be surprised if the world prefers the slavery of subjectivism to the truth that sets us free: “The time is coming when people will not endure sound doctrine, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own likings, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander into myths” (2 Tim 3:3–4). Surely it is not too much to ask of loyal Catholics that they not follow suit; that, instead, they seek out, study, and promote sound doctrine in all faith and humility; that they turn away from fashionable modern myths to embrace a heritage of perennial truths; that they accumulate teachers who, unashamed to be lowly pupils in the school of Christ, feed upon every word that comes from the mouth of God, and nourish their disciples with the same life-giving food.
A sober examination of the Church on earth at this time discloses the existence of a major “schism.” Yet, contrary to the propaganda of the progressives, it is not faithful and traditional Catholics who are in schism, but those members of the hierarchy and of the laity who, under the intoxicating influence of Modernism, have abandoned the rock of truth and the ark of salvation. We cannot expect them to be humbly admitting their errors and repenting of their sins. This, surely, is an apocalyptic storm from which only an omnipotent God can deliver us, in answer to the prayers He calls forth from our weary but unvanquished souls. As Archbishop Viganò says:
The Church is shrouded in the darkness of modernism, but the victory belongs to Our Lord and His Bride. We desire to continue to profess the perennial faith of the Church in the face of the roaring evil that besieges her. We desire to keep vigil with her and with Jesus, in this new Gethsemane of the end times; to pray and do penance in reparation for the many offenses caused to them…. We know…that even the “synthesis of all heresies” represented by Modernism and its updated conciliar version can never definitively obscure the splendor of the Bride of Christ, but only for the brief period of the eclipse that Providence, in its infinite wisdom, has allowed, to draw from it a greater good.10
Our growth in holiness through trials, our recommitment to prayer, our study and proclamation of the truth, our grateful adherence to all that God has lavished upon us in our Catholic Tradition — may all this be the evidence in our own lives that He has indeed drawn from the crisis a greater good.
For a superb treatment of the defined dogmatic truths to which Modernism is opposed, see Lamont and Pierantoni, Defending the Faith, 103–13, 268–69.
See “Is Jesus Christ the ‘privileged way’ to salvation—or the only way?,” LifeSiteNews, December 17, 2018.
“What Did St. Pius X Mean When He Called Modernism ‘the Synthesis of All Heresies’?,” Catholicism.org, September 9, 2007.
For documentation, see “The Ongoing Saga of ‘the Hermeneutic of Continuity,’” New Liturgical Movement, November 26, 2013—written at a time when I still believed that Francis might continue in the same line as Benedict, and also that Benedict’s own line was unobjectionable. The passage of time together with further study has clarified much.
McCall, A Voice in the Wilderness, 109.
“If it is desirable to offer a diagnosis of the text [Gaudium et Spes] as a whole, we might say that (in conjunction with the texts on religious liberty and world religions) it is a revision of the Syllabus of Pius IX, a kind of countersyllabus…. [T]he Syllabus established a line of demarcation against the determining forces of the nineteenth century: against the scientific and political world view of liberalism. In the struggle against modernism this twofold delimitation was ratified and strengthened…. Let us be content to say here that the text serves as a countersyllabus and, as such, represents, on the part of the Church, an attempt at an official reconciliation with the new era inaugurated in 1789” (Principles of Catholic Theology: Building Stones for a Fundamental Theology, trans. Sr. Mary Frances McCarthy, S.N.D. [San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1987], 381–82).
See my lecture “Beyond Summorum Pontificum: The Work of Retrieving the Tridentine Heritage,” Rorate Caeli, July 14, 2021.
See the Encyclical Letter Spe Salvi (November 30, 2007), nn. 44–46; cf. my article “On Hell: Clarity Is Mercy in an Age of ‘Dare We Hope,’” OnePeterFive, August 7, 2019.
Modernists were not uniformly in favor of liturgical reform or experimentation. Since their concern was to deny the literal meaning of dogmas and to emphasize subjective religious and ethical experience, it was easy enough for them to revel in the religious symbolism the traditional rites provided. At the same time, Modernism’s general evolutionary framework, in which mankind’s present condition and future state are seen as superior to the past, readily lends itself to liturgical aggiornamento. Ironically, we see in the official policy of the Society of St. Pius X an inversion of the Modernist problem: the focus is placed so strongly on “doctrine” that liturgical deformation, such as the Pius XII Holy Week (a trial run for the Novus Ordo), is accepted without protest. It’s as if they maintain that a pope can be an absolute monarch with no responsibilities to the Church’s tradition of worship, as long as dogma is untouched; he could create a new liturgy de novo and it would have to be accepted if no doctrinal objections could be made to it. Such is the essence of liturgical nominalism and voluntarism; and such a view is not Catholic.
A Voice in the Wilderness, 157; 256.
That was fantastic. Thank you.
(Just one tiny little thing: those who have committed adultery are not prohibited from receiving 'the sacraments' since obviously Confession is a sacrament that they are very much encouraged to receive. This term 'the sacraments' is used very clumsily in a lot of Catholic media and it needs to stop.)
That's a nice photo of Francis standing in the mess.