Pius X to Francis: From Modernism Expelled to Modernism Enthroned (Part 2)

A poison worse than Protestantism yet everywhere in the bloodstream

In the first part of this three-part series, I went back to the first generation of Modernists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in order to compile the salient traits of Modernism and arrive at a definition. I considered several steps in the emerging response of Pius X, culminating in the encyclical Pascendi Dominici Gregis of 1907 and systematic efforts to identify and disarm the proponents of error. I ended with Cardinal Mercier’s excellent summary of the phenomenon. Today, our examination will continue with an inquiry into the fundamental problem with Modernism; then I shall take up the role of the “Oath against Modernism” and ask if, in fact, large numbers of prelates who took this oath perjured themselves.

Ljubow Sergejewna Popowa, “Raum und Kraft Konstruction” (1921) (source)

False philosophy dissolves faith

Writing many decades after Pascendi, the great Dominican traditionalist Fr. Roger-Thomas Calmel had this to say about our subject:

Modernism is deadlier than Protestantism; in effect, it does not proceed by open negation but by interior sterilization. Dogmas and sacraments are not denied outright, but, by a diabolical process of dismantling, modernism leads gradually to their denaturing and the voiding of their proper mystery.¹

For these errors and still others, Pius X in Pascendi condemned the entire system of Modernism as “the synthesis of all heresies,” or, to translate more accurately the pope’s Latin phrase, omnium haereseon conlectum, “the collector of all heresies.” It was declared incompatible with the first truth of the Catholic Faith, namely that God, in the freedom of His love, willed to reveal Himself to man, to whom He also provided the gift of faith and reasonable motives of belief so that man may freely and reasonably respond to that revelation with intellectual assent and base his life upon it.

But why did Pius X brand Modernism with the striking and perhaps perplexing phrase “the collector of all heresies”? Br. André-Marie explains it well:

The Holy Father says that the Modernists “lay the ax not to the branches and shoots, but to the very root, that is, to the faith and its deepest fibers.” There is, then, something fundamental to the heresy. It is not a question of the Modernists literally professing every single historical heresy, something mentally impossible, since many of them are mutually exclusive; it is, rather, a question of Modernism being radical — in the literal sense of going to the radix (root) — in its denial of the faith. This is so because “[the Modernists’] whole system has been born of the alliance between faith and false philosophy,” a philosophy that fundamentally denies knowledge, the supernatural order, the stability of truth, the principle of non-contradiction, and the metaphysics of common sense…. The manifold results of this evil union between faith and an unworthy handmaid are the fruits of a tree which is corrupt at its very roots.²

When St. Thérèse of Lisieux spoke her memorable words “all is grace,” she might well have been summing up Pius X’s objections to Modernism. That God made us; that He reached out to us in our wretched condition; that He was made flesh and died for us; that he poured His Spirit of love into our hearts; that He offers us a share in His life through the sacraments of the Church — all this is pure grace, pure gift, coming down to us from the Father of Lights, the giver of every good gift, to whom we make a gift of ourselves through obedience, filial love, and adoration.

For the Modernist, everything is upside down; one is in a hall of mirrors where all is self, welling up from self, trapped in time, ever evolving, a confusion of becomings, a cacophony of opinions. Behind the catechetical, liturgical, doctrinal, and moral chaos of the Catholic Church today, it is easy to detect the lingering influence of the Modernist ideas that even Pius X’s strict disciplinary efforts — and similar efforts of Pius XII decades later — were unable to eradicate.