From the bulletin of March 21, 2021
Continuing with the documents of Pope St. Pius X, we come to one of his better known encyclicals, Pascendi Dominici Gregis, subtitled “On the Doctrine of the Modernists,” published in 1907. “Modernism” is the name that the pope uses to describe a collection of erroneous beliefs which were becoming popular at the time. As the pope, he sees it as his responsibility to point out and correct these errors as directly as possible.
The first error he tackles is what he calls “agnosticism.” This refers to the belief that human reason can only work within natural laws. It starts with the assumption that supernatural things either aren’t real or can’t be really understood. So, it means that miracles are not to be believed and that it’s impossible for mankind to know if God exists. Obviously, this does not fit with the Catholic belief that God revealed himself to us through miracles and scripture. Pope Pius X points out that this agnostic belief eventually becomes outright atheism. He goes on to note that the modernist way of thinking creates what is called “historical criticism.” This is a method of interpreting scripture that starts out by removing all supernatural things. It also assumes that Jesus is only human. The goal of this method is to uncover the “historical Jesus,” who was, they claim, just a human being and not God. But Jesus is God, so these assumptions must be rejected as incompatible with Catholicism.
This rather limited idea of the human experience causes modernists to reduce religion to a series of evolving intellectual ideas based a vague “religious sense.” Religion is reduced to a man-made response to this sense. As something man-made, based on human reason, and lacking in supernatural guidance, religion can and should change with the times. So, claim the modernists, things like doctrine and dogma can change along with evolving human ideas. This is not true. Catholic teaching does allow for the “development” of doctrines, but never for them to be truly changes or removed. For example, Jesus is God. That will always be true. We’ve always taught that and always will. In the beginning of the Church, however, it was not perfectly clear how Jesus was God and what that meant for his human nature. Over time, the doctrine developed to clarify the relationship between his divine and human natures without ever rejecting that first fundamental truth that Jesus is God.
Modernists also take a dangerous position on the relationship between science and religion. Because they deny the possibility of supernatural things like miracles, there are never any places for science and religion to interact. They often treat history and religion as separate, as if all the history and stories of scripture did not really happen. On the contrary, the truth is that Jesus really did live in a real period of history and did real miracles that transcended the real limits of the natural world. History needs toa ccount for the fact that God has stepped in and acted in a supernatural way. To this day, miracles do occur and science interacts with the supernatural enough to say “this is beyond nature, it must be from God.” The Church often asks doctors and other scientists to study claimed miracles as part of the process of certifying them as miracles.
This all spills over also into our understanding of the sacraments. Modernists treat the sacraments as primarily symbolic. They deny that Jesus gave them to the Church and hold that we made them up to serve our religious sense. As such, they claim it is okay for us to override, disregard, or change the sacraments if we find it more helpful to do so.
A lot of this should sound a little familiar to you. To this day, there are people in the Church, even some priests and theologians, who act as if our faith is man-made and free to change. Belief in the real presence of the Eucharist is at an all time low. Historians and Scientists often assume God can’t be real, so they are unwilling to take a real look at the evidence. The influence of modernism continues to affect us. So, we’ll pick up next week by continuing to look at what they believe and why.
In Christ,
-Fr. Albert