The Ancient Serpent had oft-times crawled into the sacred precincts of Holy Church since his first entry. However, this time his havoc would strike a thousand blows to the Mystical Body of Christ. St. Pope Pius X named the serpent: Modernism.
At the beginning of time a snake slithered into a Garden called Eden. He entered quietly and quite unobtrusively, as is his wont. And he wreaked havoc on the human race.
That same serpent slithered into the supernatural Garden of Eden, which is the Holy Catholic Church, in the waning years of the nineteenth century. Again, he did so unnoticed and blending quite naturally into the human landscape. This Ancient Serpent had oft-times crawled into the sacred precincts of Holy Church since that first entry. But this time it was different. Dramatically different. His havoc this time would strike a thousand blows to the Mystical Body of Christ. These were blows that cut more deeply than any in the two millennia that Christ’s Body trod the earth. Truth be told, those wounds have now been freshly reopened in a cruel twist of the serpent’s ingenuity.
Back in 1907, one man possessed the grace to spot the serpent. This man was a priest and a pope. More importantly, he was a saint. Giuseppe Melchiore Sarto was baptized on June 8, 1835, and was crowned Roman Pontiff as Pius X in August 1903, and died on the eve of World War I. Four decades later, Pope Pius XII raised Pope Pius X to the altars, the first pope to be canonized since Pope Pius V in 1712.
This saint named the serpent: Modernism. The title is easily misunderstood as a censure of all things contemporary, but it was chosen because this new heresy was a veritable cornucopia of philosophical and theological errors festering since the Enlightenment. He wasted no time in promulgating on September 8, 1907, a fierce and unambiguous condemnation in an encyclical, Pascendi Dominici Gregis (Tending the Flock of Our Lord). The encyclical’s title summarized the entire office of the Roman Pontiff, and indeed every successor of the Apostles: to feed, protect, and defend the “little ones,” like you and me. This saint understood, despite his meek and self-effacing manner, that Our Lord was summoning him to be a strong Father, by jealously guarding the depositum fidei which alone nurtures the souls of men. Papa Sarto recognized that the “little ones” would not be able to rise to the heights of Holy Charity if their souls were riddled with the toxins of heresy.
Pope Pius X understood that the easy religion Modernism proposed would tickle the ears of modern man like the sirens that seduced Odysseus’ soldiers. Modernism drained the life from Catholicism, leaving only an embalmed Church. Under cover of becoming more ‘friendly’ to the world, Modernism would wed the Church to the world leaving its Savior as only a noble historical footnote. The great pope would have none of this and set about purifying the Church. From Peter’s throne he hurled thunderbolts that shook the Church east to west, north to south.
The encyclical’s dense 87 pages exposed a heresy of startling depth, prompting the Pontiff to tag it “the synthesis of all heresies.” Where other errors in the Church’s history had threatened branches of the supernatural vine, Modernism attacked the trunk and root. Over and over, the Modernist partisans protested that an obscurantist Rome was once again impeding progress. A peasant pope lacked the sophistication to delicately parse anew a revised Gospel more congenial to men come of age. When the excommunicated Father Alfred Loisy (one of Modernism’s founders and most brilliant defenders) was approached at the end of his life for the Last Rites and rapprochement with the Church, he snapped: “Reconciled to the Church of Rome? To Pius X? A man more stupid and embarrassing than the Curé of Ars? No!”
Distilling the rich analysis of Pius X’s encyclical would be as much a miscarriage as recommending Cliff Notes for Hamlet. A few highlights must suffice: Modernism insisted that religion is simply a matter of a subjective movement of man’s élan, or, more idiomatically, a transaction of feelings. God was not “outside,” administered exclusively by a paternalistic Church; God was “within,” or, in Bergson’s phrase, God was man’s élan vital. This Modernist novelty earned one of Chesterton’s choicest quips: “The most horrible of all religions is the religion of the god within. When Mr. Jones says that he is talking to the god within, all that Mr. Jones is doing is talking to Mr. Jones.”
Modernism didn’t stop there. It held that the Church’s immemorial teachings had been mummified in a lifeless ahistorical irrelevancy, like a flea in amber. The Modernist prescribed “historical consciousness,” so that each doctrine is seen as only useful for the time in which it was written. Christ and his truth must evolve. Their meaning must depend upon the zeitgeist of each age. Finally, Modernism’s lodestar was its stress upon individual human experience. This was to become the gravamen of Revelation. A rebooted Christ was to be refashioned into the image of each individual man. No longer was man made in the image and likeness of God; God was remade in man’s. Or, in the words of that de rigueur theologian of the 1960s, John Robinson of Honest To God fame, “In order for Christ to be saved, Christianity must die.”
Truly, the “synthesis of all heresies.” Not just one aspect of the Faith was threatened, but the very Faith itself. Not just one aspect of God’s truth disappeared, but God himself. No wonder Pius X knew he must count no cost too great in addressing this malignancy. He mandated every one of his bishops around the globe to hunt down this heresy and crush it. The saint commanded that every priest solemnly proclaim an oath against Modernism as a prerequisite for reception of Holy Orders. That oath remained in effect till 1978, when it was thought to be an embarrassing fossil from a crouched and paranoid Catholic past, a relic of a Fortress Church. Today, echoes of Modernism resound in not a few parishes and university lecture halls. Its resuscitated apologists preach an open church that will make possible the easy dissemination of the old theological errors along with their newer variations.
During the Modernist crisis, Pope Pius X was approached by some cardinal advisers to reconsider his condemnation of the Modernist heresy. Shouldn’t he adopt a more conciliatory tone? Wouldn’t the Church be better served by fruitful dialogue? The humble yet Herculean pope famously retorted: “You want them to be treated with oil, soap and caresses. But they should be beaten with fists. In a duel, you don’t count or measure the blows, you strike as you can.” Isn’t this how we expect fathers to sound when his children are at risk? Especially Holy Fathers? Wouldn’t it be nice to think that Winston Churchill was inspired by that remonstrance of Pius X when, faced with advisers who pleaded negotiation with Hitler, he bellowed, “One does not reason with a tiger when one’s head is in his mouth!”
Someone, please tell me, where is Pius X today?
Republished with gracious permission from Crisis Magazine (August 2018).
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The featured image is a photo of St. Pope Pius X, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
There are quite a few St. Pius X’s today, they are within the priestly society that bears his name. Unfortunately none of them are likely to be elected pope anytime soon.
Thank you very much for this article. St. Pius X is in the traditional movement. Also, even though he is attacked viciously there, he can still be seen in the Church in Poland, where, as one priest said, Cardinal Wyszynski did not let the church to become a whore of Babylon. Not sure how long She can stay pure though, with Poland being in the diabolical EU…
I wonder if the objection was to modernism or rather another “Ism”, namely, atheism. If “Modernism” simply means modern technology, modern conveniences, modern standards of living, etc., then modernism is almost entirely a good thing. Seems to me, though, it’s atheism that’s the problem, not modernism.
Eric, that synthesis of all heresies known as Modernism involves far more than atheism; indeed, it need not involve atheism at all. In fact, it usually doesn’t. The supreme text against Modernism is Pope St. Pius X’s Pascendi encyclical. Essential reading. Also see Bishop Richard Williamson’s lectures on it posted on Youtube.
Modernism makes the human being far to simple, but even with the assumption of modern science, the human soul contains four billion mathematical years of natural history, so the human is quite incomprehensible to itself. In his spiritual testament, Memory and Identity, deceased pope John Paul II argued in favour of the literal interpretation of Genesis (“as seen with the eyes of the angels,” according to the Summa Theologica). In his book, God and Reason (Gott und die Vernunft, not available in English), pope Benedict XVI argued in favour of the traditional “theologia naturalis” of the faith. We must (with the pope emirito) pray for pope Francis. It is to be hoped that Pius X is in Ratzinger Schülerkreis.
Modernism instead of religion, that is in stead of beliefs in human dignity with some kind of grace, is atheism. The Danish bishop Hans Martensen wrote in 1962, before the Second Vatican Council, that by the First Vatican Council in 1871, time and theology was not yet ripe for a big council, and that it had become common among theologians to admit the interruption of that council, once it had defined the dogma of the infallibility of the pope, to be due to divine providence. Then, with two world wars and the possibility of a third, and with pope Pius XII’s usage in 1950 of papal infalibility to define the dogma of the Holy Virgin Mary’s dormitio, time and theology had ripened for the big council. Indeed, to the Second Vatican Council, it was not modernism, but atheism that is the big problem, and hence the final declaration Of Human Dignity, for religious liberty, was probably the big achievement. The Church has always taught that salvation is open to all of Adam’s and Heva’s descendants, especially so to those to whom the gospel is preached in this world, by grace.
And to think that but for the fortuitous veto of Cardinal Rampolla by Kaiser Franz Joseph (though for purely personal rather than any well-considered theological or political reasons) at the 1903 conclave, Sarto may never even have become Pope at all. The Lord moves in mysterious ways indeed.
Even without atheism, modernism can still be a problem, if modernist philosophers (such as Immanuel Kant) though they believe in God (which Kant personally did), reject the cosmological mystery of geocentrism (which Kant also did), namely that the human being with a rational soul is special to Earth (Kant and his follower Danish H. C. Ørsted believed in various intelligent life throughout the Universe) – since sacred scripture claims : God created the heavens and the Earth, and : God chose Israel for his people, and : Jesus Christ became incarnated in the Holy Land. Natural history of Life conforms with the account of Creation in Genesis. Namely, precambrium was the second and third day, with the formation of our planet from fire, gases, water and dry continents with clay, then the Aristotelian living soul, in fungi, plants, and invertebrates. And higher Life became dependant on the Sun, the Moon, and the Stars through secondary or the fourth day. And higher animals had Aristotelian motional and emotional souls with tertiary, the two long ages, on the fifth and sixth day. Then, the Aristotelian rational soul came to be in the human being, with quarternian on the seventh day, now.
Modernism will then claim that this act of Creation is common throughout the Universe, and unfortunately, pope John XXIII expressed his openness towards aliens. Probably, Life does exist in the Universe, in some solar systems, but with probability inversely proportional to its level of natural history. Even though not atheistic, modernistic philosophy is false. But pope Pius XII, by 1950, in his readable encyclical, Humani generis (Of Humankind), had claimed the dogma of monogenism (and hence also geocentrism) that all human beings descend from Adam and Heva here on Earth. With more astronomical knowledge, the Earth is a special place.
Extremely good discussion in light of modern day developments in the Church under a far left pontiff.
What this article lacks is a recognition that Pope Pius X may have been intemperate in his criticism of the Modernists.
The problem with “Modernism” is that it became the code word for reactionaries to attack what they don’t like in necessary Church reforms. And Church reforms were necessary – because the Church in the way she operated was no longer relating to the people she is supposed to evangelize. And also she held many assumptions about the world that were no longer true.
And we now face the embarrassment that the Roman Curia is indeed obscurantist. It is an obscurantist institution that refuses to let clerical sex-abuse survivors advise bishops if they are women.
For instance, Pascendi and Lamentabili condemned Protestantism, but their image of Protestantism is that of 16th-Century Protestantism. 20th Century Protestantism is changed vastly from 16th-Century Protestantism, so what is a valid criticism of 16th-C Protestantism may or may not be a valid criticism of 20th-C Protestantisim.
This article tells more about American traditionalists than about Pius X that traditionalists choose to focus on “beating with fists”, in contrast to Christ who taught us to turn the other cheek.
Thank you, a great and insightful essay. Pius X is a Pope for the ages.