under the patronage of St Joseph and St Dominic

By the rivers of Babylon there we sat and wept, remembering Zion;
on the poplars that grew there we hung up our harps. . . Ps 136

POPE BENEDICT’S SIGNIFICANT FAILURE

Treason doth never prosper, what’s the reason?
For if it prosper, none dare call it treason.[1]

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Could there be a greater testimony to the triumph of the heresy of Modernism among the popes, bishops, priests, religious and laity of the Catholic Church than the deafening silence which has marked the 100th anniversary of the encyclical that condemned it?

Pope Pius X published the encyclical Pascendi Dominici Gregis on Our Lady’s birthday, 8th September 1907.  Until Pope John Paul II came along, no pope had written a longer encyclical.  Though Pius X is a saint, sanctity has not been enough to prevent his teaching being relegated to oblivion by the Church’s authorities.  The only pope to be canonised by the Church in 450 years is treated as a pariah!  You disagree?  Dear reader, pick up your copy of the Catechism of the Catholic Church see if you can find there any mention whatsoever of Pope Pius X.

What is the essence of the heresy of Modernism?  It is the practical denial of the supernatural; the insistence that the assertion of anything beyond the reach of the senses is false; that religion is nothing but self-delusion.  The technique of its proponents, exemplified by the appalling theologian Karl Rahner and his counterpart in scripture studies, Raymond E Brown, is that of silence, of not speaking when speech is required; of innuendo, of questioning when forthright proclamation of the central dogmas of the faith is demanded.  Modernism introduces into religion the falsity (precipitated by Protestantism) at the heart of all modern philosophy, subjectivism.  The end of the heresy is atheism: indeed, the whole tendency of Modernism is to atheism.

If you wish to know the answers to the following questions, obtain for yourself a copy of St Pius X’s great encyclical (access can be had via the link in the footnote below[2]).  When you read it you will understand why—

• religious priests, brothers and nuns forsook their vocations in the thousands after the close of the Second Vatican Council;
• the vernacular translations of the Church’s sacred liturgy are marked by serial mistranslations of the original Latin text;
• the vernacular liturgy you attend at your local parish church seems more suited to a circus or an entertainment hall than a church;
• your parish church is characterised by an almost total lack of respect for the presence of Christ in the Blessed Sacrament in the tabernacle;
• the children you sent to Catholic schools are now atheists;
• the complaints you have made about breaches of the liturgy, or about the Catholic education system, to your parish priest or bishop have been ignored or dismissed, or have led them to treat you with anger and disdain;
• there is almost no Catholic bishop who will speak publicly against the errors broadcast daily in the media about the Church and about morality;
• the popes have issued no document condemning the pernicious ideologies of feminism, or of secular humanism, or of the irrationality of thinking on which atheism and Darwinian evolutionary theory are based;
• there has been no encyclical renewing the condemnation of freemasonry since the reign of Leo XIII;
• Pope John Paul II adopted wholeheartedly the principles of feminist ideology stopping short only of endorsing its logical consequences, contraception and abortion;
• in breach of almost twenty centuries of tradition and practice, the same Pope allowed women and girls to serve on the Church’s altars.

The Second Vatican Council was not evil: no Council of the Church ever is.  But because it was dominated by Modernist experts, periti, the considerations of its bishops reflected their influence.  Thus, the Council served as a catalyst for the resurgence of the heresy within the Church.  Even before they gathered in Rome in October 1962, the bishops of the Church were inundated by the views of these ‘experts’.  Their submersion in Modernism was the result of disobedience of those charged with the supervision of Catholic seminaries.  The Church’s 1917 Code of Canon Law[3] and the express directions of successive popes culminating in Pius XII’s Humani Generis (12th August, 1950) required that priests and religious were not to be instructed in any kind of philosophy or theory at all but strictly according to the method, doctrine and principles of St Thomas Aquinas, the Church’s principal philosopher and theologian.  These seminary heads disobeyed the Church.  Like all heretics, they knew better!

After reading Pascendi, we invite you to read Humani Generis (access can be had via the link in the footnote below[4]) to see the concerns that Pius XII expressed over the state of the Church less than fifty years afterwards.  This pope is said to have had a vision of the future of the Church:
“A day will come when the civilised world shall deny its God, when the [members of the] Church will doubt as Peter doubted.  [They] will be tempted to believe that man has become God, that His Son is a mere symbol, a philosophy as good as any other, and in the churches, Christians will look in vain for the red lamp where God awaits them, just as Magdalen wept before the empty tomb, ‘Where have they taken him…’”[5]

For a synopsis of some of the effects of Modernism in the Church over the last forty years we invite you to read the two papers on this website, The Loss of Metaphysics[6] and Failure of the Executive Power[7].

Heresy is in the spiritual order what treason is in the temporal: each is a betrayal of an allegiance owed to lawful authority.  In the temporal order the authority is earthly, even if obedience to its lawful commands has the Divine mandate[8].  In the spiritual order, the authority is Divine.  If the penalty for treason should be death, what penalty will be demanded for heresy?  Of all heresies, Modernism is the worst because it is, as St Pius X teaches, “the synthesis of all heresies”: its end is not just religious distortion but atheism, the explicit hatred and mockery of God.

It is not the Church which has erred in respect of this frightful heresy, but the Church’s popes and the bishops.  The Church’s members have suffered greatly from the negligence of those that rule the Church.  Millions have lost the faith.

It is greatly to be regretted that Pope Benedict XVI has not yet seen fit to remedy the failures of his predecessors.

Michael Baker
8th December 2007—Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception