Victor R. Claveau, MJ
Modernism seeks to undermine the authority of sacred Scripture by denying any divine Revelation or inspiration. Modernists see Scripture as made up of forgeries and myths. They claim that prophecies and predictions were made up after the fact, and that miracles did not happen. “Scholars” who claim to be Christians, indeed theologians, present these errors to the faithful as new great new discoveries. They spread their poisons through books, pamphlets, newspapers, speeches, and general conversation; and they pervert minds, especially those of the young, to hold the sacred Scriptures in contempt.
In 1907 Pope[i] Pius X issued the encyclical, Pascendi Dominici Gregis – On the Errors of the Modernists. Modernism, the Pope said, is the synthesis of all heresies, and its doctrines are introduced, by devious methods, into many fields. According to the principles of the Modernists, Pope Pius wrote, the sacred books may be rightly described as a summary of experiences; and inspiration, as it applies to Scripture, “is in nowise distinguished from that impulse which stimulates the believer to reveal the faith that is in him…. It is something like that which happens in poetical inspiration.” The Modernist critic analyzes and rearranges the sacred books in accordance with his own criteria. The pope continued:
“The result of this dismembering of the records, and this partition of them throughout the centuries, is naturally that the Scriptures can no longer be attributed to the authors whose names they bear. The Modernists have no hesitation in affirming generally that these books, and especially the Pentateuch and the first three Gospels, have been gradually formed from a primitive brief narration, by additions, by interpolations of theological or allegorical interpretations, or parts introduced only for the purpose of joining different passages together. This means, to put it briefly and clearly, that in the sacred books we must admit a vital evolution of faith. The traces of this evolution, they tell us, are so visible in the books that one might almost write a history of it. Indeed, this history they actually do write, and with such an easy assurance that one might believe them to have seen with their own eyes the writers at work through the ages amplifying the sacred books…. To hear them descant [discuss discerningly] of their works on the sacred works on the sacred books, in which they have been able to discover so much that is defective, one would imagine that before them nobody even turned over the pages of Scripture. The truth is that a whole multitude of Doctors, far superior to them in genius, in erudition, in sanctity, have sifted the sacred books in every way, and so far from finding in them anything blameworthy have thanked God more and more heartily the more deeply they have gone into them, for His divine bounty in having vouchsafed to speak thus to men. Unfortunately, these great Doctors did not enjoy the same aids to study that are possessed by the Modernists for they did not have for their rule and guide a philosophy borrowed from a negation of God, and a criteria which consists of themselves.”[ii]
The ideas of the Modernists, the pope noted, have found much acceptance among Catholics, principally because of two things:
“First, the close alliance which the historians and critics of this school have formed among themselves independent of all differences of nationality or religion; second, their boundless effrontery by which, if one of them makes an utterance, the others applaud him in chorus, proclaiming that science has made another step forward, while if an outsider should desire to inspect the new discovery for himself, they form a coalition against him. He who denies it is decried as one who is ignorant, while he who embraces and defends it has all their praise.”[iii]
[i] The word pope–in Latin “Papa,” and by initials PP–was once common to all bishops, and even to simple priests and clerics; but when certain schismatics of the eleventh century began to use it in a sense opposed to the supreme fatherhood of the Roman Pontiffs over all the faithful, clergy, as well as people, it was reserved as a title of honor to the bishops of Rome exclusively.
[ii] Pascendi Domenici Gregis, § 34, in the book, All things in Christ, Encyclicals and selected Documents of St. Pius X. (Westminster, MD., Newman Press, 1954), 86-132.
[iii] Ibid.