Using Catholicism to Destroy the Faith of our Fathers

Seattle Catholic ^ | July 12th 2004 | Dr Thomas Droleskey

[AskStPhilomena]

Unlike the Protestant Revolutions of nearly half a millennium ago, those within the ranks of the true Church who have fomented a veritable revolution against the Deposit of Faith and the Immemorial Mass of Tradition have used the very levers of the Church and the sensus fidei of the Catholic people to destroy the Faith of our fathers. Clever and cunning people have thus used, for example, the natural bent of Catholics to trust their popes and bishops and priests and nuns and teachers in order to desensitize them to novelties that are alien to the truths contained in the Deposit of Faith and best protected and expressed in the Traditional Latin Mass.

As sheep of Christ's true Sheepfold, the Catholic Church, we should be able to rely on the sensus fidei in order to trust the shepherds appointed to watch over us as we walk along the rocky road that is meant to lead us to the narrow gate of Life. It is this natural trust of Christ's sheep in their shepherds that has made it possible for wolves in shepherds' clothing to get the people to embrace novelty by the use of their authority (as well as by the use of their own personal charm) and to miss altogether the subtle nuances of the errors that are presented so eloquently in sermons and in classrooms. The acceptance of subtle errors leads to the acceptance of full-scale, overt (and sometimes quite bold) heresies, such as the false assertion that the Gospels do not contain historically accurate accounts of the events they portray or that Jews are saved by the Mosaic Covenant because they wait "expectantly" for the Messiah. The Arians of yore were at least honest about what they believed; the Modernists mix truth with error, making it so very difficult for the average Catholic to know the truths of the Faith clearly and without ambiguity, no less attempt to scale the heights of personal sanctity.

The novelties and errors and heresies of the past forty to forty-five years have done more than confuse individual Catholics and reaffirm many souls in lives of unrepentant sin. The novelties and errors and heresies of the conciliar and postconciliar eras have divided families, alienated friends, profaned the worship of God in the context of the Mass, and embraced the worship of false gods and the doctrines of heretical and schismatic sects as containing elements of truth that might lead us all to a fuller knowledge of God if only we engaged in a sincere "dialogue." The success of these novelties and errors and heresies has been made possible in no small measure by the absolute and total corruption of every single aspect of Catholic education, starting from contemporary "pre-school" programs (replete with leftist brainwashing about environmentalism and feminism and mulitculturalism and "diversity," which is a code word for the acceptance of perversity) right on up the ladder through seminary and postgraduate programs. Entire books and book length monographs have been written on the use of Catholic educational institutions as vehicles to misuse the authority of the Church so as to misrepresent the teachings Our Lord entrusted to the Apostles and thus misshape entire generations of Catholics in the twisted images of Modernism.

As one who has two of his three degrees from Catholic institutions of higher learning and who has taught at the undergraduate and/or graduate level in three of those institutions, I want to focus in this article on the state of Catholic higher education. For the corruption of Catholic colleges and universities has had a synergistic effect on Catholic education at the elementary and secondary levels, thus perpetuating a cycle of ignorance about the actual truths of the Faith that is now manifesting itself in yet a third generation of young Catholics at present. Over and above my actual experience on the physical plant of Catholic colleges and universities (and two seminaries), I have seen this ignorance about the Faith displayed by graduates of Catholic high schools and/or products of Catholic "religious education" programs in the secular, state and non-denominational institutions at which I taught at various points between January of 1974 and July of 2003.

The Remote Roots of the Problem The problems in Catholic higher education are worldwide in scope, part of the rotten fruit that some, including our Holy Father, contend is the "springtime of the Church." It would be wrong, however, to state in any way that the multifaceted and interrelated problems in Catholic colleges and universities began in 1958 or at some point thereafter. No, the influences of Modernity and Modernism crept into various aspects of Catholic education a little bit at a time. Great inroads were made over the course of time as a result of the efforts of German Protestant Scripture "scholars," who sought to "de-mythologize" the Bible, and by the "process thought" of Fathers Loisy and Whitehead, which was really an effort to baptize Hegelianism, thus paving the way for Teilhard de Chardin's "cosmic Christ" that had no room for Special Creation, Original Sin, or even the Incarnation itself. After all, if one can deny the miracles of Our Lord, what's the big deal about claiming that He was simply an "allegorical" figure, as a Passionist priest who taught a theology course I took at Saint John's University in my sophomore year in the Fall of 1970 contended. (That particular course, which featured an anthology containing the writings of Karl Rahner and Hans Kung and other such lights, followed a course taught by a lay woman that featured the denial of the actual canonicity of Sacred Scripture.)

Pope Saint Pius X's Pascendi Domenici Gregis, issued on the Feast of the Nativity of Our Lady in 1907, summarized the Modernist errors that are now taught as a matter of course in Catholic colleges and universities and seminaries. He tried to erect a firewall against those errors by requiring all those who taught in Catholic institutions of higher education to take the Oath against Modernism, reprinted below. Those errors still seeped into some of our colleges and universities before Vatican II, although it must be admitted that the lion's share of our colleges and universities did teach the Faith well and produced men and women who were knowledgeable enough about the Faith to recognize the errors of conciliarism and thus to be in the vanguard of the earliest efforts to preserve Tradition in the 1960s precisely because they had learned the Faith so well in authentically Catholic colleges and universities. Some of these Catholics, many of whom are now in their seventies and eighties, learned the Summa so well that they can still quote its passages and apply them to our contemporary ecclesiastical and civil problems.

The errors of Modernity and Modernism were able to penetrate in large part as a result of the fact that we live a society founded on a specific rejection of Catholicism, especially the Social Reign of Christ the King. It is almost impossible to avoid being influenced by the constant bombardments of utilitarianism and careerism and materialism and commercialism and relativism and evolutionism and religious indifferentism, to say nothing of John Dewey's pragmatism. Mind you, this just a partial listing of major cultural trends and ideologies. Learned tomes and monographs have been written by authentic Catholic scholars to discuss the specific manifestations of these general trends in educational theory and practice. A review of these theories and practices is beyond the scope of this article. However, it is important to note that there is very important scholarly work being done to unmask the particular manifestations of modern errors in Catholic education. Christ the King College will review these scholarly works in our series of courses on the errors of modern philosophy.

One of the phrases that best describes the net effect of these (and other) nefarious influences is "professionalism," the belief that professionals (Scripture scholars, scientists, social scientists, psychologists, liturgists, educators) know better than others, especially parents. A "professional" trained in the ethos of the false philosophies and ideologies of Modernity and Modernism has an arrogant contempt for the past, especially for Christendom, and must redefine the past in order to justify his or her revolutionary goals for the present and for the future.

The Proximate Roots of the Problem This concern with "professionalism" was very much on display in Catholic colleges and universities in the immediate aftermath of World War II, although it had antecedent roots even before then. It was a desire to produce "professionals" who would be able to compete successfully in the world of American finance and law and politics that drove some administrators of Catholic colleges and universities in the late 1950s and early 1960s to try to de-emphasize their Catholic mission and to remodel their institutions more and more along the lines of the career-oriented private and state-run institutions. The introduction of uncertainty and ambiguity as normal in the life of the Church as a result of the Second Vatican Council — and its embrace of the spirit of a world that was at specific odds with the authentic patrimony of the Church — made it possible for the total and rapid-fire destruction of Catholic education, starting with colleges and universities.

A major bridge between the gradual seepage of Modernism and the cultural influences of Modernity in Catholic colleges and universities and the Land O'Lakes Document in July of 1967 occurred in 1964 when many, although not all, faculty members at Saint John's University in New York went on strike. The strike centered on faculty demands that responsibility for the hiring and promotion of faculty members be de-centralized from the office of the President to the individual academic departments, which would then make recommendations that would be more or less binding on the dean of the particular college in which the departments were located. The president of Saint John's at the time, Father Joseph Cahill, C.M., desired to maintain his office's responsibility to assure not only the professional competency of a prospective faculty member but his or her commitment to the integrity of the Catholic Faith.

The Vincentian Fathers of Saint John's University lost the strike, ceding ground to the faculty demands, thus paving the way for the gradual, de facto de-Catholicization of Saint John's (which is still a de jure Catholic institution, one of the few in the nation) by means of the hiring of non-Catholic faculty members and/or Catholics who were dissenters from the Deposit of Faith and who used their classrooms as active forums to disseminate their errors. Father Donald Harrington, C.M., who succeeded Father Cahill as President of Saint John's in 1988, has sought to "diversify" the faculty and the student body of the university to such an extent that I was warned by one of my colleagues there in 1991, at a time I was adjuncting in the Department of Government and Politics, that it was more or less the sense of the nouveau regime that it was considered to be an "imposition" of Catholicism upon students to begin class with the Sign of the Cross and a Catholic prayer. Father Harrington desired Saint John's to become an "urban" university that reflected the "diversity" of the City of New York. Translation: there would be room for Mario Cuomo to give lectures at his alma mater but no room for the propagation and defense of the Faith of our fathers.

A series of articles I wrote for The Wanderer in 1995 that detailed the problems at Saint John's in the context of the hiring of one Tanya Hernandez, who had worked for the Center for Reproductive Law and Public Policy in Puerto Rico, to teach in the law school there aroused Father Harrington's complete fury. A student told me a few months later that Harrington raced from the administration building to the office of a department chairman, holding a copy of The Wanderer and shouting breathlessly, "What are we going to do? He's killing us!" The fact that there are authentic Catholics still teaching at Saint John's is nothing short of a minor miracle.

The story of Saint John's University is important as the loss of control over faculty hiring predates the aforementioned, historic Land O'Lakes Conference in Wisconsin in July of 1967. The inability of Father Cahill at Saint John's to retain the Catholic identity of an officially Catholic university permitted his successor, Father Harrington, to do at Saint John's what had been done in almost every other Catholic college and university in the aftermath of Land O'Lakes: emphasize "professionalism" at the expense of Catholicism. Father Harrington proved that it is not necessary for a Catholic college or university to officially divest itself of its formal ties to the Church in order to accomplish the agenda of Land O'Lakes and to thus marginalize the Faith and/or to de-construct It of Its authentic meaning.

Thus, as Monsignor George Kelly pointed out in his massive work, Battle for the American Church, the Land O'Lakes Conference was a watershed in Catholic education. Within a short period of time from that conference, administrators of most of the Catholic colleges and universities believed it was necessary for them to secularize their institutions by divorcing themselves voluntarily from the official control of the Roman Catholic Church in this country. This opened the way for these institutions to take down the Crucifixes from classroom walls, hire a glut of non-Catholics (as well as dissenting, heretical Catholics), and to go about their business as though the salvation of the souls of the students entrusted to them did not matter at all. Indeed, if there is no such thing as objective truth which exists in the nature of things and exists definitively in the person of the God-Man, Jesus Christ, Who deposited His teaching in Holy Mother Church, then there is no need to be concerned about educating students in the framework of Christian truth. Catholic education thus became thoroughly Protestantized, concerned about the business of training good apparatchiks who would make a lot of money in the professional world — and who would therefore donate money back to the institutions which gave them the ability to become successful financially.

The result of this has been to make close to ninety-nine percent of Catholic colleges and universities dangerous places for the temporal and eternal welfare of souls. Personnel decisions have been made to favor most deliberately the hiring and promotion of faculty members who are either non-Catholics or those deemed to be "progressive" Catholics. Those adjudged to be reactionary "conservatives" found themselves unable to obtain positions in our colleges and universities or they were denied tenure and/or promotions. Many are the horror stories of faithful Catholic faculty members who have been hounded and harassed for their orthodoxy while teaching in Catholic universities. Naturally, the harassment has come from the very people who claim that they are open-minded and receptive to all people. Catholic college administrators have either looked the other way or have actively participated in this harassment, preferring to be viewed as sophisticated professionals in the eyes of their peers at secular and/or state-run institutions of higher learning.

All of this has had a devastating impact on the intellectual and spiritual formation of young Catholics, many of whom now enter a Catholic college or university after having received the relativistic theological training provided them in a Catholic high school, where they were taught by the graduates of the very institutions intent on providing them with the same sort of advanced disinformation provided to their high school teachers. The cycle thus perpetuates itself ad infinitum. Most of the graduates of Catholic colleges and universities have learned nothing that is true about the Faith, coming to believe they can do anything they want as long as their "fundamental option" is for God, including the practice of contraception and the procuring of an abortion. Remember, William Jefferson Blyth Clinton received his undergraduate degree from Jesuit Georgetown University in the direct aftermath of Georgetown's having secularized itself. (Georgetown's sister Jesuit university, Fordham, was the first Catholic institution in the nation to divest itself of official Catholic control and to voluntarily remove Crucifixes from the walls of its classrooms in the Fall of 1966.) And it is no wonder that a large number of the Catholic pro-aborts in public life are graduates of Catholic institutions of higher learning.

Despite the massive amount of documentation about these problems, a lot of ordinary Catholics are clueless about them, believing the glossy brochures produced by Catholic colleges and universities to recruit their children to become reaffirmed in the myths and slogans that had been taught to them in Catholic schools and/or religious education programs. A lot of the alumni and alumnae of the institutions of Catholic higher education continue to donate vast sums, including bequeathing unbelievable amounts of money and land, to them because they cannot admit that the institutions which trained them so well in the Faith now use the trappings of Catholicism to destroy the Faith.

As noted earlier in this article, Catholic collegiate and university education used to integrate the truths of the Faith into every aspect of their academic programs. While non-Catholics who had a speciality in mathematics or science might have been hired from time to time to teach in their fields of competency, they were expected to familiarize themselves with how the Catholic Faith imbues all fields of knowledge, as Pope Pius XI noted in Divini Illius Magistri in 1929. Such scholars were also expected to remember that they were never to place in doubt the truths of the Catholic Faith, never to use their classrooms as a forum to profess that which was contrary to what the Catholic Church held was the received teaching of the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity made Man, Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. And Catholics who taught in Catholic universities and colleges understood that they had the obligation to be scholars who were faithful to the totality of the Deposit of Faith and to see in their students redeemed creatures who were looking to them, the faculty, for a model as to how to live the faith in the midst of one's own professional responsibilities. There was an integrity to the teaching of the Faith which flowed over into all aspects of a college or university.

The late Father John A. Hardon, S.J., said in 1978 that the implantation of doubt in the souls of the young was a crime almost as great as that of killing an unborn child by abortion (whether by chemical or surgical means). "To cause a young person to doubt the Faith is to help to abort that soul," Father noted, moving his head from side to side, looking straight at his audience for emphasis. Sadly, though, much of Catholic education (including elementary and secondary schools) does precisely this, doing so in the fallacious belief that there can be no true Faith without doubt. While it is true that some people may have crises of faith in their own lives from time to time, we are not to encourage doubt. One of the spiritual works of mercy is precisely to counsel the doubting.

Contemporary Catholic higher education in most instances does more than encourage doubt. Indeed, it actually does much to destroy Faith by the promotion of leftist, collectivist, relatitivst, statist, feminist, positivist, environmentalist, pantheistic, and other New Age ideologies. Its participation in the rot of sex instruction feeds the myth that human beings are beasts who are incapable of controlling themselves. And more than a handful of practicing homosexuals and lesbians have been recruited into a lifestyle of perversity and self-destruction as a result of the propaganda in favor of sodomy disseminated on the campuses of Catholic colleges and universities (where openly pro-sodomy groups are permitted to meet and to participate in the life of those campuses).

As if the hiring of non-Catholic and heretical Catholic faculty members has not caused enough damage to souls over the last forty years, the messages transmitted by those faculty members in their classrooms is forcefully reinforced by speakers, many of whom are pro-abortion Catholic public officials, brought in to address students during special events (or at their graduation ceremonies). Workshops are held and retreats are sponsored to brainwash students in the ways of "progressive" Catholicism. Zen meditation rooms are to be found on Catholic college campuses. Some Catholic colleges have even actively recruited a body of non-Catholic students so as to force anyone who might be inclined to speak authentically as a Catholic (whether students or faculty members) to be dissuaded from doing so in order not to offend the sensibilities of multiculturalism and pluralism and diversity. "Liturgies" held on most Catholic colleges and universities are abysmal, and that is putting the matter very, very mildly. They usually demonstrate the farthest edge of that which has engendered all liturgical abuses, the Novus Ordo Missae itself.

The bottom line of this is all really quite simple: a Catholic does not possess the right to deny the received teaching of Christ. No one is free morally to lead people into error. Indeed, the whole secular notion of academic freedom is itself both an exercise in relativism and hypocrisy. It is an exercise in relativism in that it asserts that scholars must be free to distort history and to relativize known truths into meaninglessness, much in the manner promoted by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. It is an exercise in rank hypocrisy in that those who dissent from the prevailing cultural orthodoxy have no freedom at all to teach as they desire in the classroom. In an utter perversion of a right principle, the very people who profess to be the guardians of academic freedom jealously fight off perceived heresies, denying to others the very freedom they extol. The very people who want liberation from the Church, who is our mater and our magister, make themselves into a magisterium which will impose harsh penalties upon those who dissent from its defense of cultural orthodoxy, theological relativism, and liturgical irreverence.

Correcting the Problems Efforts to correct the problems in Catholic higher education have been ongoing for the past thirty years. A number of believing, practicing Catholics have sought to work from within the structure of the older universities and colleges to try to undo the harm of the influences and events described above. Others have started their own colleges to provide the framework of a Catholic college education that is meant to be a response to the influence of Modernism on the older, more established Catholic colleges and universities. Even in these newer institutions, however, there is in some instances a degree of confusion and the presence of faculty members who contradict each other about the meaning, say, of the conciliar and postconciliar documents. Some of us have concluded that confusion and ambiguity are two of the inevitable byproducts of the regime of novelty that has beset the Church within the past forty to forty-five years, that one cannot pretend that everything that has happened in that period of time is consonant with the Deposit of Faith and with the authentic Tradition of the Catholic Church. Many good souls saw this from the very outset of the whole conciliar era, rejecting outright and quite forcefully what they knew to be harmful novelties that would bring nothing but disaster to the Church and thus to the good ordering of souls and the world.

One can bemoan the problems, whose surface has only been scratched in this article (I could produce a book based solely on the experiences I have had in Catholic higher education), or one can attempt to do something about them. Recognizing that there is no panacea, no overnight solution, no infallible endeavor that will correct the longstanding and multifaceted problems in Catholic higher education recounted in brief above, it is important to try to make an effort to provide current and future generations of Catholics a haven wherein they can learn the truths of the true Faith and how they are meant to penetrate every field of study without any exception whatsoever. It is important to at least initiate an endeavor that will equip students to recognize the errors of Modernity and Modernism and how they have infiltrated the highest quarters of the Church herself and to devote themselves to the restoration of the Traditional Latin Mass and to the Social Reign of Christ the King.

Christ the King College is being founded to try to fulfill the vision of Catholic education outlined by Pope Pius XI in Divini Illius Magistri, issued in 1929, which is such a wonderful summary of the purpose of Catholic education. Who is the subject of Catholic education? Man, body united to soul, redeemed by the shedding of the Most Precious Blood of the Divine Redeemer, Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. What is the "proper and immediate end" of Catholic education? "To cooperate with divine grace in forming the true and perfect Christian, that is, to form Christ Himself in those regenerated by Baptism. ... For the true Christian must live a supernatural life in Christ ... and display it in all of his actions."

Pope Pius XI's rejection of all forms of naturalism stands in direct contrast to the blithe acceptance of contemporary "pedagogical" theories by most Catholic colleges and universities today. Consider the following passages:

Hence every form of pedagogic naturalism which in any way excludes or weakens supernatural Christian formation in the teaching of youth, is false. Every method of education founded, wholly or in part, on the denial or forgetfulness of original sin and of grace, and relying on the sole powers of human nature, is unsound. Such, generally speaking, are those modern systems bearing various names which appeal to a pretended self-government and unrestrained freedom on the part of the child, and which diminish or even suppress the teacher's authority and action, attributing to the child an exclusive primacy of initiative, and an activity independent of any higher law, natural or divine, in the work of his education.

If any of these terms are used, less properly, to denote the necessity of a gradually more active cooperation on the part of the pupil in his own education; if the intention is to banish from education despotism and violence, which, by the way, just punishment is not, this would be correct, but in no way new. It would mean only what has been taught and reduced to practice by the Church in traditional Christian education, in imitation of the method employed by God Himself towards His creatures, of whom He demands active cooperation according to the nature of each; for His Wisdom "reacheth from end to end mightily and ordereth all things sweetly."

But alas! It is clear from the obvious meaning of the words and from experience, that what is intended by not a few, is the withdrawal of education from every sort of dependence on the divine law. So today we see, strange sight indeed, educators and philosophers who spend their lives in searching for a universal moral code of education, as if there existed no decalogue, no gospel law, no law even of nature stamped by God on the heart of man, promulgated by right reason, and codified in positive revelation by God Himself in the ten commandments. These innovators are wont to refer contemptuously to Christian education as "heteronomous," "passive," "obsolete," because founded upon the authority of God and His holy law.

Such men are miserably deluded in their claim to emancipate, as they say, the child, while in reality they are making him the slave of his own blind pride and of his disorderly affections, which, as a logical consequence of this false system, come to be justified as legitimate demands of a so-called autonomous nature.

Ah, for the days when some pope will be as direct and blunt as Pius XI was. The entire encyclical letter is a prophetic description of the errors besetting educational theory in the early Twentieth Century and where they would lead man if they were not corrected by the antidote provided by the Holy Faith. We have chosen to make Divini Illius Magistri, therefore, the cornerstone of Christ the King College.

There is, to be sure, a genuine pluralism allowed a Catholic educator in the furtherance of Catholic scholarship and instruction at the collegiate level and beyond. That is, there are a variety of different approaches and methods that can be used and adapted to meet different needs and circumstances. There is enough room in authentic Catholic education to embrace the approaches of John Senior or John Henry Cardinal Newman or Christopher Dawson, to name just a few. While Catholics are never free to disagree about what is true, they can disagree about the best approaches to teach the truth and how it is to be applied in the concrete circumstances of ordinary living.

Our approach at Christ the King College is to reach Catholics, whether matriculated students or those taking courses for adult enrichment, of average intelligence to give them a solid grounding in the Faith and to help them to view all of the traditional subject matters through Its eyes. We want to provide a challenging course of studies (216 trimester credits over four years is nothing to sneeze at as inconsequential) yet at the same time to make our program accessible to those who are willing to work hard for the honor and glory of God as befits redeemed creatures. By no means do we think that our program will be free of glitches and that we will not have growing pains. However, we do believe that our program does fill a void that does not exist in the Church at present and possesses of its nature as an online (or distance learning) institution a sufficient flexibility to let students take courses sequentially at their own pace.

We have entrusted the success of Christ the King College to Our Lady of Good Success. It was on the feast of the Immaculate Conception last year that we decided to stake our near-term future in the establishment of this College and to work hard to make its launching a reality. As of the date of the posting of this article, we are within several weeks of being licensed to grant our Bachelor's in Catholic Studies, thus permitting us to enroll students and to formally offer a degree program. Currently in construction is a complex, interactive website for Christ the King College that will be used by administrators, faculty and students. It is my particular hope that our efforts of the past few years (the curriculum was devised in November of 2002 with the hopes of finding a donor to make possible a brick and mortar campus, which was not in God's Holy Providence to happen) will provide traditional Catholics who see the necessity of making no compromises with the regime of novelty of the past forty years with a place where they can feed on the patrimony of the Faith and thus be inspired to plant seeds for the ultimate fruit of the Triumph of Our Lady's Immaculate Heart, the Social Reign of Christ the King.

We want to use the authentic patrimony of Catholicism to defend the Faith, not to reaffirm students in the false currents of Modernity that have shaped the world around us and/or the insidious elements of Modernism that have infected the life and the liturgy of the Catholic Church so tragically in the recent past.

Our Lady of Good Success, pray for Christ the King College and all of its faculty, students and benefactors.

*** More information regarding Christ the King College is available at www.ChristTheKingCollege.com .

The Oath Against the Errors of Modernism From Motu Proprio, "Sacrorum antistitum," September 1, 1910

I, N.......... firmly embrace and accept all and everything that has been defined, affirmed, and declared by the unerring magisterium of the Church, especially those chief doctrines which are directly opposed to the errors of this time. And first, I profess that God, the beginning and end of all things, can be certainly known and thus can also be demonstrated by the natural light of reason "by the things that are made", that is, by the visible works of creation, as the cause by the effects.

Secondly, I admit and recognize the external arguments of revelation, that is, divine facts, and especially miracles and prophecies, as very certain signs of the divine origin of the Christian religion; and I hold that these same arguments have been especially accommodated to the intelligence of all ages and men, even of these times.

Thirdly, likewise, with a firm faith I believe that the Church, guardian and mistress of the revealed word, was instituted proximately and directly by the true and historical Christ Himself, while he sojourned among us, and that the same was built upon Peter, the chief of the apostolic hierarchy, and his successors until the end of time.

Fourthly, I accept sincerely the doctrine of faith transmitted from the apostles through the orthodox fathers, always in the same sense and interpretation, even to us; and so I reject the heretical invention of the evolution of dogmas, passing from one meaning to another, different from that which the Church first had; and likewise I reject all error whereby a philosophic fiction is substituted for the divine deposit, given over to the Spouse of Christ and to be guarded faithfully by her, or a creation of the human conscience formed gradually by the efforts of men and to be perfected by indefinite progress in the future.

Fifthly, I hold most certainly and profess sincerely that faith is not a blind religious feeling bursting forth from the recesses of the subconscious, unformed morally under the pressure of the heart and the impulse of the will, but the true assent of the intellect to the truth received extrinsically "ex auditu", whereby we believe that what has been said, attested, and revealed by the personal God, our Creator and Lord, to be true on account of the authority of God the highest truth.

I also subject myself with the reverence which is proper, and I adhere with my whole soul to all the condemnations, declarations, and prescriptions which are contained in the Encyclical letter, "Pascendi" and in the Decree, "Lamentabili", especially on that which is called the history of dogma. In the same manner I disapprove the error of those who affirm that the faith proposed by the Church can be in conflict with history, and that Catholic dogmas, in the sense in which they are now understood, cannot be reconciled with the more authentic origins of the Catholic religion.

I also condemn and reject the opinion of those who say that the more erudite Christian puts on a dual personality, one of the believer, the other of the historian, as if it were permitted the historian to hold what is in contradiction to the faith of the believer; or to establish premises from which it follows that dogmas are either false or doubtful, provided they are not directly denied.

I disapprove likewise that method of studying and interpreting Sacred Scripture, which disregards the tradition of the Church, the analogy of faith, and the norms of the Apostolic See, and adheres to the fictions of the rationalists, and no less freely than boldly adopts textual criticism as the only and supreme rule.

Besides I reject the opinion of those who hold that to present the historical and theological disciplines the teacher or the writer on these subjects must first divest himself of previously conceived opinion either on the supernatural origin of Catholic tradition, or on the aid promised by God for the perpetual preservation of every revealed truth; then that the writings of the individual Fathers are to be interpreted only by the principles of science, setting aside all divine authority, and by that freedom of judgment with which any profane document is customarily investigated.

Finally, in short, I profess to be utterly free of the error according to which the modernists hold that there is nothing divine in the sacred tradition; or, what is far worse, admit this in the pantheistic sense, so that nothing remains but the bare and simple fact to be assimilated with the common facts of history, namely, of men by their industry, skill, and genius continuing through subsequent ages the school inaugurated by Christ and His disciples.

So I retain most firmly the faith of the Fathers, and shall retain it until the final breath of life, regarding the certain gift of truth, which is, was, and will be always in the succession of the episcopacy from the apostles, not so that what may seem better and more fitting according to each one's period of culture may be held, but so that the absolute and immutable truth preached by the apostles from the beginning may never be believed otherwise, may never be understood otherwise.

All these things I promise that I shall faithfully, completely, and sincerely keep and inviolably watch, never deviating from them in word and writing either while teaching or in any other pursuit. So I promise, so I swear, so help me God ... Amen.