Fighting Modernists, a Decree Shaped Catholicism (Pope St. Pius X's Pascendi)(Catholic Caucus)

NY Times ^ | 9/1/2007 | Peter Steinfels

[Pyro7480]

One hundred years ago next Saturday [September 8] Pope Pius X issued a papal encyclical, “Pascendi Dominici Gregis,” that would have a huge impact on the Roman Catholic Church and consequently on its role in the blood-drenched history of the first half of the 20th century.

Today, not many Roman Catholics, let alone others, could identify or describe “Pascendi.” Yet compared with the widely known encyclicals addressing social and moral problems, it has probably had a deeper impact on their religious lives.

“Pascendi” was a sweeping and vehement condemnation of a loose movement of Catholic biblical scholars, philosophers and theologians who were labeled “modernists.”

...“Pascendi” did not merely repeat earlier papal warnings about particular modernist errors; it portrayed the modernists as a fifth column in the church, a traitorous conspiracy of like-minded individuals with a coherent program and a secret agenda that would destroy Catholicism....

Major documents solemnly approved by the Second Vatican Council — on the nature of the church, on Scripture and on worship — cannot be squared with aspects of “Pascendi,” nor can many statements by Pope John Paul II, or the most recent book on Jesus by Pope Benedict XVI.

But “Pascendi” has its defenders, nonetheless. Some argue that, whatever its shortcomings, it was the right move for its time....

A few defenders go further. Convinced that the church is no less endangered today by heretics within and enemies without, they would like to see “Pascendi” resurrected and a strictly enforced regime of oaths, censorship and denunciations restored. On the other side are many, Roman Catholic or not, who feel that a great deal of the turmoil in contemporary Catholicism has resulted from the chill that the anti-modernist campaign cast for decades on the church’s intellectual life....

[Pyro7480]

Steinfel's conclusion:

In a wider historical perspective, they would argue that the anti-modernism of “Pascendi” was a latter-day revival of the battle against liberalism that the papacy and much of the church had been waging throughout the 19th century — and tragically the purge the encyclical started crippled those very elements in European Catholicism that might have resisted the church’s sympathy for authoritarian regimes after World War I, when liberal parliamentary governments were besieged by rising totalitarianism.

In the short run, in other words, “Pascendi” was a success: it stopped risky new ideas dead in their tracks. In the long run, however, it failed abysmally — and at a very high cost.

In other words, not only Pius XII, but also Pope St. Pius X is to blame for not stopping the Nazis!

A little background on Steinfels, from Wikipedia:

A native of Chicago, Illinois, and a lifelong Catholic, Steinfels earned his PhD from Columbia University and joined the staff of the journal Commonweal in 1964. He served as a visiting professor at Notre Dame in 1994-95 and then as visiting professor at Georgetown University from 1997 to 2001. He currently writes a biweekly column for the New York Times called "Beliefs". He is a professor at Fordham University and co-director of the Fordham Center on Religion and Culture. Steinfels has also written several books, including The Neoconservatives: The Men Who Are Changing America's Politics and A People Adrift: The Crisis of the Roman Catholic Church in America. He is married to wife, Margaret (Peggy), and has two children, Gabrielle and John Melville.

[Pyro7480]

Catholic ping!

[sageb1]

So the NYT tries an intellectual approach to head off any discussion of the left’s new “love” of religion?

[dsc]

Steinfel is a theological leftist, of just the sort that Pope Saint Pius X termed “enemies of the Church.”

His arguments all rest on the assumption that the modernists were correct and the Saint wrong.

He blames all the ills wrought by the modernists on the Saint’s encyclical. Typical leftist crap.

[RobbyS]

In a wider historical perspective, they would argue that the anti-modernism of “Pascendi” was a latter-day revival of the battle against liberalism that the papacy and much of the church had been waging throughout the 19th century — and tragically the purge the encyclical started crippled those very elements in European Catholicism that might have resisted the church’s sympathy for authoritarian regimes after World War I, when liberal parliamentary governments were besieged by rising totalitarianism.

I can remember people saying the same things back around 1960, and it is poppycock. The modernists were liberals, not, the liberal Catholics, the Commonweal Catholics of forty years ago. They were men as opposed to Catholicism as Luther was, and as convinced that they were right and the Church was wrong. Jacques Maritain, who was anything but a crypto-fascist, in afct until 1965 the adrling of liberal Catholics saw them for what they were, men working their mischief even as the Council was ending, workinbg to take over, with consideerable success, the direction of the Church. These were men who,in his words, geneflected to the world. Would they have stayed the power of the likes of Mussolini, Lenin and Hitler? Hardly, they looked at Christianity the same way these men did. On the Protestant side, Karl Barth looked at liberal Protestantsim and found it wanting. Loisy and his crowd offered nothing more than that, although they would have dressed it up in any empty show of Catholic liturgy. Hitler would have picked their bones.