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| An Encyclical that Packed a Punch | |
One hundred years ago, Pope St. Pius X published an encyclical letter that has been both praised and reviled like few other papal documents. It was a firm response to a problem that was several decades in the making and an initial salvo in a battle that some believe the Church is still fighting today.
The Synthesis of All Heresies
The encyclical addressed a heresy known as modernism. With roots in Protestant biblical scholarship, the key idea of modernism was that the Christian faith had to be understood according to modern ideas about truth and knowledge. The Church, it suggested, was not as much in the role of teaching truths as it was in the business of providing meaning to people's lives.
The modernist movement was driven by a group of well-known European thinkers of the late nineteenth century, including the priests Alfred Loisy and George Tyrell, and the layman, Friedrich von Huegel.
"These men were concerned with the question of how to function in a European culture that was increasingly pluralistic and secular," Dr. Russell Reno, professor of theology at Creighton University, recently told Our Sunday Visitor. "Modernism solves that by separating the inner world of our personal religious experience from the outer world of science and truth. It says religion provides meaning, but science deals with real truth."
Applying this to doctrines about God, scripture, Jesus, and the Church resulted in a drastic watering down of Church teaching. If religion is about meaning disconnected from truth, then individual believers are free to invent their own religious concepts.
By the beginning of the twentieth century, modernism had become increasingly influential.
A Papal Response
On July 7, 1907, the Roman Inquisition (now known as the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith) published Lamentabili Sane with the Pope's approval, a list of 65 modernist ideas that it condemned as "very serious errors."
Two months later, on September 8, Pope Pius X published the encyclical Pascendi Dominici Gregis, subtitled "On the Doctrine of the Modernists." Condemning modernism as "the sythesis of all heresies," the Pope insisted that modernism "means the destruction not of the Catholic religion alone, but of all religion."
The Pope also called for some strong remedies to root out modernist thinking. Catholic seminary and university teachers were to be investigated and anyone "found to be tainted with Modernism ... removed." All theological study was to be centered around scholasticism, based on the thinking of the great thirteenth century philosopher and theologian, St. Thomas Aquinas. Starting in 1910, every priest was required to take the Oath against Modernism (a practice which continued until 1967).
"Some rather draconian measures were taken," Reno said. "In the first half of the twentieth century, anti-modernism became within the Church what anti-Communism was in the United States in the 1950's. Any theologian who made an effort to explore the idea of faith in the modern world was labeled a modernist."
As a result, several prominent theologians came under the suspicion of Church authorities. They included Henri de Lubac, Yves Congar, and Joseph Ratzinger. Some of them were forbidden to teach or publish their works for several years.
This suspicious atmosphere changed with the opening of the Second Vatican Council. The same men whose work had been questioned by the Vatican were invited to serve as theological experts at the Council, which explored ways that the Church might interact with the modern world in positive ways. Congar and de Lubac were eventually made cardinals, and Ratzinger is now Pope Benedict XVI.
"Viewed from a hundred years distance, we can look back and say it was providential that the Church put the brakes on this false solution. Most alive today didn't live through the period of intense scrutiny and constant suspicion. But there's a generation of priests, who are retired today, who tend to remember the harsh methods."
Meanwhile, some observers have argued that modernism was never completely defeated and that it is still influences the faith of Catholics today.
"If modernism means everyone gets to make their own definition of God, then there are a lot of modernists out there today," Reno said.