Examining the Modernist Roots of the Church’s Current Crisis

Scholars trace the origins of today’s doctrinal and moral confusion to the philosophical error of Modernism which asserts that truth can ‘change and evolve.’

 

Theologians, historians and philosophers came together in Rome last month to discuss the origins of the current crisis of doctrinal and moral confusion afflicting the Church and to find ways to resolve it.

Called “Old and New Modernism: The Roots of the Church’s Crisis,” the June 23 study day sought to examine the “root of the errors that over the years have penetrated the Mystical Body of Christ from top to bottom” in order to better “understand where the Church is going today.”

Hosted by the Lepanto Foundation, its president, Professor Roberto de Mattei, delved into the history of Modernism and provided an overview of the crisis, from its beginnings in the 19th up until the “neo-Modernism” of today.

The movement, he recalled, owes itself primarily to the 19th and 20th century theologians such as Maurice Blondel, Alfred Loisy, George Tyrell and Ernesto Buonaiuti who affirmed in various ways that the truth is not unchangeable, but rather evolves as man evolves.

These writers, he added, went on to influence other well-known Church scholars, such as Teilhard de Chardin, Henri de Lubac, and Karl Rahner, all of whom had a significant influence on the Second Vatican Council. This was despite Pope St. Pius X condemning the “aggressiveness and errors” of the Modernist movement through his 1907 “prophetic” encyclical, Pascendi Dominici Gregis (Feeding the Lord’s Flock).

For St. Pius X, the “nucleus” of Modernism was not just about opposition to “revealed truths,” de Mattei explained, “but in the radical transformation of the whole notion of ‘truth’ itself, through the acceptance of the ‘principle of immanence’ which is at the foundation of modern thought.”

 

Spread of Errors

For the modernists, de Mattei said, the formulas of dogma “do not contain absolute truths; they are images of the truth which ought to adapt themselves to religious feeling.” So the representations of the divine realities (for example, the Sacraments), are “reduced to ‘symbols,’ whose ‘intellectual formula’ changes according to the ‘interior experience’ of the believer’.”

In the end, he added, religious truth is resolved by recourse to a person’s conscience in the face of “individual problems of faith” — something observers say is clearly visible in recent papal documents such as Amoris Laetitia. But this, he said, is a “return to the tendency of Gnosticism … the subjectivity of the truth and the relativity of all of its formulas.”

Despite St. Pius X’s strong condemnation of Modernism, the movement hit back, modernist thought continued to develop, and circulated “not only in books, but throughout the entire body of the Church, poisoning every aspect,” de Mattei explained. It led to the birth of “nouvelle théologie” that gave rise to the 20th century philosopher Teilhard, and the French philosophers Henri de Lubac and Jacques Maritain.

But nouvelle théologie comes from Modernism and “leads to complete apostasy,” taught the 20th century Dominican theologian Pere Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange, thereby perverting the “eternal notion of truth.” It was a theology which supported the evolution of dogmas, and was therefore condemned by Pius XII in 1950 with his encyclical Humani Generis, but not before it extended to the moral realm, “substituting absolute and immutable natural law with a new moral law which was affective, personal, and existential.

“The individual conscience,” De Mattei explained, “became the sovereign norm of morality.”

The author of The Second Vatican Council, An Unwritten Story then showed how Modernism entered the Council. He quoted from the diary of Italian bishop, Msgr. Luigi Borromeo, who said that, by that time, Modernism was “more subtle” than aggressive, “more camouflaged, more penetrating, and more hypocritical.”

“It does not want to stir up another tempest,” Bishop Borromeo wrote, adding:

“It desires that the entire Church will find that it has become Modernist without noticing it. Thus, the Modernism of today saves all of Christianity, its dogmas and its organization, but it empties it completely and overturns it. It is no longer a religion which comes from God, but a religion which comes directly from man and indirectly from the divine which is within man.”

De Mattei drew attention to the “anthropological shift” of the Second Vatican Council — not unlike the “paradigm shift” being talked about in the Church today — and its chief interpreter: the 20th century Jesuit, Karl Rahner.

Nouvelle theologie at that time became an “organized party, with a precise objective and strategy,” de Mattei recalled, while the Council ignored communism, and stressed the “primacy of praxis” — the Marxist idea that experience drawn from action is more important than the truth. It led, he said, to key words being used such as “pastoral,” “aggiornamento,” “signs of the times,” which have resulted in a “cultural revolution” in terms of language.

 

Modernism Today

These errors, De Mattei continued, have led to the “Neo-Modernism” of today where, he believes, “it is difficult to find a seminary or a Catholic university that is immune to it.”

Modernism, he argued, “pervades the Church” even if few admit it. One who does, he pointed out, is Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, president of the Pontifical Council for Culture, who praised Loisy, Tyrell and Buonauiti as “theologians of great intellectual quality who were attacked by the anti-Modernist repression of the Church.” Cardinal Ravasi also wrote a preface to two books on Modernism of the last century, despite the publications being placed on the Vatican’s index of forbidden books.

Cardinal Walter Kasper is not as overt in claiming Modernism, De Mattei went on to note, but his “philosophical and theological vision is imbued with the same errors” whereby “becoming prevails over being, time over space, history over nature, Scripture over Tradition, praxis over doctrine, life over truth.”

Pope Francis has also adopted such ideas, De Mattei asserts, and argues that the Holy Father has been influenced by Blondel through Father Gaston Fessard — one of the Pope’s favorite intellectuals.

As an example, De Mattei cites one of the Pope’s repeated aphorisms, that “reality is greater than ideas,” saying it is a philosophical affirmation that “overturns the primacy of being and contemplation” which is the “basis for all Western and Christian philosophy.” it reduces human action to “individual conscience rather than the objectivity of the divine and natural law,” he said.

“Today we are faced with a revolutionary process” De Mattei concluded, a crisis that is not abstract but touches on a “profound crisis of faith, a loss of the religious sense.”

To oppose this neo-Modernism of a “changeable and subjective interpretation of Catholic doctrine,” he believes it is necessary to draw on the “fullness of Catholic doctrine, which coincides with Tradition, maintained and transmitted not only by the Magisterium but by all the faithful.”

“It is necessary to reintegrate the disassociation which the neo-Modernists have created between doctrine and praxis,” De Mattei asserted “restoring to Truth and to Life the inseparable unity expressed in those words of Jesus Christ which show us the only possible Way in the darkness of the present moment.”

 

Other Interventions

Professor Giovanni Turco further examined how Modernism exalts experience, praxis, conscience and sentiment over objective and immutable truths.

A philosophy professor at the University of Udine, Turco showed how such the Modernist error leads to both the exclusion of transcendence and the unchanging nature of the faith, resulting in seemingly limitless, indeterminate possibilities.

Any orthodoxy or doctrine can then “only be seen as inauthentic: an intolerable rigidity or a form of intransigence” which impedes Modernism’s “vital and charismatic expansion,” Turco explained. But this ultimately leads to an emptying of the faith, becoming “nothing more than praxis.” In the end, it is not that “one or a set of truths of the faith or morals are denied,” he said. “Every truth is denied.”

Modernism can only “commit suicide,” he said, “both in the theoretical and practical sense” as it eventually leads to the “denial of itself.” By placing change or temporality above all else, every other value is placed into a “void” of the past, he added, and religion, which is reduced to experience and faith to sentiment, is “rendered unrecognizable.”

Abbe Claude Barthe explained how Modernism’s exclusion of transcendence coincided with a “diminishing liturgical message.” He recalled that the new Latin rite liturgy, implemented in the 1970s, was “oriented towards Protestants only” because the Vatican body that was responsible for implementing the reform “deliberately chose not to invite orthodox observers.” It resulted in the “Protestant sensibility being a major focus,” he said, leading to “lesser reverence” towards the Real Presence by, for example, reducing of the number of genuflections, signs of purification, the protection of the holy species.

Abbé Barthe added that put together, these innovations, including celebration of the Mass facing the people, general use of the vernacular, spoken words instead of ritual and sacred “secret,” and especially a weakening of the “reality of the sacramental sacrifice” to resemble a “meal,” have had a considerable effect.

The process has led to a similar problem to the one “raised by ambiguous doctrinal texts,” he said, such as principles of ecumenism, or the controversial Chapter VIII of Amoris Laetitia.

Instead of doctrine and a “dogmatic magisterium,” “pastoral” teaching is used; similarly, worship and the discipline of the sacraments becomes governed by “very loose rules, giving the choice of infinite possibilities.”

But Abbé Barthe concludes: “a weak liturgy echoes a weak magisterium,” both corresponding to the “expectation of modernity” which his to “reject the absolute constraints of the Creed.”

 

A critic has argued that Professor De Mattei mistakenly included under the epithet “modernism” “every influential scholar of the first half of the 20th century who criticised the stale scholasticism of the time.” What do you think? Feel free to share your comments below.