You are a modernist, making Rome the seat of the Antichrist

YOU believed, Most Holy Father, that you were doing a great work, doubtless for the greater glory of God and for the good of His Church, but you did it against all the solemn warnings of your most august predecessors. The unremitting labour of your life has been to reconcile modern atheistic humanism and age-old Christianity. In particular it has been to meet Marxism on its own terrain and to push it, sympathetically, to its extreme consequences, in order to convert it rather than to combat and anathematise it endlessly and profitlessly.

For this reason, you had to accept their criticism of religion and so work firstly to purify religion and consequently to reform it. You could then bring the adversary – who had thus been pacified by means of a closely argued dialectic – to listen to and even share your faith. It would be necessary to accept the humiliation of God, the “ death of God ”, but it would be justified by the promise of His triumphant return and of His “ resurrection ” in the midst of the modern world.

You have employed all your life in this intellectual creation, which consists of a humanist and Christian dialectic, while applying its theoria in a praxis which was to be its continual verification and, already, its historical realisation. It was your new ethic that dictated your revolutionary pastoral approach and which earned you your accession to the Supreme Ministry. And from there you teach your secular humanism whilst pushing for its implementation at every level and in every sphere of the Church’s life.

Now, this theory and practice happen to have been denounced, rejected, condemned and outlawed in the Church for three quarters of a century by the major Encyclical of the holiest of popes of modern times as “ the synthesis of all the heresies ”, inevitably leading to the radical destruction of religion, of the Church, and of human civilisation itself, leaving nothing, absolutely nothing, standing.

Most Holy Father, read St. Pius X’s encyclical Pascendi Dominici gregis; on page after page you will hear the Pope of all time penetrating the thoughts and the works of the Pope of a day, of the Pope of today, denouncing them and commanding the whole Church to fly from such a doctrine and from such works, to separate herself from such an heresiarch in order to remain faithful to Jesus Christ, judge of the living and of the dead.

You will read there your methods, your illusions, your errors, and their disastrous consequences, all clearly set out by his pen.

A METHOD DOOMED TO FAILURE

The enemies of the Cross of Christ, says the holy Pope, by arts entirely new and full of deceit, are striving to destroy the vital energy of the Church, and, as far as in them lies, utterly to subvert the very Kingdom of Christ… These partisans of error are to be sought not only among the Church’s open enemies, but – what is to be most dreaded and deplored – in her very bosom and they are the more to be dreaded the less they keep in the open. They put themselves forward as reformers of the Church, and, forming more boldly into line of attack, assail all that is most sacred in the work of Christ and religion itself… We number them amongst the worst enemies of the Church.

“ They play the double part of rationalist and Catholic, and this so craftily that they easily lead the unwary into error… To this must be added the fact, which indeed is well calculated to deceive souls, that they lead a life of the greatest activity, of assiduous and ardent application to every branch of learning, and that they possess, as a rule, a reputation for irreproachable morality… They attempt to ascribe to a love of truth that which is in reality the result of pride and obstinacy.

A DIALECTIC ALREADY CENSURED

Now, the first hydra head of Satan’s that St. Pius X undertook to vanquish was precisely that of the agnostic philosopher: The philosopher who asserts that reason is confined to the phenomenal sphere and who concludes that God is not an historical person, a visible actor, tangible through his works, in either our scientific world or our history.

Pius X censured this scientific and historical atheism, which is precisely where the Modernist joins the enemy camp, not hesitating to banish God from the human sphere and excluding theology, natural religion, Christian apologetics, and finally divine Revelation itself from the sphere of scientific knowledge, despite the fact that they compel universal recognition and acceptance for the salvation of all.

But the holy Pope censured no less vehemently the other side of this error, that of vital immanence, which, having excluded religion from historical and physical reality, then seeks to re-establish and resuscitate it in the actual life of every human being’s deepest consciousness, where God becomes the object and intimate cause of that sentiment whereby “ in some way man is united to God ”. This faith is both illumination and revelation at the same time. It is sufficient, therefore, to itself and can today favourably succeed to yesterday’s “ theism ” with its ecclesiastical teaching, its sacramental and liturgical rites, its moral laws and public discipline. For all must clearly be subject to this religious consciousness, even the supreme authority in its threefold manifestation of doctrine, worship and discipline.

The reason for this is simple. Such a living, intimate, mystical experience ceaselessly rediscovers and recasts the words and events of Salvation in an inexhaustible intuition of the divine, giving them their true meaning and their exact application to today, interpreting and transfiguring all things in accordance with lights greatly superior to the Church’s blind methods and dogmatic and juridical procedures.

Splendidly absent from the secular domains of natural philosophy, from the rational sciences, from politics and from sociology, the Modernist faith is, nevertheless, ever present as the spontaneous and universal creation of the deepest human feeling. Thus it is humanist, naturalist, universal and secular. If it is still a religion – a purely interior religion – this is merely the proper and spontaneous fruit of a natural grace given to all human beings equally. Thus, it uses the dogmas and rites of the various religions as symbols and instruments of its innermost life, always seeking more perfect forms.

YOUR ENTIRE HERESY DENOUNCED

Most Holy Father, I would only need to continue until the last page of this encyclical, inspired by the extraordinary Wisdom and Fortitude of this holy Pope, in order to review all your thinking and all your action. I shall simply pick out this one paragraph which is a mortal blow to your entire system and which should persuade you to change it:

“ Thus far, Venerable Brethren, we have considered the Modernist as a Philosopher. Now if we proceed to consider him as a believer, and to seek to know how the believer, according to Modernism, is marked off from the Philosopher, it must be observed that, although the Philosopher recognises the reality of the divine as the object of faith, still this reality is not to be found by him except in the heart of the believer, as an object of feeling and affirmation, and therefore confined within the sphere of phenomena; but the question as to whether in itself it exists outside that feeling and affirmation is one which the Philosopher passes over and neglects.

For the Modernist believer, on the contrary, it is an established and certain fact that the reality of the divine does really exist in itself and quite independently of the person who believes in it. If you ask on what foundation this assertion of the believer rests, he answers: In the personal experience of the individual. On this head the Modernists differ from the Rationalists only to fall into the views of the Protestants and pseudo-Mystics. The following is their manner of stating the question: In the religious sense one must recognise a kind of intuition of the heart which puts man in immediate contact with the reality of God, and infuses such a persuasion of God’s existence… as far to exceed any scientific conviction.

… How far this position is removed from that of Catholic teaching! We have already seen how its fallacies have been condemned by the Vatican Council. Later on, we shall see how these errors, combined with those which we have already mentioned, open wide the way to Atheism. ” (Pascendi Gregis)

THAT IS YOUR SUPREME AND DEFINITIVE CONDEMNATION

Thus you have annihilated religion in general, Christianity more precisely and in particular our Catholic faith, by excluding them from the domain of philosophy, science and history, without excepting Sacred History and Divine Revelation. You have thus joined the ranks of the atheist rationalists and of the humanists, for whom everything in the world belongs to Man, and to Man alone, for his profit and for his glory.

In so doing, you betray the Church and oblige her to take refuge in the secret sanctuary of the individual private conscience, never to come out again. If the Church be permitted still to express herself publicly, by the very fact of thus presenting herself in the world, she renounces doing anything that would make manifest her exclusive and incomparable divine titles, so as to be merely tolerated by virtue of human rights and man’s freedom of thought and action.

The end which you proposed in this martyrdom imposed on the Church, on Christ in His Mystical Body, was, as St. Pius X wrote (Ibid.), to lead the unbeliever to an experience of the Catholic religion, an experience that would in no way upset his humanist ideas and habits. But you see the result: by such paths, nobody adheres to our holy religion. Firstly, because this intimate experience, as you have announced it and recklessly guaranteed to all men of good will, does not exist. And still more, because no man of good sense would have any esteem for such a religion, still less embrace one that its apostles, bishops, and supreme Head were thus molesting and banishing from every sphere of wisdom, science, and public life, where, on the contrary, it should be resplendent and dominant… if it is of God!

I have said enough to stigmatise your Modernism as the worst of all those which our century, alas, has seen proliferate in the Church. And it is free to proliferate through the extreme character of your system – on both the theoretical and practical level – and by means of the supreme authority given you, not by Jesus Christ certainly, but by the Devil, to have that system imposed on the whole Church, leading us to believe that the time foretold by Our Lady of Salette has come when “ Rome will lose the faith and become the seat of Antichrist. ”