Source of Modern Theological Errors

If you look at St. Pius X's encyclical Pascendi Dominici gregis paragraphs 44-55 you will see a very specific, detailed, comprehensive plan to root out Modernism from all Catholic institutions and societies. These policies were more or less sustained under Benedict XV and to a lesser extent under Pius XI. When Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli was elected Pope in 1939, he returned to the program introduced by St. Pius X but much had transpired between 1914 and 1939.

The interwar years were the period where the Modernists developed their underground networks and clandestine publishing enterprise. This is the primary way spirits like Teilhard de Chardin were countenanced, because under Pius XII he was forbidden to publish and teach. Pacelli was also very vigilant against the Nouvelle Theologie and the Ressourcement movements and with Cardinal Ottaviani as the Prefect for the Holy Office, suppressed the works of conciliar luminaries such as Henri de Lubac, Hans Urs Von Balthasar, Karl Rahner, and even Josef Ratzinger who was suspected of heresy.

We see these errors confronted in 1950 with the sky-splitting encyclical Humani generis featuring the subtitle, CONCERNING SOME FALSE OPINIONS THREATENING TO UNDERMINE THE FOUNDATIONS OF CATHOLIC DOCTRINE. Sound familiar? It should. It deals directly with the same level of threats treated in St. Pius X's Pascendi.

It is often portrayed as having a decisive influence from Fr. Reginald Garrigou Lagrange who, in his essay "Where is the New Theology Leading Us?" answered with "back to Modernism." The recommendations to combat the "false opinions" given in paragraphs 18-21 and 41-43 are nearly the same ones provided by Pius X: return to Scholastic philosophy and depart not from it.

Fr. Reginald Garrigou-LaGrange, O.P.

This is the battlefront of the theological war that ensued: modern philosophy vs. Scholastic philosophy. Those in favor of the former based their reliance on modern philosophy on a felt need to harmonize theology with the 'new science' epoch that began with Copernicus and peaked with Teilhard - both Catholic priests, mind you. The New Theology partisans argued that the mythical creature known as 'modern man' would not accept 'ready made truths' fed by the manualists to reluctant theology students. St. Pius X and Pius XII knew what letting go of St. Thomas would mean in the environment of the utopianism of the 19th and 20th centuries: a wholesale plunge into novel theories without being moored in Tradition. And those apprehensions have been confirmed 1,000 fold.

This insistence on the primacy of science dealt a staggering blow to belief in the supernatural. The men of science stigmatized miracles as 'myths' and 'magic' and sought to save the 'stories' of the Bible by divining "what the sacred writer meant to say" - a system expressly condemned by Pope Leo XIII in Providentissimus Deus. Yet this view was widely seen as 'relevant' and more in tune with ways of 'modern man', so much so that Vatican II stated,

"May the faithful, therefore, live in very close union with the other men of their time and may they strive to understand perfectly their way of thinking and judging, as expressed in their culture. Let them blend new sciences and theories and the understanding of the most recent discoveries with Christian morality and the teaching of Christian doctrine, so that their religious culture and morality may keep pace with scientific knowledge and with the constantly progressing technology." (GS #62) 

May keep pace! So that religion may keep pace with science!

Loss of belief in the supernatural order always results in a loss of divine and Catholic faith.

John Paul II devoted his life to an impossible task: synthesizing Thomism and Personalism/Phenomenology. This of course is a violation of the law of noncontradiction. The existentialist-subjectivist philosophies can never be synthesized with Scholastic philosophy because they are polar opposites with two diametrically opposed versions of reality. Scholasticism begins with God and ends with man. Existentialism begins with man and ends with whatever each man determines is real. JPII approached the mystery of the Incarnation with a personalist paradigm and concluded that by it Christ has united Himself forever with each man. Thus, each man by accepting his 'transcendent' humanity accepts the Christ with whom he is united, even if he is utterly ignorant of this Christ.

He inverted the mystery of the incarnation by establishing a novel theory from Vatican II's Gaudium et spes known as the 'mystery of man'. This mystery concludes that Christ by revealing the Father and His love to man also reveals man to man himself. Giuseppe Cardinal Siri concluded that this means either Christ is a mere man or each man is divine (Gethsemane). In this theory, Christ reveals man's supreme dignity to him: not in potency, viz, if a man accepts the Son, he receives the power to become a son of God (St. John 1:11); but in actuality, viz, each man is already a "sharer in Jesus Christ" and a "partaker of the mystery of redemption" (RH).

The greatest error produced by this anthropocentric inversion is that the Incarnation is identified as the cause of the Redemption of mankind. The Church has always taught that the PASSION of Christ was the cause of redemption - His death, burial, and resurrection - this priestly sacrifice is what redeems man. John Paul II reduces the cross to the "sign of God's love for man" and the proof of man's surpassing dignity. He makes the Incarnation the cause of redemption. Check Redemptor hominis carefully; he mentions redemption 37 times; the word justification - that process by which the redemption is subjectively applied by faith and baptism - is never mentioned. Neither will one find the word "Catholic" anywhere in the encyclical.

To sum it all up, we must look to what is considered as Pope John Paul II’s greatest dogmatic achievement: the promulgation of the Catechism of the Catholic Church in 1992. This volume quotes Vatican II over 600 times. It quotes John Paul II 135 times. It never quotes St. Pius X - not even once - who led the Church in its combat against the most dangerous collection of errors ever to menace her - Modernism - just 80 years prior.

At the time (1992) Pius X was the last canonized Pope. Before him, it was Pius V. How one can leave St. Pius X completely out of any 20th century catechism staggers the imagination - unless it is a deliberate conspiracy of silence to avoid the confrontation Papa Sarto is yet making with the Synthesis of all Heresies even today. Think about it.