He may have understood how the postion of people called Modernists erred from Church teaching. Whether or not he had extensive knowledge of the variopus ways they fell into error may be worth researching, but I know of nothing showing that he had extensive knowlege of the paths they took.
You plainly haven’t read Pascendi. He knew enough to know that it was organized and deliberate as a movement in its attempts to undermine the Church.
*“Once indeed We had hopes of recalling them to a better mind, and to this end We first of all treated them with kindness as Our children, then with severity; and at last We have had recourse, though with great reluctance, to public reproof. It is known to you, Venerable Brethren, how unavailing have been Our efforts. For a moment they have bowed their head, only to lift it more arrogantly than before. If it were a matter which concerned them alone, We might perhaps have overlooked it;
but the security of the Catholic name is at stake. Wherefore We must interrupt a silence which it would be criminal to prolong, that We may point out to the whole Church, as they really are, men who are badly disguised.” *
And to use your term “quite workable”, that is exactly the point I am tryiing to make.
The point you were making before was: "As I said, there is no definition of Modernism that is workable. "
Modernism is simply being used as a cathc=all code word to mean “they disagree with Church teaching” which is to say, “I am too sloppy a thinker, or too lazy a thinker to analyze how this individual fell into error; but I have this really neat code word that is so broad that no one can disagree with me because it answers all problems”.
That unproven assertion that you’ve made is false. You’re simply trying to blunt the use of the word “modernist” which, whether you like it or not, touches on virtually all aspects of the Church’s teaching.
“…the danger is present almost in the very veins and heart of the Church, whose injury is the more certain from the very fact that their knowledge of her is more intimate. Moreover, they lay the ax not to the branches and shoots, but to the very root, that is, to the faith and its deepest fibers. And once having struck at this root of immortality,
they proceed to diffuse poison through the whole tree, so that there is no part of Catholic truth which they leave untouched, none that they do not strive to corrupt.”
And your ascribing the motives of sloppy or lazy thinking on the part of anyone who uses it is just an exercise in your own lazy thinking.
No, it doesn’t. When a definition is so broad that any error, no matter its source, can be swept up into it, it ceases to have any viable use.
"For this reason it will be of advantage, Venerable Brethren, to bring their teachings together here into one group, and* to point out their interconnection,** and
thus to pass to an examination of the sources of the errors, and** to prescribe remedies **for averting the evil results." *
It becomes the code word to condemn anyone you disagree with in a simple, dismissive fashion.
Actually you are doing what you accuse others of, simply dismissing anyone who uses the word modernism to describe some of the specific errors laid out by the pre-conciliar Popes as “using code words”
I for one don’t use modernism to describe the errors of the Orthodox or the rampant papolatry that has erupted in the Church since the “EWTN/JPII” era. Though that has lead to the easy adoption of modernist errors in the Church.
Satanism and Wicca are also not characteristic of Modernism.
… the Church is capable of more clear thinking than that; sadly, too many lay people are not vcapable of clear thinking.
Are you accusing Popes Gregory XVI, Pius IX, St. Pius X, Pope Pius XI and Pius XII or not being capable of clear thinking?
Compare any of their encyclicals with those of John Paul II’s tautological nightmares and you’ll see JPII has more in common with Tielhard De Chardin and Hans Kung than with his predecessors.
An amalgam is a bunching together of a series of disparate issues. when one cannot clearly define what it is - bbeacause it takes a vague broad sweep at issues - then it becomes unworkable.
You keep saying they are disconnected. They only appear to be disconnected as St. Pius X showed in Pascendi, they are interconnected and deliberate.
There are a whole series of ways that people may disagree with, and dissent to Church teaching.
Yes. They are called heretics and apostates.
If one really wants to deal with them, one needs to find out what the source of the error is, not simply paste a label on it as if that explained all.
No one is claiming to explain “it all” with the use of modernism no more than someone is claiming to explain it all by describing someone as ascribing to “Protestantism” or “Atheism.” But it does quite a bit in categorizing the error or errors and points to where the roots of them lie.
What makes the errors floating around in theology is teh lack of clear thinking, and the lack of catechesis.
You think that isn’t deliberate?
“It is one of the cleverest devices of the Modernists (as they are commonly and rightly called) to present their doctrines without order and systematic arrangement, in a scattered and disjointed manner, so as to make it appear as if their minds were in doubt or hesitation, whereas in reality they are quite fixed and steadfast.”
How else can you subtly change the thinking of a population other than creating a buffer of ignorance and confusion between the older, more informed generation and the youngest but with a group of under-educated generations in between?
We have had way too many educators - from those teaching kindergarten all the way through those teaching grad school - teaching anything and everything but what the Church teaches.
Not all of it, nor even necessarily a large portion of it, may have anyhting at all to actually do with Modernism
.
Then again, it may have an awful lot to do with Modernism. What Romano Amerio described as the advent of Pyhhronism and Mobilism in modern catechesis has its antecedents in the Agnosticism and Vital Immanence of Modernism.
For example, attempting to sweep liberation theology into the category of Modernism is to fail to understand either of them.
Again, you are wrong in trying to separate them completely. The principal of vital immanence and the so-called ‘evolutionary’ mechanism of the progressive and conservative forces results in a “this world, action-oriented” philosophy. While the ingredients of liberation theology have their origins in European, masonic and Soviet thinking, it is the modernist denial of an objective, anti-democratic authority capable of determining objective truth in the Church that gives the movement of liberation theology dynamism.
Just as Marxism is a philosophy of sorts and Communism is a manifestation of it. Modernism is also a “philosophy” with Liberation Theology being a manifestation of it.
And to fail to understand them from their sources is to fail to understand how to approach them in terms of getting back on track.
Not necessarily. One doesn’t have to comprehend every facet of an error something in order to accept the truth.
I never suggested that it was sealed away. You take too lightly the creativity of people in getting off track from Magisterial teaching.
You must be kidding. To paraphrase Chesterton, anyone can fall in a thousand directions, but there is only one direction in which to stand up.
No one is slavishly following the thought of Loisy; most people don’t even know who he was or what he had to say. That he may have had some impact on a theologian, who then went off in another direction due to other sources does not mean that a third theologian, having studied the second, and having spun off in yet another direction, is a Modernist.
It doesn’t mean he’s not a Modernist either. What’s your point?
Often you will find that they would reject what Loisy had to say, which makes them rejecting Modernist thought. It doesn’t make them right; but it doesn’t make them a Mondernist, either.
But you will often find people rejecting “modernism” or a specific Catholic “luminary” like Von Balthazar and at the same time and in virtually the same breath they will state that they believe in the same things in essence. They will insist that Scripture is incorrect in a literal interpretation or that EENS doesn’t hold because of the discovery of the New World or because they have some anecdote about a “good jew” or a “good Muslim” that died outside the Church as far as our senses could determine.
Considering that I follow the magisterium , I’ll levae you to cipher that out yourself. But ascribing it to the Devil is about as helpful as calling some theologian today a Modernist. It doesn’t explain anything.
Since I don’t know if we agree on what the Magisterium is, I don’t know if you believe in the Devil or not. How about if you just answer the question with a “yes” or a “no”?
As far as whether or not ascribing something to the Devil is helpful would be dependent on whether or not you believe in the Devil.
continued…
