Pascendi Dominici Gregis

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quantum_star22

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In St Pius X’s encyclical on the doctrine of the modernists, St. Pius X clearly warns against some operating in the Church who seek to reduce Christ to the condition of normal man. It is quite telling: " We allude, Venerable Brethren, to many who belong to the Catholic laity, and, what is much more sad, to the ranks of the priesthood itself, who, animated by a false zeal for the Church, lacking the solid safeguards of philosophy and theology, nay more, thoroughly imbued with the poisonous doctrines taught by the enemies of the Church, and lost to all sense of modesty, 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, not sparing even the Person of the Divine Redeemer, whom, with sacrilegious audacity, they degrade to the condition of a simple and ordinary man. "-St. Pius X.

Does anyone else see this happening today?
 
Modernism is a phrase that attempted to lump a number of issues, arising out of the Enlightenment and subsequent permutations of philosophy. The last two Popes moved from the label “modernism” to specifying what the source of the issue was, for the matters they were addressing.

There are significant problems in the world and as the Church is in the world (but not of it), those problems will manifest themselves among the laity, the professed religious, and the clergy; we are all human, and we are all affected by what we deal with on a daily basis.

Hint: it was happening before the Enlightenment; and it will happen in the future. Problems morph, and as someone else said, the more things change, the more they remain the same. One of the current problems is Gnosticism, something that Pius X was not dealing with, but which has arisen again - and how long ago was the Church dealing with that?

Pius X warned against reformers; that has been used without any discrimination by some who insist that any sort of reform is wrong; history shows that in every age, the Church has had to reform itself in one area or another. Reform per se is not wrong; but those who insist that either morals or doctrine need to be reformed are. It is one thing to insist that doctrine must be reformed; it is another to reform how we may convey that doctrine (or substitute morals for doctrine in that statement).

An example: Pope Paul VI wrote Humanae Vitae, and to put it politely, it didn’t fly far. John Paul II gave us Theology of the Body, essentially providing the same message as Humanae Vitae, and it has spread well among young practicing Catholics. Same moral issue, different way of explaining it.

Are there people agitating? Sure; just look at the issue of gay “marriage”. Are they people generally recognized as part of the mainline Church? I would submit they are not. But the issue grows, particularly among the laity who have been poorly catechized.
 
We see Christ today being reduced to a pawn in the political arena where we are blasted for not being like him in His tolerance and compassion. They devalue Him by turning Him into a moral teacher, a stooge for any liberal cause. They do not understand His divinity nor His mission.
 
quantum_star22 said:
In St Pius X’s encyclical on the doctrine of the modernists, St. Pius X clearly warns against some operating in the Church who seek to reduce Christ to the condition of normal man. It is quite telling: " We allude, Venerable Brethren, to many who belong to the Catholic laity, and, what is much more sad, to the ranks of the priesthood itself, who, animated by a false zeal for the Church, lacking the solid safeguards of philosophy and theology, nay more, thoroughly imbued with the poisonous doctrines taught by the enemies of the Church, and lost to all sense of modesty, 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, not sparing even the Person of the Divine Redeemer, whom, with sacrilegious audacity, they degrade to the condition of a simple and ordinary man. "-St. Pius X.

Does anyone else see this happening today?
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Keep in mind that St. Pius was himself a reformer, encouraging things like frequent communion, which was controversial at the time, maybe like Pope Francis washing feet.
Some of his statements were taken out of context in a way that would reduce the credibility of recent popes and the Council, which I am sure he never intended.

However, there is truth in this post. We have seen a denial of the supernatural, of the Magisterium, of the very nature of dogma itself. This did not happen as a result of the Council, but the attack became evident right after the Council. Keep in mind that the people who undermined the Church, and bishops and religious superiors who failed to respond adequately to the undermining, were appointed or promoted long before Vatican II. Those trends were building up, under the radar, for decades. There must have been problems in seminaries, in religious orders, and elsewhere, in the 1940s and 1950s that were just not noticed at the time.

At the time St. Pope Pius wrote those words, he was responding to a problem that was just internal. Pope Paul VI and subsequent popes have been responding to a massive wave of secularization from society in general. This external attack did not exist a century ago. So in that sense, the situations are somewhat different.
 
ATTENTION

Please do not use papal documents to pit one pope against another. Such an action is a bannable offense.
 
otjm said:
An example: Pope Paul VI wrote Humanae Vitae, and to put it politely, it didn’t fly far. John Paul II gave us Theology of the Body, essentially providing the same message as Humanae Vitae, and it has spread well among young practicing Catholics. Same moral issue, different way of explaining it.
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Very good of you to point this out. What I would like to say is that it is good to have both of these broad kinds of documents: the abc123 doctrinal definitions “here’s why, let’s do it,” documents like HV, AND the more poetic doctrinal expositions “and this is reflected in the complementarity of males and females in the marital bed in which the natural outcome is twofold etc.*,” things like TotB.

I think when we only have things like TotB we run the risk of not having hard documents like HV to fall back on in terms of clarity. The moral theologian is going to teach first-level sexual ethics to college students with TotB; he is going to consult and back himself up with HV when a chaplain priest who needs counsel has a critical moral question relating to things happening on the OB floor of the local hospital.

*not a real quote, just making a point
 
From western secular culture as a trend and some laity as an exception yes, from the Church itself, no.
 
Speaking about the errors of ecumenism, I’m reminded of the post-conciliar popes.

How far off we are here from Catholic teaching we have already seen in the decree of the Vatican Council. We shall see later how, with such theories, added to the other errors already mentioned, the way is opened wide for atheism. Here it is well to note at once that, given this doctrine of experience united with the other doctrine of symbolism, every religion, even that of paganism, must be held to be true. What is to prevent such experiences from being met within every religion? In fact that they are to be found is asserted by not a few. And with what right will Modernists deny the truth of an experience affirmed by a follower of Islam? With what right can they claim true experiences for Catholics alone? Indeed Modernists do not deny but actually admit, some confusedly, others in the most open manner, that all religions are true. That they cannot feel otherwise is clear. For on what ground, according to their theories, could falsity be predicated of any religion whatsoever? It must be certainly on one of these two: either on account of the falsity of the religious sentiment or on account of the falsity of the formula pronounced by the mind. Now the religious sentiment, although it may be more perfect or less perfect, is always one and the same; and the intellectual formula, in order to be true, has but to respond to the religious sentiment and to the Believer, whatever be the intellectual capacity of the latter. In the conflict between different religions, the most that Modernists can maintain is that the Catholic has more truth because it is more living and that it deserves with more reason the name of Christian because it corresponds more fully with the origins of Christianity. That these consequences flow from the premises will not seem unnatural to anybody. But what is amazing is that there are Catholics and priests who, We would fain believe, abhor such enormities yet act as if they fully approved of them. For they heap such praise and bestow such public honour on the teachers of these errors as to give rise to the belief that their admiration is not meant merely for the persons, who are perhaps not devoid of a certain merit, but rather for the errors which these persons openly profess and which they do all in their power to propagate.
 
Ace86 said:
Speaking about the errors of ecumenism, I’m reminded of the post-conciliar popes.

How far off we are here from Catholic teaching we have already seen in the decree of the Vatican Council. We shall see later how, with such theories, added to the other errors already mentioned, the way is opened wide for atheism. Here it is well to note at once that, given this doctrine of experience united with the other doctrine of symbolism, every religion, even that of paganism, must be held to be true. What is to prevent such experiences from being met within every religion? In fact that they are to be found is asserted by not a few. And with what right will Modernists deny the truth of an experience affirmed by a follower of Islam? With what right can they claim true experiences for Catholics alone? Indeed Modernists do not deny but actually admit, some confusedly, others in the most open manner, that all religions are true. That they cannot feel otherwise is clear. For on what ground, according to their theories, could falsity be predicated of any religion whatsoever? It must be certainly on one of these two: either on account of the falsity of the religious sentiment or on account of the falsity of the formula pronounced by the mind. Now the religious sentiment, although it may be more perfect or less perfect, is always one and the same; and the intellectual formula, in order to be true, has but to respond to the religious sentiment and to the Believer, whatever be the intellectual capacity of the latter. In the conflict between different religions, the most that Modernists can maintain is that the Catholic has more truth because it is more living and that it deserves with more reason the name of Christian because it corresponds more fully with the origins of Christianity. That these consequences flow from the premises will not seem unnatural to anybody. But what is amazing is that there are Catholics and priests who, We would fain believe, abhor such enormities yet act as if they fully approved of them. For they heap such praise and bestow such public honour on the teachers of these errors as to give rise to the belief that their admiration is not meant merely for the persons, who are perhaps not devoid of a certain merit, but rather for the errors which these persons openly profess and which they do all in their power to propagate.
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Please give the source of this quote. TY
 
YoungTradCath said:
Very good of you to point this out. What I would like to say is that it is good to have both of these broad kinds of documents: the abc123 doctrinal definitions “here’s why, let’s do it,” documents like HV, AND the more poetic doctrinal expositions “and this is reflected in the complementarity of males and females in the marital bed in which the natural outcome is twofold etc.*,” things like TotB.

I think when we only have things like TotB we run the risk of not having hard documents like HV to fall back on in terms of clarity. The moral theologian is going to teach first-level sexual ethics to college students with TotB; he is going to consult and back himself up with HV when a chaplain priest who needs counsel has a critical moral question relating to things happening on the OB floor of the local hospital.

*not a real quote, just making a point
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I am not sure that HV is going to be used on the floor of the OB. However, lest anyone think that I am dismissive of HV, I am most certainly not. It is the most prescient, prophetic document to come for the papacy in who knows how long.

Nor am I suggesting that we should only have documents such as TotB; but the point is, it is, or certainly has been, a very effective one because of its style and methodology.

There is room for both.
 
Re contraception, the facts are that the Anglicans, at the Lambeth Conference of 1930, broached the Christian solidarity up to then against contraception, and this was answered clearly by Pope Pius XI’s Casti Connubii in December 1930 in which he definitively taught that “any use whatsoever of matrimony exercised in such a way that the act is deliberately frustrated in its natural power to generate life is an offense against the law of God and of nature, and those who indulge in such are branded with the guilt of a grave sin.” Casti Connubii, 56, 1930].

In “Vatican II’s *Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World *(Gaudium et Spes) #50-51:
“In questions of birth regulation, the sons of the Church, faithful to these principles, are forbidden to use methods disapproved of by the teaching authority of the Church in its interpretation of the divine law. 14”
And to what does note 14 refer?
To Pope Pius XI’s Encyclical Casti Connubii, 1930.

In Humanae Vitae, 1968, Pope Paul VI, after rejecting his Commission’s Report re contraception, teaches definitively:
“Similarly excluded is any action which either before, at the moment of, or after sexual intercourse, is specifically intended to prevent procreation—whether as an end or as a means”…. “it is never lawful, even for the gravest reasons, to do evil that good may come of it” and uses this to affirm that: “it is a serious error to think that a whole married life of otherwise normal relations can justify sexual intercourse which is deliberately contraceptive and so intrinsically wrong.”

Catholics who query this depth, appropriateness and constancy of doctrine leave a lot to be desired.
 
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