Hello OTJM.
While I agree with some of what you’ve stated, I need to remind you that a Saint who was also a Pope was the person who said that Modernism was a synthesis of all heresies which is much more meaningful then as you say, “next to nothing.” Perhaps you’d like to re-word your statement. There is not much that I find vague in the Encyclical. Do you mean from another source? Can you clarify?
Glenda
I am well aware that he is a saint; but that doe not mean that everything he ever stated was perfectly clear. A comment made last week (or 2) in Our Sunday Visitor could make this clear; about John Paul it said that he (john Paul) was being canonized; not his period in office. Look at the post before yours - M Dent; he is correct that the problem Pius was dealing with was rooted in agnosticism. Alfred Loisy, a priest, was excommunicated (there was another whose name I can’t dredge up right now) and I think Loisy died that way. A goodly portion of what was stirring at the time had to do with biblical scholarship; Protestant theologians had lead the way od deconstruction and it was infecting some within the Church.
I have read Pius’s work, and I cannot make a clear definition of it (and doing research, you will find repeated comments about it being vague as to any clear definition). And I have a degree in philosophy and another in law, so it is not like I am just wandering around loose.
After Pius X, there was much ado in the upper echelons of the Church; theologians were censored (and a number of them rehabilitated). The Church appeared under attack (and it was from some points) but the result was that legitimate scholarship was in part derailed, and for lack of a better term, the reaction was too broad. One needs to keep in mind that certain Cardinals attempted to stop Vatican 2 before it got started; that they produced one round of documents that were turned down, and then the documents we have were put forth.
From the time of Pius X forward, there were both radical right and radical left elements within the Church. And as has been said repeatedly, where there is error, there is normally some truth. The radical left was falling into error; however, the radical right was so over-reacting to error that the net of their position seemed to be that no new formulations of anything could be possibly true. That may be a bit overstatement, but the attitude in the upper echelons of the Church prior to Vatican 2 was in some aspects similar to McCarthyism.
The problem I have is that people with no formal training in theology sound off with the cry of “modernism” when that is totally inappropriate; they cannot give a definition of it, but they absolutely don’t like what they are attacking and they drag that word out as if it answers all objections.
Read the documents of Paul VI, John Paul II and Benedict XVI and you are going to find that they define errors without using the term "modernism’. They define the source of the errors, such as liberalism, relativism, secularism, and etc., which give far more clear indications of the source of the errors they address, than giving a broad, sweeping label which in fact doesn’t address the source of the error.
And as to saying that modernism is a synthesis of all errors, I disagree; plenty of errors have occurred which were not rooted in agnosticism. Pius X was trying to address a number of problems; I think the Church would have been better served if he had identified the roots of the problems rather than trying to synthesize an overall response to it. And that has nothing to do whatsoever as to his sainthood - he was awesome.
