by Professor Raymond B. Marcin
Professor of Law Emeritus, The Catholic University of America.
[Thesis Statement: Our Catholic Church has been backing away from its definitive 1907 condemnation of Modernism as a Heresy ever since its dalliance with the Heresy of Modernism in the Second Vatican Council. This leaves our Catholic Church in an untenable position. The common if not universal belief among Catholics is that reconciling our Church with the Modern World became the purpose of the Second Vatican Council shortly after it was convened. One problem with this well-founded belief is that reconciling our Church with the Modern World implicates the very essence of the Heresy of Modernism. Another compounding problem is that every Vatican-II-Council-member who cast his final vote of approval for all the teachings of the Second Vatican Council had taken an Oath Against the Heresy of Modernism. Yet, the course that our Church has currently chosen for us to follow is that very course that implicates the essence of the Heresy of Modernism compounded by a massive violation of the Oath Against the Heresy of Modernism.]
INTRODUCTION: DEFINING THE HERESY OF MODERNISM
First of all, what is the Heresy of Modernism? Modernism in Catholic theological doctrine is indeed a heresy—a heresy that progressive-minded Catholics often dally with, and that tradition-minded Catholics have always avoided like the plague. Modernism was present in our Church for a long time before Pope Saint Pius X officially named and condemned it as a heresy in 1907.1 Its presence in the Church had grown significantly during the 19th century and into the early 20th .
The Church’s 1907 condemnation of Modernism as a heresy stifled its 20th-century growth, at least superficially, for a generation or two, but the specter of Modernism never ceased haunting the corridors of the Vatican until Modernism itself broke forth big-time—in the open—in the teachings of our Church’s Second Vatican Council (1962-65).2
It is difficult to get an exact, literal handle on the content of Modernism in Catholic theological doctrine, precisely because of what theological Modernism is. When Saint Pius X named and condemned it as a heresy in 1907 in his encyclical Pascendi, there were several then-well-known (and now all but forgotten) advocates of various Modernist principles among the clergy within the Catholic Church at the time, but the Pope was condemning Modernism itself in all of its manifestations—pre-1907, contemporary, and post-1907—on into the indefinite future. That became clear in paragraph 39 of Pascendi.
SAINT PIUS X DEFINED MODERNISM AS ‘THE SYNTHESIS OF ALL HERESIES’
Pope Saint Pius X clearly acknowledged that he was condemning Modernism itself in all of its manifestations—pre-1907, contemporary, and post-1907—on into the indefinite future when he defined Modernism as “the synthesis of all heresies”:
“It may be, Venerable Brethren, that some may think We have dwelt too long on this exposition of the doctrines of the Modernists. But it was necessary, both in order to refute their customary charge that We do not understand their ideas, and to show that their system does not consist in scattered and unconnected theories but in a perfectly organised body, all the parts of which are solidly joined so that it is not possible to admit one without admitting all. For this reason, too, We have had to give this exposition a somewhat didactic form and not to shrink from employing certain uncouth terms in use among the Modernists. And now, can anybody who takes a survey of the whole system be surprised that We should define it as the synthesis of all heresies? Were one to attempt the task of collecting together all the errors that have been broached against the faith and to concentrate the sap and substance of them all into one, he could not better succeed than the Modernists have done”3 [Emphasis added.]
Thus the “synthesis of all heresies” is to be found in “the sap and substance” of all heresies. A question presents itself: What, then, is the “sap and substance” that the Heresy of Modernism shares with all other heresies? It’s at this point that we confront the fact that Pope Saint Pius X is condemning Modernism itself in all of its manifestations—pre-1907, contemporary, and post-1907—on into the indefinite future—including, most importantly, our own time. What, then, is the “sap and substance” that the Heresy of Modernism shares with all other heresies?
In 1954, Igino Giordani, the biographer of Pope Saint Pius X, helpfully explained the Modernism that plagued Saint Pius X’s papal reign (1903-1914) in words that apply to our present-day encounters with it:
“Modernism consisted principally in a state of mind and way of life that sought to make over Christianity, rationalistically explaining away its difficulties to make the religion acceptable to the thinking of the day.”4 [Emphasis added.]
The Heresy of Modernism consisted principally in a state of mind and way of life that departed markedly from the state of mind and way of life instilled in us by Catholicism itself in order to change Catholicism and thereby make it “acceptable to the thinking of the day.” Because Modernism seeks to make “the thinking of the day” an influential criterion for explaining Catholic doctrine, understandings of Catholic doctrine will evolve with “the thinking of the day.” Think about it: Accessing the thinking of the day in order to reconcile our Church with the “wisdom” of modern thinking means that there can be no Eternal Catholic Truth at all in “Modernist” Catholicism.
Modernist thought changes with the times to conform to the times. It is what Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (who became Pope Benedict XVI) was referencing when he cautioned against an unrestrained and unfiltered openness to “the wisdom of the world,”5 but God regards “the wisdom of the world” as “foolishness”—we know this from the Bible itself. Saint Paul actually warned us about the very essence of what we’re discussing today as the Heresy of Modernism: “[T]he wisdom of this world is foolishness with God.”6
Moreover, an openness to “the wisdom of this world” in order to make Catholic truths acceptable to this world’s ever-changing “wisdom” seems to fit into the “sap and substance” of all heresies in Pope Saint Pius X’s condemnatory definition of Modernism as “the synthesis of all heresies.”
THE SLY AND TACIT NULLIFICATION OF THE HERESY OF MODERNISM
Ever since the Second Vatican Council, the Heresy of Modernism (especially as sagely understood in paragraph 39 of Pascendi) has been a growing phenomenon within our Catholic Church. During that same period of time, Modernism as a Heresy has been a matter of rapidly diminishing concern to the Hierarchy of our Catholic Church (as incongruous as that might seem at first glance). Few if any of our current Catholic Hierarchy write about or even mention Modernism as a genuine heresy.
Interestingly, Cardinal Ratzinger’s past writings may have influenced the minds of many of the members of today’s Catholic hierarchy to agree sub rosa (i.e., never to be disclosed publicly) that Pope Saint Pius X should never have defined Modernism as a Heresy in the first place. It seems as if the current members of the hierarchy of our Catholic Church have begun to agree with Cardinal Ratzinger’s past writings and thus regard the Second Vatican Council as having somehow tacitly “repealed” on the sly and without saying so (i.e., a completely specious “repeal”) our Church’s settled, century-old 1907 dogma condemning Modernism as a Heresy.
CARDINAL RATZINGER ON THE INTENT MOTIVATING VATICAN II
In 1982 Cardinal Ratzinger, who had been an influential peritus (i.e., expert theological advisor) at the Second Vatican Council, authored some astonishing statements in his seminal treatise Principles of Catholic Theology.7
In the epilogue at the end of that 1982 treatise, Cardinal Ratzinger wrote (and these are his exact words): “Not every valid council in the history of the Church has been a fruitful one; in the last analysis many of them have been just a waste of time,” and in the very next sentence he wrote that “the last word about the historical value of Vatican Council II has yet to be spoken.”8
He then went on to suggest that the documents of the Second Vatican Council, and especially its centerpiece, Gaudium et Spes (the “Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World”), were intended to “correct” what he called “the one- sidedness of the position adopted by the Church under Pius IX and Pius X”9 (the popes whose Syllabi of Errors and Encyclicals warned against the dangers of Liberalism and the Heresy of Modernism). This is hard to describe as anything but a remarkably cavalier and dismissive characterization of Blessed Pius IX’s warnings about the dangers to our Church in Liberalism and a beyond-cavalier-and- dismissive characterization of Saint Pius X’s dogmatic condemnation of Modernism as a Heresy. These are Cardinal Ratzinger’s words:
“If it is desirable to offer a diagnosis of the text [of Gaudium et Spes, i.e., Vatican II’s Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World] as a whole, we might say that (in conjunction with the texts on religious liberty and world religions) it is a revision of the Syllabus of Pius IX, a kind of countersyllabus.”10
In a footnote to the above-quoted passage, Cardinal Ratzinger explained that “[t]he position taken in the Syllabus [of Pius IX] was adopted and continued in Pius X’s struggle against ‘Modernism’.”11 Saint Pius X’s dogmatic condemnation of Modernism as a Heresy and as “the synthesis of all heresies” is to be understood as a mere “struggle” against Modernism??? !
Cardinal Ratzinger then continued in his main text:
“[T]he text [of Gaudium et Spes] serves as a countersyllabus and, as such, represents, on the part of the Church, an attempt at an official reconciliation with the new era inaugurated in 1789.”12
Cardinal Ratzinger explained the reference to the year 1789 as “the new phase of history inaugurated by the French Revolution”—the new phase of history against which (he suggests) Blessed Pius IX and Saint Pius X were reacting in their anti-Liberal and anti-Modernism writings.13
To many of today’s liberal or progressive Catholics, these statements of Cardinal Ratzinger may not seem to be “astonishing” at all. Cardinal Ratzinger was, after all, only stating the obvious, wasn’t he? He was only being candid. His statement was actually quite unremarkable. It has become well accepted in Catholic thought that reconciling the Church with the modern world was the whole point of the Second Vatican Council—wasn’t it?
What perhaps gnaws uncomfortably at the intellect of other, less-progressively-minded Catholics is the fact that Cardinal Ratzinger was suggesting that the main goal of the Second Vatican Council was to set up a countersyllabus, i.e., an opposition document, to the Church’s officially settled dogma defining Modernism as a Heresy and as “the synthesis of all heresies”. An astonishing way of “repealing” a settled dogma of the Catholic Faith! But wait, there’s more…
POPE BENEDICT XVI SOFTENED THE VIEWPOINT OF CARDINAL RATZINGER
On April 15, 2005, Cardinal Ratzinger became Pope Benedict XVI. On December 22, 2005, Pope Benedict delivered an address to the Roman Curia during which he softened his earlier enthusiasm (as Cardinal Ratzinger) for the “countersyllabus” understanding of the teachings of Vatican II. In the address, Pope Benedict suggested that interpretations of the teachings of Vatican II must be filtered through a technique which he called a hermeneutic of continuity.14
The conventional and almost uniform understanding throughout our Catholic Church of the meaning of Pope Benedict’s hermeneutic of continuity seems to be that whenever a controversial teaching of Vatican II seems to conflict with a truth of the Catholic Faith as found in Sacred Dogma or in Sacred Tradition, the Vatican II teaching should be interpreted not as negating Sacred Dogma or Sacred Tradition or (to use Pope Benedict’s format) not as a rupture with past Church teaching, but rather in continuity with it.
The obvious problem with Pope Benedict’s apparently sensible hermeneutical effort was, and still is, that Pope Benedict’s hermeneutic of continuity begs the question as to whether the conflict between the heretical Modernist teachings in the Second Vatican Council documents can be interpreted in continuity with our Church’s definitive dogma condemning Modernism as a Heresy.
Note well: The “Cardinal Ratzinger/Pope Benedict” trek over the years from (as Cardinal Ratzinger) regarding Pope Saint Pius X’s dogmatically declared definition of the Heresy of Modernism as being nothing but a mere “struggle” against Modernism to (as Pope Benedict) moving heaven and earth in a valiant effort to create a hermeneutic that would place Catholic Tradition above the Modernist teachings in the Vatican II documents, is important. Even a brilliant theologian can grow in depth of understanding as long as he doesn’t succumb to the seemingly attractive passing trends of the day.
MANY MEMBERS OF VATICAN II VIOLATED THEIR OATH AGAINST MODERNISM
Yes, every member of the Second Vatican Council who cast his final vote of approval for all the teachings of the Council, including the problematic teachings implicating the Heresy of Modernism, had taken an Oath Against the Heresy of Modernism. A slight digression into history….
On September 1, 1910, Pope Saint Pius X issued a motu proprio entitled Sacrorum Antistitum15 in which he mandated that an Oath Against Modernism be taken by all Catholic seminarians before being ordained to the sub-diaconate on their way to the priesthood. It is important to note that in 1918, four years after the death of Saint Pius X, the Vatican’s Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office declared that the motu proprio on the Oath Against Modernism must remain in full force until the Holy See declares otherwise.16 The Holy See did declare otherwise, but not until July 17, 1967 (more than a year after the closing of the Second Vatican Council).17
It is even more important to note that every Catholic priest ordained between the years 1910 and 1967 had been required to take the Oath Against Modernism as mandated by Pope Saint Pius X. The implications are startling. With only one lone exception, every bishop, archbishop, and cardinal who participated in the Second Vatican Council and every Vatican II peritus who was also a priest had taken the Oath Against Modernism. The one lone exception was Pope John XXIII, who was ordained in 1904 and died in June of 1963, early in the Vatican II proceedings.
Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, who served as Apostolic Nuncio to the United States from 2011 to 2016, has confirmed the massive violation of the Oath Against Modernism:
“I confirm that, according to the canonical norms then in vigor, all the bishops who participated in the Second Vatican Council and all the clerics with positions in the commissions swore the Iusiurandum anti modernisticum [i.e., the Oath Against Modernism] together with the Professio Fidei [Profession of Faith]. Certainly those who at the Council rejected the preparatory schemas prepared by the Holy Office and played a decisive role in the drafting of the most controversial texts violated their oath sworn on the Holy Gospels; but I do not think that for them this posed a serious problem of conscience.”18
Every active participant in the Second Vatican Council (except Pope John XXIII) was under an oath-bound obligation to Almighty God, “with due reverence [to] submit and adhere with [his] whole heart to the condemnations, declarations, and all the prescripts contained in the encyclical Pascendi …”19 Seen in this light, Cardinal Ratzinger’s “countersyllabus” statements are indeed truly astonishing. How could the participants in Vatican II set out intentionally to “correct” by setting up a “countersyllabus” to that which each and every participant had sworn “with [his] whole heart” to “submit and adhere”?20
How can one who is oath-bound to support the papal condemnations of Modernism vote to “correct” or “counter” those condemnations? What are we to believe? Are we to believe that those who voted in favor of the heretical teachings of Vatican II intentionally violated the Oath Against Modernism that they had taken? That they forgot their oath? Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò has given the most candid and (in my opinion) most obvious answer to those quandaries. His answer is key to his understanding of why the obligation to take the Oath Against Modernism was abolished in the aftermath of Vatican II:
“The abolition of the Iusiurandum Antimodernisticum [i.e., the Oath Against Modernism] was part of a plan to dismantle the disciplinary structure of the Church, precisely at the moment in which the threat of the adulteration of Faith and Morals by the Innovators was greatest.”21
In the aftermath of Vatican II, when enthusiasm for regarding “the thinking of the day” a proper criterion for discerning religious truth, and when the “spirit of Vatican II” was loudest in proclaiming an unrestrained and unfiltered openness to “the wisdom of the world”—at that moment “in which the threat of the adulteration of Faith and Morals by the Innovators was greatest”—our Catholic Church set itself (and us) on the path that it has now followed for decades in the wake of the Second Vatican Council.
Cardinal Ratzinger was prescient when he drew his post-Vatican II conclusion that the main goal of the Second Vatican Council was to set up an opposition document to the anti-Modernist position adopted by the Catholic Church under Popes Pius IX and Pius X. The anti-Modernist position adopted by the Catholic Church under Pope Saint Pius X is now, as it was when he declared it in Pascendi, a settled and then-as-now still-binding Dogma of our Church (albeit an unwanted . and completely ignored Dogma).
Evidence is not lacking that Modernism as a heresy has been a matter of diminishing (to the point of disappearing) concern to the Hierarchy of our Catholic Church, but Modernism with its Heretical veneer covertly suppressed is thriving throughout our Catholic Church today. Our current Holy Father, Pope Leo XIV, has recently begun a series of talks on the Second Vatican Council urging Catholics throughout the world to familiarize themselves with the documents of the Second Vatican Council so that they will “continue to be inspired by its prophetic teachings.”22 His complete commitment to all the teachings of the Second Vatican Council became evident very early in his papacy.
POPE LEO XIV URGES ‘COMPLETE COMMITMENT’ TO VATICAN II
Pope Leo XIV may have demonstrated his “complete” lack of concern over the heretical Modernist teachings in Vatican II’s documents very early in his papal reign. In his address to the College of Cardinals on Saturday, May 10, 2025, just two days after his election as pope, he invited all the cardinals to commit themselves completely to the Vatican II’s teachings:
“I would like us to renew together today our complete commitment to the path that the universal Church has now followed for decades in the wake of the Second Vatican Council. Pope Francis masterfully and concretely set it forth in the Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii Gaudium, from which I would like to highlight several fundamental points: the return to the primacy of Christ in proclamation; the missionary conversion of the entire Christian community; growth in collegiality and synodality; attention to the sensus fidei, especially in its most authentic and inclusive forms, such as popular piety; loving care for the least and the rejected; courageous and trusting dialogue with the contemporary world in its various components and realities; Second Vatican Council, Pastoral Constitution Gaudium et Spes.23
Pope Leo XIV is now committing all of us, i.e., the entire Catholic Church, to follow that path—i.e., “the path that the universal Church has now followed for decades in the wake of the Second Vatican Council” by joining together in a “courageous and trusting dialogue with the contemporary world in its various components and realities.”
CONCLUSION: THE CURRENT CRISIS IN OUR CHURCH
Thus it is, that we find ourselves in the midst of the title placed on this essay: “The Current Covert Demise of the Heresy of Modernism”—a demise somehow orchestrated by members of the current hierarchy of our Catholic Church in order to turn our Church’s century-old dogma condemning Modernism as a Heresy into a forgotten, no-longer-operative nonentity. We are ordered to follow the teachings of the Second Vatican Council by engaging in a “trusting dialogue with the contemporary world.” Those few Catholics who still accept Saint Paul’s clear biblical warning that “the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God”24 find themselves in a dilemma of biblical proportions.
Unless our current Holy Father and his Vatican bureaucracy somehow decide to end their commitment to a “trusting dialogue with the contemporary and recognize the teaching of the Bible that “the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God,” our Church seems destined to continue on its chosen path of ignoring the Heresy of Modernism—not ad infinitum, thanks be to God—but rather until the Second Coming of Our Lord, which seems imminent, given the unprecedented chaos in world conditions and the unprecedented covert surrender of our beloved Catholic Church to the very essence of the Heresy of Modernism.
Footnotes:
1 See Pope Saint Pius X’s encyclical Pascendi Dominici Gregis on the Internet at https://www.vatican.va/content/pius-x/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-x_enc_19070908_pascendi-dominici-gregis.html . Hereinafter cited as “Pascendi.”
2 See Fr. Dominic Bourmaud, One Hundred Years of Modernism (Angelus Press, 2006). Also, for a first-hand account of the emergence of the heresy of Modernism in the culture of Catholic-Seminary life on the eve of the Second Vatican Council, see: https://www.lifesitenews.com/opinion/my-experience-with-modernism-in-a-catholic-seminary-in-the-late-1950s/ .
3 See Pascendi, footnote 1, supra, paragraph 39.
4 Igino Giordani, Pius X: A Country Priest, p. 153 (1954).
5 Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger with Vittorio Messori, The Ratzinger Report: An Exclusive Interview on the State of the Church, pp. 36-37 (1985).
6 1 Cor. 3:19.
7 Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Principles of Catholic Theology: Building Stones for a Fundamental Theology (San Francisco: Ignatius Press 1987). Originally published in German in 1982. Hereinafter cited as “Ratzinger.”
8 Ratzinger, p. 378.
9 Ratzinger, p. 381.
10 Id.
11 Id.
12 Id., p. 382 (emphasis added).
13 Id., p. 381.
15 https://www.fisheaters.com/sacrorum.html.
16 See The Code of Canon Law: A Text and Commentary (eds. James A. Coriden, Thomas J. Green & Donald E. Heintschel, Paulist Press, 1985), p. 585.
17 See “Oath against Modernism” in The Harper Collins Encyclopedia of Catholicism, ed. Richard P. McBrien (1995), p. 926.
18 “Abp. Viganò on St. Pius X’s ‘Oath Against Modernism’, Its Abolition by Paul VI,” Catholic Family News, Jan. 11, 2021.
19 St. Pius X, Sacrorum Antistitum (The Oath Against Modernism).
20 Id.
21 Abp. Viganò, “St. Pius X’s ‘Oath Against Modernism’, Its Abolition by Paul VI,” Catholic Family News, Jan. 11, 2021.
22 According to an article published on the Internet by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. See https://www.usccb.org/news/2026/pope-leo- xiv-calls-catholics-rediscover-vatican-ii-teachings .
24 1 Cor. 319. Mentioned in the text accompanying footnote 6, supra