"Far, far from the clergy be the love of novelty!" Exactly 99 years ago today, Pope Saint Pius X, after years of mild admonishments and loving rebukes, acting with the firmness of the charitable Father that he was, issued the strongest encyclical in modern history, Pascendi Dominici Gregis, a brief treaty on the newest heresy, the sum of all heresies: Modernism.
The stern measures enacted as a result of Pascendi certainly delayed for more than half a century the disgraceful trends, already quite active in the underworld of clerical disobedience, which would lead to the apparent disintegration of the Church after the Second Vatican Council. Yes, thankfully, even in such a critical age for the Holy Roman Church as the present one, the faithful may be comforted in hearing the words of the living Successor of Peter:
In the century of the Reformation, the Catholic Church seemed truly to be almost finished. It seemed that triumph belonged to this new movement, which asserted: now the Church of Rome is finished! And we see how with the great saints like Ignatius of Loyola, Teresa of Avila, Charles Borromeo, and others, the Church rose again. She finds in the Council of Trent a new restoration and revitalization of its doctrine. ...
The Church is alive! ... We see the time of the Enlightenment, during which Voltaire said: finally this ancient Church is finished, and humanity lives! But what happened instead? The Church renewed itself. The 19th century became the century of the great saints, of a new vitality for many religious congregations. The faith is stronger than all the movements that come and go.
Just so: the Church lives today, despite the violent warfare waged by the Modernists, insidiously and openly, for more than 100 consecutive years. During the next twelve months, we will try, within our very limited intellectual means, to celebrate the memory of this giant of the faith, Saint Pius X, and his struggle, which was not in vain, against Modernism, the "Enlightenment of the Faith". We invite all our friends in other weblogs and forums to do the same. Let us all celebrate, in 2007, 100 years of this great document.
Sancte Pie, ora pro nobis!
