The age of gentle private rebukes had come to an end. The errors of the satanic enemies working inside the ecclesiastical structures were doing simply too much harm for the entire edifice of Holy Mother Church and it was time for decisive action against the "reformers".
In a warm July day in 1907, exactly 100 years ago, the Holy Roman and Universal Inquisition (which would be renamed simply as Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office in 1908) made public a list, a new Syllabus of errors against sane Catholic doctrine, by way of the Decree Lamentabili sane exitu, approved by Pope Saint Pius X. The heresy of Modernism was going to be successfully stopped and kept under control for several decades, and the glorious history of the Catholic Church during the first half of the 20th century would be built on the foundations of those papal measures of 1907: Lamentabili, the encyclical Pascendi Dominici Gregis (which would be published in September of that same year), and the motu proprio Præstantia Scripturæ Sacræ (November 18, 1907).
One of the most well-known commentators of the Syllabus of Lamentabili, Monsignor Franz Heiner, an Auditor of the Roman Rota at the time, classified the 65 condemned propositions in the following 7 categories, to which we add some relevant examples of each category:
I. Errors 1 to 8: attacks to the Magisterium of the Church, to its authority, and to the obedience it is owed.
II. Errors 9 to 19: false exegetic propositions, opposed to the divine origin of Sacred Scripture.
In a warm July day in 1907, exactly 100 years ago, the Holy Roman and Universal Inquisition (which would be renamed simply as Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office in 1908) made public a list, a new Syllabus of errors against sane Catholic doctrine, by way of the Decree Lamentabili sane exitu, approved by Pope Saint Pius X. The heresy of Modernism was going to be successfully stopped and kept under control for several decades, and the glorious history of the Catholic Church during the first half of the 20th century would be built on the foundations of those papal measures of 1907: Lamentabili, the encyclical Pascendi Dominici Gregis (which would be published in September of that same year), and the motu proprio Præstantia Scripturæ Sacræ (November 18, 1907).
One of the most well-known commentators of the Syllabus of Lamentabili, Monsignor Franz Heiner, an Auditor of the Roman Rota at the time, classified the 65 condemned propositions in the following 7 categories, to which we add some relevant examples of each category:
I. Errors 1 to 8: attacks to the Magisterium of the Church, to its authority, and to the obedience it is owed.
4. Even by dogmatic definitions the Church's magisterium cannot determine the genuine sense of the Sacred Scriptures.
II. Errors 9 to 19: false exegetic propositions, opposed to the divine origin of Sacred Scripture.
9. They display excessive simplicity or ignorance who believe that God is really the author of the Sacred Scriptures.III. Errors 20 to 26: false exegetic propositions, which falsify the origin and the intrinsic value of Divine Revelation.
11. Divine inspiration does not extend to all of Sacred Scriptures so that it renders its parts, each and every one, free from every error.
12. If he wishes to apply himself usefully to Biblical studies, the exegete must first put aside all preconceived opinions about the supernatural origin of Sacred Scripture and interpret it the same as any other merely human document.
21. Revelation, constituting the object of the Catholic faith, was not completed with the Apostles.
22. The dogmas the Church holds out as revealed are not truths which have fallen from heaven. They are an interpretation of religious facts which the human mind has acquired by laborious effort.
IV. Errors 27 to 38: denials of the most important dogmas of Christianity, related to the Person of the Divine Redeemer, to his Divinity, to his supernatural knowledge, to the expiatory character of his sufferings, Passion, and Death, and to his bodily Resurrection.
27. The divinity of Jesus Christ is not proved from the Gospels. It is a dogma which the Christian conscience has derived from the notion of the Messias.V. Errors 39 to 51: denials of the institution of the means of salvation by Christ through his Church, particularly the Sacraments, and of their efficacy.
29. It is permissible to grant that the Christ of history is far inferior to the Christ Who is the object of faith.
30 In all the evangelical texts the name "Son of God'' is equivalent only to that of "Messias." It does not in the least way signify that Christ is the true and natural Son of God.
35. Christ did not always possess the consciousness of His Messianic dignity.
37. In the beginning, faith in the Resurrection of Christ was not so much in the fact itself of the Resurrection as in the immortal life of Christ with God.
41. The Sacraments are intended merely to recall to man's mind the ever-beneficent presence of the Creator.
45. Not everything which Paul narrates concerning the institution of the Eucharist (I Cor. 11:23-25) is to be taken historically.49. When the Christian supper gradually assumed the nature of a liturgical action those who customarily presided over the supper acquired the sacerdotal character.
50. The elders who fulfilled the office of watching over the gatherings of the faithful were instituted by the Apostles as priests or bishops to provide for the necessary ordering of the increasing communities and not properly for the perpetuation of the Apostolic mission and power.
VI. Errors 52 to 63: attacks on the divine foundation of the Church, of her essential constitution, and activities.
VII. Errors 64 and 65: calls for the "reform" of the Church:
53. The organic constitution of the Church is not immutable. Like human society, Christian society is subject to a perpetual evolution.54. Dogmas, Sacraments and hierarchy, both their notion and reality, are only interpretations and evolutions of the Christian intelligence which have increased and perfected by an external series of additions the little germ latent in the Gospel.
55. Simon Peter never even suspected that Christ entrusted the primacy in the Church to him.
59. Christ did not teach a determined body of doctrine applicable to all times and all men, but rather inaugurated a religious movement adapted or to be adapted to different times and places.
60. Christian Doctrine was originally Judaic. Through successive evolutions it became first Pauline, then Joannine, finally Hellenic and universal.
64. Scientific progress demands that the concepts of Christian doctrine concerning God, creation, revelation, the Person of the Incarnate Word, and Redemption be re-adjusted.
65. Modern Catholicism can be reconciled with true science only if it is transformed into a non-dogmatic Christianity; that is to say, into a broad and liberal Protestantism (id est in protestantismum latum et liberalem).
It is painful to notice that so many of these errors (condemned by Saint Pius X under pain of excommunication, as he would expressly establish in the aforementioned motu proprio*) persist to this day, and have become even dominant interpretations among ordinary Catholics, and especially among theologians, under the eyes of the successors of the Apostles: Kyrie eleison!
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* "...in order to check the daily increasing audacity of many modernists who are endeavoring by all kinds of sophistry and devices to detract from the force and efficacy not only of the decree "Lamentabili sane exitu" (the so-called Syllabus), issued by our order by the Holy Roman and Universal Inquisition on July 3 of the present year, but also of our encyclical letter "Pascendi dominici gregis" given on September 8 of this same year, we do by our apostolic authority repeat and confirm both that decree of the Supreme Sacred Congregation and that encyclical letter of ours, adding the penalty of excommunication against their contradictors, and this we declare and decree that should anybody, which may God forbid, be so rash as to defend any one of the propositions, opinions or teachings condemned in these documents he falls, ipso facto, under the censure ... which is the first among the excommunications latae sententiae, simply reserved to the Roman Pontiff. This excommunication is to be understood as salvis poenis, which may be incurred by those who have violated in any way the said documents, as propagators and defenders of heresies, when their propositions, opinions and teachings are heretical, as has happened more than once in the case of the adversaries of both these documents, especially when they advocate the errors of the modernists that is, the synthesis of all heresies" (Præstantia Scripturæ Sacræ ).
Father Alfred Loisy, pictured above, would be among the first to be punished.
Father Alfred Loisy, pictured above, would be among the first to be punished.
