The heresy of Modernism continues to grow. None of our Church leaders seem to care

(LifeSiteNews) — First of all, what is the heresy of Modernism? It’s important to understand that this essay refers to the formally declared heresy of Modernism—not “modernism” in the artistic, cultural, political, or purely philosophical usages of the word. Modernism in Catholic theological doctrine, however, 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 condemned it as a heresy in 1907. 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 Church’s teachings in the Second Vatican Council (1962-65).

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 condemned it as a heresy in 1907, he was condemning it in all of its manifestations, pre-1907 and on into the indefinite future. Igino Giordani, the biographer of Saint Pius X, 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. [Emphasis added.]

Because Modernism seeks to make “the thinking of the day” an influential criterion for discerning Catholic truths, the content of Modernist thought about Catholic truths will vary with “the thinking of the day.” Think about it: accessing the thinking of the day in order to reconcile our Church with the modern world means there can be no fixed eternal Catholic Truth at all in Modernist thought. 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” which (the Bible tells us) God regards as “foolishness.” Thus, the very essence of the heresy of Modernism.

Pope Pius X: “Modernism is the synthesis of all heresies.” pic.twitter.com/o8HOxKYEyV

— Sign of the Cross (@CatholicSOTC) January 3, 2026

Saint Pius X defined Modernism as ‘the synthesis of all heresies’

Saint Pius X, in paragraph 39 of his encyclical Pascendi Dominic Gregis, seemed to touch upon and even invoke the very theme of Modernism as the unrestrained and unfiltered openness to the wisdom of the world, and thus making Catholicism acceptable to the world’s ever-changing “wisdom”:

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.” [Emphasis added.]

What, then, is the “sap and substance” that the heresy of Modernism shares with all other heresies? The determination to make “the thinking of the day” a decisive criterion for discerning religious truth seems to fit the bill. As does an unrestrained and unfiltered openness to “the wisdom of the world.”

The sly and tacit ‘demise’ 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 Saint Pius X should never have defined Modernism as a heresy in the first place.

It seems as if the current hierarchy of our Catholic Church has 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 1907 dogma condemning Modernism as a heresy.

Cardinal Ratzinger on the intent motivating the Vatican II documents

Back 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.

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.”

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” (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.

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’.” Saint Pius X’s dogmatic condemnation of Modernism as a heresy and 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.

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 been well accepted 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 attack on the Catholic Church itself! 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.

The conventional and almost uniform understanding throughout our Catholic Church of the meaning of Pope Benedict’s hermeneutic of continuity seems to have been that whenever a controversial teaching of Vatican II seems to conflict with the truths 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.

Problems with Pope Benedict’s hermeneutic of continuity

The main 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.

In an article in the January 23, 2023, issue of The Remnant, Catholic columnist Robert Morrison has urged a “hermeneutic of correction and rejection” for reconciling the problematic texts in the Vatican II documents with the timeless truths of the Catholic Faith. Morrison’s words:

This differs from the ‘hermeneutic of continuity’ approach advanced by Benedict XVI because the progressive, anti-Catholic interpretations must be rejected entirely rather than accommodated. There is complete discontinuity between Catholicism and what the progressives have accomplished through their interpretation of Vatican II. Unless and until a holy pope formally resolves the Vatican II crisis, the discontinuity must be rectified by rejecting the non-Catholic interpretations and insisting on the Traditional Catholic interpretations. The goal of this approach is not to preserve, defend, or promote the Council; rather the goal is to neuter the progressivist weaponization of the Council until such time as a holy pope can adequately resolve the questions about Vatican II. [Emphasis added.]

A few years earlier, the late John Vennari (then-editor of Catholic Family News) had also explained and critiqued Pope Benedict’s hermeneutic of continuity:

Pope Benedict says, many Catholics have approached the Council with an interpretation of rupture with the past.

The proper way to approach the Council, he insists, is through a “hermeneutic of continuity.” His basic claim — and this has always been his claim as Cardinal Ratzinger — is that Vatican II did not constitute a rupture with Tradition, but a legitimate development of it. We can find this legitimate development if we approach the Council through a hermeneutic — an interpretation — of continuity.

This gives the impression to many that Pope Benedict XVI plans a restoration of Tradition in the Church.

But this is not the case. … [T]he hermeneutic of continuity does not signal a return to Tradition. Rather, it is another attempt, first and foremost, I believe, to save Vatican II.

Vatican II is still his [i.e., Benedict XVI’s] pivotal principle. The so-called “hermeneutic of continuity” approach will give us nothing more than a new synthesis between Tradition and Vatican II — a synthesis between Tradition and Modernism — which is not a legitimate synthesis.

Vennari’s point seems to fit nicely into the definition of Modernism that was encountered at the beginning of this essay: “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.” Modernism, by definition, changes Tradition to make it acceptable to Modernism’s “thinking of the day” and thus, as Vennari asserted, “a synthesis between Tradition and Modernism … is not a legitimate synthesis.” It’s a contradiction in logic.

This “a contradiction in logic” in connection with Modernism brings to mind another, perhaps even more fundamental, “contradiction in logic” in connection with the Second Vatican Council’s dalliance with the heresy of Modernism. First, a bit of history…

Members of Vatican II violated their Oath Against Modernism

On September 1, 1910, Pope Saint Pius X issued a motu proprio entitled Sacrorum Antistitum in which he mandated that an Oath Against Modernism be taken by all Catholic seminarians before being ordained to the sub-diaconate order 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. The Holy See did declare otherwise, but not until July 17, 1967 (more than a year after the closing of the Second Vatican Council).

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 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 (1962-1965).

Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, who served as Apostolic Nuncio to the United States from 2011 to 2016, has confirmed the 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.

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 …” 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”?

How can one who is oath-bound to support the papal condemnations of Modernism “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.

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.

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.

Pope Leo XIV urges ‘complete commitment’ to the teachings of 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, he invited all the cardinals to commit themselves completely to 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. [Emphasis added.]

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

We find ourselves in the midst of the current covert demise of the heresy of Modernism, a demise apparently deliberately 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.

Our two most recent Holy Fathers, however, have been paving the rough-hewn path chosen for us to follow with the very essence of that erstwhile heresy of Modernism. We are to follow the wake of the Second Vatican Council by engaging in a “trusting” dialogue with the contemporary world. And we are to follow that re-paved path undistracted by the heresy of Modernism itself, because the heresy of Modernism itself is now a forgotten nonentity.

Hence one’s lack of confidence in the wisdom of the modern contemporary world and the wisdom of the modern current Vatican bureaucracy joined together in a mutually “trusting” dialogue relationship in their quest for a brave new modern Vatican II future.

One’s confidence is better placed in the timeless truths of our Catholic Faith, given to us in the Wisdom of the Holy Spirit through God’s revelation—not in evolving (in which direction?) human dialogue. God’s only Son, Jesus Christ, is the only Way, the only Truth, and the only Life for the Catholic Christian.

Raymond B. Marcin is Professor of Law Emeritus at The Catholic University of America.