A summary of the last few centuries reveals a progressive and pernicious infiltration of a fatal error into the heart of the Church: naturalism. Understood as the tendency to explain faith, morals, and the very life of the Church based on merely human principles, stripping them of their supernatural origin and end, this error is not an isolated novelty, but the root of a much deeper evil. Having germinated in the rationalism and moralism of past centuries, it found its most complete and dangerous expression in a system that corrodes the faith from within, known as modernism, which is nothing more than naturalism applied coherently to all aspects of Catholic doctrine.
🌱 The False Root: Sentiment and a Humiliated Reason
The foundation of this entire naturalistic deviation rests on a corrupt philosophy, which operates through two destructive principles. The first is agnosticism, which imprisons human reason within the world of phenomena, declaring it incapable of rising to God and knowing His existence with certainty through created things. Thus, natural theology, miracles, and all external revelation are rejected as improper subjects for science and history, being relegated to a purely subjective domain (Pius X, 1907).
Once the door of reason is closed, another, deceptive one is opened: that of vital immanence. If religion cannot come from without, it must necessarily spring from within man. Its origin is attributed to a need for the divine, a blind movement of the heart that emerges from the subconscious and manifests as a religious sentiment. This interior and purely natural experience is, for this doctrine, the sole source and the very essence of faith and revelation (Pius X, 1907). Thus, the supernatural order is denied at its origin, being reduced to a spontaneous product of human nature.
💥 The Destruction of the Supernatural Order
Once this naturalistic foundation is established, the consequences for the Catholic faith are devastating and inevitable, unfolding with implacable logic. If faith is a sentiment, then:
Dogma is no longer an immutable truth revealed by God, but a mere symbol, a human formula created to express that sentiment in a given era. As sentiment evolves, dogma must also evolve and adapt, losing all its character of absolute truth (Pius X, 1907).
The Sacred Scriptures cease to be the inspired Word of God and become a collection of extraordinary religious experiences, whose value is purely human and symbolic.
Our Lord Jesus Christ is stripped of His divinity. By the principle of agnosticism, history can only see Him as a man. Faith, in turn, "transfigures" Him, but this divinity is a product of the sentiment of the first believers, not an objective reality. He is reduced to the level of a pure and simple man, albeit of an exceptional nature (Pius X, 1907).
The Church and the Sacraments are no longer divine institutions, but creations of the "collective conscience" of the faithful to organize and propagate religious sentiment. Authority, therefore, does not emanate from Christ, but from the community, and must submit to democratic forms.
Indeed, this is not one error among others, but the "synthesis of all heresies," for by naturalizing the faith, it destroys not only Catholicism but the very notion of any revealed religion, paving the way for pantheism or complete atheism (Pius X, 1907).
🧠 The Moral and Intellectual Causes of Apostasy
This system does not thrive in a vacuum but is nourished by profound moral and intellectual disorders. The primary cause is pride, which leads man to trust presumptuously in himself, to the point of setting himself up as the measure and rule of all things, despising all authority and tradition. It is pride that leads him to believe he possesses a superior knowledge, rejecting the wisdom of the ages and embracing all sorts of novelties, no matter how absurd (Pius X, 1907).
To this pride is allied a fatal ignorance, especially of Scholastic philosophy. By despising this sound method of reasoning, the promoters of error lack the necessary instruments to discern the confusion of ideas and refute the sophisms of modern philosophy, being deluded by it. From the alliance between this false philosophy and a faith already weakened, this system of errors that threatens the Church is born (Pius X, 1907).
🔬 The Definitive Diagnosis: Modernism as Theological Naturalism
The historical analysis that traces the advance of naturalism—from the political to the theological field—is correct in its final diagnosis. The modernist system is, in fact, the most complete and coherent manifestation of naturalism in the realm of faith. It does not consist of vague and disconnected doctrines, but of "a single, compact body of doctrines, in which, if one is admitted, all the others must also be" (Pius X, 1907).
Its perversity lies in the fact that its promoters are not declared enemies, but hide "in the very bosom of the Church," feigning love for her while working to "undermine the foundations, if they could, of the very kingdom of Jesus Christ" (Pius X, 1907). The fight against this plague, therefore, requires not only the condemnation of the error but the application of energetic remedies: the restoration of sound philosophy, vigilance over teaching, and the firmness of authority to uproot this evil that threatens the deposit of faith.
📚 References
Pius X, Pope. Encyclical Letter Pascendi Dominici Gregis on the doctrines of the modernists. Vatican, 1907.