Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Aug 23, 2025 / 08:00 am (CNA).
The Catholic Church celebrated the feast of St. Pius X on Aug. 21 — an influential pope at the turn of the 20th century whose warnings about the heresy of “modernism” help shine light on the deterioration of faith in the West today and the disregard of Church teaching, according to one Catholic scholar.
Pius, who reigned as pope from 1903 to 1914 after the death of Pope Leo XIII, took charge of the Church in the aftermath of the Enlightenment era, which had spurred rationalist and liberal movements throughout Europe and the Americas.
Several of Pius’ predecessors combatted certain Enlightenment-era philosophies, which appeared to be a predominantly outside threat to the Church. This included Pope Gregory XVI’s rebuke of liberalism in the 1830s — which he saw as promoting religious indifferentism and secularism — and Blessed Pius IX, who condemned trends toward naturalism and absolute rationalism, which sought answers to philosophical questions absent divine revelation.
Pius X followed in their footsteps, combatting the heresy of “modernism” in his 1907 encyclical Pascendi Dominici Gregis. This heresy, he taught, was the pervasion of “false philosophy” within the Catholic laity and clergy, even within the Catholic university system and the seminaries that threatens the foundations of the faith itself.
“The danger is present almost in the very veins and heart of the Church, whose injury is the more certain, the more intimate is their knowledge of her,” Pius wrote. “Moreover they lay the axe not to the branches and shoots but to the very root; that is, to the faith and its deepest fires.”
Modernism, Pius explained, is essentially a form of agnosticism within the Church, which views human reasoning as confined to “things that are perceptible to the senses.” With agnosticism as their foundation, modernists see human reason as “incapable of lifting itself up to God, and of recognizing his existence, even by means of visible things.”
“It is inferred that God can never be the direct object of science and that, as regards history, he must not be considered as an historical subject,” the Holy Father wrote.
Because modernists hold that God cannot be understood through reason, Pius explained, the heresy reduces one’s relationship with God to an “experience of the individual.” A belief in God, the modernists believe, is rooted in “a kind of intuition of the heart, which puts man in immediate contact with the very reality of God.”
Pius continued to say this position can be used to justify any religion. He wrote: “Modernists do not deny but actually admit, some confusedly, others in the most open manner, that all religions are true.”
Pius called modernism “the synthesis of all heresies” because when one applies this foundation to all facets of the faith — such as the divinity of Christ, miracles, tradition, and Scripture itself — the modernists promote an ever-evolving understanding of dogma “that ruins and destroys all religion.”
“[Modernists believe] dogma is not only able, but ought to evolve and to be changed,” the Holy Father explained. “This is strongly affirmed by the Modernists, and as clearly flows from their principles.”
Ron Bolster, the dean of philosophy and theology at Franciscan University, told CNA that the concern about modernism is primarily rooted in its belief that “you cannot know the things of God” and that “all we can do is look toward our internal religious experience.”
“If you have a religious person convinced by a modernist that you can’t really know these things, it leads to a kind of despair,” he said.
“When people are convinced by that or too lazy to sort it out, they abandon the practice of the faith and they no longer have access to the means of salvation that God made available to them,” Bolster warned.
Modernism’s impact on modern society
Bolster said he believes there is “a very clear connection” between Pius X’s warnings against modernism in the Church and the subsequent decline in religiosity in the Western world, along with the large number of Catholics openly dissenting from Church teaching.
A Pew Research Center survey in January 2024 found that the largest religious category in the United States is the “nones,” which is no religion in particular. These individuals make up about 28% of the American population, but only 17% of people in that category identify as atheist. The majority of the category, 63%, identify as “nothing in particular” and the other 20% are agnostic.
The modernist impact on Catholicism itself is also clear. A 2025 Pew survey found that only about two-thirds of Catholics are certain that God exists. About 86% believe heaven exists, but just 69% believe in hell. A majority of Catholics support legal abortion and homosexual civil marriages.
A 2024 EWTN/RealClear poll found that about 52% of Catholics believe in the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, while 32% do not and 16% are unsure. Among Catholics, the strongest dissent from teaching appears to consistently be the issue of contraception, with a 2024 survey showing that 90% have used condoms and 60% have used hormonal birth control.
Bolster said the Catholic dissent on contraception, which occurred about 60 years after Pius X published the encyclical, “was the first time that there was kind of a precedent-setting public dissent against Church teaching.”
“That was really your turning point where you see for the first time [a large number of Catholics] publicly dissenting from … Church teaching,” he said.
Bolster noted that “calling into question the teaching of the Church because [of the belief that] we cannot know [the truth]” is a major symptom of modernist trends.
When speaking about Pius X’s warnings about modernism, Bolster said “the language of that document is astoundingly strong” and the pope is “not pulling any punches and the threat is real and the solutions are heavy-handed.”
At the time of the encyclical, Pius X called for ousting clergymen who promote modernism and censoring the promotion of those beliefs, along with establishing diocesan watch committees to find promoters of the heresy.
Pius X also called for a resurgence of the teaching of Scholastic philosophy, for which he said modernists only have “ridicule and contempt.” Many scholastics, such as St. Thomas Aquinas, taught that people can learn about and understand God through the use of reason.
The encyclical also notes that the First Vatican Council anathematizes any person who states that God “cannot be known with certainty by the natural light of human reason by means of the things that are made.”
Bolster noted that Aquinas and other Scholastics point out that Greek pagans like Aristotle and Plato “reasoned to the existence of God” and understood certain limited truths about God that they could gather without specific revelation.
“We can know by natural reason that God exists, that he contains all perfections, that he’s all powerful, and that he’s limitless,” Bolster said.
In spite of the impact that modernism has had on society, Bolster said Catholics should “remain positive.” He said the easy availability of the Catechism of the Catholic Church and “materials that are available for teaching the faith today … [are] reason to hope and reason to give credit to the bishops.”
“We have to get back — double down on the teachings of the Church,” he said.
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Bolster underlines an important truth, that we may arrive by reason at belief in God, and knowledge of his attributes. He cites Plato, Aristotle, although they’re others preeminently Cicero.
Whereas acknowledgment of Christ as the Son of God is an act of faith, a gift of the Holy Spirit. Faith in Christ infers reasoned knowledge such as God from God, Light from Light, True God from True God. That only in God is essence identical with existence. That God is Love.
Pius X exposed the modernist heresy of reducing our reasoned knowledge of God, and the Son of God as fictitious musing. Modernism today has taken a different turn. It’s seen in the reformation of our knowledge of God from divine revelation, to God made manifest in the human condition. That is to say God as revealed by Man nevertheless similar to Pius X’s critique of interior revelation. We find this in the Synodal theme of new revelation from the Holy Spirit given in prayerful petition.
About Modernism versus Eternity…
Looking up from the Periodic Table, J.R. Oppenheimer makes a primal observation:
“Our civilizations perish; the carved stone, the written word, the heroic act fade into a memory and in the end are gone [….] Yet no man, be he agnostic or Buddhist or Christian, thinks wholly in these terms. His acts, his thoughts, what he sees of the world around him—the falling of a leaf or a child’s joke or the rise of the moon—are part of history; but they are not only part of history; they are part of becoming and of process but not only that: they partake also of the world outside of time; they partake of the light of eternity.
“These two ways of thinking, the way of time and history and the way of eternity and of timelessness, are both part of man’s effort to comprehend the world in which he lives. Neither is comprehended in the other nor reducible to it [!]. They are, as we have learned to say in physics, complementary views, each supplementing the other, neither telling the whole story” (J. Robert Oppenheimer, “Science and the Common Understanding,” Simon and Schuster, 1953, p. 69).
Regarding the “first-time ever” dissent from Catholic teaching, Paul VI’s promulgation of “Humanae Vitae,” I recall the summer of ‘68 clearly. It was the summer I turned 15, and though naïve about a “grownup” matter like artificial contraception, I recall hearing adults talking about it. The general attitude was that the pope must have been out of his mind and who was he to tell married couples how to manage so intimate a part of their lives? Was he going to take care of all the children who would be born?
As I came of age in my agnostic-to-atheist early adulthood, I shared the attitude of society at large regarding artificial birth control; however, my attitude began shifting after reading an essay by the late James Hitchcock, in which he stated that as a young adult, he had felt disappointed by “HV”; he’d hoped that some sort of compromise position could have been reached. As he looked around, however, and saw what was becoming of the contraceptive culture that had developed, he became convinced that Paul VI was correct and that “HV” was one of the most prophetic documents of the 20th century.
While on my road back to Catholicism in the mid-90s, I did what few people I knew who dissented from “HV” had done — I actually read the encyclical. Far from being the hammer-fisted blow that I expected, it was one of the gentlest, tenderest documents I’d ever read.
I understand that American Catholics contracept as much as the non-Catholic population, as they also support a host of other issues at variance with Church teaching. The loss, I believe, is theirs. My wife, a nurse practitioner and marriage and family counselor, teaches NFP. Not a single client has ever expressed dissatisfaction with it.
“Bolster said he believes there is “a very clear connection” between Pius X’s warnings against modernism in the Church and the subsequent decline in religiosity in the Western world, along with the large number of Catholics openly dissenting from Church teaching.”
The erroneous notion that “modernism” in Christ’s One, Holy, Catholic, And Apostolic Church, can actually exist, is a denial of The Unity Of The Holy Ghost , The Spirit Of Perfect Divine Eternal Love Between The Father And His Only Begotten Son, Jesus The Christ, Who Proceeds From Both The Father And His Only Begotten Son, Jesus The Christ, and the fact that we, who are Baptized into Christ’s One, Holy, Catholic, And Apostolic Church, in answering God’s Call To Holiness, must fulfill our Baptismal Promises , least we defect and separate ourselves from The One Body Of Christ, which exists, for The Salvation Of Souls.
The fact that a multitude of Baptized Catholics who deny The Sanctity of the marital act within The Sacrament of Holy Matrimony and thus deny God’s Intention that we respect The Sanctity and Dignity of human life from the moment of conception until death, have been permitted to subsist within The One Body Of Christ, while denying The Lord And Giver Of Life, is evidence enough that by doing away with The Charitable Anathema, Revealed By Christ Himself, when He Stated, “ You cannot be My Disciples, if you do not Abide In My Word”, Vatican II changed The Deposit Of Faith, and this fissure, which permitted a false ecumenism to subsist within The One Body Of Christ, which denied The Unity Of The Holy Ghost, is directly responsible for not just the conflicts and divisions between various denominations, but these conflicts and divisions have, for sometime now, been permitted to subsist within Christ’s Church, without being Charitably Anathema, making it appear as if Christ’s One, Holy, Catholic, And Apostolic Church, is no longer One, Holy, Catholic, And Apostolic, which is , in essence due to an acceptance of modernism, the synthesis of all heresies, because, in denying The Unity Of The Holy Ghost, it denies The Spirit Of Perfect Divine Eternal Love Between The Father And His Only Begotten Son, Jesus The Christ, and in denying The Divinity Of The Most Holy Blessed Trinity, Father, Son, And Holy Ghost, is, in essence, apostasy.
Dear Blessed Mother Mary, Mirror Of Justice And Destroyer Of All Heresy, Who Through Your Fiat, Affirmed The Filioque, and thus the fact that There Is Only One Son Of God, One Word Of God Made Flesh, One Lamb Of God Who Can Taketh Away The Sins Of The World, Our Only Savior, Jesus The Christ, thus there can only be, One Spirit Of Perfect Divine Eternal Love Between The Father And His Only Begotten Son, Jesus The Christ, Who Must Proceed From Both The Father And His Only Begotten Son, Jesus The Christ, In The Ordered Communion Of Perfect Divine Eternal Complementary Love, The Most Holy And Undivided Blessed Trinity (Filioque), hear our Prayer..🙏✝️💕🌹
Is not Rupnik’s art and his ideological face of Christ the true representation of modernism?
Has not his appetite for novelty, shared and sponsored by his patrons, reduced the mystery of Christ to an immanence that it becomes in a certain sense a precondition for ‘the death of God’.
Instead we are comforted by the ancient icon of Christ the Pantocrator who is eternal, loves us and will judge us.