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).
Peter Beaulieu’s citation from Oppenheimer is profoundly evocative: the scientist, gazing beyond the periodic table, recognizes that man’s life is caught between history and eternity, time and timelessness, and that both perspectives resist being reduced to the other. This insight, however, is already shaped by a modern consciousness that treats the eternal as one “view” among others, rather than as the light in which time itself is judged and redeemed.
Here the testimony of Giovanni Gentile on Giordano Bruno is illuminating. Gentile, himself the philosopher of actual idealism, regarded Bruno as the master and precursor of modern philosophy, precisely because he rejected the Augustinian and medieval axiom Credo ut intelligam in favour of a radical Non credo ut intelligam. For Bruno and those after him, reason must not receive its illumination from revelation, but rather emancipate itself from it. Faith, being “an act of another and not our own,” is cast aside in favour of man’s self-positing intelligence, which now claims to create its own truth.
In this light, Oppenheimer’s complementarity of history and eternity is not neutral. It reflects the modern philosophical turn inaugurated by Bruno and hailed by Gentile: a view in which the eternal is acknowledged, but only as a dimension that man himself apprehends or generates, not as the transcendent reality of God’s self-revelation in Christ. Here we glimpse the very trajectory that St. Pius X would later denounce as modernism — the “synthesis of all heresies” — for it subtly shifts the axis from truth received to truth created.
The paradox is that Oppenheimer, an agnostic physicist, senses something real: that man’s experience of the world touches eternity. But without revelation, that eternity becomes either pantheistic or subjective. Only in the Logos, the Word made flesh, do time and eternity converge without confusion, giving meaning to history without dissolving it into man’s self-projection.
Thus, Gentile’s testimony on Bruno is highly relevant. It helps us see that the “light of eternity” Oppenheimer perceives is not a complement to history but its source and fulfilment, and that the true conflict is not between science and faith, but between man creating his own truth and man receiving the Truth that is God.
Both posts above are eloquent, and Oppenheimer, a struggling agnostic, expressed an inner longing to apprehend God, a longing he found in contemplating the meaning of Physics. My mind, inferior to his, nonetheless began overcoming my nonbelief from my own work in physics. I am often stunned during encounters with strangers seeking to pick my mind – an obvious act of desperation that they would not seek someone more worthy – asking me to define truth. I always give the same nine word answer: The Mind of God; the eternal Mind of God.
I am humbled at witnessing the frequent silent reaction that reveals a recognition of the sensibility of my comment and wonder why they seldom heard it defined so simply, an echo of what they already know in their deepest levels of honesty.
Edward, thank you for this moving testimony. What you describe — that silent recognition when you name truth as “the Mind of God” — confirms that the human heart is made for Him, even when our intellects struggle. Oppenheimer’s longing, as you note, reflects this same thirst: he glimpsed eternity through physics, but without revelation, he could not identify the Eternal as the living God.
It seems to me that here lies the hinge between modern philosophy’s trajectory (from Bruno through Gentile, in my earlier comment) and the Christian vision. Modernity recognizes eternity as an intuition of reason, but Christianity proclaims eternity as Someone who speaks, who enters history, who is Truth.
Your words recall St. Augustine: “You have made us for Yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in You.”
I’m a very minor physicist, though I did get my Ph.D. and have some significant postdoc positions. I have never understood, though, why anyone would be convinced of a theological position one way or another based on physics or science in general.
(St. Augustine actually gives a good counterexample. He rejected Manichaeism in large part because certain astronomical propositions that were apparently central to their faith could be proven wrong by observation. See Book V of his Confessions, https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/110105.htm. This includes some very useful words for Christians who insist on asserting unnecessary scientific propositions as though they were part of the Faith: “For when I hear a Christian brother ignorant of these things, or in error concerning them, I can bear with patience to see that man hold to his opinions; nor can I apprehend that any want of knowledge as to the situation or nature of this material creation can be injurious to him, so long as he does not entertain belief in anything unworthy of You, O Lord, the Creator of all. But if he conceives it to pertain to the form of the doctrine of piety, and presumes to affirm with great obstinacy that whereof he is ignorant, therein lies the injury.”)
At any rate, science is quite good — by no means perfect, but generally better as time goes on — at answering exactly the questions posed to it. It is crap if you take the answer to a physics problem and try to make it into some Deep Insight, or if you otherwise misapply it to some other question.
As an example, several years ago I wrote a Python program to fill out brackets for the Men’s NCAA Basketball Tournament. Now I’m not a basketball fan, but when I was an undergrad I wanted to compete with the other guys all the same. My program would produce plausible-looking brackets around which it was easy to construct Just-So stories about teams that went on streaks or had been overestimated or underestimate — even though I knew that the program was just using their seeding and random chance. The results were typically about as good as those of actual basketball fans, and at any rate would not be embarrassingly stupid. This is what my undergrad self would have wanted.
A fellow faculty member then suggested I should use this for gambling. I was actually astonished that he did not realize that optimizing the score of my bracket was a different question than replicating the likely number of upsets. In my model, the single most likely bracket was the one with zero upsets, so if I were just trying to make the best score (without having a deep understanding of basketball, a comprehensive knowledge of the psychology and injury status of each team, etc.), I would go with no upsets. However, it is obvious that upsets will almost certainly occur, and anyone submitting a bracket without upsets would be mocked for being lazy and not understanding the game. I *was* that lazy and do not understand the game, but I do not want that to be obvious. (It was actually a lot of work to put this together, but to me it is still more fun than watching the games.)
So even in the basketball case, science is good at answering the question you actually ask, but not at answering a different question you might be more interested in. I know the questions that physics addresses, but I don’t see how anyone could think these questions are of significance to the existence of God.
Your caution is well taken: physics cannot by itself prove or disprove the existence of God. As you note with Augustine, theology errs when it ties itself to provisional cosmologies. Yet I would add that the very intelligibility of physics — the fact that the universe can be studied by rational laws — points beyond itself. This is where metaphysics comes in: the true bridge between empirical science and theology.
For the Scholastics, only mathematics and logic were incontestable sciences, while physics, however powerful, included contingencies (storms, meteorites). Metaphysics, by contrast, studies being as such and its first causes, offering the rational foundation both for science and for theology. The real problem is not physics but distorted conceptions of metaphysics. Some reject it outright (Hobbes, Hume, Marx, the positivists). Others subjectivise it (Bergson, Jaspers). Still others elevate it into a false “gnosis,” imagining a knowledge higher than revelation (Hegel, Heidegger, modernist theologies).
The Church, however, has consistently defended true metaphysics, especially in the Thomistic line: a discipline that prepares the mind for faith, justifies it rationally, and shows that revelation does not abolish reason but elevates it. This is why Aquinas, Bonaventure, and Scotus are not only great philosophers but Doctors of the Church.
So while physics answers the questions it poses, it cannot close the larger question of why the world is intelligible at all. That is the domain of metaphysics — and from there theology can affirm, with Augustine, that our restless minds find their rest only in God.
As Peter Beaulieu implies by noting Oppenheimer’s struggle, and we both know, questions in physics might identify particular phenomena, but it is near impossible to not take time to contemplate the meaning of it all.
God is deeply involved in the life of everyone, no less with nonbelievers. So many Christians get this wrong, contending that God doesn’t care about those without religion. Everyone, whatever their discipline in life, contemplates meaning from time to time. A truck driver admiring a sunset, while traveling one of the vast highways of the American west, through a sparsely populated region, can experience a glimpse of God in that sunset in his seemingly mundane journey. JPII said a great deal about the spirituality of work, whatever our tasks. Only God gets to decide what means He uses to inspire a mind to find glimpses of Him.
The reason there is such hostility towards those very good scientists who discuss intelligent design is because their hatred cannot accept that someone can find actual objective evidence of God in scientific observation, something that affirms the lives of the religious. Religion hatred is rooted in denial, the common denial of human conceit that says that washerwoman mopping the hallway outside my lecture hall can’t possibly have a more worthy mind than mine and can’t possibly know what is more important in this world than me.
Incidentally, I pick the example of driving into the sunset, because it parallels one of my experiences while turning my life around from disbelief. Exactly fifty years ago this month, I took a solo cross country motorcycle trip. Even the breakdowns I had along the way, I came to appreciate later as necessary struggles, a part of every meaningful journey.
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.
I was 26 and had just given birth to twins when Humanae Vitae came out in 1968. A well intentioned but poorly catechized priest gave my husband and me a convoluted rationale to practice artificial birth control as long as we periodically reevaluated it—as if that would somehow make ok what I now know is an intrinsically evil practice that can never be justified under any circumstance.
Today, over a half century later, my husband and I have only 3 grown children, and now that it’s too late, I regret terribly that we did not have more. But with my “itching ears” at the time, I was all too happy to accept this false teaching.
“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.
Outis, contra Giosuè, I prefer the view, expressed also by Mariano Artingas, that the particular sciences (experimental as in like physics and human as in like sociology) are proper subjects of philosophy and are to be properly founded on their own respective metaphysical bases under scrutiny of philosophy. Philosophy disciplines their activity, scope and insight and metaphysics discovers their relational bearing or part in unity.
I do not accept that “metaphysics shows that Revelation does not abolish reason” nor that “metaphysics shows that Revelation elevates reason”.
Edit: Artigas not “Artingas”
Thank you, Edward, for such a moving testimony. Your description of those moments of wonder—whether in a sunset on the open road, in the quiet dignity of work, or even in the hardships of a motorcycle journey—strikes me as a beautiful witness to how God meets each person in the concreteness of life.
What you describe corresponds, in the language of the tradition, to what the Thomistic school calls the mystical life. It is not something extraordinary or reserved for a few, but rather the ordinary flowering of grace: an intuition of divine truth, proceeding from faith vivified by charity and illuminated by the gifts of wisdom and understanding. It presupposes faith, yet adds to it a certain experiential depth—an anticipation of that vision of God which faith promises, but which in this life we do not yet see.
In this sense, your journey reflects how faith matures into a more immediate awareness of God’s presence—a sign that the Spirit is already at work, leading us towards the fullness of vision.