Posted on 08/29/2003 9:41:23 PM PDT by Land of the Irish
If ever there was a man who made no effort to curry favor with the powers that be, it was Pope St. Pius X. And when he died, even those who had not been especially fond of him admitted his greatness. Woodrow Wilson, for example, described the Pope as a lover of humanity, and said that the world was poorer for his passing.
But it was his own who loved him the most, of course, and in the tributes that Catholic periodicals in this country paid to him we see a realization among American Catholics that they had been blessed with a truly extraordinary Supreme Pastor for the previous eleven years. We also catch a glimpse of another world, a world in which everyone and every publication spoke the way traditional Catholics do today. In the early 20th Century you would have had to find something else with which to line your bird cage or wrap your fish, since even America magazine was an extremely good read.
A constant note throughout the tributes to the great Pope is a genuine appreciation of his campaign against Modernism, a heresy described elsewhere in this issue. Praising the Pope's forceful disciplinary measures, the Catholic World wrote: "We cannot say that [the eradication of Modernism] was gained without opposition, and even the loss of some who had figured prominently as writers and teachers, but the faith, the future training of priests and people were in jeopardy, and the Pope knew that half- measures would not answer the requirements of such a crisis."[1] The Catholic World, by the way, was the journal of the Paulist Fathers. Imagine a world in which even the Paulists were fans of St. Pius X and supporters of vigorous action against Modernism and you have the Catholic Church of one human lifetime ago.
The author of this beautiful tribute concluded that his article would have served its purpose "if it but serve to renew sweet and abiding memories of one who was simple and strong and holy -- a Great Shepherd true to his office, a Pontiff full worthy of his lineage, a Pope, unflecked and radiant in the intense light which beats on the Fisherman's throne."[2]
A year later, Catholic World returned to the subject of the life of Pope St. Pius X with yet another commemoration. "His spirituality," it concluded, "in- flamed the piety of all his children; his zeal and independence prompted him to prune away abuses unsparingly, to promote learning and initiative, to direct Catholic activities into new avenues of endeavor."[3]
In America magazine we see the same kind of acknowledgment of the importance of the measures that St. Pius X took to safeguard the Faith against Modernism, that scourge he described as "the synthesis of all heresies". Consider how the famous Jesuit periodical remembered Father George Tyrrell, the notorious Modernist who died in 1909. After giving a brief summary of his life, the editors praised the swift action of Pope St. Pius X against Modernism in general and Father Tyrrell in particular (who was excommunicated in 1907). Father Tyrrell's death, they went on, "happens at a moment which emphasizes the fidelity of the Church in safeguarding the Faith of those who seek its light from her. When other Christian bodies are licensing as preachers young men who have abandoned the foundations of Christian belief, the Church would rather face the threatened defection of thousands of minds reputed brilliant or learned, than sacrifice one iota of the Truth confided to her by her Founder."[4]
It hardly requires much imagination to figure out what the magazine's editors would have thought of today's neo-Catholic excuse factory and its convoluted argument that the complete lack of discipline in the Church today actually amounts to a brilliant and cagey plan. (What the editors of 1909 would have thought of the current editors of America is perhaps too sad to contemplate.)
The lengthy tribute from the American Catholic Quarterly Review was the most thorough of all in its assessments of this great pontificate.[5] Although the Review's tribute discussed a great many of the Pope's major achievements, it devoted no fewer than twenty pages to a discussion of the campaign against Modernism and its significance.
The campaign against Modernism was important not only for the Church, the Review explained, but also for philosophy throughout the English-[6] At the risk of oversimplification, Pragmatism was a philosophical school that held that it was impossible to find objective answers to major philosophical questions. To a Pragmatist, a metaphysical question has meaning only if adopting one position rather than another has identifiable consequences in the real world. There is no absolute truth. Truth is not an antecedently existing reality -- something out there, as it were, to be discovered by rational creatures -- but something made through experience.
The Pragmatist, explains the 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia, "objects to the view that concepts, judgments, and reasoning processes are representative of reality and the processes of reality. It considers them to be merely symbols, hypotheses and schemata devised by man to facilitate or render possible the use, or experience, of reality. This use, or experience, is the true test of real existence. In its positive phase, therefore, Pragmatism sets up as the standard of truth some non-rational test, such as action, satisfaction of needs, realization in conduct, the possibility of being lived, and judges reality by this norm to the exclusion of all others."[7]
Truth, in a sense, is merely provisional, for I may have to set aside a truth I believe today when an experience comes along tomorrow that cannot be assimilated into the body of provisional truths in my possession. As the Catholic Encyclopedia explains it, "no truth is made and set aside, or outside experience, for future reference of new truth to it; experience is a stream out of which we can never step; no item of experience can ever be verified definitely and irrevocably; it is verified provisionally now, but must be verified again tomorrow, when I acquire a new experience."[8]
It is a short step from this outlook to that of the Modernist, who describes religion as rooted not in philosophical demonstration but in individual experience alone, and as something constantly evolving along with the experiences of human beings. Just as the pragmatist views concepts and judgments as merely symbols devised by man in order to come to grips with his experiences, the Modernist claims that religious dogma is merely a fumbling, man-made mechanism by which man's religious experiences are given awkward expression. In both cases, subjective experience is primary.
Along with John Dewey, it was William James, the Harvard professor famous for his contributions to philosophy and psychology, who exemplified Pragmatism. The apparent affinity between Pragmatism and Modernism became all too evident when James turned his attention to religion. Since James insisted throughout his philosophical writings on the priority of experience in establishing a truth, it is not surprising that in his religious work he was unsympathetic to dog- ma. Dogmas, he explained, were simply "the buildings- out performed by the intellect into which feeling originally supplied the limit.[9]
The origin of belief lay in what James called religious experience, which in turn has often led in practice to the emergence of dogma, but it need not and probably should not do so. To him, religious experience was an intensely personal and subjective phenomenon, not subject to anything so prosaic as empirical verification or Scholastic disputation. The Catholic Encyclopedia explains the Catholic objection to this perspective: "If therefore you go as far as making the Divinity a belief, that is to say, a symbolical expression of faith, then docility in following generous impulses may be religious, and the atheist's religion would not seem to differ essentially from yours."[10]
Catholic philosophers responded with such vigor to the claims of Pragmatism in part, no doubt, because they had seen the fruits of a similar line of thinking within their own Church during the Modernist controversy. Like the Pragmatist, the Modernist taught "the essentially fluid nature of all truth, dogmatic as well as natural". Revelation, to a Modernist, was not a manifestation of God's truth but merely an interpretation of widely shared religious sentiment. Dogma's true value consisted in "its capacity to satisfy a certain momentary need of the religious feeling". To the Modernist, no religious dogma could be considered absolute and unchanging since it was merely an intellectual expression of believers' pre-existing religious sentiments -- precisely James' position -- and these sentiments, like everything else in the universe, were part of the ceaseless flux of evolutionary change that characterized the physical world. Dogmas were not absolutely true statements of belief presented for the assent of the faithful by an infallible teaching authority but merely the inchoate expression of an ineffable religious "sentiment" to be found within all men. Father Tyrrell once wrote: "Revelation is a supernaturally imparted experience of realities, an experience that utters itself spontaneously in imaginative popular non-scientific form; theology is the natural, tentative, fallible analysis of that experience."[11]
From the idea of dogmatic truth as "realizing itself in the consciousness of the faithful" and thereby giving rise to the Church's Magisterium -- a teaching authority thus now seen to come not from God but from the people -- followed the idea that no particular religion could claim the kind of universality that Catholicism had claimed for itself. Thus came "the doctrine that Christianity is merely a step forward in the natural process of the evolution of religions.[12] It becomes impossible for the Modernist to imagine religious reconciliation as consisting of anything but a shared spiritual journey in which the religious sentiment common to the human race comes to its full realization in some new dispensation that is the exclusive possession of no single group.
Such an outlook naturally tended to undermine the foundations of the Catholic Church, which claims to be not merely a repository of symbols and practices flowing spontaneously from an amorphous and ill-defined "religious instinct," or merely one stage in an evolutionary convergence of all religions, but the divinely instituted guardian of a fixed doctrine entrusted to her by Jesus Christ. Furthermore, if it were established that a dogma depended for its truth on its ability to nourish and sustain religious sentiment, anti-Modernists pointed out, then it would simply be cast aside as soon as it no longer continued to do so. Hence Pope St. Pius X, in the oath against Modernism he imposed on "all clergy, pastors, confessors, preachers, religious superiors and professors in philosophical- theological seminaries," demanded assent to the proposition that faith "is not a blind sentiment of religion welling up from the depths of the subconscious under the impulse of the heart and the motion of a will trained to morality.[13]
" The excessive subjectivism of the Modernists, the Pope feared, would lead to an individualistic spirituality that would render the Church superfluous to the believer. Its tendency toward a nonspecific spirituality in place of the concrete, revealed dogmas of the Catholic Church especially troubled the Pope in light of global trends he saw beginning to emerge. At work in the world, he warned the bishops, was "a great movement of apostasy being organized in every country for the establishment of a one- world Church which shall have neither dogmas nor hierarchy; neither discipline for the mind nor curb for the passions ..."[14] More than ever, then, it was incumbent upon Catholics to place due emphasis on the objective nature of religious belief and to recognize the role of the Church as the divine guardian and repository of the specific doctrines entrusted to her by her Lord.
The American Catholic Quarterly Review, then, was arguing that in attacking Modernism, the great Pontiff had assailed not only a theological system that threatened the foundations of the Church, but also a philosophical system that threatened to undermine the very idea of truth. "[W]e have placed the parallel with Pragmatism in order to show Modernism's deeper roots and character, and thus to explain that Pius was combating a foreign foe as well as a domestic enemy; was combating not alone his own disobedient children, who have shown much more of stubbornness than of talent, but was struggling also against the most brilliant of the new and Satanic philosophers that recent years have brought into prominence in America, England, France and Italy.)"[15]
The Review summed up how all American Catholic periodicals felt about this great Pope: "In Pius the Tenth God gave to His Church the pastor it needed most when he was needed most for its deepest inner care; and the same God sustained him throughout all his arduous years..[16]
"And of all his great deeds for the Church, he would be chiefly remembered for the enemies he had fought. "Napoleon and Caesar are best known by their wars," said the Review, "and Pius can best be studied by the enemies he met and opposed. Positive enactments of his own free will must also be noted and weighed, but the life of man on earth is a warfare, and this is especially true of the Popes, since they must ever be the leaders in denying the irregular desires of sin-corrupted human natures."[17]
In hindsight, we in 2003 can see an aspect of St. Pius X that his contemporaries could not. He governed a Church in which people could live their Catholic lives in enthusiastic collaboration with the hierarchy and with their local pastors. Over the course of my research since graduate school I have read virtually every article published in every major Catholic periodical from 1907-1920, and I cannot recall a single piece whose orthodoxy was even questionable. In the Church of St. Pius X, moreover, no one was ever accused of mental instability for loving Catholic Tradition. Here was the Church Militant, ready to do battle for souls and filled with a thirst for holiness. It is only in a valley as deep as our own that we can truly appreciate the great gift that Pope St. Pius X gave to the Church.
Footnotes:
1. M.P. Smith, C.S.P., "Pope Pius the Tenth," Catholic World 100 (Oct. 1914): 97. Emphasis added.
2. Ibid., p. 99.
3. William P.H. Kitchin, Ph.D., "The Achievements of Pius X," Catholic World 102 (August 1915): 623.
4. "The Late Rev. George Tyrrell," America, July 24, 1909, p. 110. Emphasis added. America's moving tribute to the Pope appeared as The Editor, "Pius X, Man, Pope and Priest," America, August 29, 1914, pp. 465-66.
5. Daniel A. Dever, "Pius the Tenth: An 'Ecclesiastical' Pope," American Catholic Quarterly Review 39 (July 1914): 361-87. (Because of a quirk in the dating system used by the Review, the article in question appeared in the July issue despite the fact that the Pope died in August.) In just one of many ways in which the pontificate of Pope St. Pius X might be compared with the present one, consider this observation by the Review (p. 362): "We have indicated that Pope Pius the Tenth had his face turned to the Church and away from diplomacy, but by this we by no means mean to affirm any lack of ability in this important direction. We only assert an inherent tendency and almost instinctive feeling by which he seemed impelled, almost exclusively, to the interior beauty of the house of God; statecraft and its allied activities being to him an unwelcome interruption and distraction interfering with this task of native predilection."
6. The relationship between Pragmatism and Modernism is explained in detail in chapter one of Thomas E. Woods, Jr., Ever Ancient, Ever New: Catholic Intellectuals and the Progressive Era (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004, forthcoming).
7. William Turner, "Pragmatism," Catholic Encyclopedia, 1913.
8. Ibid.
9. William James, Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (New York: Longmans, Green, & Co., 1902), p. 431.
10. A. Vermeersch, "Modernism," Catholic Encyclopedia, 1913.
11. George Tyrrell, The Programme of Modernism (New York: Putnam's, 1908), p. 17.
12. Vermeersch, "Modernism," Catholic Encyclopedia; Edmund T. Shanahan, S.T.D., "Completing the Reformation, V," Catholic World (November 1914): 185; James J. Fox, "St. Thomas and His Philosophy," Catholic University Bulletin 14 (April 1908): 345; William Turner, "The Philosophical Bases of Modernism," Catholic University Bulletin 14 (May 1908): 447-50 and passim.
13. Pius X, Sacrorum Antistitum, September 1, 1910.
14. Pius X, Apostolic Letter Our Apostolic Mandate: On the "Sillon", trans. Yves Dupont (Yarra Junction Vic, Australia: Instauratio Press, 1990), pp. 21-22.
15. Dever, "Pius the Tenth," pp. 380-81.
16. Ibid., p. 362.
17. Ibid., p. 366.
Reprinted from the August 2003 edition of Catholic Family News MPO Box 743 * Niagara Falls, NY 14302 905-871-6292 * cfnjv@localnet.com
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