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Posted on 01/14/2026 9:22:34 AM PST by ebb tide
Editor’s note: Below follows the full text of an Open Letter to Pope Leo XIV by Emeritus Professor of Law at the Catholic University of America Raymond B. Marcin.
(LifeSiteNews) — Your Holiness,
The purpose of this letter is to express a concern regarding the path that our Catholic Church has been following for six decades now in the wake of its Second Vatican Council.
In your address to the College of Cardinals on Saturday, May 10, 2025, just two days after your election as Pope, you described that path with clarity and invited the entire College of Cardinals to commit themselves completely to the teachings of the Second Vatican Council in these words:
In this regard, 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 (cf. No. 11); the missionary conversion of the entire Christian community (cf. No. 9); growth in collegiality and synodality (cf. No. 33); attention to the sensus fidei (cf. Nos. 119-120), especially in its most authentic and inclusive forms, such as popular piety (cf. No. 123); loving care for the least and the rejected (cf. No. 53); courageous and trusting dialogue with the contemporary world in its various components and realities (cf. No. 84; Second Vatican Council, Pastoral Constitution Gaudium et Spes, 1-2).[1]
READ: Pope Leo backs Palestinian state, decries humanitarian crisis in Gaza and Israeli settler attacks
The teachings of the Second Vatican Council to which our Church has committed itself, however, contain the most basic element of the heresy of Modernism which our Church condemned as “the synthesis of all heresies” in 1907 – an element that inheres in the very name given to the heresy, i.e., “Modernism” suggesting an allegiance to modern thinking that is so strong that it urges changes in hitherto settled Church doctrine in order to conform the Church doctrine with the newly favored modern thinking.
Saint Pius X named and condemned Modernism as a heresy in his encyclical Pascendi Dominici Gregis way back in 1907.[2] Those who favor Modernist thinking in our Catholic culture today often make the statement that Saint Pius X’s condemnation of Modernism as a heresy applies only to the now-outdated doctrines espoused by the all-but-forgotten early 20th century Modernist heretics of Pius X’s day. They ignore paragraph 39 of Pascendi where Saint Pius X explained why he was defining Modernism as “the synthesis of all heresies”:
39. 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 organized 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.
I have been studying and writing about the heresy of Modernism since before it infiltrated the teachings of the Second Vatican Council,[3] and I have recently completed a lengthy manuscript which I have entitled, “The Current Covert Demise of the Heresy of Modernism.” Much of what follows in this letter comes from that manuscript.
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.
What, then, is the heresy of Modernism in the expanded understanding of it as “the synthesis of all heresies”? Igino Giordani, the biographer of Saint Pius X, helpfully explained the Modernism that plagued Saint Pius X’s papal reign (1903-1914) in words that apply to our present-day encounters with it; he wrote in 1954:
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.[4]
Modernism in general thus seeks to make “the thinking of the day” an influential criterion for discerning Catholic Christian truths. The content of Modernist thought about Catholic Christian truths will thus vary with “the thinking of the day.” Indeed, at base, there can be no fixed eternal Catholic Christian truths at all in Modernist thought. Modernist thought changes with the age to conform to the age. It is what Cardinal Ratzinger (who became Pope Benedict XVI) was referring to when he cautioned against an unrestrained and unfiltered openness to “the wisdom of the world”[5] (which – the Bible tells us – is foolishness with God.)[6]
Interestingly, Cardinal Ratzinger’s past writings may have influenced the minds of many of the members of the 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 have 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) Saint Pius X’s 1907 crystal-clear condemnation of Modernism as a heresy and indeed as “the synthesis of all heresies.”
Back in 1982, Cardinal Ratzinger (who had been an influential peritus at the Second Vatican Council) made some astonishing statements in his seminal treatise on Catholic theology.[7]
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.”[8] 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”[9] (the popes whose syllabi of errors and encyclicals warned against the dangers of the heresy of Modernism). This was a remarkably candid admission. These are Cardinal Ratzinger’s words:
If it is desirable to offer a diagnosis of the text [of Gaudium et Spes, the 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 counter-syllabus.[10]
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.’”[11]
Cardinal Ratzinger 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.”[12]
To many of today’s liberal or progressive Catholics, these statements of Cardinal Ratzinger may not seem to be “astonishing.” 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 progressive-minded Catholics is the fact that Cardinal Ratzinger was suggesting that the main goal of the Second Vatican Council was to set up a counter-syllabus, i.e., an Opposition Document, to the anti-Modernist position adopted by the Catholic Church under Popes Blessed Pius IX and Saint Pius X and to the consistent and uniform teachings of at least six predecessor popes.[13]
On April 15, 2005, Cardinal Ratzinger became Pope Benedict XVI. On December 22, 2005, Pope Benedict delivered an address to the Roman Curia in which he modified his earlier enthusiasm (as Cardinal Ratzinger) for the “counter-syllabus” understanding of the teachings of Vatican II. In the address, Benedict suggested that interpretations of the teachings of Vatican II must be interpreted using a technique which he called a hermeneutic of continuity.[14]
READ: Leaked consistory texts reveal cardinal’s defense of Latin Mass restrictions
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 the Church in the Second Vatican Council seems to conflict with prior Church teachings, the Vatican-II teaching should be interpreted (to use Pope Benedict’s format) not as a rupture with past Church teaching, but rather in continuity with it. Can the Modernist-tainted teachings of the Second Vatican Council be interpreted as being “in continuity with” the Church’s prior crystal-clear condemnation of Modernism as “the synthesis of all heresies”? Forgive my doubt.
Finally, one brings to mind the statement of Pope Paul VI, the pope who oversaw and approved the teachings of the Second Vatican Council. On June 29, 1972 (on the otherwise joyous occasion of the ninth anniversary of his papal election), Paul VI reversed course in his enthusiasm for Vatican II’s teachings and issued the following hesitant and halting lament:
We believed that after the [Second Vatican] Council would come a day of sunshine in the history of the Church. But instead there has come a day of clouds and storms, and of darkness…. And how did this come about? We will confide to you the thought that may be, we ourselves admit in free discussion, that may be unfounded, and that is that there has been a power, an adversary power. Let us call him by his name: the devil…. It is as if from some mysterious crack, no, it is not mysterious, from some crack the smoke of Satan has entered the Temple of God.[15]
The Vatican has published a narrative about Pope Paul’s homily in the Italian language.[16] The narrative is not, however, a word-for-word complete rendering of Pope Paul’s homily. It makes indirect statements about what he said and, at times, a few short quotes from what he said, followed by lengthy explanations, always referring to Pope Paul in the third person and attributing what he said to his disappointment over the teachings of the Second Vatican Council not being followed rigorously enough. (Forgive my skepticism.)
All the actual words spoken by Pope Paul VI in that famous “smoke of Satan” homily, one suspects, must exist today in some recorded form in some Vatican archive. Pope Paul VI delivered his famous homily orally in Italian, of course, but he must have had a transcript, and it seems unthinkable that no audio recording was made of such an important homily. What conclusion are we to draw from the Vatican’s reticence on this matter? That the Vatican doesn’t want a pristine word-for-word complete rendering of what Pope Paul VI said in that famous homily to be made public? Why not?
(Please forgive me for ending this letter with an account of my own personal memories – memories that are so important to me that they motivated my decision to write this letter.)
The results of the smoke of Satan entering the Temple of God are not difficult to recall for those octogenarians among us (including me) who have lived as adults over the past 60 years since the close of the Second Vatican Council. Many octogenarians (including me) still remember the sharp drop-off in Mass attendance, as well as in vocations to the priesthood and religious life; the widespread loss of faith in the Real Presence of Jesus (Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity) in the Holy Eucharist among the laity (some surveys suggest that two-thirds of Catholics no longer accept that dogma of the faith[17]; the failure of Catholic schools and teachers to catechize and educate the past several generations of Catholic children in the timeless truths of the Catholic faith; the widespread non-use of the Sacrament of Penance – not to neglect mentioning the shocking priestly and even episcopal homosexual sex scandals.
It might be helpful to time-travel a tiny bit earlier and visit the octogenarian memory of the pre-Vatican-II Catholic Church: Some octogenarians (including me) will have clear personal memories of the condition of the Catholic Church in the post-World-War-II era just before the Second Vatican Council’s ill-fated “modernizations” came into play – parish churches were full on Sundays. Most city and suburban churches offered five crowded Masses every Sunday. Saturday Confession lines were tediously long. Parishes were well staffed with pastors and curates. Parishioners followed the Sunday (and daily) Mass attentively with their Latin/vernacular missals. Seminaries were full. Catholic grade school faculties were staffed completely with nuns. Children learned and understood the timeless truths of the Catholic faith from their age-appropriate “Baltimore” catechisms. All seemed well – better than well. The Catholic Church was thriving. It really was. Then came the Second Vatican Council.
(It’s important for today’s Catholics to know that their Church was once (not terribly long ago) thriving, and that their fellow Catholics were once closely united in their beliefs. Yes, we really were, in the years before the Second Vatican Council, a thriving Church united in our beliefs – and the years before the Second Vatican Council were really not so very long ago in Church-history time.)
Pope Paul VI was correct in his late-in-life lament that what happened amid the misguided Modernist enthusiasms of the majority of the bishops participating in the Second Vatican Council was that “the smoke of Satan [had] entered the Temple of God.” His hesitant and halting – but ultimately firm and heartfelt – statement that the crack that let the smoke of Satan enter the Second Vatican Council was not mysterious at all, but rather was obvious for all to see, redounds (I believe) to his credit.
Pope Francis, as we know, canonized Paul VI as a saint in 2018, but Pope Francis was most certainly not motivated to canonize him for his firm and heartfelt renunciation of his prior support of the teachings of Vatican II, but rather for his prior support of those heretical teachings. Thus, there may be some arguable doubt as to the validity of his papal canonization.
Nonetheless, Paul VI’s firm and heartfelt confession in his late-in-life “Smoke of Satan” homily is (I like to think) what has occasioned for him the “ordinary” sainthood that attends the salvation that we all seek, i.e., the eternal bliss that accompanies acceptance and entry into the Kingdom of God.
In the hopes that the contents of this letter will move you to recognize the dangers that lie in the Second Vatican Council’s dalliance with the heresy of Modernism, and that you will reconsider our Church’s complete commitment to the teachings of the council, I have written this letter to you.
Sincerely,
Raymond B. Marcin
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We believed that after the [Second Vatican] Council would come a day of sunshine in the history of the Church. But instead there has come a day of clouds and storms, and of darkness…. And how did this come about? We will confide to you the thought that may be, we ourselves admit in free discussion, that may be unfounded, and that is that there has been a power, an adversary power. Let us call him by his name: the devil…. It is as if from some mysterious crack, no, it is not mysterious, from some crack the smoke of Satan has entered the Temple of God.[15]
Ping
It is refreshing to see a truthful labeling of the problem.
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