The Philosophical Roots of Modernism: Agnosticism and Immanentism — Frank J. Morriss
This was the first talk given. Frank Morriss was first introduced by Al Matt Jr.:
Again, I think there’s very little need to introduce Frank Morris to you. Anybody who reads The Wanderer knows who Frank Morris is and what he does, and I always think of him as the middle linebacker of the Wanderer team. In other words, he’s all over the field and wherever there’s a possibility of a breakthrough, he’s there to stop it.
With regard to his background, he got his bachelor’s degree from Regis College, a Jesuit college. I think he’s since burnt his diploma from that particular institution. But when he went there, it was quite good and he got a very good education in English literature, some of the leading Jesuit scholars in English literature were there at the time. He later got his JD, Doctor of Jurisprudence, from Georgetown Law School. I don’t think he’s burnt that yet, but he’s been tempted to do so as a result of his conflicts with Father Henley, who I think has since been replaced as the president, possibly due to Frank’s influence, I don’t know. He is also the author of a column in some 10 diocesan papers, including Washington, Baltimore, Seattle, and other places.
So he does get read in areas beyond The Wanderer, and I think he is a thorn in the side of a good many of our modernists, because after all, he’s saying what needs to be said, bringing it out. And you know, most diocesan newspapers just don’t get that kind of thing. They’re very much pablum rather than paprika.
Frank has nine published books, and I would like to call your attention especially to this most recent one, A Neglected Glory, concerning the presence of the church in America. There are copies of it available out in the room of existence, and it is being advertised in The Wanderer at reduced rates when you buy more than a single copy.
So I introduce to you Frank Morris, Wanderer columnist, and as I say, middle linebacker of our team on one aspect of the modernist heresy.
[Comment on the cassette tape: Toward the end of Mr. Morris’ talk, the electrical power was lost for a brief period. So as not to lose the context of this passage, I have dubbed in the two missing sentences. We apologize for this unavoidable mishap.]
And now Frank Morriss’s talk:
I am fortunate to be the first speaker, for I have you fresh and eager, like those anxious to begin a challenging trip or climb. And then too, I can count on those eminent speakers to follow, to fill in the lacunae that I undoubtedly shall leave, or explain the questions I shall most certainly scatter about.
The one thing I believe I can say with certainty, at least for me, and I imagine for others you will hear, I cannot take you on a climb into sunlight, to the peaks of Darien, from whence we can see the Pacific future for our faith, where we can plant the flag of Catholic triumph. Our journey, rather, must be into the depths, to the nether regions that opened in reality at the first crunch of Adam’s teeth into the apple. For it was at that moment that God, reality itself, began to fade from the clear vision of mankind, and man’s imaginings began to become more real than man’s very creator.
When the descendants of Adam, or perhaps our first father himself, fell into these caverns of mind, over the mind falls into a realm of nightmarish inversions, where handsome grows of thought are reduced to wildernesses, and cables to truth become cobwebs, I cannot tell you.
What I can do for you, and hopefully for others, that you and I may contact in our apostolate, is to convince you or confirm you in the understanding that this is a realm of darkness, of nightmare, of escape from truth and the duty to it, and of reveling in all that hides from God’s light and his very presence. For there are those who find that darkness comforting, make an intellectual home of those noxious places, call the phantasms that dwell there real, and are discomforted by any intrusion of logic or loyalty to the practitioners of true sciences of reality. We will be assaulted there by whispered derision, proffered pities, and invitations to remain and make our home with the same phantasms, to convert to a future that belongs only in the mind, and dive by choice over those mine cliffs of despair.
We must not consider ourselves immune from these temptations. Those of undeniable quality of mind have succumbed, and now inhabit these vacuums where all is vaporized into nothingness. Our children, or the children of our neighbors, have heard the siren sounds and followed downward, and see us, should we attempt their rescue as the unreal ones, and their tutors in unreality the tangible and credible.
If I am gloomy, foreboding, even frightening, it is because I have just returned from one of the deepest of those black pits, dug mentally at the campus of Notre Dame University by the wraith-like creatures of these airs. Three days of listening to their songs of unreality make the ivy-covered buildings, the great stadium Rockne built, the past of great intellects like the school’s founders and giants, become dreamlike.
To understand the dwellers in the mental darkness I am about to treat, one must enter in and play the game in which the darkness is light, the unreal real, and the pretended and imagined brought into existence as if in a counter-creation. For if there is one thing certain about agnosticism, it is that it is accompanied by an absolute assertion. And if there is anything certain about immanentism, it is that those who are pregnant with it desire that it be given birth, a habitation and a name, as if it were more than a thing of the mind. If an abortionist pretends a child is not real, an immanentist pretends an unreality is a child.
It is true that St. Pius X, scything to the ground the entangling weeds of modernism, discussed agnosticism before the intellectual tumescence that is immanentism, for it is common to move from the negative to the positive. But I believe a case can be made for both the psychological and logical precedence of that prideful contention that we know for certain only that men assert there is a God and contend they have God’s revelation.
In other words, the negative aspect of agnosticism does not lead to immanentism, but just the opposite. And it is important that we know how and why this happens. Every person ever born finds eventually the presence all about of the intuition of a power and a greatness. With the vast majority, it is in the belief that there is a God who is good and who brought into existence all apart from himself that exists and sustains it and somehow guides it all toward his ultimate purpose. In others, it may be only the vague admission that man is not self-sufficient and not his own cause or a disturbing call within that is called conscience that cannot be explained away or dismissed completely. It is in dealing with this that those disinclined to believe in God, but not yet at that state of agnosticism, must offer an explanation for those beliefs and feelings.
They are good enough empiricists to recognize the universality of religious inclination, but face themselves with embracing such an inclination or rejecting it, they must somehow explain its presence. So it is, the proud say, that man has created God rather than that man is the creature of God. Man is thus the universe itself, being the creator of a concept greater than the universe. Man conceives reality, shapes it, lives it, becomes it. History is merely that process. Reality and its importance are within man’s consciousness.
The illusions of any other reality are at their most real only dreams, those odd phantasms we have beyond analysis or control, in which some deep, dark pool within is liberated of its creatures who prowl through our awareness until waking sends them back into its recesses. Now to assert positively there is no God, to embrace atheism, is to deny that power of man’s consciousness to create. Rather it is to assert an absolute, and modern man eschews all absolutes.
Alongside the majority of modern scholars, including the most prestigious Catholic ones, Madeline O’Hare is a positive dogmatist, and I assure you it is more exhilarating to listen to her than to sit three days and listen to the immanentists and assorted dogmatists of doubt.
On the other hand, to admit there is a God, and that the intellect of man can and has come to know him, and that he has spoken clearly and definitely to man, is to reduce our race to a position of subordination, and to burden us with the responsibility to say, “Yes, here is your servant.” The immanentists are constitutionally opposed to hewing moral wood and hauling dogmatic water.
Thus the great poorest we do not know in place of a majestic “Amen.” Thus a cowardly maybe in the place of “Yes, sir, God.” T.S. Eliot‘s Prurock is the perfect creature of this outlook. “I am no prophet, and here is no great matter. I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker, and I have seen the eternal footman hold my coat and snicker, and in short I was afraid. And would it have been worth it, after all, after the cups, the marmalade, the tea, among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me, would it have been worthwhile to have bitten off the matter with a smile, to have squeezed the universe into a ball to roll it toward some overwhelming question, to say, “I am Lazarus, come from the dead, come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all,” if one, settling a pillow by her head, should say, “That is not what I meant at all. That is not it at all.” We have lingered in the chambers of the sea, by sea girls, reed with seaweed, red and brown, till human voices wake us and we drown.
It is their conviction, and a well-taken one, that they will drown in the admission of objective reality that leads immanentists eventually to embrace agnosticism, that is, to choose a perpetual existence in the chambers of the sea, watching the sea girls and hearing their song but saying in the words of Prufrock, “I do not think that they will sing to me.” The Catholic scholars I have referred to have not yet reached, at least most of them, the point of agnosticism, but some of them certainly dwell in its fringes.
The inwardness of their vision leads them already to talk in terms of relativism, which is the epistemological sickbed of agnosticism. If there is one term used most frequently at the Notre Dame Colloquium, it undoubtedly was “quest.” That is a slightly more elegant term for “search.” Yet in terms of evolution, it is “becoming.” All of these, you will understand, are simply ways to avoid saying, “I know,” or “I have been brought back from the grave and I am compelled to tell you all.” Father Avery Dulles recommends thinking of the Church as “response and process” rather than clinging to what he calls “substantialist ecclesiology.” In other words, there is no point of arrival at religious truth.
Does not this substitute the condition of a moment for faith in the absolute, and is it not therefore something of an exercise in agnosticism? Giuseppe Alberigo of Bologna speaks of an opportunity of “discovering the fecundity of Christian division, which can express itself in the possibility of realizing a common search.” But it is a search promoted by theologians who offer no determinants for realizing what is being sought or when it has been found. This is theological make-work. Keep them busy so they won’t notice that Christians are not supposed to be on a religious treasure hunt.
Has not the Pearl of Great Price been offered mankind? Was it not delivered to our ancestors, some of whom died to keep it and pass it on to us? And so do we not declare ourselves agnostics when we talk about grubbing about in the ruins of that disloyalty and doubt have created? Is there some theological alchemy that can transmute the lead of rebellion into the gold of faith full and complete?
Mary Durkin, too, sees the role of Christianity in terms of continuous motion. The ability of the Catholic Christian tradition to contribute directivity to the lives of its members and to the quest for meaning of the wider culture depends on the manner in which the Church of the future is able to respond to human experience. The Church, therefore, ceases to become a guide toward a certain home, a shrine that pilgrims come to, but is rather a tagalong, itself created or prompted to activity by the experiential. I do not find such an example in Christ, for though he took humanity where it was, he also demanded it follow him rather than agree that he follow it. Tagalongs are always agnostics, and a Church, the teaching of which would be determined by human experience, would be an agnostic Church, just as today’s law, which is determined by human experience, is an agnostic law.
All of this, I am happy to say, is at odds with at least one understanding of Fr. Carl J. Peter of the Catholic University, who believes doctrine can be a friend to man’s desire to know, and that theological inquiry is toward the meaning and truth of that doctrine. This is a somewhat traditional interpretation of theology’s duty, and was a glimmer of light in the cavernous shadows of the Notre Dame Colloquium. I hasten to warn that few contemporary theologians view their science in the light of such duty. If modern theologians are wandering about in the margins of agnosticism, they are deep in the bilious pond of immanentism. Fr. Edward Schillebeeckx, O.P., expresses it most academically, “The critical consciousness of man must lead us to the right road. If reason is something specifically human, then the human capacity of judging the ambiguous phenomena of human history on the basis of norms is the proper critical task of man. Man is a being caught up in history. His essence itself is a story, a historical happening, and not something that is predetermined. Critical consciousness is the consciousness that the critical capacity of human reason is codependent on the historical circumstances in which the human reason finds itself.” Contemporary consciousness leads man to surrender to the recognition of ambiguity in all which man’s intellect contacts.
In this type of immanentism, man creates himself, but never for certain or for all ages. Obviously then, religion becomes impermanent.
A social scientist at the Notre Dame Colloquium, James T. Barry of the University of New York at Buffalo, most completely expressed modern immanentism. He moves from Marx, who observed that “consciousness emerges from human activity” — that is, we are what we do, so obviously we can be created by those in control of what we do—to the idea that man completes reality through acts of his imagination, will, and choice. Truth becomes an event, the birthday parties of an era, the experiences of an epoch. It is no wonder that sociology is the wench that theology chose to romance at the Notre Dame Colloquium.
Ontology, the science of absolute truth, has long since been dismissed with a bill of divorcement from theology. T. Barry treats Michael Poliani’s answer to Descartes’ “straight and narrow path of doubt.” For Poliani, objective knowledge depends upon “an almost seamless web of commitments, traditions, and personal judgments which link knowers into a community within which knowledge is produced and, in the case of scientific knowledge, verified.” This of course leaves religious knowledge outside the verifiable. That is a classic statement of modernist quasi-epistemology.
We know faith, religion, but not in the way we know the verifiable. Finding the conclusion, “consciousness and community are two sides of the same coin. One belongs by believing, and believes so as to belong.” It is something like the social contract applied to belief. It is an arrangement to legitimize the child-called reality conceived by human coming together. This is only a slightly refined idea of the tribal created gods, the origin of religion in fear and magic, and the common desire of humans to explain the inexplicable.
Religion is the huddling together for comfort. As a result, the “quality of believing, of faith, must be considered processual.” Time marches on. That which we thought was for eternity is for a present moment only, and the ancient idea of a faith that is the same now and forever is the naïveté of a bride who believes marriage is a constant state of existence till death do us part. This type of thinking is behind the insistence that though there may be some underlying, unobtainable reality to faith, its symbols and expressions are new to each age. But the reality must only be the creating consciousness, and therefore not only the symbols change, but they change as an evidence that the creating is going on in each period of history.
It is true to say that you can have another word to symbolize what transubstantiation is, but whatever the symbol, it must flow out of the reality of transubstantiation and communicate that reality to humans of every age. But this is heresy to immanentism. In its way of assertion, every age may have its own explanation for the real presence. This fails to take into consideration that the very doctrine itself is thus slowly drained of its meaning until it becomes only a pale substitute for what was given us at the beginning as the truth.
The divorce of symbol from reality and the idea that both reality and symbol are the creation of man and his experience leaves no certain doctrine that holds for all time. Henry admits that some beliefs arrive from ascriptive membership, as he calls it in the Church, and that such beliefs should be distinguished from those arrived at voluntarily. But this is so that he may argue against considering those who reject the Church community as being disbelievers. In other words, just because some have found the pharmacist too rigid in his filling of prescriptions doesn’t mean they are totally opposed to medicine. They simply want to have prescriptions filled to their own specifications. Barry and his fellow social scientists, as well as the theologians who have taken them as a spouse, apparently think this can be done in regard to religious belief without the danger of sickness and even death were it applied to the science of pharmacy. Yet that danger is surely real if, as we know, Christ licensed only one religious pharmacist.
The Catholic Church, namely in the magisterium, it alone exercises. In fairness, it must be said there were a few, though very few, at the colloquium that this seemed to worry slightly. Anton van den Booguard, president of Concilium, which sent the European scholars to Notre Dame, in his opening remarks confessed, “Plurality of thought, even among Catholic theologians, has become so great that I, being a layman, sometimes wonder just how much theology, with the help of the humanities, still has to offer to us in terms of bringing a message of encouragement and orientation.” I have mentioned in an article that I believe will run eventually in the pages of the Wanderer, Monsignor Miles Burke‘s suggestion that we perhaps should begin to consider that if modern man cannot share reverence and awe in the Eucharist, it may be something is wrong with modern man.
A young psychologist, John Cotrie of the University of Michigan, told the Notre Dame Colloquium that Western psychology has created a new man who corresponds with the ancient one of Eastern transpersonal humanistic psychology. “A being that exalts self without limits, differing only in the fulfillment of that self, the one the Eastern says let self flow into a cosmic consciousness. The Western psychology says, ‘Let itself actively taste of every experience. Let it become now this impulse, now that. Let it expand and raise its consciousness.'” I’m still quoting Cotrie. “Consciousness, of course, is never expanded in the direction of recovering early experience, for the past must be fled at all costs. Nor is there recognition of the fact that expansion can only take place by way of self-imposed frontiers that both hold a person in and give him something to go beyond.” Cotrie says that this new man was parented by behaviorism’s “empty, unknowable self. Humanistic psychology talks incessantly about the self, telling us either to lose it or expand it. Behaviorism ignores the self, but both, explicitly or not, preach the virtues of a fluid self, without limits, incapable of choice, incapable of loyalty to something outside self.” Eliot, of course, was prophet and biographer of this new man long before modern psychology, and was able to foresee his coming because he had seen the abandonment of the values of the older man of faith and Christianity.
Rather, new man says, in Eliot‘s words, “Do I dare disturb the universe? In a minute there is time for decisions and revisions, which a minute will reverse.” With good evolutionary taste, however, the modernists speak of decisions and revisions reversed not in a minute, but in an age or two, a few generations, some eventual new Curia or a new Pope, for all is a becoming and a searching and an experimenting. Make no doubt about it: The mark of modernism is upon these scholars, almost to a man and a woman. They are persons of autonomous and superior disciplines. Those disciplines determine the reality and purpose of faith. They look inside a man, not with the aid of a philosophy of reality, but with keyhole peeping of modern psychology and sociology. Man is no longer a free knight who might and did betray his lord, but a bondsman at the mercy of time, culture, baffled by ancient symbol and left bereft of a new symbolism by the elevation of community and proletarian folk art.
He is convinced, that is man today, that the product of self must be superior, no matter what its quality, to the product of any other person. He is encouraged to deal in intellectual and cultural parthenogenesis, like some lower organism. He is the specimen of the social scientists and various periti who keep him docile by denying him the liberating works of intellect and art of past geniuses, and the philosophy of truth that is the metaphysics of the schools. He is encouraged to take pride in his cultural or tribal roots, but not in his religious ones.
Pride of faith is called triumphalism, even as the modernists preach and practice a triumphalism of the varied intellectual disciplines. If a pope tells today’s faithful, “God wills it,” and they respond, “Amen,” they are called reactionary. But if Hans Kűng shouts the same and they respond, “Amen,” they are called enlightened.
No pope is expected to make a narrower moral definition than Charles Curran, at least if that pope does not want to risk a campus revolt. The modernists insist that God’s regarded word be treated with no greater respect than that of any other author. But in bringing to bear criticism upon scripture, they do not even follow the lessons of recent literary criticism, for such criticism has verified much that is old understanding and traditional acceptance, let us say of Homer or Shakespeare. Regarding scripture, the modernists have not gotten beyond the passé era of debunking. Their attempt to separate terminology, symbol, from reality of the thing, given term and symbol is in direct keeping with those scholars chastised by Pius XII in Humani Generis.
Those who contend a way will be found to satisfy modern needs, “that will permit of dogma being expressed also by concepts of modern philosophy, whether of immanentism or idealism or existentialism or any other system.” They add that the history of dogmas consists in the reporting of the various forms in which revealed truth has been closed, forms that have succeeded one another in accordance with the different teachings and opinions that have arisen over the course of the centuries.
Behold Pius XII‘s warning that this is the way toward “dogmatic relativism” fulfilled in what has just been said in the Notre Dame Colloquium. The new Church proclaimed there is a temple of such relativism. Our only consolation is that, like all false churches, it is established by men and women, though they may be Catholic or call themselves such, and not by Christ. And they are a long way from being even the angel of heaven bearing a false teaching which Paul warned us against.
There is a most beautiful children’s fable I trust you have read, even though it is by a Presbyterian divine, George MacDonald. It is a story that, like the one that occupies us here, has its caverns underground, inhabited by impish and evil goblins, whose ambition is to emerge above ground and wage war on all that is good. To enter their labyrinthine dwelling place is to risk eternally being lost, for there is no light there to be a guide, no sure way back from whence one came. But as with all respectable children’s fairy stories, the princess and the goblin has its fairy godmother. She gives to the heroine a ring and a ball of delicate thread, the ring she must touch and the thread she must follow in time of danger. That time of danger inevitably comes when the heroine, Irene, must descend into the darkness of the goblins. But she remembers the gifts and wears the ring and follows the thread. Her companion, a minor boy, cannot feel the thread at all. The princess asks him, “Then what can be the matter with your finger? I feel it perfectly. To be sure, it is very thin, and in the sunlight looks just like the thread of a spider, though there are many of them twisted together to make it. But for all that, I can’t think why you shouldn’t feel it as well as I do.” He was too polite to say he did not believe there was any thread there at all.
Now our modernist theologians are not polite in the least, though they do attempt to be hospitable to such a fool as I. They not only admit they have thrown away the gifts that are necessary to keep theology safe from danger, but they feel they need no support, no protection, no way back. Need to return implies a place of certainty and belonging, and the new theologians have cast themselves adrift. The ring that the theologians should wear is the golden one of faith, and the thread is the delicate one of metaphysics, by which I mean a science of absolute and certain reality. The godmother that provides these is Holy Mother of the Church, who, like the godmother of the fairy story, appears permanently young, though she is ages old.
Faith as it has been kept by that Church and the philosophy that Church has woven are absolutely essential to competent and trustworthy theology. These teachers have entered into the caverns of secularism. These are inhabited by relativists, subjectivists, immanentists, agnostics, all desiring nothing better than to do damage to what Christianity has given and has dispensed faithfully over 2,000 years. The scandal is that theology has chosen this company, prefers the darkness underground, and indeed seems to have entered a conspiracy with those hobgoblins of modern thought. It will do theology no good to maintain it is not understood, that it is oppressed by blind authority, that it is punished and put to disrepute unfairly.
But truth is it has willingly taken off the ring of faith and abandoned the thread of ontology. It is lost, and it does not have the humility to admit it. Only a few of its practitioners have the courage to suggest that it has entered into a region of dark danger. In these circumstances, we are not being anti-intellectual or uncharitable to pick up the discarded ring and thread and to use them and give them to all who will listen. The theologians have lost them to a future generation of theologians who might learn from bitter experience that one does not enter the regions of error unguarded and unprepared. But we have the ring and thread in safekeeping for that generation. They are like all such miraculous gifts capable of both being kept and given away. Indeed they must be kept to be given away.
A little paradox of Christianity that the progressives and modernists have forgotten. Notice it is the ring of faith that makes the thread of philosophic truth discernible. Humans are afflicted with a deplorable tendency to become blinded in intellect when they become blinded in soul. Or perhaps it is a feigned thing, a self-inflicted blindness of intellect to prevent the chance that light of mind may force one to admit a spiritual darkness. Once the mind is filled with the insane idea that reality depends upon it, then the soul becomes filled with the results of such pride. And one result is that the soul pretends it is the product of some material type of imagining or evolution, that it is in effect simply the essence of mind-knowing. Thus the thread is put down as something childish, held onto in the days when the mind imagined that it did not create truth, but only humbly discovered it and offered it as a diadem for the sovereign will.
Forgotten are the warnings of the popes that only such a thread of philosophic truth can keep us from theological and hence spiritual danger. Students who have a right to that thread are kept from a knowledge even of its existence. What has taught young Catholics, even theologians, in place of true philosophy are the imaginings of other modernists or secularists who themselves never discovered or long ago abandoned the thread of truth. Minds so empty and unguided are ripe for the slick errors of those who speak in eight-syllable symbols to convey a double zero nothing.
The deception becomes easier when the modernists garb their theories in somewhat traditional intentions or phrases. “I do not advocate rebellion,” says Kűng, “but be sure to listen to God rather than men.” How do we listen to God? With Kűng as medium, of course.
“I am for real morality,” says Curran, “but the only absolute prohibitions are murder and rape.” “We are for the Church,” chorus the modernists, “but it is a Church you will not recognize, a Church so adapted to culture that it will be impossible to say where the age stops and the Church begins.” Such nearly became the condition in another age of understanding and toleration, the Renaissance, and the rescue came not from the theologians of such condition but from those who demanded a healing, a turning back, an ouster of the permissivists.
The rescue of the Church at that time, when revolt raged and robbed it of the very allegiance of those new theologians then that today’s theologians defend, came not from the scholars, not from human wisdom. It came from the patient and the pious, from those who never changed, who kept the medieval ideals even when they were proclaimed dead and buried. It does not seem that such can be brought to the Church’s rescue today.
Those who can be so described seem silenced, discredited, discarded, but so it seemed then and in periods of dangers before. Look for the ring to touch. You will find it is the fisherman’s ring, worn by the pontiffs from time immemorial.
Take up the thread to follow. You will find it is the philosophy of the schoolmen and the fathers of old. Then we can enter safely into the very lairs of the heretics and the schismatics, be they of right or left, be it at Louvain or Notre Dame or Tubendon.
Possibly a few will learn from us, touch the ring, and grasp the thread to emerge as great defenders of the faith. But regardless, we shall come through with the pearl of great value so that it can be placed into the hands of the next generation of the Churches and our children. Though the Pope eventually has the last word on all these matters, in an age of modernism with its self-important proclamations and presentations, he is lucky to have any word.
So I proudly give him here first and last voice, though he had none at all at Notre Dame, or elsewhere among those who once considered being among his followers their proudest boast. It was Pius XII who spoke strongly of the resurgence of modernism, though he saw only its beginning compared to today’s flood. It is not surprising that novelties of this kind have already borne their deadly fruit in almost all branches of theology. It is now doubted that human reason, without divine revelation and the help of divine grace, can, by arguments drawn from a created universe, prove the existence of a personal God.
It is denied that the world had a beginning. It is argued that the creation of the world is necessary, since it proceeds from the necessary liberality of divine love. It is denied that God has eternal and infallible foreknowledge of the free actions of men, all this in contradiction to the decrees of Vatican Council I. Still quoting Pius XII, “Some also question whether angels are personal beings, and whether matter and spirit differ essentially. Others destroy the gratuity of the supernatural order, since God, they say, cannot create intellectual beings without ordering and calling them to the beatific vision.” Nor is this all.
Disregarding the Council of Trent, some pervert the very concept of original sin, along with the concept of sin in general as an offense against God, as well as the idea of satisfaction performed for us by Christ.
Some even say that the doctrine of transubstantiation, based on an antiquated philosophic notion of substance, should be so modified that the real presence of Christ in the Holy Eucharist be reduced to a kind of symbolism, whereby the consecrated species would be merely efficacious signs of the spiritual presence of Christ and of his intimate union with the faithful members of the mystical body.
And still quoting, “Some say they are not bound by the doctrine explained in our encyclical letter of a few years ago, and based on the sources of revelation, which teaches that the mystical body of Christ and the Roman Catholic Church are one and the same thing. Some reduce to a meaningless formula the necessity of belonging to the true Church in order to gain eternal salvation. Others finally belittle the reasonable character of the credibility of Christian faith.” And still quoting, “These and like errors, it is clear, have crept in among certain of our sons who are deceived by imprudent zeal for souls and by false science. To them we are compelled with grief to repeat once again truths already known and to point out with solicitude clear errors and dangers of error.” These words in Humani Generis call every true son and daughter of the Church to call out “Amen,” and with God’s help we do so.
And we shall do so, though we become the only ones left of the ancient and true faith to find voice and courage enough for the shouting.
Thank you.
Morris, Frank J. “The Philosophical Roots of Modernism: Agnosticism and Immanentism” Speech delivered at the Thirteenth Wanderer National Forum Conference. St. Paul, MN 1977.
