The 1949 letter of the Holy Office was nothing more than an authoritative reflection of the consensus of the theologians on this point.
At that point yes, when theologians and bishops had already fell into liberalism setting the stage up for progressive Vatican II Council, leaving the few traditionalists powerless.
At least modernist Rahner would show more honesty in his progressive approach than the radical sedevacantists BODers of CI. This type of comments may be expected from the Novus Ordo liberal crowd but are totally inexplicable for those who profess "tradition" and naively think that everything collapsed over night after Vatican II.
Again, well said Cantarella!
The NSAAers simply refuse to acknowledge that even prior to Pope St. Pius X's time there were already modernist enemies infiltrated within the clergy.
In Pope Pius X's Pascendi Dominici Gregis promulgated in 1907, he starts off saying:
"...We allude, Venerable Brethren, to many who belong to the Catholic laity, nay, and this is far more lamentable, to the ranks of the priesthood itself.......vaunt themselves as reformers of the Church........We number such men among the enemies of the Church.......Nor indeed will he err in accounting them the most pernicious of all the adversaries of the Church. For as We have said, they put their designs for her ruin into operation not from without but from within."The NSAAers act as though they believe that the pope's encyclical was only a warning for the future and that none of the heresies the pope was warning about were happening at that time.
As such, they naively believe that prior to about 1962, the catechisms, sermons, teachings, theology manuals, encyclopedias, books and etc. were all automatically pristine. Yet errors like a BOD were already prevalent and being taught everywhere, and accepted everywhere, way back at and before the turn of the century, as the pope declares:
"And here we have already some of the artifices employed by Modernists to exploit their wares. What efforts they make to win new recruits! They seize upon chairs in the seminaries and universities, and gradually make of them chairs of pestilence. From these sacred chairs they scatter, though not always openly, the seeds of their doctrines; they proclaim their teachings without disguise in congresses; they introduce them and make them the vogue in social institutions........ He is not speaking about something that might happen in the future, or something that could happen, he specifically states "here we have already some..."
NSAAers reject that prior to the 1960s, heresies were being taught by the clergy and accepted by the masses. They cannot fathom that by the 1930s and 1940s, that the enemy was already well situated within the hierarchy - even though Pope Pius X correctly said they were.
The ultimate aim of the enemy is to destroy the Church completely, to rip it to shreds, to make it disappear. The devil knew that the best way to accomplish this is to get people to believe the heresy that there is another way to heaven, that the Church is not really necessary, that membership within the Church is optional, that some outside the Church can make it if they're good and ignorant people and that a sincere desire is just as good as the real thing.
These are the deceits of the devil and these deceits have engulfed the entire world and nearly the entire Church, and it took 100s of years to get to this point. But make no mistake about it, we are in this crisis because the foundational dogma of EENS and all the requirements that are associated with it have successfully been adulterated and all but obliterated, mostly from within, just as Pope St. Pius X warned.