There are two misconceptions about Modernism.

One comes from the public at large and one comes from Traditionalists.

The public at large conflate the word ‘modern' with something inherently good by virtue of its current relevance. In theological terms, Modernism means looking at eternal truths through a prism of novelty. Pius X called it the ‘synthesis of all heresies’, encompassing naturalism, private interpretation and gnosticism.

Traditionalists make a mistake in thinking that Modernism only infected the church after the Second Vatican Council. Before the council, beautiful churches were being torn down and replaced with Communist style ones, altars were being dumped, Communion in the hand was being trialled in places and experimental liturgies were well under way. That is not to mention the spread of naturalist theological ideas from individuals such as Teilhard de Chardin or George Tyrell, which denied the supernatural. While the problems accelerated in the 1970s, it is hard to imagine the Council as being able to do anything other than slow it down if it had tried rather than stopping the onslaught entirely, which had been building for a century. To read Pope Saint Pius X's great work Pascendi Dominici Gregis from 1907 is to realise that the church was under the cosh so severely a half century before the Council that it required as dramatic an intervention as this. Going back to what caused Pius X to have to write such a passage, and to introduce the Anti Modernist Oath, is a better exercise than the simplistic ‘everything was fine until Vatican II' mantra that avoids getting to the root of the issue.

In fact, Pius X The Great returns all the way to 1864, a century before Vatican II to discuss how an abandonment of scholasticism was at the heart of the Modernist Crisis.

‘Whether it is ignorance or fear, or both, that inspires this conduct in them, certain it is that the passion for novelty is always united in them with hatred of scholasticism, and there is no surer sign that a man is on the way to Modernism than when he begins to show his dislike for this system. Modernists and their admirers should remember the proposition condemned by Pius IX: The method and principles which have served the doctors of scholasticism when treating of theology no longer correspond with the exigencies of our time or the progress of science (Syll. Prop. 13). They exercise all their ingenuity in diminishing the force and falsifying the character of tradition, so as to rob it of all its weight’

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https://www.catholicarena.com/latest/2021/8/21/h8dnsvzn29fa7dbvhisktgglk9oem9