CathInfo.com

Not to dismiss this man's experience he had at the seminary, but human nature being what it is, could not a man or even a large group of men, have had the same experience at a seminary say 50, 100, or even a 1000 years ago?
 

This isn't an inappropriate question, and I think it would take someone with more experience in seminaries and stories of seminaries of the past to answer this.  

Fr. Pfeiffer has mentioned that his mentor, an Irish priest, Fr. Hannifin (of happy memory), had told him many stories of how the priesthood had been before Vat.II and how the seminaries had changed since then.  So Fr. P. would be a good one to field this question your have, John Steven.

I might not be too far off by observing that it wasn't until the mid-19th century that Modernism was beginning to take a firm hold of seminaries worldwide, and we had been blessed with a string of good popes (Gregory XVI, Pius IX, Leo XIII, Pius XII and perhaps then Pius XI and XII), who waged a gallant battle against Modernism.  But all that changed with John XXIII et. al., to the point where we could then say that "the same seminary experience 50 years ago" might have been well-nigh impossible because the corruption had not sufficiently "evolved" at that time.  

This is a complex and anti-reactionary state of affairs, as I see it.  The deeds that were done in the 1970's were flat-out bad, but later, the deeds done inside the Society which was supposed to be correcting the Newchurch corruption, are doubly corrupt, and such a level of defection from the good had not been 'needed' before.  

But I could be wrong.

My sense of these times is, that Modernism, as condemned and defined in Pascendi, is not something that priests of 1,000 years ago would have understood.   What I mean to say is, if you could somehow go back in time and try to warn priests of the first millennium after Christ about "the grand sewer of all heresies" that would erupt in the distant future, they would most likely would have thought you to be off your rocker.  

There are many reasons for this, but it is founded in the fact that in the study of philosophy, specifically, the field of EPISTEMOLOGY was then something that they knew existed, because philosophy had developed to the point, even among the ancient Greeks (before Christ), on a natural plane, so as to recognize the existence of that branch of the "queen of the sciences" that would be identified as the study of what it means for man to know.  

Epistemology is the study of knowing about knowing, per se.  Now, you can know THAT you know something, but that does not address HOW you know that thing.  And in those 'saner' days, they would have not seen any great need to study the science of studying the science itself.  Even so, they were wise enough to recognize that this branch of the science in fact existed, yet it was so to speak, left unexplored, for lack of any motive for engaging what it took to make the exploration happen.  

But then along came Immanuel Kant, and that's a long story in itself.  Suffice it to say that in his home town, there endures to this day a street named "Philosopher's Walk," which is a street he used to take for his daily stroll. (Speaking of "exercise".)  People living in houses along this way could look out their windows and SET THEIR CLOCKS to the moment they saw Kant walking down the side of the road.  You see, they did not have Fort Collins, Colorado or Radio Controlled timekeeping based on a cesium clock that guzzles liquid nitrogen as if it were a soft drink.  He did the same activities every day.  He took his walk at the same time because he got up at the same time, got dressed at the same time, ate breakfast at the same time, read the newspaper at the same time, and sat down to "PHILOSOPHIZE" at the same time, every day.  Later, he took his walk at the same time, and he took the same walk at the same rate of speed.  So he passed each house at the same time every day.  Isn't that just beautiful?  He was the first modern "professional philosopher."  And in his so doing, he tore down what it means for us to think (the verb infinitive), to its most fundamental elements, and began to REBUILD the theory of how we think, and how we know -- EVERYTHING that we know.  He basically re-invented thought.  

Now, 1,000 years ago, nobody had to deal with the complications that emerge when a guy like that re-invents thought.  And since Modernism is an outgrowth of what Kant did to our thinking of thought, those guys in the year 1001 wouldn't even give you the time of day if you had tried to warn them about it.  Why would they be concerned with Modernism when it was nowhere on the radar?  

They didn't even HAVE radar.

.

i found thatwriting gripping. probably, because it resonates with many experiences with sspx. we all believed we 'had a dog in this race'(excuse the expression) we were there for the long haul, nothing was to much trouble, we gave our time, our homes, our pennies, all for the beloved society, and the glory of God. and the worst part for me is, the complete lack of charity, shown by ALL of the priests we accompanied on this journey. their failure to alert us, when things were changing, their their inability to defend the indefensible, and so their silence, became complicity, where colatteral damage to the souls they pledged to serve, is sacrificed, they lead us from the desert, into a greater one,

Ladislaus, I am sure you know that nobody goes to a monastery to become a priest but to become a monk. The superior of the monastery decides who among the monks will become priests. Perhaps it is not like that anymore in the Novus Ordo monasteries.

I wasn't speaking about just monasteries, but about orders in general:  Jesuits, Dominicans, Franciscans ... or even diocesan priests.