How Catholics Strengthen the Reign of Satan

Our worst enemies: Modernists

1. To the mission entrusted to us from above to feed the flock of the Lord, Jesus Christ assigned as the first duty to keep with a jealous care the traditional deposit of faith, against the profane novelties of language as contradictions of false science.

No age, no doubt, where such vigilance was not necessary for the Christian people: for it has never failed, raised up by the enemy of the human race, of men with perverse language, tidbits of novelties and seducers, subjects of the error and leading to error.

But, it must be admitted, the number has increased strangely in recent times of the enemies of the Cross of Jesus Christ who, with a new and supremely treacherous art, strive to cancel the vital energies of the Church, and even, if it could, to overthrow the reign of Jesus Christ.

We are no longer in favor, if We do not wish to appear unfaithful to the most sacred of Our duties, and the goodness of which We have hitherto used, in the hope of amendment, be accused of forgetting Our charge.

2. What especially demands that We speak without delay is that, the makers of errors, there is no need to seek them today among the declared enemies. They hide and it is a subject of apprehension and anguish very strong, in the very heart and the heart of the Church, enemies all the more formidable as they are less open.

We speak, Venerable Brothers, of a great number of lay Catholics, and, what is still more to deplore, of priests , who, under the color of love of the Church, absolutely short of philosophy and theology serious, impregnated on the contrary, to the marrow of a venom of error drawn from the adversaries of the Catholic faith, they pose, in defiance of all modesty, as renovators of the Church; who, in close knuckles, boldly give an assault to all that is most sacred in the work of Jesus Christ, without respecting his own person, whom they lower, by a sacrilegious temerity, to simple and pure humanity.

3. These men may be astonished that We rank them among the enemies of the Church. No one will be surprised with any foundation which, putting their intentions apart, whose judgment is reserved for God, will examine their doctrines, and, consequently, their manner of speaking and acting.

Enemies of the Church, certainly they are, and to say that it has no worse ones one does not deviate from the truth.

It is not from outside, indeed, it has already been noted, it is from within that they wreak its ruin; the danger today is almost to the very bowels and veins of the Church; their blows are all the more certain that they know better where to strike them.

Add that it is not to the branches or to the offspring that they have laid the ax, but to the very root, that is, to faith and its deepest fibers.
Then, this root of immortal life once decided, they give themselves the task of circulating the virus through the whole tree: no part of the Catholic faith that remains safe from their hand, no they do not everything to corrupt.

And while they pursue by a thousand ways their evil design, nothing so insidious, so treacherous as their tactics: amalgamating in them the rationalist and the catholic, they do it with such a refinement of skill that they easily abuse the unsuspecting minds.

Moreover, consumed in rashness, there are not so many consequences that make them retreat, or rather that they support strongly and obstinately.
With that, and a very peculiar thing to give the change, a life of activity, an assiduity and ardor peculiar to all kinds of studies, morals generally recommendable for their severity.

Finally, and this seems to remove all hope of cure, their doctrines have so perverted their souls that they have become contemptuous of all authority, impatient of all restraint: taking a plate on a distorted conscience, they do everything to Attributes to the pure zeal of truth that which is only work of obstinacy and pride.

Certainly, We had hoped that they would change their minds someday: and for that we had used with them first of all gentleness, as with sons, then of severity: finally, and very reluctantly, of public reprimands. You are not ignorant, Venerable Brothers, the sterility of Our efforts; they bend their heads for a moment, to raise them at once more proud.

Ah! if it were only a question of them, We could perhaps conceal; but it is the Catholic religion and its security that are at stake. So, silence, which henceforth would be a crime! It is time to lift the mask to these men and show them to the universal Church as they are.

4. And as a tactic of the modernists (so they are commonly called and with great reason), tactical indeed very insidious, is to never expose their doctrines methodically and as a whole, but to fragment somehow and to scatter them here and there, which makes them judged undulating and undecided, when their ideas, on the contrary, are perfectly fixed and consistent, it is important here and above all to present these same doctrines under a single view, and to show the logical connection between them.

We reserve the right to indicate the causes of the errors, and to prescribe the remedies necessary to remove the malady.


Pope Saint Pius X - Encyclical Pascendi - 1907
[Translated from the French, emphasis in the original.]