CATECHISM ON MODERNISM – PART I – THE MODERNIST AS APOLOGIST – II. APPLICATION OF THE PRINCIPLE OF AGNOSTICISM

PART I
THE ERRORS OF THE MODERNISTS

CHAPTER VI

THE MODERNIST AS APOLOGIST
I. PRINCIPLES AND ORIGINS
II. APPLICATION OF THE PRINCIPLE OF AGNOSTICISM

Q. Let us see how the Modernist conducts his apologetics. What does he propose to do?

A. The aim he sets before himself is to make one. who is still without faith attain that experience of the Catholic religion.

Q. Why is he so anxious to produce this experience in the non-believer?

A. Because this, ‘according to their system, is the sole basis of faith.’

Q. How does a man acquire this personal experience of the Catholic religion?

A. There are two ways open to him, the objective and the subjective?

Q. Whence starts the first or objective way?

A. The first of them starts from agnosticism.

Q. What proof does this first way claim to establish?

A. It tends to show that religion, and especially the Catholic religion, is endowed with such vitality as to compel every psychologist and historian of good faith to recognize that its history hides some element of the unknown.

Q. To establish this proof, what needs first to be demonstrated?

A. To this end it is necessary to prove that the Catholic religion, as it exists to-day, is that which was founded by Jesus Christ–that is to say, that it is nothing else than the progressive development of the germ which He brought into the world.

Q. But if Christ brought into the world only the germ of the Catholic religion, what task is laid upon the Modernists with regard to it?

A. It is imperative first of all to establish what this germ was.

Q. By what formula do the Modernists claim to determine what this germ was?

A. This the Modernist claims to be able to do by the following formula: Christ announced the coming of the kingdom of God, which was to be realized within a brief lapse of time and of which He was to become the Messiah, the divinely-given Founder and Ruler.

Q. This germ being thus determined, what, according to our Modernist apologists, must be shown in the next place?

A. Then it must be shown how this germ, always immanent and permanent in the Catholic religion, has gone on slowly developing in the course of history, adapting itself successively to the different circumstances through which it has passed, borrowing from them by vital assimilation all the doctrinal, cultual, ecclesiastical forms that served its purpose; whilst, on the other hand, it surmounted all obstacles, vanquished all enemies, and survived all assaults and all combats.

Q. To what conclusion do our Modernist apologists claim that we must come through duly considering this mass of facts?

A. Anyone who well and duly considers this mass of obstacles, adversaries, attacks, combats, and the vitality and fecundity which the Church has shown throughout them all, must admit that if the laws of evolution are visible in her life, they fail to explain the whole of her history the unknown rises forth from it and presents itself before us.

Q. What is the radical defect of all these reasonings?

A. Thus do they argue, not perceiving that their determination of the primitive germ is only an a priori assumption of agnostic and evolutionist philosophy, and that the germ itself has been gratuitously defined so that it may fit in with their contention.

 

III. APPLICATION OF APOLOGETIC PRINCIPLES

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