CATECHISM ON MODERNISM – PART I – THE MODERNIST AS APOLOGIST – IV. APPLICATION OF THE PRINCIPLE OF IMMANENCE

PART I
THE ERRORS OF THE MODERNISTS

CHAPTER VI

THE MODERNIST AS APOLOGIST
I. PRINCIPLES AND ORIGINS
II. APPLICATION OF THE PRINCIPLE OF AGNOSTICISM
III. APPLICATION OF APOLOGETIC PRINCIPLES
IV. APPLICATION OF THE PRINCIPLE OF IMMANENCE

Q. We have just seen in what objective way Modernists hope to dispose the non-believer to faith; but is there not also another way, and do they not bring forward other arguments?

A. It is not solely by objective arguments that the non-believer may be disposed to faith. There are also those that are subjective?

Q. On what philosophical doctrine do the Modernists build up these subjective arguments?

A. For this purpose the Modernist apologists return to the doctrine of immanence. They endeavor, in fact, to persuade their non-believer that down in the very depths of his nature and his life lie hidden the need and the desire for some religion.

Q. Is it just of any religion at all that they believe they find in us the desire and the need?

A. Not a religion of any kind but the specific religion known as Catholicism.

Q. How, with the doctrine of immanence, do they claim to discover in us the need and the desire of a super natural religion like the Catholic religion?

A. This it is which, they say, is absolutely postulated by the perfect development of life.

Q. And here, in union with you, Holy Father, what must we deplore?

A. Here again We have grave reason to complain that there are Catholics who, while rejecting immanence as a doctrine, employ it as a method of apologetics.

Q. Do not these Catholic apologists attenuate the method of immanence, and do they desire to find anything else in man than a certain harmony with the supernatural order?

A. They employ the method of immanence so imprudently that they seem to admit, not merely a capacity and a suitability for the supernatural, such as has at all times been emphasized, within due limits, by Catholic apologists, but that there is in human nature a true and rigorous need for the supernatural order.

Q. Are these apologists Modernists in the fullest sense of the word?

A. Truth to tell, it is only the moderate Modernists who make this appeal to an exigency for the Catholic religion.

Q. The moderate ones! What more, then, can the others say?

A. As for the others, who might be called integralists, they would show to the non-believer, as hidden in his being, the very germ which Christ Himself had in His consciousness, and which He transmitted to mankind.

Q. If such is a summary description of the apologetic method of the Modernists, what is to be thought of it?

A. That it is  in perfect harmony with their doctrines.

Q. How may their doctrines be described?

A. Methods and doctrines replete with errors, made not for edification but for destruction, not for the making of Catholics but for the seduction of those who are Catholics into heresy; and tending to the utter subversion of all religion.

CHAPTER VII
THE MODERNIST AS REFORMER

 

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