PART II
THE CAUSES OF MODERNISM
I. MORAL CAUSES: CURIOSITY AND PRIDE
II. INTELLECTUAL CAUSES
III. ARTIFICES OF THE MODERNISTS FOR THE PROPAGATION OF THEIR ERRORS
1. NEGATIVE MEANS
2. POSITIVE MEANS
Q. Are the Modernists zealous to enlist new recruits?
A. What efforts do they not make to win new recruits!
Q. What are their principal means of conquest?
A. They seize upon professorships in the seminaries and Universities, and gradually make of them chairs of pestilence. In sermons from the pulpit they disseminate their doctrines, although possibly in utterances which are veiled. In congresses they express their teachings more openly. In their social gatherings they introduce them and commend them to others. Under their own names and under pseudonyms they publish numbers of books, newspapers, reviews, and sometimes one and the same writer adopts a variety of pseudonyms, to trap the incautious reader into believing in a multitude of Modernist writers. In short, with feverish activity they leave nothing untried in act, speech, and writing.
Q. With what result are all these Modernist artifices employed?
A. With what result? We have to deplore the spectacle of many young men, once full of promise and capable of rendering great services to the Church, now gone astray.
Q. What is there that cannot but cause us sorrow on the part of certain Catholics who are not as yet thorough going Modernists?
A. It is also a subject of grief to Us that many others, while they certainly do not go so far as the former, have yet been so infected by breathing a poisoned atmosphere, as to think, speak, and write with a degree of laxity which ill becomes a Catholic.
Q. Are these Catholics, who allow themselves to be contaminated by Modernism, to be found only among the laity?
A. They are to be found among the laity, and in the ranks of the clergy.
Q. But is it possible that there are some even in the religious Orders?
A. They are not wanting even in the last place where one might expect to meet them in religious communities.
Q. How do these Catholics, laymen, priests, and religious, who are all more or less tainted with Modernism, treat of Biblical questions?
A. If they treat of Biblical questions, it is upon Modernist principles.
Q. How do they write history?
A. If they write history, they carefully, and with ill-concealed satisfaction, drag into the light, on the plea of telling the whole truth, everything that appears to cast a stain upon the Church.
Q. How do they act with regard to pious popular traditions and venerable relics?
A. Under the sway of certain a priori conceptions, they destroy as far as they can the pious traditions of the people, and bring into disrespect certain relics highly venerable from their antiquity.
Q. At bottom, what is it that impels them to break thus with the ancient traditions?
A. They are possessed by the empty desire of having their names upon the lips of the public, and they know they would never succeed in this were they to say only what has always been said by all men.
Q. But have not these Catholics, who are more or less Modernists, good intentions in breaking with the traditions of the past?
A. It may be that they have persuaded themselves that in all this they are really serving God and the Church.
Q. What is the fact?
A. In reality they only offend both, less perhaps by their works in themselves than by the spirit in which they write, and by the encouragement they thus give to the aims of the Modernists.