Chapter 22 - FILL IN HERE

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The Popes Unmask the Conspiracy of the Sect

The conspiracy of the liberal sect against the Church consisted, as I have shown you in the preceding chapter, in rising up to the assault on the Church by using its hierarchy, in perverting it up to the highest degree.

The popes, with the clear vision of their responsibility and the enlightenment with which God was able to endow them, clearly saw and denounced this program.

Leo XIII (1878-1903) saw this subversio capitis in advance, this subversion of the head; and he described it in black and white, in all its crudity, by composing the small exorcism against Satan and the fallen angels. Here is the passage in question, which figures in the original version but was suppressed in the subsequent versions by I do not know which successor of Leo XIII, who perhaps found this text impracticable, unthinkable, unpronounceable. Yet, a hundred years from its composition, this text seems to us now on the contrary to be of a burning truthfulness:

Behold, very cunning enemies have filled the Church, Spouse of the immaculate Lamb, with bitterness; have watered it with absinthe; they have cast ungodly hands onto all that is desirable in it. Where the See of the blessed Peter and the Chair of Truth were established like a light for the nations, there they have set the throne of abomination of their impiety; in order that, once the shepherd is struck down, they may be able to disperse the flock.

“How is this possible?” you will say. I do not know at all, I admit; but there it is, more and more, day after day. It causes us a keen anxiety and poses a painful question: which popes therefore are the ones who allow the auto-demolition? Who puts their hands into it? St. Paul was already saying for his time, “The mystery of iniquity is already at work.“1 What would he say now?

Next it is St. Pius X’s (1903-1914) turn to tell the anguish that binds him in the face of the progress brought about by the sect even in the interior of the Church. In his inaugural encyclical E supremi apostolatus, of October 4, 1903, he expresses his fear that the time of apostasy that the Church was entering may be the time of the Anti-Christ—this must be understood as Anti-Christ, counterfeit of Christ, usurper of Christ. Here is the text:

We experienced a sort of terror in considering the deadly conditions of humanity at the present hour. Can anyone not be aware of the sickness so deep and so serious which, at this moment much more than in the past, torments human society and which, growing worse from day to day and eating away at it right down to the core, is carrying it away to its ruin? Venerable Brethren, you know this illness; in regard to God, it is surrender and apostasy. Beyond any doubt, there is nothing which leads more surely to ruin, according to this word of the prophet: Behold, those who go away from Thee shall perish.2

The holy Pontiff continues further:

In our time, it is only too true that the nations have trembled and the peoples have contemplated insane projects against3 their Creator. This cry of His enemies has become all but common: Withdraw from us.4 From this come the habits of life, as much private as public, where no account is taken of His sovereignty. Much more, there is no effort or artifice that is not put to work in order entirely to abolish the memory and even the idea of Him.

He who thinks these things over has the right to fear that such a perversion of minds is the beginning of the evils announced for the end of time, and perhaps their establishing of contact with the earth, and that truly the son of perdition of whom the Apostle speaks5 may have already made his arrival in our midst. So great is the boldness and so great is the frenzy with which they throw themselves everywhere into the attack on religion, they batter the dogmas of the Faith, they strain with an obstinate exertion to annihilate every relation of man with the Divinity! In return—and there you have, in the words of the same Apostle, the proper nature of the Antichrist—man, with a temerity beyond words, has usurped the place of the Creator by raising himself up above everything that bears the name of God. It is to such a point that, powerless to extinguish the notion of God completely in himself, he nevertheless shakes off the yoke of his majesty and dedicates to himself the visible world as a kind of temple, where he pretends to receive the adorations of his fellow creatures. He sits in the temple of God, where he shows himself as if he were God himself.6

Then St. Pius X concludes by recalling that God triumphs in the end over His enemies, but that this certitude of faith “does not excuse us, insofar as it depends on us, from hastening the divine work,” that is to say, the triumph of Christ the King.

St. Pius X again, in his encyclical Pascendi, of September 8, 1907, on the Modernist errors, denounces with clear sightedness the infiltration of the Church by the Modernist sect, an infiltration already in progress, which was, as I have told you,7 the ally of the liberal sect in the plan to demolish the Catholic Church. Here are the passages of this document most salient to my purpose:

What particularly requires Us to speak without delay is that the agents of error are not to be sought for today among our declared enemies. They are hiding—and it is a cause for very sharp apprehension and anguish—in the very midst and in the heart of the Church, enemies so much the more fearsome as they are less openly enemies. We are speaking, Venerable Brethren, of a great number of lay Catholics and, what is still more to be deplored, of priests, who, under pretense of love for the Church, absolutely short on solid philosophy and theology, impregnated on the contrary right down to the marrow with a venom of error derived from the adversaries of the Catholic Faith, set themselves up, with contempt for all modesty, as renovators of the Church. In closed phalanxes, with audacity, they begin the assault on everything that there is of the most sacred in the work of Jesus Christ, without respecting His very person, which they reduce, with a sacrilegious temerity, even to a pure and simple humanity.

Those men may be astonished that We rank them among the enemies of the Church. No one will have just reason to be surprised at this who, putting aside their intentions, of which the judgement is reserved to God, will indeed attempt to examine their doctrines, and their system of word and action. Enemies of the Church, to be sure they are this; and to say that it does not have any worse ones is not to stray from the Truth. It is not from outside, indeed, as has been already noted, it is from within that they contrive its ruin. The danger lies today almost in the very veins and bowels of the Church: their blows are so much more certain as they know the Church more intimately. Add to this that it is not to the branches or to the shoots that they have put the axe, but to the very root, that is to say, to the Faith and to its deepest fibers. Then, once this root of immortal life is severed, they set themselves the task of making the virus circulate throughout the tree, in such a way that no part of the Catholic Faith remains protected from their hand, and that there is no part that they do not strive with great care to corrupt.8

St. Pius X next unveils the tactics of the Modernists:

While they are pursuing their pernicious scheme by a thousand paths, nothing is so insidious or so false as their tactics: blending in themselves the rationalist and the Catholic, they do it with such a refinement of cunning that they easily deceive minds that are not well informed. Consumed moreover with audacity, they are not put back by any kind of consequences, but rather endure them boldly and obstinately. Along with this, something very fitting for bringing in changes, a whole life of activity, a singular diligence and ardor in all kinds of study, morals usually commendable for their severity… You are not unaware, Venerable Brethren, of the sterility of Our efforts; one moment they bow their heads, just to lift them again immediately even more prideful…9

In the way of a tactic of the Modernists (thus they are called commonly and with good reason), a really very insidious tactic, they never expose their doctrines methodically and in their entirety; but they break them up as it were and disperse them here and there, a fact which leads to their being judged as changeable and undecided, when their ideas, on the contrary, are perfectly settled and consistent. It is important here, and above all, to present these same doctrines from one single viewpoint, and to show the logical connection that binds them to one another.10

To stay inside the Church in order to make it evolve-such is the keynote of the Modernists’ policy:

They follow their path; reprimanded and censured, they go forward, always covering up, under the false-tongued exterior of compliance, a boldness without limit. They hypocritically bow their heads, while, with all their thoughts, with all their energy, more boldly than ever before, they pursue the laid out plan.

This is their intention and their tactics: both because they hold that authority must be stirred up, not destroyed, and because it is important for them to remain in the midst of the Church in order to be at work there and alter the common consciousness little by little: acknowledging thus, but without being aware of it, that the common consciousness is therefore not with them, and that it is against every right of which they claim to be the interpreters.11

Pascendi stopped the audacity of the Modernists for a time, but before long the methodical and progressive occupation of the Church and of the hierarchy by the Modernist and liberal sect took root again more than ever before. The liberal theological intelligentsia would before long hold the higher places in the specialized reviews, the congresses, the great printing houses, the centers of pastoral liturgy, perverting the Catholic hierarchy from top to bottom, scorning the latest condemnations of Pope Pius XII in Humani Generis. The Church and the papacy would soon be ripe for the “Etats Généraux,“12 for a liberal surprise attack such as took place in 1789 in France, on the occasion of an ecumenical council, foretold and awaited for a long time by the sect, as we shall see in the following chapter.

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1 II Thess. 2:7.

2 Ps. 72:27.

3 Ps. 2:1.

4 Job 21:14.

5 II Thess. 2:3.

6 II Thess. 2:2.

7 It is under the flag of progress, of evolution that the Liberals have risen to the assault on the Church. Cf. Chapter XVIII.

8 Pascendi, nn.2-3.

9 Ibid., n.3.

10 Ibid., n.4.

11 Ibid., n.37.

12 This assembly marked the beginning of the French Revolution .