Laetare Sunday

March 15, 2026

It has been a couple of weeks now since we left off in our little - highly abbreviated - journey through what can be called one of the three worst heresies: Arianism, Protestantism and Modernism. If you recall, we found ourselves looking at an actual headline form the New York Times announcing that Pope Paul the VI had “cancelled the antimodernist oath”. Notice how it was carefully framed using the negative “anti”. It could have easily been titled “Pope cancels oath requiring faithful adherence to the Faith and Teachings of the Church” as that is what the Oath Against Modernism actually was. While my pointing out this little tidbit might seem like much ado about nothing to some, to the more discerning theological eye, it points to just what progress the heresy had made in the public sphere.

The goal was to frame opposition to the heresy in a negative, regressive light. This heresy had its proponents and supporters for many years already within the Church and they carefully guided and shaped the understanding of it among many in the seminaries, universities, colleges and media. In all reality, the oath against modernism would have been relatively unknown to most people as it didn’t directly concern them. The common folk simply trusted that those who were to be leading them in the Faith would not intentionally lead them astray. This was something dealing with those in positions of power within the Church who were tasked with leading, teaching and formation. The goal of those in the Church who had given themselves over to this heresy was to chip away at the foundational aspects of the Faith amongst those who were going to be leaders of the next generations. So it began in the religious orders, seminaries and Catholic universities. A slow, deliberate deformation of the Faith and the conscience. One of the particular hooks that was used was the nefarious and intentional warping of the understanding of the “primacy of conscience”. Simplistically speaking, this teaching meant that a person was to obey their conscience in all things. However, the Church always taught that a conscience must be well formed in the Faith and objective truth before it can be considered a worthy guide for life’s decisions. What modernism did was to deliberately remove the emphasis on the necessity for the conscience to be well formed by the Faith, substituted objective (eternal, never changing) truth for subjective (based on one’s own feelings or strictly modern understanding) truth and then simply state that a person was to follow their conscience based simply upon what they thought to be right. Here we have a perfect recipe for disaster. At the end of the day, we all know – whether or not we want to admit it – that we are not always right, that we have made bad decisions and that sometimes we do desire things that are bad or evil. It’s part of our human brokenness. One of the goals of modernism was to remove any objective standards except those which the “modern man” deemed important. That our desires were good in so long as we deemed them to be so regardless. Where did this lead to? It led to the current situation in our Church and world today.

Next time we will look at two opposing ends of the result of the Modernist heresy – Pope Paul VI’s 1968 encyclical Humanae vitae (of human life) and the factions on the right and left in our Church and also how this is connected to what is currently happening with the Society of St. Pius X and the push for episcopal consecrations without the approval of the pope.

God love you,

Fr. Anthony