WHY BIG NO TO RH-BILL

The Lord Jesus with the Children

Origin:

http://veritas899.weebly.com/why-no-to-rh-bill.html

Birth Control

In 1968, Pope Paul VI issued his landmark encyclical letter Humanae Vitae (Latin, "Human Life"), which reemphasized the Church’s constant teaching that it is always intrinsically wrong to use contraception to prevent new human beings from coming into existence.

Contraception is "any action which, either in anticipation of the conjugal act [sexual intercourse], or in its accomplishment, or in the development of its natural consequences, proposes, whether as an end or as a means, to render procreation impossible" (Humanae Vitae 14). This includes sterilization, condoms and other barrier methods, spermicides, coitus interruptus (withdrawal method), the Pill, and all other such methods.

The Historic Christian Teaching

Few realize that up until 1930, all Protestant denominations agreed with the Catholic Church’s teaching condemning contraception as sinful. At its 1930 Lambeth Conference, the Anglican church, swayed by growing social pressure, announced that contraception would be allowed in some circumstances. Soon the Anglican church completely caved in, allowing contraception across the board. Since then, all other Protestant denominations have followed suit. Today, the Catholic Church alone proclaims the historic Christian position on contraception.

Evidence that contraception is in conflict with God’s laws comes from a variety of sources that will be examined in this tract.

Nature

Contraception is wrong because it’s a deliberate violation of the design God built into the human race, often referred to as "natural law." The natural law purpose of sex is procreation. The pleasure that sexual intercourse provides is an additional blessing from God, intended to offer the possibility of new life while strengthening the bond of intimacy, respect, and love between husband and wife. The loving environment this bond creates is the perfect setting for nurturing children.

But sexual pleasure within marriage becomes unnatural, and even harmful to the spouses, when it is used in a way that deliberately excludes the basic purpose of sex, which is procreation. God’s gift of the sex act, along with its pleasure and intimacy, must not be abused by deliberately frustrating its natural end—procreation.

Scripture

Is contraception a modern invention? Hardly! Birth control has been around for millennia. Scrolls found in Egypt, dating to 1900 B.C., describe ancient methods of birth control that were later practiced in the Roman empire during the apostolic age. Wool that absorbed sperm, poisons that fumigated the uterus, potions, and other methods were used to prevent conception. In some centuries, even condoms were used (though made out of animal skin rather than latex).

The Bible mentions at least one form of contraception specifically and condemns it. Coitus interruptus, was used by Onan to avoid fulfilling his duty according to the ancient Jewish law of fathering children for one’s dead brother. "Judah said to Onan, ‘Go in to your brother’s wife, and perform the duty of a brother-in-law to her, and raise up offspring for your brother.’ But Onan knew that the offspring would not be his; so when he went in to his brother’s wife he spilled the semen on the ground, lest he should give offspring to his brother. And what he did was displeasing in the sight of the Lord, and he slew him also" (Gen. 38:8–10).

The biblical penalty for not giving your brother’s widow children was public humiliation, not death (Deut. 25:7–10). But Onan received death as punishment for his crime. This means his crime was more than simply not fulfilling the duty of a brother-in-law. He lost his life because he violated natural law, as Jewish and Christian commentators have always understood. For this reason, certain forms of contraception have historically been known as "Onanism," after the man who practiced it, just as homosexuality has historically been known as "Sodomy," after the men of Sodom, who practiced that vice (cf. Gen. 19).

Contraception was so far outside the biblical mindset and so obviously wrong that it did not need the frequent condemnations other sins did. Scripture condemns the practice when it mentions it. Once a moral principle has been established in the Bible, every possible application of it need not be mentioned. For example, the general principle that theft is wrong was clearly established in Scripture; but there’s no need to provide an exhaustive list of every kind of theft. Similarly, since the principle that contraception is wrong has been established by being condemned when it’s mentioned in the Bible, every particular form of contraception does not need to be dealt with in Scripture in order for us to see that it is condemned.

Apostolic Tradition

The biblical teaching that birth control is wrong is found even more explicitly among the Church Fathers, who recognized the biblical and natural law principles underlying the condemnation.

In A.D. 195, Clement of Alexandria wrote, "Because of its divine institution for the propagation of man, the seed is not to be vainly ejaculated, nor is it to be damaged, nor is it to be wasted" (The Instructor of Children 2:10:91:2).

Hippolytus of Rome wrote in 255 that "on account of their prominent ancestry and great property, the so-called faithful [certain Christian women who had affairs with male servants] want no children from slaves or lowborn commoners, [so] they use drugs of sterility or bind themselves tightly in order to expel a fetus which has already been engendered" (Refutation of All Heresies 9:12).

Around 307 Lactantius explained that some "complain of the scantiness of their means, and allege that they have not enough for bringing up more children, as though, in truth, their means were in [their] power . . . or God did not daily make the rich poor and the poor rich. Wherefore, if any one on any account of poverty shall be unable to bring up children, it is better to abstain from relations with his wife" (Divine Institutes 6:20). Natural Family Planning (NFP)

The First Council of Nicaea, the first ecumenical council and the one that defined Christ’s divinity, declared in 325, "If anyone in sound health has castrated himself, it behooves that such a one, if enrolled among the clergy, should cease [from his ministry], and that from henceforth no such person should be promoted. But, as it is evident that this is said of those who willfully do the thing and presume to castrate themselves, so if any have been made eunuchs by barbarians, or by their masters, and should otherwise be found worthy, such men this canon admits to the clergy" (Canon 1).

Augustine wrote in 419, "I am supposing, then, although you are not lying [with your wife] for the sake of procreating offspring, you are not for the sake of lust obstructing their procreation by an evil prayer or an evil deed. Those who do this, although they are called husband and wife, are not; nor do they retain any reality of marriage, but with a respectable name cover a shame. Sometimes this lustful cruelty, or cruel lust, comes to this, that they even procure poisons of sterility [oral contraceptives]" (Marriage and Concupiscence 1:15:17).

The apostolic tradition’s condemnation of contraception is so great that it was followed by Protestants until 1930 and was upheld by all key Protestant Reformers. Martin Luther said, "[T]he exceedingly foul deed of Onan, the basest of wretches . . . is a most disgraceful sin. It is far more atrocious than incest and adultery. We call it unchastity, yes, a sodomitic sin. For Onan goes in to her; that is, he lies with her and copulates, and when it comes to the point of insemination, spills the semen, lest the woman conceive. Surely at such a time the order of nature established by God in procreation should be followed. Accordingly, it was a most disgraceful crime. . . . Consequently, he deserved to be killed by God. He committed an evil deed. Therefore, God punished him."

John Calvin said, "The voluntary spilling of semen outside of intercourse between man and woman is a monstrous thing. Deliberately to withdraw from coitus in order that semen may fall on the ground is doubly monstrous. For this is to extinguish the hope of the race and to kill before he is born the hoped-for offspring."

John Wesley warned, "Those sins that dishonor the body are very displeasing to God, and the evidence of vile affections. Observe, the thing which he [Onan] did displeased the Lord—and it is to be feared; thousands, especially of single persons, by this very thing, still displease the Lord, and destroy their own souls." (These passages are quoted in Charles D. Provan, The Bible and Birth Control, which contains many quotes by historic Protestant figures who recognize contraception’s evils.)

The Magisterium

The Church also, fulfilling the role given it by Christ as the identifier and interpreter of apostolic Scripture and apostolic tradition, has constantly condemned contraception as gravely sinful.

In Humanae Vitae, Pope Paul VI stated, "[W]e must once again declare that the direct interruption of the generative process already begun, and, above all, directly willed and procured abortion, even if for therapeutic reasons, are to be absolutely excluded as licit means of regulating birth. Equally to be excluded, as the teaching authority of the Church has frequently declared, is direct sterilization, whether perpetual or temporary, whether of the man or of the woman. Similarly excluded is every action which, either in anticipation of the conjugal act, or in its accomplishment, or in the development of its natural consequences, proposes, whether as an end or as a means, to render procreation impossible" (HV 14).

This was reiterated in the Catechism of the Catholic Church: "[E]very action which, whether in anticipation of the conjugal act, or in its accomplishment, or in the development of its natural consequences, proposes, whether as an end or as a means, to render procreation impossible is intrinsically evil" (CCC 2370). "Legitimate intentions on the part of the spouses do not justify recourse to morally unacceptable means . . . for example, direct sterilization or contraception" (CCC 2399).

The Church also has affirmed that the illicitness of contraception is an infallible doctrine: "The Church has always taught the intrinsic evil of contraception, that is, of every marital act intentionally rendered unfruitful. This teaching is to be held as definitive and irreformable. Contraception is gravely opposed to marital chastity, it is contrary to the good of the transmission of life (the procreative.aspect of matrimony), and to the reciprocal self-giving of the spouses (the unitive.aspect of matrimony); it harms true love and denies the sovereign role of God in the transmission of human life" (Vademecum for Confessors 2:4, Feb. 12, 1997).

Human Experience

Pope Paul VI predicted grave consequences that would arise from the widespread and unrestrained use of contraception. He warned, "Upright men can even better convince themselves of the solid grounds on which the teaching of the Church in this field is based if they care to reflect upon the consequences of methods of artificially limiting the increase of children. Let them consider, first of all, how wide and easy a road would thus be opened up towards conjugal infidelity and the general lowering of morality. Not much experience is needed in order to know human weakness, and to understand that men—especially the young, who are so vulnerable on this point—have need of encouragement to be faithful to the moral law, so that they must not be offered some easy means of eluding its observance. It is also to be feared that the man, growing used to the employment of anti-conceptive practices, may finally lose respect for the woman and, no longer caring for her physical and psychological equilibrium, may come to the point of considering her as a mere instrument of selfish enjoyment, and no longer as his respected and beloved companion" (HV 17).

No one can doubt the fulfillment of these prophetic words. They have all been more than fulfilled in this country as a result of the widespread availability of contraceptives, the "free love" movement that started in the 1960s, and the loose sexual morality that it spawned and that continues to pervade Western culture.

Indeed, recent studies reveal a far greater divorce rate in marriages in which contraception is regularly practiced than in those marriages where it is not. Experience, natural law, Scripture, Tradition, and the magisterium, all testify to the moral evil of contraception.

Wishful Thinking

Ignoring the mountain of evidence, some maintain that the Church considers the use of contraception a matter for each married couple to decide according to their "individual conscience." Yet, nothing could be further from the truth. The Church has always maintained the historic Christian teaching that deliberate acts of contraception are always gravely sinful, which means that it is mortally sinful if done with full knowledge and deliberate consent (CCC 1857). This teaching cannot be changed and has been taught by the Church infallibly.

There is no way to deny the fact that the Church has always and everywhere condemned artificial contraception. The matter has already been infallibly decided. The so-called "individual conscience" argument amounts to "individual disobedience."

NIHIL OBSTAT: I have concluded that the materials presented in this work are free of doctrinal or moral errors. Bernadeane Carr, STL, Censor Librorum, August 10, 2004

IMPRIMATUR: In accord with 1983 CIC 827
permission to publish this work is hereby granted.
+Robert H. Brom, Bishop of San Diego, August 10, 2004

Permalink: http://www.catholic.com/library/Birth_Control.asp

Father Ford, Paul VI and Birth Control

Germain Grisez Offers New Light on the Papal Commission

By E. Christian Brugger

WASHINGTON, D.C., MAY 11, 2011 (Zenit.org).- Anyone interested in the rise of the phenomenon of public dissent by Catholics from the Church’s moral teaching in the last 40 years is familiar with the controversy generated by the publication of the papal encyclical "Humanae Vitae" issued by Pope Paul VI on July 25, 1968.

That publication was preceded by five years of careful review on the part of the Pope on all sorts of questions related to the regulation of birth. Part of that review was entrusted to a study group made up of ecclesiastics and experts, popularly referred to as the "Papal birth control commission."

The study group, formally called the Pontifical Commission on Population, Family, and Birthrate, was actually established by Pope John XXIII on April 27, 1963, six months after the start of the Second Vatican Council. Contrary to popular belief, its purpose was not to consider whether the Church should change its teaching on contraception, but rather to assist the Holy See in preparing for an upcoming conference sponsored by the United Nations and the World Health Organization.

John XXIII died 37 days later and Cardinal Giovanni Montini was elected Pope on June 21, taking the name Paul VI. The new Pope was keenly aware of the problem posed to the Church by the new secular consensus in the West on birth control. Catholics were increasingly using contraception and European theologians were beginning to challenge the received teaching in scholarly journals. He was also undecided on the question of whether the birth control pill, because it did not interfere with the performance of sexual intercourse, was a form of contraception. Advisors from all sides were pressing upon him a sense of urgency about the issue and urging him to take up the topic for consideration.

The Pope agreed that the issue needed serious consideration, but thought that the Vatican Council, now in its second year, was not the proper place to undertake it. He thus decided to expand the membership of the Pontifical Commission, which he did on June 23, 1964, adding physicians, psychiatrists, demographers, sociologists, economists and married couples. Because he did not clearly specify the commission's new mandate, its members redefined it on their own: to re-examine the content and status of the received teaching in the Catholic Church on the use of birth control.

Because it was a confidential commission, many details related to its inner workings have never been made known. We do know, however, that a year before "Humanae Vitae" was published, and about six months after the commission finished its work, in the spring of 1967, four commission documents were leaked to the press and published in English and French. They revealed that a majority of the members were in favor of overturning the traditional teaching on contraception and had recommended as much to the Pope.

The press had a field day with the leaked documents. Catholics throughout the world were given the impression that the Church was prepared to "change its teaching" on the contraception question. Consequently, false hopes and expectations were solidified. This in part accounts for the consternation many in the Church expressed in July 1968 when the Holy Father reaffirmed the ancient teaching.

Why were Catholics so poorly prepared to receive the papal teaching? Why did the Pope receive so little support from the bishops of the world? Why would defenders of change leak documents that were likely to cause terrible confusion in the minds of simple Catholics? Several books outlining the workings of the commission have been published over the years, but most have been written by steadfast opponents of "Humanae Vitae."

The rest of the story

The eminent American moral theologian, Germain Grisez, professor emeritus of Christian ethics at Mount Saint Mary's University in Emmitsburg, Maryland, recently published on his Web site, The Way of the Lord Jesus (www.twotlj.org/Ford.html), several of the official documents of the papal commission, including the four leaked documents.

Few persons alive today are more qualified than Grisez to speak on the workings of the commission. As a young moral philosopher, he was the right hand man of Jesuit Father John C. Ford, the foremost American moral theologian at the time and most influential theological advisor of the commission who defended the Church's traditional teaching. Together, Ford and Grisez drafted most of the commission's documents setting forth arguments in defense of the received teaching against artificial contraception.

Grisez provides links to the documents in the context of a biographical essay on Father John C. Ford, a truly great Jesuit who suffered seriously for his defense of the Catholic truth on sexual morality (not to be confused with Holy Cross Father John T. Ford). The documents make clear that from the earliest days of its expansion under Paul VI, the commission's secretary-general, Dominican Father Henri de Riedmatten, in concert with other like-minded members of the commission, were determined to persuade the Pope to overturn the Church's teaching on contraception.

When a vote was taken on June 20, 1966, of the 15 prelate members of the commission who were present, nine of the 15 bishops voted in favor of change. In addition, 12 of the 19 theological experts supported change, as did almost all of the lay advisory members. Sadly, even Paul VI's personal theologian, Bishop Carlo Colombo, made clear that he believed there might be contraceptive methods consistent with the Church's moral tradition.

Commission member Archbishop Karol Wojtyła of Kraków was prevented from attending the sessions because of obstacles put in place by the Polish authorities. No doubt he would have voted in the minority.

In publishing "Humanae Vitae," the Pope had to break with the views of a majority of his cardinal and bishop advisors, as well as with his own personal theologian. Recalling Father Ford's comments on the disproportionate results of the consultation, Grisez writes: "Plainly, Ford observed, when Pope Paul reorganized the commission, he hardly tried to load it against change; rather, he wanted to give the proponents of change every opportunity to make their case." They made their case, and the Pope rejected it as wanting.

Grisez's recently published account will supply important material for a critical evaluation, perhaps re-evaluation, of a painful period in the Church's recent history -- the pain of which is still being keenly felt in the life of the Church.

* * *

E. Christian Brugger is a Senior Fellow of Ethics and director of the Fellows Program at the Culture of Life Foundation; and the J. Francis Cardinal Stafford Chair of Moral Theology at St. John Vianney Theological Seminary in Denver, Colorado.

[Readers may send questions regarding bioethics to bioethics@zenit.org. The text should include your initials, your city and your state, province or country. The fellows at the Culture of Life Foundation will answer a select number of the questions that arrive.]

Katanungan Hinggil sa 1965 Missal

Pope Paul VI, the Prophet of Life, celebrating the Holy Mass

Anonymous said...

Father, ano po ang masasabi niyo sa 1965 missal? di po ba yan po yung halos kapareho ng TLM na isinalin sa vernacular tapos may mga kaunitng nabago tulad ng paggamit ng "Katawan ni Cristo" sa komunyon at ang pagtanggal ng Last gospel? Salamat po.

May 4, 2011 4:53 PM

Fr. Abe, CRS said...

ANG 1965 MISSAL AY NAGTATAGLAY NG RITE OF THE HOLY MASS AS APPROVED BY THE SERVANT OF GOD POPE PAUL VI. ANG MISANG ITO AY SIMPLIFIED VERSION NG TLM.

MAGANDA ANG PAULINE MASS DAHIL ITO AY NASA VERNACULAR AT NAPAKA SIMPLE DAHIL TINANGGAL ANG MGA ELEMENTO NA IDINAGDAG SA MISA THROUGH THE COURSE OF THE CENTURIES NA HINDI NAMAN TALAGA ESSENTIAL SA CELEBRATION NG HOLY MASS. MERON DING DINAGDAG TULAD NG CONCELEBRATION, ANG RESPONSORIAL PSALM, ANG SECOND READING KAPAG SUNDAYS AND SOLEMNITIES AT IBA PA. SUBALIT ANG MGA IDINAGDAG AY GALING LAHAT SA CATHOLIC AND BIBLICAL TRADITION.

ANG TLM AT ANG PAULINE MASS AY PAREHONG VALID MASS NG LATIN RITE. THEY ARE THE EXTRAORDINARY AND ORDINARY FORMS NG ATING ROMAN RITE. DAPAT PAREHO NATIN ITONG MAHALIN AT TANGKILIKIN. WAG PANIWALAAN ANG MGA MAKITID ANG ISIP NA TLM LANG ANG GUSTO AT YUNG IBA NA ITINATAKWIL ANG TLM.

May 4, 2011 8:10 PM

THE MODERNIST PERSONA by Jack Taylor

His Holiness Pope Paul VI

We have all had the experience of meeting someone, hearing him tell us he is Catholic, then finding out as the conversation continues that he denies or is entirely ignorant of some portion of the Catholic faith.

Many such people seem to love being in the Church and are involved in almost every parish ministry—yet they do not know or believe that missing Mass without just cause on Sunday is a serious sin, that using artificial contraception or living together before marriage are grave moral evils, or that doing any of these things would require the rite of reconciliation before one could receive the Eucharist worthily. The concept of sin as an actual stain on the soul is unfamiliar or unreasonable to them.

They put off baptizing a new child until it can be conveniently done at the next family reunion, and they wonder aloud why a small child should go to a first confession before receiving First Communion. The most vocal among them openly disagree with the teachings of the Holy Father or the lessons of Sacred Scripture, particularly those of Paul on sexual morality.

When we ask them how this can square with traditional Church teachings, they tell us that the lessons in Scripture are really more suitable for an earlier time—as is our current pope. They say they cannot conceive of a God who would impose all these intricate rules on mankind in the name of love. God, after all, is love, and rules—well, rules are of human origin.

We come away from these encounters dazed, wondering how these people can believe themselves Catholics. I submit that they are Catholics, but rather are more accurately described as Modernists or as Neo-Modernists. They are the product of a systematic teaching program which has been in full swing since the close of the Second Vatican Council. That teaching program is the outgrowth of an earlier movement which, in 1907, Pius X condemned as Modernism in his encyclical .

To point this out is not to invite name-calling. The purpose is to state a fact already well known: that a large non-Catholic subculture has come to share the pews with Catholics in churches around the world. The purpose is also to suggest that, contrary to appearances, the ascendancy of this subculture is passing.

If Catholics would like to speed the process, they need to understand both the origins and the failures of the Modernist movement and the opportunities at hand for bringing Neo-Modernists into the fullness of the Catholic faith.

To begin with, Modernism is not so much a theological movement as it is a philosophical one. It springs from the ideas of Rene Descartes (15961650), who is rightfully called the father of modern philosophy, but who was not a Modernist in the sense that the word came to describe a movement within the Catholic Church. Descartes believed in the objective content of divine revelation, but he sought a way of presenting the reality of God to skeptics who would not accept revelation as an avenue of truth.

A calculus of faith

In Descartes' day, science was the source of brilliant successes. The application of mathematical methods in astronomy had resulted in great advancements; the Copernican Revolution had shown, contrary to some interpretations of Scripture, that the earth was not at the center of the solar system. Scientists seemed to demonstrate findings with precision and clarity.

Descartes hoped to bring a similar clarity to the belief in God by applying mathematical and scientific methods. He desired to build a kind of calculus of faith, starting from some fundamental principle which even the skeptics could not deny, and working to the undeniable existence of God. To this end, he began to examine everything in the world from the skeptic's point of view, creating a procedure that came to be known as "methodic doubt."

He first concluded that the man's senses are not reliable. A stick looks straight when it is held in the air, but looks bent when it is stuck in the water. Since both the true and false images of the stick are presented to the mind by the same senses, the senses cannot be trusted.

(Here he ignored the fact that, using all of his senses, man can confirm the stick to be straight. This is characteristic of a scientific method that tends to dissect things and isolate one attribute from all others when analyzing anything.)

Next he concluded that the mind of man, trapped inside a body fed unreliable information by the senses, cannot be certain that the images it receives truly represent reality. He went so far as to speculate that some evil higher being could be feeding the information to the mind, making it that there is an objective world out there when in fact there is not. In the long run, Descartes concluded that almost everything we normally take for granted can be doubted.

Even skeptics concur

It was not that Descartes doubted. He was examining everything from the perspective of a skeptic to find something even the skeptic could not doubt. What he found is summed up in the phrase, "" ("I think, therefore I am"). No skeptic could doubt this. Even if the entire world is an illusion, the skeptic, by the simple fact that he is pondering the illusion, must admit that he himself exists.

After demonstrating the certainty of his own existence as a thinking mind, Descartes reasoned his way back to the existence of the world and to the existence of a God who is all good and therefore would not fool man by creating the world as an illusion.

The validity of Descartes' reasoning was challenged for being, among other things, circular, but an important aspect of his thought remains with us to this day—the concept of man as a mind trapped in a body. It is because of Descartes' thus splitting man that today one can still pick up popular books about the so-called "mind/body problem."

Descartes himself . was not very interested in this problem. The important point is that this severing of the mind from the body was a direct divergence from the previously established Scholastic and Catholic view of man as a composed unity of body and soul. The human soul, in the Scholastic sense, is much more than a mind. It is the substantial form of a man. It is the nature of the soul to form the body, and the body and soul together are the man.

Man, in this sense, has direct knowledge of the objective world around him because he sees it, hears it, tastes it, puts his hands on it. It is evident to him, and need not be proven. This is not to say that some knowledge of the world does not result from proofs. Through proofs one can come to the knowledge, for example, that the tangent of an angle is always equal to the inverse of the cotangent of that same angle.

But one can know that a river exists by seeing it and putting one's feet in it. This type of knowledge is more certain than knowledge obtained by proofs. It cannot, and need not, be proven through a series of mathematical or logical propositions and conclusions.

Unfortunately, there was no great Scholastic philosopher among Descartes' associates to hammer this point home. As a consequence, modern philosophy has thought of man ever since in a dualistic manner: mind distinct from body.

Descartes' division of man created a division in modern philosophy itself. Some philosophers believed, like Descartes, that the only things we can know with certainty are concepts in the mind. These are the "Rationalists." A counter-movement thought we can know things for sure only through our senses; what is in our minds, since it cannot be sensed, measured, and weighed, is basically unknowable. These are the "Empiricists."

It is beyond the scope of this article to trace out the various schools of thought spawned by these two philosophies, but it can be known that they all came to despair because each was looking at only a part of man while trying to understand how man as a whole can know things.

It's all in your mind

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) tried to bring these two lines back together, but only succeeded in driving man further inside himself, believing, in the end, that man can know things only in his own mind, never things as they exist outside of his mind.

In what he called his own "Copernican Revolution," Kant declared that the mind does not conform itself to the world, rather the world conforms itself to the mind. The world we know is constructed inside our minds from unstructured sense data our minds receive.

In the face of a philosophy like this, the objective world becomes unknowable, then irrelevant, and finally nonexistent. The only thing worth studying is how man conceives things in the depths of his own mind.

This is the reason why modern philosophers have ceased to be able to say anything intelligible to the average man who continues to live in the objective world, transporting body and soul to and from work, using his five senses to navigate the objective reality of rush-hour traffic. The Church, though, never abandoned Scholasticism and has fostered a flowering of interest in Scholasticism in the twentieth century.

The effect of Rationalism, when applied to theology, also led to despair. It separated belief in God from the objective events of history, such as the burning bush and the Incarnation of Jesus Christ. It focused on how man God rather than how man can God through creation and revelation.

This tendency showed up almost immediately in the person of the Jewish philosopher Benedict de Spinoza (1632-1677), whose life overlapped with that of Descartes. In Spinoza we find the foreshadowing of the Modernist persona in religion. He followed Descartes in seeking the origin of truth in the confines of his own mind, but he departed from Descartes in that he abandoned belief in traditional theology entirely.

For Spinoza, biblical miracles were misinterpreted natural events, and the writings of the prophets applied only to their time of life, not to his. He did not see support in Scripture for belief in angels or the immortality of the human soul, and he once told his fellow students in the synagogue that they knew more about physics or theology than Moses.

With Spinoza we find revealed religion replaced with pantheism: The universe and everything in it is God. Individual things are just different of God. Spinoza's is a religion of the mind, independent of historical events, institutions, dogma, and doctrines. Spinoza set the theme that would be developed over the next three hundred years.

A few examples will suffice to demonstrate how a religion of the mind eventually denied that God was an objective reality and laid the foundation for Modernism.

The Deists in England, for example, took the line that God would only do things in reasonable ways. They held that, since knowledge of God had to be accessible to all, it would not come through revelation to just a select group of people, but through common reason which is accessible to all.

Matthew Tyndall (1657-1733), one of the most respected Deists of the eighteenth century, declared that, since the essence of Christianity is ethics, grasped by natural reason, there is no need for divine revelation. Religion thus is separate from miracles, history, religious institutions, and priestly hierarchies. No one needs anyone else to tell him what to do; we can all figure it out for ourselves through reason.

In France, Rationalism took a nastier turn. Francois Marie Arouet de Voltaire (1694-1778), who coined the term "modern," was impressed with English Deism and believed that the rational man would believe in God, but certainly not institutional religion. He used his formidable wit and skill as a writer to heap scorn on the concept of Christian salvation and to paint the Church as a cruel instrument of an oppressive hierarchy.

In doing so, he planted the seeds for the darker side of the French Revolution (1789), in which reason finally reigned supreme. People found reasons for scuttling boats full priests and nuns in the Seine because drowning them individually, or tied together in pairs in what was called a "Republican wedding," was taking too long.

In Germany, the idealist philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) did not scorn religious dogma or institutional religion, but trivialized it as a phase in man's intellectual evolution. All ideas, according to Hegel, have their moment in history before encountering antithetical ideas with which they are combined into a higher synthesis. The higher synthesis has its moment as an idea before it, too, undergoes the same process in a continuous witch's brew of evolving truth. Religious doctrines and dogma then are a phase through which man passed on the way to an ever higher consciousness.

When David Friedrich Strauss (1808-1874) combined Hegel's theory with the historical biblical criticism that was popular at the time, the result was predictable. In his three-volume work , he tells us that the Gospels were neither revelation nor history, but the ideas of people who were deeply moved by the moral example of Jesus.

The Gospel writers were pre-scientific people, innocent of historical methods, who saw no inconsistency in weaving myths into to life Jesus. They projected their own faith onto the life of the man Jesus.

Thus far, the movements discussed are not Modernism as the term applies to a movement in the Catholic Church, but they bring together two streams of thought that form the current from which Modernism is liberally watered.

The first is the tendency to see God as something conceived in man's mind, rather than as something exterior to man. The second is to blend such thinking with a biblical criticism that claimed, among other things, that the Gospels were written, a couple of generations after the fact, by people who had no contact with the historic Jesus. These writers, it is suggested, were not interested in history. They were more interested in convincing non-believers and passing on the faith as they conceived it.

The reality of God is reduced to the way people God in various religious communities. The Old Testament writers conceived of a judgmental God in a way characteristic of their times. New Testament writers conceived him in as more loving, but still within the context and moral prejudices of their times.

In this manner, the traditional relationship (God's dictating man's concept of morality) is turned on its head; it is man's morality, in any given time or place, that dictates his concept of God.

Modernism is the attempt by Catholic theologians, most prominently George Tyrrell (1861-1909) in England and Alfred Loisy (18571940) in France, to introduce these trends into Catholic theology. Tyrrell, an Irish-born Jesuit, was a scholar and a poet.

He proposed "Immanentism," in which religious truth exists in the heart and mind of the individual believer, not in some unchangeable, objective reality exterior to man. Loisy, a priest—scholar and historian, used biblical criticism to propose that Jesus had never thought of himself as God, but only as a prophet.

Loisy believed that Jesus had never intended to establish a Church and sacramental system at all. To get back on track with Jesus, he wanted the Church to stop teaching doctrines and dogmas and concentrate on bringing the world a message of hope. The combination of the ideas of these two men is Modernism—a faith which is , based on a communal life without the constraints of institutions and creeds.

The heresy that didn't die

Though Modernism was condemned and both Tyrrell and Loisy were excommunicated, it remained a strong, formative force among theologians right up to the Second Vatican Council. But, the teaching office of the Church has always looked on the faith in another way. Certainly faith includes the way we live in whatever times we find ourselves; but there is another meaning to the word faith which indicates its content, the deposit of faith, which does not change from community to community or from age to age.

Since the of faith is a response to the of the faith, you cannot have one without the other. Part of the objective content of the faith is the belief that the Gospels were written by apostles and that they conveyed the historic events of the life of Jesus as witnessed by his followers. It was not the faith of Christians that created the events in the life of Jesus, but the events witnessed in the life of Jesus that created the faith of Christians.

The apostles wrote about these events in order to convince their audience, but that does not mean that what they said is not true. When a lawyer describes events to jurors to persuade them of the innocence of his client, these events must have some grounding in fact, particularly when there are other eyewitness present. The same is true for the Gospel writers.

The Second Vatican Council itself came down resoundingly against Modernist theories. While the Church encouraged the legitimate use of critical methods in exegesis (when freed from the secularizing prejudices), , declared that the Church maintains that the "apostles and other men associated with the apostles . . . committed the message of salvation to writing" (7).

The four Gospels these men wrote, "whose historicity she unhesitatingly affirms, faithfully hand on what Jesus, the Son of God, while he lived among men, really did and taught" (19). The Church reminded the faithful that "the task of authentically interpreting the word of God . . . has been entrusted exclusively to the living teaching office of the Church" (9).

The Council also went against Modernism in , affirming the hierarchical structure of the Church and the necessity of unity with the Holy Father, who, by virtue of his office, "has full, supreme and universal power over the whole Church, a power which he can always exercise unhindered" (22).

Making an end run

When Modernist theories were explicitly rejected at the Council, Modernists tried to sell their program at the parish level by making it appear that Vatican II had endorsed their views. Within months of the close of the Council, a new catechism was issued by the Dutch bishops, it expounded Modernist views.

The catechism was published in numerous languages and was quickly being sold around the world. Soon it became the source of catechetical works emphasizing the essence of the Eucharist as a communal meal, but not as the Real Presence of Jesus Christ; emphasizing the priesthood of all believers, but never the sacrament of holy orders; emphasizing the conscience of the individual, but never the binding authority of the magisterium of the Church and particularly not the authority of the Holy Father.

This phase has been called Neo-Modernism because it moved to aggressive proselytizing at the parish level, whereas Modernism before Vatican II was more of an ivory-tower phenomenon.

The Vatican met the challenge head-on, calling on the Dutch bishops to correct their catechism and countering its effect with the promulgation of Pope Paul VI's , which reaffirmed the Catholic truths that Modernism was denying.

Neo-Modernist teaching, however, has continued at the street level. Educational texts and programs incorporating its creedless Christianity are still cranked out in such quantities that the old method of placing such books on an index is impossible. Religion teachers who drank deeply of Modernist principles are still at their posts, and many of this graying cadre are still true advocates of the Modernist movement. It is probably true that this group will have to die out before it will become possible to teach pure Christianity again without resistance.

At the same time, things have steadily gone downhill for the Modernist movement. In 1993, the Church brought out the , which is thoroughly orthodox despite aggressive attempts by Modernists to implant their themes in it. It is a bestseller around the world to a degree that the authors of the Dutch Catechism could only envy.

A 1995 survey of Catholic priests in American showed a major shift away from Modernist views. Contemporary research, including the recent work at Oxford University by Carsten Peter Thiede, a leading authority on New Testament manuscripts, places the writing of the synoptic Gospels in a period predating A.D. 66-70, thus establishing their prophetic content regarding the destruction of Jerusalem and placing them firmly within the lifetimes of eyewitnesses to the existence of Jesus.

There is also evidence of a movement away from Modernism's emphasis on individual communities toward a unity centered on the Holy See and the Pope's stands against "the culture of death," which is the secular inheritance of modern philosophy.

Dying, but not dead

At the same time, the Modernist movement, even as it is losing ground in scriptural scholarship and theology, has inflicted deep wounds in the body of the Church. Those teachers who continue teach the Neo-Modernist line are not healing the body, but pouring salt in the wounds. Pointing this out is not divisive; it is the responsible thing to do, especially for the sake of children and converts who have been exposed to Neo-Modernist teaching since Vatican II.

Neo-Modernist teachers do not assent to the creed of the Catholic Church and, therefore, would not themselves have passed the most rudimentary catechism class at any time in Christian history. In dissenting from the creed, they have refused to teach it and have created a class of people who, not having been taught the creed, cannot be considered to be Catholic in the full sense of the word.

Many people are in this state through no fault of their own. They are Modernists, not by deliberate choice, but because they have been caught in the Modernists' web. Should we begin calling them such? It would serve no good purpose. They have, in some sense, been baptized into the body of the Catholic Church. Many of them are innocent of the Christian creed, which should have been their true inheritance. It is in their innocence of the creed that we should think of them as Modernists and not Catholics. Why? Because they stand in a good position to embrace the fullness of the Catholic faith.

Among the young, such as the hundreds of thousands who attend World Youth Days, there is a hunger for the fullness of the faith, an openness to the sacramental life, a willingness to adhere to an exacting morality. We should provide them with authentic teachers to compensate for the Neo-Modernist teachers they had. We should rain down catechisms among them in the universities, high schools, and CCD programs and exhort them to take up and read the fullness of the faith.

In this way, they can come to know the creed and say ", I believe!" By believing, they can begin to hope; by hoping, they can truly learn to love; and by loving, which starts with knowing the creed, they can become fully Catholic. This should be our great enterprise as we approach the first day of the next millennium—the prayerful evangelization of the Church from the inside out.

What then of the Neo-Modernist teachers and clergy who still occupy their posts? They too should be the objects of our solicitude and prayer. When Thomas More was condemned to death by his fellow Englishmen for adhering to the authentic faith that they themselves had abandoned, he showed no rancor and refrained from guessing their motives.

He said he hoped and prayed to see them in heaven someday, and he knew it was possible, because both Stephen, who was stoned to death, and Saul, who held the coats of those who stoned Stephen, now stand side by side as saints of the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church. We should be so charitable. We should be so true.

Jack Taylor freelances from Northern Virginia.

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This article was taken from the November 1996 issue of "This Rock," published by Catholic Answers, P.O. Box 17490, San Diego, CA 92177, (619) 541-1131, $24.00 per year.

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