"The world awoke with a groan..."

St. Jerome (El Greco)
The Arian heresy was one of the first of the great heresies that threatened the soundness and unity of the Catholic Church. In its simplest terms, Arianism denies the trinitarian God and placed Jesus Christ below God the Father in substance and dignity. During the fourth century, the debates and excommunications raged as emperors and bishops sided with the heretics. St. Athanasius was exiled five different times by Arian forces. St. Jerome summed it up by writing, "The world awoke with a groan to find itself Arian." Catholics who held to orthodoxy often found themselves in the minority.



So too, the influences of Gertrude Stein, Pablo Picasso, Albert Einstein and their contemporaries to make a new world seeped into the thought of many Catholics, eventually creating what St. Pius X called "the synthesis of all heresies": Modernism.

It is hard to define Modernism in exact terms, but St. Pius X gave us a solid list of indicators in his encyclical Pascendi Dominici Gregis, Lamentabili Sane, and his Oath Against Modernism. Among these false, non-Catholic ideas are:

• Catholic dogma is irreconcilable with science and must be subservient to science

• Scripture interpretation is strictly personal and does not need the guidance of the Church

• All religions are equally valid

• There is nothing divine in sacred tradition

• Dogmas can be tailored to suit cultures and time periods

• There can be many "Christs" and Jesus Christ is not actually the Son of God

• Dogmas of the faith can change and evolve

• Christ's death as expiation for our sins is just an idea that St. Paul developed

• Mass was originally simply a Christian "supper" that later assumed the nature of a liturgical action

• Faith is simply a sentimental impulse of the unconscious

• Truth is not unchanging and can evolve



Now none of these ideas are teachings of the Church. Certainly they are not products of any Ecumenical Council, including the often invoked and seldom read Second Vatican Council. But for the last 30 years or so, the certitudes of the Catholic faith have been replaced by relativism, disobedience to the Magisterium and an unsettling imposition of a Church that seems to "change with the times" rather than offering a timeless refuge from the tempests of the world's decline. Forces within our Church have tried to secularize the Holy Catholic Faith. St. Pius tried to warn us, but many have ignored his warnings at their own peril.

Alas, for many of us, the Church awoke with a groan one day in the early 1970's to find itself Modernist.

Remember Athanasius. Those who deposed him are a mere footnote in history. He is a saint.

If you are one of the minority who have stood against the Modernist attack, hold on. Salvation is at hand.