Letters to His Holiness, Pope Pius X

Introduction

HE author of these letters to his Holiness, Pope Pius

X, is not known to me personally, but I have heard

enough about him to form a vivid picture of his char-

acter and attitude. My source of information is not

limited to Catholics; in fact, my acquaintance with him

is due to a widely known Protestant theologian, who lives in one of our Eastern metropolitan cities.

Judging from what I know, the author is a devout Christian and also a good Catholic in the broad sense of the word. He has been an active priest for many years, and is devoted to his pastoral work. But his piety has suffered severe shocks and he is fretting under the conflict between the ideal he cherishes and the realization with which, to his deep regret, he finds so much fault. The result is a state of mind which can be imagined from these letters to the highest ecclesiastical authority. They are written in the hope that His Holiness will hear the voice crying in the wilderness. If we are not mistaken in the signs of the time, this voice is not isolated. It finds a strong resonance in the minds of many pious Catholics, who realize that it would not be wise to speak out boldly because of the subtle methods of the organized hierarchy, which have hitherto proved very efficient in meeting any attempt at reform. It is easy enough to

Vil

Vili INTRODUCTION force the discontented out of the church, but the church would scarcely be benefited thereby.

These letters are not intended to create a sensation, but to prepare for a future which, in moments of enthusiasm, seems near at hand. They have a twofold purpose. On the one hand, our author wants to make the Curia feel its enormous responsibility, and on the other hand, to educate both priest and layman for the work of reconstruction.

The author, in his recent correspondence, expresses the purpose which he has in mind as follows:

“Nothing can be truer than your declaration that one who would work for reform needs to examine his conscience as to his motives. I can say in very solemn truth that before setting to work on the ‘Letters’ I examined mine. Two years before I put pen to the final writing I made a beginning on them—and tore up what I had written because not yet satisfied that I ought to undertake so grave a responsibility. All the thought that I could bring to the decision, as well as all the counsel I could get, preceded the determination to go ahead with the work. So far as I can read the processes of mind and conscience that issued in the decision to write the book, these two considerations were foremost. First, to do a work of education among the priests of the church. . I know that body of men well—their nobility, their vague aspirations, their concealed sufferings—and I am convinced to a degree of absolute certainty that the first step toward progress, and a primary need of truth, is to educate them

INTRODUCTION ix

—to undo, in part, anyhow, the results of a training in self-repression, which begins often when they are children of fourteen and fifteen—and leaves them for life with crippled personalities and perverted minds. Secondly, I desired to show—and make the effort, in the second part of the book—that dark and painful as the collapse of a cherished orthodoxy is—still, when criticism has done its worst, it leaves us a splendid Christ to revere, and an immortal spirit to purify and love.. I hope that the book is both educational and constructive. I trust it attacks nothing that Truth itself and Progress are not attacking—and that it has something to offer for all that it takes away. At all events, every word of it is written in sincerity, and many words of it were written in feelings which, if possible, are deeper still.”

In further comment I may add a word of my own.

I know the attraction which the Catholic church has, and at the same time I know the shortcomings of Protestantism. Many Protestants look upon art as pagan, if not as superstitious, while Catholicism has inherited, or rather gradually acquired, the beauty of old paganism. Pope Gregory X, when rebuilding St. Peter’s, crowned the cross of the aisles with the Pantheon in conscious recognition of his intention to have Christians imbued with the spirit of classical antiquity. This Pope, who was incapable of understanding the zeal of Luther and who is often denounced by Protestants as an infidel and a pagan, was, in his way, a reformer of the church. His love of art, quite in contradiction to the tendencies x INTRODUCTION of early Christianity, has become an inheritance of the Roman church, while Protestants, in contrast to Catholics, have retained to a great extent a hostile attitude to art. This is especially true of the Puritans.

Both Confessions, Romanism and Protestantism, have pursued their ideals in their own ways. By concentrating their fervor on truth irrespective of consequences, Protestant savants have worked out philosophy, science, and Biblical criticism, and have made science the basis of a new and higher civilization. The inheritance of Catholics has been limited to art and mystical devotion, and whatever may be wrong in it, Protestantism is now ready to broaden and to accept of art what is good and noble. Superstitions, at least so far as belief in legend and literalism is concerned, have in Protestant countries entirely lost their hold on the human mind and there is no danger of a relapse. It is time that the two hostile brothers should share their inheritance, and while Protestants would welcome art, Catholics might recognize the right of free inquiry and admit to scientific truth a place in their theology.

Should the Roman Catholic church not conform to the demands of the time, should the Curia continue to prevent a reformation so much needed, it is quite probable that many pious souls will break away from Rome and originate a genuine Catholic church. There are not a few who cling devoutly to the traditional form of worship, but who are dissatisfied with the narrowness of the old ecclesiastical institutions,

INTRODUCTION x1

The present Catholic church is not Catholic but is Italian, and even Roman. Its first principle is that only an Italian can become Pope, and among the Cardinals few non-Italians are tolerated in order to keep the balance of power in Italy. Will the time ever come when the Roman Catholic church will drop the epithet “Roman” and be simply a Catholic church in which Romans, Americans, English and Germans are on a parity?

In case Rome should be impervious to the kindly advice of her sons, would not the natural outcome be a Catholic church independent of Rome?

The situation reminds us of Christ’s lamentation over Jerusalem in Luke xix. 41-42: “And when he was come near, he beheld the city, and wept over it, saying, ‘If thou hadst known, even thou, at least in this thy day, the things which belong unto thy peace! but now they are hid from thine eyes.’” Let the men who have the ear of Pius X read the handwriting on the wall.

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AUTHORS PREFACE flan ne TYRRELL, less than a year before his too

early death, said, speaking of Modernism in America: “I cannot understand America. With its freedom and intelligence, its representatives ought to be in the forefront of the Modernist movement. Yet Modernism has produced there hardly an echo. The Church in America is asleep; and I can conceive nothing that will awaken it, but the production of some book native to the soil, which will raise so loud a cry of reform that all who have ears must hear.”

The disappointment expressed in these words has been felt and uttered by practically all the leading Modernists of Europe. On his visit here two years ago, Houtin said that Roman Catholicism in this country was in almost primeval darkness, and all but blind to what shall probably be considered one of the most momentous agitations of Christian history. Loisy in his mild way has wondered at the lack of intellectual activity among American Catholics, and Ehrhardt has expressed himself on the subject in terms of summary contempt, declaring in substance that the Church in America has yet to show the first sign of the possession of scholarship in the face of modern problems.

The astonishment and regret of these men are per-

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XIV AUTHOR’S PREFACE fectly natural. They are engaged in a movement for a religious life which shall be intelligent and free. They are seeking to prove that religion is greater than the formulas which once were thought adequate to express it; that the life of the spirit is not of so contemptible a value as to be menaced because a text is shown to be spurious, or a devout legend unmasked ; and that in seeking religious truth the intelligence of mankind ought not to be submitted to the coercion of any external authority, save the sovereign authority of critical and scientific evidence. What was more to be expected then, than that they should look for support to America, and to their co-religionists in America? Whence could a more zealous advocacy of Modernism have rightly been anticipated? To what other country could a movement for emancipation, intellectual and spiritual, turn with more confident assurance? The assurance was all the greater, as from among us had appeared Modernism’s precursor, Americanism. The late Pope condemned tendencies, which he said existed here, toward an undue independence, a restiveness under venerable restraints, and a general attitude of novelty, of experiment, and of modernizing. And it cannot be doubted that these admonitions of January, 1899, were received here with considerably more coolness than was to the fancy of the Papal court.

Americanism is a word that connotes patriotism. It seems to embrace all that is indigenous to this republic and is typical of it; and whatever becomes of Biblical

AUTHOR’S PREFACE XV criticism, or the philosophy of dogmatic conformity, the mass of Catholics in this country will not be un-American. So the Testis benevolentie, which laid Rome’s solemn disapproval upon Americanism, was not received with enthusiasm, and raised indeed in some quarters a levity not far removed from disdain which fitted ill with the letter’s august source. It assuredly loosened rather than tied more firmly the bonds uniting America to Rome.

But before going to the heart of the matter, a word must be said concerning the magnitude of this question of Modernism. It is not a squabble intra partetes, one of the petty ecclesiastical quarrels which the student of large problems can afford to despise. It is fundamentally a great question of spiritual liberty, attended, as advancing liberty nearly always is, with the tragic element of suffering, as men strive to reach forward to the new light of the intellect while not relinquishing the ancient loyalties of the heart. It has brought a crisis perhaps of life and death to the mightiest religious organization that has ever existed among men. It aims at a restatement of the creed, a revolutionary change in the external polity, and a regeneration of the inner spirit of the mother-church of Christendom. Upon the issue of it depends, to an extent which those who know the movement best are most inclined to magnify, the future place of Roman Catholicism in the history of civilization.

Will the Church, which was once the arbiter of Europe, turn aside from traditions of secular ambition and

XVi AUTHOR’S PREFACE authority ? Will the great tribunal which retains its Index, still a power, and its Inquisition, now a shadow, say to the scholar: “I will not interfere with you; be free!’’ and to the heretic: “I will not anathematize you; be sincere!” ? Will the institution which, claiming absolute infallibility, has moulded the minds of its devout adherents to total submissiveness, modify its claim, and relax the obedience in which it holds half the civilized world? These are the questions raised by Modernism. This is the crisis which has wrung a cry of terror from the present Pope. And the crisis is of so impressive a magnitude, extending indeed to other orthodoxies over and beyond the Roman; it is so full of possibilities for the religious history of the future that the interest in it must appeal not only to the Roman Catholic, but to every man reflective enough to read history in the events that happen before his eyes. Why then has the Church in the United States taken so small a part in the agitation? Principally for two reasons: “First, Modernism, while not wholly, is predominantly, an intellectual movement. It began in Biblical criticism with Loisy, Lagrange, and Minocchi, all under the influence of German scholarship. It pushed its researches into the history of dogma and comparative religion, with Cumont, Turmel, and Batiffol. And it ended in philosophy, with an attempt at reconstruction and reconciliation, under the leadership of Blondel, Laberthonniére, Le Roy, and Tyrrell. Now any movement of distinctively academic parentage will be slow in penetrating either the clergy or the laity. of the Roman Catholic

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Church in America. It is a simple fact that among them critical studies are in a state of infancy. The Catholic University at Washington, the best institution of that Church for furnishing an introduction to the methods of criticism, has only a handful of students, and the professors have repeatedly deplored the lack of interest in their school. And, to come to the most conspicuous as well as to an absolutely decisive proof that the Church in this country is intellectually backward, in all the voluminous literature of Biblical criticism, the history of dogmas and religions, and the philosophy of religious phenomena, not a single work of competence and authority has yet been produced by an American Catholic, and the books that reach even the second class are hardly more than half a dozen.

There are, of course, mitigating circumstances. The clergy here are busy with the rough work of building up a rapidly growing Church; and—a fact not less important—the Church in this young nation has no traditions of scholarship, no generations of illustrious thinkers and teachers, as Europe has, and in consequence it lacks one of the most powerful inspirations to a life of study and research.

There is another less creditable reason which cannot be ignored. A few years ago at a meeting of Catholic educators in Milwaukee, two papers were read, written by priests who had had long experience in the direction of seminaries, which declared with a frankness that quite stunned the college officials present, especially the Jesuits

XVili AUTHOR’S PREFACE among them, that the men sent up to the seminaries by Catholic colleges are in a condition of almost scandalous unfitness for prosecuting the higher studies of an ecclesiastical course. The indictment—for it was nothing less— stated that not only were these candidates deficient in positive erudition, but that they were mentally untrained, unable to grasp a problem, incapable of thinking for themselves, and formulating an independent personal conclusion on a matter of scholarship. The complaint was new only in the daring method of announcing it. It had been made years before in a less public manner, and is made still, by the professors of the Catholic University. Obviously a condition thus criticised must change before a fundamentally critical movement like Modernism can get a fair start.

Shall it ever be brought home? We think so; and believe it will be in the manner suggested in the keen remark of Father Tyrrell quoted at the head of this article. The very air and soil of America are favorable to Modernism, as to all other movements that make for intelligence, strength, sincerity and independence. We know what the American spirit is in the political and social order. Translate it into the religious order, and you have Modernism at its best and purest.

THE AUTHOR.

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