We continue our analysis of the landmark 1907 encyclical Pascendi by Pope St Pius X. While this piece can absolutely stand alone, we invite you to more nuance and understanding in recent articles and videos starting in early October.
I am working to build a bridge of understanding for Novus Ordo Catholics–including those in my own very intimate circle–to us Traditionalists, at least on a basic level. I say “basic,” because even inside “Tradition” are differing facets that would be too cumbersome at this point in our efforts.
There’s a particular venom in the modernist distortion of Tradition that Pius X describes in paragraph 15–a twisting so subtle it doesn’t destroy the idea of “handing down” the faith, but rewires its meaning altogether. Tradition, once understood as the transmission of truth, becomes instead the transmission of feeling. The Modernist doesn’t deny revelation outright; he redefines it, as if what God said once in time must now evolve to suit each man’s experience. In doing so, he converts the faith from a divine inheritance into a kind of collective self-expression–a religion of mood and performance, endlessly renewable, endlessly malleable, endlessly manipulable. This is how the language of the Church becomes a stage for sentiment rather than a fortress of meaning, how even Scripture and liturgy are drained of their objective power and filled instead with some perceived electricity of the moment.
And that’s how you turn revelation into a rebrand. That’s how you turn Christ into a caricature:
15. But this doctrine of experience is also under another aspect entirely contrary to Catholic truth. It is extended and applied to tradition, as hitherto understood by the Church, and destroys it. By the Modernists, tradition is understood as a communication to others, through preaching by means of the intellectual formula, of an original experience. To this formula, in addition to its representative value, they attribute a species of suggestive efficacy which acts both in the person who believes, to stimulate the religious sentiment should it happen to have grown sluggish and to renew the experience once acquired, and in those who do not yet believe, to awake for the first time the religious sentiment in them and to produce the experience. In this way is religious experience propagated among the peoples; and not merely among contemporaries by preaching, but among future generations both by books and by oral transmission from one to another. Sometimes this communication of religious experience takes root and thrives, at other times it withers at once and dies. For the Modernists, to live is a proof of truth, since for them life and truth are one and the same thing. Hence again it is given to us to infer that all existing religions are equally true, for otherwise they would not live.
It’s no exaggeration to say that this passage could have been written for our time–and many a Traditionalist, joining Pascendi to prophecies of great men like Padre Pio and of the Blessed Mother herself, believe it was. In other words, many a Catholic may look at Pascendi as something meant for a still more future generation, or if indeed it was intended for us, certainly it must apply to aspects and figures of the “woke left.” It is in fact what the religionization of politics has done to our understanding, in my estimation.
It is why for so long I was warning about putting our faith exclusively in Donald Trump and MAGA as though they were and are an extension of God and the good, even though yes, I voted for Trump and believe that he was a viable means to an end.
The binary is found in Genesis 3:15, not in conservative vs woke. Conservative isn’t even conservative, if we’re honest with ourselves.
For the Modernist, truth “lives” because it adapts; it proves itself not by immovable coherence with objective divine revelation but by popularity, virality, and emotional resonance. In such a system, what “thrives” must therefore be true, and what fades must therefore be false. The Gospel becomes a trending topic, the liturgy transforms (1969) into a tool of engagement, and the Word made flesh is recast as a word made flexible, understanding, compassionate. The supernatural collapses into the psychological, and the sacred becomes a self-reinforcing echo chamber–where truth doesn’t descend from heaven but rises from within, like a social algorithm trained to reward belief itself rather than the object of belief.
That is where my work on memetic energy is important to consider.
And that’s the genius of the deception: it baptizes feeling and calls it faith. Everyone thinks they’re right and throws a “Christ is King” out there every so often as an appearance of Christian unity.
Or a “we all worship the same God.”
Many a “Catholic” talking head will say this and show Vatican II documents as proof of it.
The Traditionalist would contend that if this is true, then now we are swimming in the impossible depths of the Law of Non-Contradiction–unpacked by many a Catholic giant, including none other than the great St Thomas Aquinas.
And that’s where mass psychosis takes place in a society, in a supposed “Church.”
The Modernist “tradition” is no longer something received but something performed. It thrives on affect of the crowd, not assent to the one true King. Barabbas vs Jesus anyone? The faith becomes something you feel into being–something that lives because enough people agree it should. What Pius X described as the transmission of “religious experience” is exactly what defines the digital and ecclesial moment today: the Church as influencer network, the Mass as “shared experience,” the truth as whatever still “gets engagement.”
That’s how the old serpent of Genesis hides in new light–turning revelation into repetition, and life itself into the proof of truth.
The crowd was right in releasing Barabbas because the proof was in the numbers.
Read that again.
And it’s no coincidence that this new “Tradition” thrives most where digital life reigns supreme. Online, belief spreads not through conviction but contagion. “Religious experience” is now measured by reach. The Modernist didn’t just change theology–he built the architecture for what would one day become the algorithm. Elon Musk and X could take us only so far. The algorithm has become our catechist because we chose to worship the messengers instead of just culling them for the message and the message only. We stayed on the train instead of getting off at the station because we didn’t recognize that their purpose wasn’t to lead us to God but to god.
I say “we” with a purpose. I know as fact that many people did utilize the MAGA movement as inspiration to believe that the woke left could be defeated. But that should never have been the ultimate goal. And probably to a more numerous degree, many people trusted MAGA with their souls and their futures–including eternity–and now they are stuck living inside a movement they refused to keep at arm’s distance.
Politics became and is their religion. We warned about this very directly in October 2023–two years ago yesterday in fact–when there was still time:
This is why we must prepare our minds now for the confusion, the cognitive dissonance, the inevitable schizophrenic posture that could cripple political discourse worse than it already is, when we either admit that we cannot stand by certain “allies” anymore or else go all in with whatever they stand for, whether that be evil or not–simply because our collective American mind cannot handle any more nuance than that. We must must must avoid going all in with either Team A or Team B, because it has long been more complicated than that, and it’s only going to get worse.
Once truth is measured by what “lives,” what goes viral, what generates clicks and tears and outrage, the faith itself becomes subject to the whims of the crowd. What’s alive, we say, must be authentic. What’s unpopular must be outdated.
But this is not Christianity. This is Darwinism of the spirit–a survival of the loudest, not the truest.
Now apply to the political stage. Now consider politics as religion.
The Traditional Catholic is yelling from the rooftops, “Over here! Over here! Christ isn’t King where you are, no matter how much ‘winning’ you’re experiencing!”
If the liturgy and the sacraments are no longer the worship of God but the celebration of ourselves and photo ops, then it becomes a mirror hall of emotion–a place where sincerity replaces sanctity, and dramatic tears at a weekend retreat become the new theology. If the Mass must “live” to be “true,” then we will keep reinventing it until it dies altogether.
If you know about some of the abominations already happening–and have been since the 1970s, at the outset–you may wonder if it already has.
And that is why you are also sad as you write this, all of this for years now. Passionate about spreading a little actual Catholic history, yes, but…sad.
That’s the quiet suicide of the Modernist project. It promises life but drains the soul of the very thing that makes life eternal–objective truth.
What Pius X–and many other popes both before and after him–diagnosed was not merely a theological heresy but a psychological coup. A hostile takeover of man’s interior life disguised as enlightenment. For once revelation becomes experience, once sentiment becomes sacrament, then the only authority that remains is emotion itself. And emotion, unlike revelation, changes by the hour.
It is as changeable as their reaction to Christ on a donkey on Palm Sunday and their shouts for his crucifixion five days later.
We now live inside that volatility–where digital religion thrives on the same energy as political propaganda, feeds on the same “teaching” of shepherds that is in DIRECT opposition to what Catholic teaching was inspired to over nearly two millennia. What trends becomes what is true; what feels compassionate becomes what is good. What the latest Leo says must be right because he’s the pope–even though by extension we must discount entirely the fact that other popes said everything differently.
Close our eyes.
It’ll just go away.
Throw ourselves in the latest weekend on the ballfields without true intention to find the truth.
We’ll forget we might be responsible by Monday.
And God will just forgive us for our “unintended” ignorance.
Do we really think God shall be mocked in such ways?
No, I’m sorry, but God does not forgive indifference as though it were innocence. He forgives the contrite, not the complacent.
We weren’t meant to drift in this lukewarm fog between faith and fandom. The Apocalypse says it clearly. We were meant to be pierced by the sword of truth–to know it, to stand on it, to bleed for it if necessary. That’s what the saints understood. That’s what Pius X was trying to remind us of before the smoke of Modernism changed even the language of faith itself.
We stand now at the far edge of that smoke, calling into the darkness for our brothers and sisters to remember what the word Tradition once meant–not a trend, not a performance, but the living memory of God’s Word entrusted to His Church.
I write all of this because I am sad–yes–but also because I still believe.
Because truth does not evolve, or fade, or trend.
It does not “live” by our affirmation.
Truth is. It just is. It’s exactly what Christ said to Pilate.
And that alone is enough to rebuild the world, if only we’ll stop washing our hands of the blood.
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