When Pope Pius X wrote Pascendi Dominici Gregis in 1907, he wasn’t describing a passing theological fad. He was diagnosing a spiritual pathogen. He knew what was rising within Christ’s Church–had been for decades, indeed over a century going back to Rothschild–and his pontificate did everything it could to crush what he called “the synthesis of all heresies.”
This wasn’t new to Pius X. Gregory XVI had fought it. Pius IX had fought it. Leo XIII had fought it–and even embedded his awareness of it in the long version of the St Michael prayer:
While the 1969 calendar mashed all the archangels into one feast day, the traditional calendar spotlighted the unique duties of each by celebrating them on different days. St Gabriel is March 24, the day before the Annunciation to Mary. Raphael is October 24.
And St Michael is September 29. We once celebrated something called Michaelmas, considered the Catholic thanksgiving, but that’s been lost too. I keep telling Catholics–and I continue to study it–there is a whole world that was never taught to us. And it goes well behind historical amnesia or innocent memory holing.
This is the long St Michael prayer as penned by Pope Leo XIII in 1886. Have you ever come across the specific lines “In the Holy Place itself, where the See of Holy Peter and the Chair of Truth has been set up as the light of the world, they have raised the throne of their abominable impiety, with the iniquitous design that when the Pastor has been struck, the sheep may be scattered”? I keep trying to tell people, and my former students, that there was an infiltration into the Church that goes beyond just a few bad shepherds here and there. It seems to me in my studies that the popes did not have the power we tend to think they had, especially since we’ve lived in the age of media in the last 70 years and how the pope has been so front and center of the Church. It wasn’t always like that, and from what I’ve seen, not supposed to be. This line by Leo–“have raised”–asserting it has already happened, further reveals this infiltration.
To me this is information that can further our understanding of Jesus’s words, “The gates of Hell shall not prevail against it,” not to mention Our Lady’s words at La Salette mere decades before Leo’s prayer when she said with tears, “Rome will lose the faith.”
Some scattered criticism of these popes’ level of courage out there notwithstanding, Pius X was following in his predecessors’ footsteps–but seemingly to a more alarming degree.
Or maybe it was just more alarming because of what 20th and 21st century destruction would follow his death.
Pascendi opens thus:
The office divinely committed to Us of feeding the Lord’s flock has especially this duty assigned to it by Christ, namely, to guard with the greatest vigilance the deposit of the faith delivered to the saints, rejecting the profane novelties of words and oppositions of knowledge falsely so called. There has never been a time when this watchfulness of the supreme pastor was not necessary to the Catholic body; for, owing to the efforts of the enemy of the human race, there have never been lacking “men speaking perverse things” (Acts xx. 30), “vain talkers and seducers” (Tit. i. 10), “erring and driving into error” (2 Tim. iii. 13). Still it must be confessed that the number of the enemies of the cross of Christ has in these last days increased exceedingly, who are striving, by arts, entirely new and full of subtlety, to destroy the vital energy of the Church, and, if they can, to overthrow utterly Christ’s kingdom itself.
This kind of direct, unambiguous, unapologetic language is absent from modern encyclicals, going back to the 1960s. The charge “to guard with the greatest vigilance the deposit of the faith delivered to the saints” has been replaced by a fixation on travel itineraries and airline miles, by misguided opinions on politics and people’s personal lives–by a pastoral style that has almost completely abolished how apostolic Christianity was taught and handed down for two millennia.
Politics has always been a part of the papacy, sure. But not to this degree, and not when it puts the souls of billions in danger.
My work, though often read by Protestants–especially former students and colleagues–is more directly written for fellow Catholics who have no idea that popes of the not-so-distant past taught things now directly contradicted by recent ones. That contradiction can no longer be ignored. The Truth depends on vigilance–and dare I say the courage of martyrs, given what is likely on the horizon with surveillance and something called the Noahide Laws.
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Pius X saw what Plato’s Cave we now inhabit–a false Church and a false world being dictated to us with shadows on the wall.
Beloved Catholics! Do we not see that this religion we are witnessing every day is one of two things? It’s either a disfigurement of the Bride just as the face of Christ was disfigured in his own Passion, or it is the prophesied end times counter church–foretold by both Scripture and the saints, perhaps most recently by Padre Pio and Bishop Fulton Sheen, but certainly alluded to at places like Fatima and La Salette. Perhaps even the apparition at Ecuador in the 1600s may shed light.
It’s one of those two.
Did Jesus not say the servant would have to endure the same condemnation as the Master?
The “novelties” and “arts entirely new” Pius X spoke of were not algorithms or AI feeds, but certainly the spirit behind them–the technological translation of the same old rebellion. Modernism’s genius has always been camouflage: it cloaks unbelief in the garments of faith, repackaging the eternal as something “evolving,” the immutable as something “inclusive,” and the supernatural as something “psychological.” Pius X thus exposed the hidden architecture of the enemy–a deception that would unfold across the next century with terrifying precision:
That We make no delay in this matter is rendered necessary especially by the fact that the partisans of error are to be sought not only among the Church’s open enemies; they lie hid, a thing to be deeply deplored and feared, in her very bosom and heart, and are the more mischievous, the less conspicuously they appear. We allude … to many who belong to the Catholic laity, … to the ranks of the priesthood itself, who, feigning a love for the Church, lacking the firm protection of philosophy and theology, … thoroughly imbued with the poisonous doctrines taught by the enemies of the Church, and lost to all sense of modesty, vaunt themselves as reformers of the Church; and, forming more boldly into line of attack, assail all that is most sacred in the work of Christ, not sparing even the person of the Divine Redeemer, whom, with sacrilegious daring, they reduce to a simple, mere man.
Is this not what we’ve done to Jesus Christ today? Is he truly the King we proclaim him to be? Where is the kingdom if so? Where is the hierarchy? Where is the majesty and reverence?
Christianity today lives in the meme, in the curated reel, in the digital “Church” that trades sacraments for sensations. It lives in the algorithm that decides what’s important not by truth but by engagement. It lives in the Christian nationalism spurred on by psyops like 9-11 and Charlie Kirk post-tragedy managed populism.
And the word “revival”… feels so good, doesn’t it?
How long do we think this “revival” will last? Which Jesus Christ is this “revival” based on, among the 50,000 denominations out there?
Or is it actually based on Charlie Kirk?
Please try to see through the fog. Please try to see the curated confusion.
Modernism was always doing the invading. Modernism was always doing the confusing. Pius X and his predecessors tried. Pius XI and Pius XII, at least on the surface, for there are controversies with them too, tried. But the 20th century and all its myriad deceptions would win out. We didn’t listen to the warnings at Fatima, those that called for prayer and penance. We went our own way, did our own thing. We succumbed to the distractions and the bread and the circuses, and I am just as guilty as anyone.
We are in the aftermath of that annihilation now. Is it not comical to think that a post-Charlie Kirk “revival” is going to save us? God Almighty shall not be mocked, as all Bible readers should understand. And most likely, only a divine chastisement not unlike those found in Old Testament times is going to wake us up to what devils and deceptions we have invited into our homes this whole time.
God has been warning about this since the very beginning:
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Pius X saw the inversion, the aping of good and evil, the switching of the seeds of Genesis, very clearly:
[They are] the most pernicious of all the adversaries of the Church. For as We have said, they put their designs for her ruin into operation not from without but from within; hence, the danger is present almost in the very veins and heart of the Church, whose injury is the more certain, the more intimate is their knowledge of her. Moreover they lay the axe not to the branches and shoots, but to the very root, that is, to the faith and its deepest fires. And having struck at this root of immortality, they proceed to disseminate poison through the whole tree, so that there is no part of Catholic truth from which they hold their hand, none that they do not strive to corrupt. Further, none is more skilful, none more astute than they, in the employment of a thousand noxious arts; for they double the parts of rationalist and Catholic, and this so craftily that they easily lead the unwary into error….
That line–the very root–is everything. The enemy no longer needs to burn down the cathedral; he just needs to rot its foundation. He doesn’t forbid prayer–he simply redefines it. He doesn’t outlaw the sacraments–he turns them into symbols, changes the time-honored, centuries-old words. He steals–or tries to make extinct–the “dead language” of Latin, “dead” precisely so that it never changes and cannot be manipulated with modern language evolution. He doesn’t destroy theology–he drowns it in self-therapeutic drivel.
He combines the Catholic and the Protestant. He combines the Catholic and the Enlightenment. He combines the Catholic and the false ideals of the French Revolution.
It all seems true. But it is a triad of false syntheses.
And the Church, tired and sentimental, and its laypeople, dulled by the comforts and ease of modern life, allow it.
We allow it all.
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A century after Pius X’s reign, what he called “noxious arts” are broadcast at light speed. We scroll through spiritual propaganda dressed in pastel aesthetics, priests turned podcasters, influencers baptizing heresy in self-help. The heresy is aesthetic now–elegant, marketable, shareable.
Modernism is malleable; it moves. It spreads by infection, not argument–and certainly not tradition. It manipulates emotion instead of nurturing cautious obedience and intellect. It turns “faith” into content that feels good while it dissolves the mind’s capacity for Truth itself. It is why it is more difficult than it should be to argue from a historically Catholic perspective, because not only are you providing approved Church content as a basis for your work, largely for the sake of teaching Novus Ordo Catholics, but you’re also having to fend off Protestant arguments who use Novus Ordo Catholic content creators’ work against you–and a lot of the time they’re not wrong.
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But that’s the point of Pascendi–Pius X warned against Protestant, Modernist thought changing the Church from within.
It is the hallmark of this pernicious rot: destruction through reinterpretation, through sustained algorithmic pressure, through a sweeping and unassailable memetic energy. It is how the digital world recreates reality. Truth is not erased–it is reframed, redefined.
According to whom? According to each person’s experience and feelings, of course. Ever hear the expression “Speak your truth”?
That is not the Christian way.
We are told that meaning evolves, that doctrine develops like software, that God himself updates to remain “relevant.” The irony is that these updates never strengthen faith; they just make the faith more marketable to people who secretly despise it. It’s the same reduction that defines modern society–Christ as influencer, not Redeemer; Church as community brand, not historical, hierarchical, and sacramental; Gospel as plug and political platform, not divine revelation.
It all allows sinners to hide, to never change, to have an excuse to continue their helping hand in destroying souls. Because according to the Modernist religion, everyone is right, in their own way. Truth is no longer objective, but subjected to an onslaught of never-ending, self-referential trash.
According to Pius X, there is no saving the Modernist. For like the Marranos who have given their false allegiance throughout history only to destroy Christianity from within, Modernists simply nod and say yes to correction–before returning to their vomit when alone:
Once indeed We had hopes of recalling them to a better sense, and to this end we first of all showed them kindness as Our children, then we treated them with severity, and at last We have had recourse, though with great reluctance, to public reproof. But you know, Venerable Brethren, how fruitless has been Our action. They bowed their head for a moment, but it was soon uplifted more arrogantly than ever. If it were a matter which concerned them alone, We might perhaps have overlooked it: but the security of the Catholic name is at stake. Wherefore, as to maintain it longer would be a crime, We must now break silence, in order to expose before the whole Church in their true colours those men who have assumed this bad disguise.
Catholic name at stake? Indeed, I don’t think I could number the people, students and colleagues alike, who hate the infiltrated Church and have no idea what our ancient teaching actually is. I am working with several people as we speak on a very personal level to evangelize them back to the Faith, and what they tell me in the way of lies about the Catholic Church is so consistent that there could be only one source for such diabolical deception.
And that voice is one of the two seeds of Genesis 3:15.
Pius X saw the coming psychology of it. All of it. In Modernism the self becomes the measure of all things. Truth no longer descends from Heaven; it bubbles up from the feed. It is self-referential–just like Lucifer.
Once faith ceases to be anchored in the God who is, it becomes prey to the god we invent. Once the sacramental life is replaced by emotional experiences, the path is clear for total control–of thought, of feeling, of consent.
The poison is everywhere: in the curated news cycle, in the political “movements” that turn outrage into obedience, and yes, even in the Church’s own attempt to appear “modern.” Perhaps we do not suffer from a lack of faith so much as a misdirection of faith. Perhaps. People still believe–they just believe the feed. And they believe the feelings that well up inside them created by the orchestrated manipulation of it all.
That includes everything coming out of Rome and pulpits everywhere that is in direct opposition to everything the popes were teaching before.
The cure for all of this remains the same.
The antidote to Modernism, whether in 1907 or 2025, is the traditional sacramental life–historical, hierarchical, incarnational, immune to trends. It is the tether back to Reality with a capital R, the one Pius X fought to preserve when he warned that the poison was already coursing through the Church’s veins.
He saw what was coming. And the evidence we’re seeing with our very own eyes says we’re living it.
The question now is not whether we will be vigilant shepherds or distracted sheep, but whether we still know what flock we belong to. The modern world was built on the premise that man could rewrite God, and Pius X saw the end of that script. What remains is whether we will return to what he fought for–the Faith as it was, which the gates of hell shall not prevail against, not as we’ve remade it to our liking–before the curtain finally falls.
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