Vatican II’s Departure from the Anti-Modernist Paradigm

Joseph Ratzinger and Yves Congar OP

Central to any account of the relationship between Catholicism and modernity are the issues connected to the “Modernist Crisis” of the early twentieth history. These include the nature of divine revelation, the normative role of neo-Thomism, historical critical methods (especially when applied to the Bible), religious liberty and relations between church and state, the role of the laity, and the church-world relationship more generally. All of these issues were revisited at the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965), where, after momentous debate and struggle, the Catholic Church departed from the pre-conciliar “anti-Modernist” paradigm. As Joseph Ratzinger wrote in 1975, these profound shifts were “an attempt at an official reconciliation with the new era inaugurated in 1789”; that is, with modernity.

Church reform, especially when it involves the development of doctrine, often raises unresolved or challenging questions from the past. Sometimes, difficult phenomena in the Church’s collective memory influence the drafting of conciliar texts and subsequent debate over them. I call these phenomena “ghosts.”  In my view, Modernism was the critical ghost on the council floor at Vatican II. The concept of a doctrinal document’s “controlling function” helps us to frame these discussions about reform and the ghosts of the past. By “controlling function” I refer to a past doctrinal pronouncement or theological text which continues to frame Catholic doctrinal debate by setting boundaries of discussion. For example, no council father at Vatican II challenged the primacy or infallibility of the pope because the judgment of Vatican I’s Pastor aeternus (1870) was definitive and thus had a very strong “controlling function” in discussions of the papacy. In contrast, condemnations of certain promotions of lay Bible reading practices and lay liturgical participation in Clement XI’s bull Unigenitus (1713) had a negligible controlling function at Vatican II, and so the council fathers felt free to assert virtually the opposite positions concerning these practices. When we consider the “controlling function” of anti-Modernist doctrinal documents we are chiefly, but not exclusively, considering a trio of texts from the pontificate of Pius X: the famous 1907 encyclical Pascendi dominici gregis; the Holy Office’s accompanying syllabus of 65 errors, entitled Lamentabili; and the “Anti-Modernist Oath,” often cited as the Motu proprio Sacrorum antistitum of 1910.

Unlike Protestants (who were guests at a council dedicated to ecumenism) and unlike Jansenists (who were extinct), the ghost of Modernism was particularly neuralgic since a minority of council fathers believed Modernism was a concrete contemporary reality threatening to hijack the Church. Many other council fathers, however, saw the term “Modernist” functioning as a slur meant to shut down some necessary conversations around church reform. Understanding how anti-Modernism was evoked and how anti-Modernist critiques were rebutted sheds further light on Vatican II as a watershed event and a fundamental shift in the relationship between Catholicism and modernity.

Anti-Modernism and the “Chain of Errors”

Anti-Modernism was the regnant theological paradigm for the minority bloc of council fathers at Vatican II. For the majority bloc, it was not. This methodological and ideological difference was a critical “issue under the issues” at the Council. But we cannot adequately understand the anti-Modernism of the council minority without situating it in a longer time frame, one that stretches far earlier than the twentieth century. For the anti-Modernist council fathers at Vatican II, the terms “Modernist” and “Modernism” were not just references to early twentieth-century people or ideas that deformed the Catholic faith. Modernism was a link in a “chain of errors” that usually began with Martin Luther and his rejection of Catholic hierarchical authority, especially papal authority. This link ran from Protestantism to Jansenism, and then to “the Enlightenment” (seen as monolithic and teleologically secular). We then arrive at the Revolution of 1789 and the guillotine, and soon after to nineteenth-century liberalism and socialism. Finally, these errors culminate in the twentieth century, with atheistic totalitarian communism persecuting true religion and the “synthesis of all heresies” (Modernism) perverting it from within. This rhetorical chain of errors was forged in the age of counter-Enlightenment and counter-Revolutionary Catholicism, publicized to great effect by circles of anti-Jansenist ultramontanists. While many of these expert polemicists were ex-Jesuits, maybe the most important career to emerge from these circles was that of a Camaldolese monk named Mauro Cappellari (1765–1846). By the time Cappellari was elected Pope Gregory XVI in 1832, he was able to use the full authority of the papal office to impose this apologetic view of sacred and secular history against alternative conceptions of Catholic modernity, such as those sought by Lammenais (1782–1854) and, later, Antonio Rosmini (1797–1855). While by no means totally hegemonic in the Catholic world from 1800 to 1950, the “chain of errors” narrative was prominent, and it found much support in the teaching and influence of successive popes, especially Pius IX (Pope from 1846–1878) and Pius X (1903–1914).

Therefore, to be an anti-Modernist Catholic in the 1950s and 1960s was certainly not just to oppose Liberal views on the inspiration of scripture or the doctrine of “vital immanence” condemned in Pascendi. It was also to subscribe to a particular ideological view of church history, one which saw the errors of Protestantism, Jansenism, secularism, and Modernism as all necessarily intertwined and dependent upon one another. Modernism was intrinsically connected to a wider heresiology that relied upon the historical narrative that I have termed the “chain of errors.” Some of the council fathers acknowledged this explicitly, arguing it was justifiable to link Modernism back to “errors” in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, or forward into the pontificates of Pius XI (1922–1939) and Pius XII (1939–1958). The 1922 encyclical Ubi Arcano aided such an expansive use of the term, since in it Pius XI had condemned “moral, legal, and social modernism…no less decidedly than We condemn theological modernism.”

When we recontextualize anti-Modernism in this way, we see quite clearly why those evoking Modernism at Vatican II could move rather seamlessly from opposing vernacular liturgy, to raising concerns about historical-critical biblical research, to attacking new views of divine revelation, to assertions of papal monarchy, to rejections of religious liberty. For all council fathers, truth was one. For anti-Modernists, there was an underlying sense that error was also one.

In the second part of this article, I will demonstrate the legacy of this “chain of errors” narrative and its ultimate abandonment at Vatican II.*

Shaun Blanchard is Senior Research Fellow at the National Institute for Newman Studies in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and writes on a variety of topics in early modern and modern Catholicism. He is the author of The Synod of Pistoia and Vatican II and, with Ulrich Lehner, co-edited The Catholic Enlightenment: A Global Anthology. Vatican II: A Very Short Introduction, co-authored with Stephen Bullivant, will be published in March 2023.

*These essays were adapted from my presentation at the National Institute for Newman Studies conference "Saint John Henry Newman and Catholic Modernism" held in Pittsburgh October 17-18, 2022. My presentation was titled "The Ghost of Pascendi: The Vatican II Council Fathers and the Legacy of Modernism." I am grateful to the other presenters for their critique, encouragement, and feedback: Claus Arnold, William L. Portier, Elizabeth Huddleston, Jeffrey Morrow, and Fr. Charles Talar.