The Aristocratic Face of Modernism. By Maestro Aurelio Porfiri

The phenomenon of modernism, a Catholic reformism that was particularly strong in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, has been much studied by Church historians and historians of theology to identify its causes and consequences.

Modernism, as a whole, sought an accommodation of the Church to the world and to modern science, an accommodation that was dangerous because it subordinated the Church itself to an almost messianic idea of progress, whose demands the Church would have to accept without fighting.

Ernesto Buonaiuti (1881-1946), one of the great protagonists of modernism, said in his Letters of a modernist priest: "I dream of a priesthood that fulfils among men the mission of teaching and comforting; I dream of rites that symbolise in the eyes of a society which is healthy and virile in its hopes, the beauties of life and the light of untiring progress".

Tireless progress had become the new religion of these innovators, among whom were certainly men of great merit.

Buonaiuti's words were written in the years that saw the Catholic Church's great reaction to modernism, the encyclical Pascendi (1907), which defined modernism as the "synthesis of all heresies".

Pius X identified the danger that this movement posed, a movement that we must not consider as widespread among the people, but which is of an aristocratic and elitist type.

Moreover, most of the revolutions in the Church came about in this way: the people did not make them but suffered them.

Modernism showed a fury of a revolutionary and anti-traditional kind, as one can understand from this other text by Buonaiuti quoted from the same work: "And obstinately and sadly, the Rome of medieval Catholicism casts the anathema on this world which is fervid with expectations and predictions. The world had moved on, neglecting it. The new society, mystical wayfarer towards a new historical dawn, was beginning to get used to disregarding it: to pass by the edifice of the old Catholic traditions, twisting its gaze, and shaking its head in an act of disregard and contempt."

Progress judged the Church, not the Church judged progress.

Modernism, which according to a certain historiography finished in 1914, the year of the death of St Pius X, remained, instead, very much alive after a phase in somno and flourished again in the Church in the form of an elitist progressivism that took the reins of command in the 1960s.

That modernism which morphed into Catholic progressivism, accentuated with great vehemence its aristocratic and populist (but not popular) traits, confirming what the philosopher Augusto del Noce

stated, namely that a progressive Catholic is closer to a non-Catholic progressive than to a non-progressive Catholic.

Modernism certainly did not end in 1914, but continued to creep in its many manifestations and continued to be an occult force that took the reins of power into its own hands and passed itself off no longer as a revolutionary movement, but as normality. Imposing this narrative was its greatest, but hopefully not final, victory.