Sunday, August 17, 2014

Are Integralism and Modernism just two sides of the same coin?

+Monsignor Joseph Clifford Fenton+
"An incautious reader of Cardinal Suhard’s pastoral [letter] might possibly come to the dangerously false conclusion that modernism and integralism, as we know them, are two contrary false doctrines, that one, as it were, to the left, and the other to the right, of genuine Catholic teaching. Nothing, of course, could be farther from the truth. Modernism, on the technical language of Catholic doctrine, is the name applied to the definite series of errors condemned in the decree Lamentabili Sne exitu, in the encyclical Pascendi Dominici Gregis, and in the motu proprio Sacrorum antistitum. Pope pius X spoke of modernism as “a conglomeration of the heresies”

Integralism, on the other hand, is essentially the teaching or the attitude of those who worked for the presentation of an integral Catholicism, of Catholic dogma set forth accurately and in its entirety. Most frequently the name of integralism was applied to the doctrine and the viewpoint of those Catholic writers who entered into controversy against the modernists during the first decade of the present century. Understood in this fashion, integralism was nothing else than the contradiction of heretical modernism, It was thus basically only the exposition of  Catholic truth.

We must not forget that fact that modernism, as such, is a definite heresy or collection of heretical teachings, while integralism, as such is nothing of the sort. The true Catholic teaching is not to be found at any half-way point between the teachings of such as Tyrrell and Loisy and the doctrines of the Catholic authors who opposed them. In opposing the dicta condemned in Lamentabili, the Pascendi, and the Sacrorum antistitum, the great Catholic authors of a generation ago were perfectly justified. If, as is usual in our own country, the name of integralism is applied to this specifically anti-modernistic teaching then integralism is nothing more than a statement of Catholic truth, implied in a denial of errors which are incompatible with the divine message of the Catholic Church.”



- Monsignor Joseph Clifford Fenton, “Two currents in Contemporary Catholic Thought” (1948)

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