In Pope Pius X’s 1907 encyclical “PASCENDI DOMINICI GREGIS,” the irreproachable Saint referred to Modernism as the “synthesis of all heresies.” Indeed, it was as if each doctrinal error, each aberration in Orthodoxy, that which was so carefully dismantled by generations of pious theologians had risen from the abyss and formed one unified whole. A Frankenstein melange of cadaverous blasphemy, dug up from the charnel yard of history and stitched together by the wayward shades of past heresiarchs. A final assault on the soul of the ecclesia, appealing to wanton “rationality” and base sentiment, giving new flesh to old sins. The amorphous nature of this phenomenon, the fact that it seemed to possess disparate intellectual fields, made it that much harder to pin down and exorcise. But Pius X, in his unique genius, saw the evil for the cohesive entity that it was, and rained down anathema like lightning. “It must first of all be noted that every Modernist sustains and comprises within himself many personalities; he is a philosopher, a believer, a theologian, a historian, a critic, an apologist, a reformer. These roles must be clearly distinguished from one another by all who would accurately know their system and thoroughly comprehend the principles and the consequences of their doctrines.”
Pius noted the astral quality inherent in the phenomenon, the satanic impulse hiding behind the facade of dispassionate rationality, the handiwork of satans preferred machine: inversion. The inversion of the divine order, the inversion of symbolism, of thought, of logic. Inversion may as well be the word written on the creatures shem, that Golem that haunts the ghetto of our present epoch. For modernism is a mutable creature, a Golem, conjured up and laying waste to the world, out of control, turning even on his masters.
The impulse behind the movement is simple and yet profane in its purity. The same impulse behind the first sin at the beginning of time, pride. “But it is pride which exercises an incomparably greater sway over the soul to blind it and plunge it into error, and pride sits in Modernism as in its own house, finding sustenance everywhere in its doctrines and an occasion to flaunt itself in all its aspects. It is pride which fills Modernists with that confidence in themselves and leads them to hold themselves up as the rule for all, pride which puffs them up with that vainglory which allows them to regard themselves as the sole possessors of knowledge, and makes them say, inflated with presumption, We are not as the rest of men, and which, to make them really not as other men, leads them to embrace all kinds of the most absurd novelties; it is pride which rouses in them the spirit of disobedience and causes them to demand a compromise between authority and liberty; it is pride that makes of them the reformers of others, while they forget to reform themselves, and which begets their absolute want of respect for authority, not excepting the supreme authority. No, truly, there is no road which leads so directly and so quickly to Modernism as pride.” (pius X)
“Humility is the only virtue that no devil can imitate. If pride made demons out of angels, there is no doubt that humility could make angels out of demons.”- John Climacus
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But the modernism of today finds its strongest precedent in an earlier epoch, when an ideological forerunner cried out from the wilderness of the quattrocento, and made straight the way for the Beast. This movement of which I speak is made doubly sinister by virtue of the fact that it is almost universally exalted by men of today. Cherished as a high point of Western culture, the rank perversion of its heroes is exalted by legions of misguided conservatives. Men of today look back at the giants of the Renaissance through their rose-tinted glasses, falsely discerning a glorious cultural past to return to, while in fact, it was this era that engendered our current one. Our present condition is so spiritually anemic and aesthetically hollow, that I can sympathize with the impulse. But these delusions must be cast off.
Renaissance humanists prophesized the ultimate spiritual inversion, which unfortunately crystallized into sublime works of aesthetic brilliance. Their heretical thoughts found form in marble and oil, manifesting across the piazze and basilicas, as man was enthroned at the center of the cosmos. Over a millennium of Christian doctrine taught that God became Man, while the frescoes of the humanists displayed Man becoming God. This is the crux of the Renaissance, the metaphysical subject shifting from God to Man. The hubris of these men could only be matched by their undeniable genius. Something that certainly cannot be said for the last century of modernists.
I have written at length about the Renaissance and all I find vile in it, and I am in no mood to tread old ground. Instead, we will discuss the man God ordained to counter it.
A man of Power. A man of God.
When Antonio Ghislieri ascended to the Throne of Peter, the blessed Bride of Christ bore deep and fresh wounds. Lacerations, cleaved by a century of butchers, had dissected the ecclesia like it was the flesh of a pig. And many of these butchers of division arose from the bosom of the Church herself. Just as Judas had betrayed Christ, so too did Princes of the Church in 15th and 16th centuries.
The first wave of desolation brought with it a sublime renewal of the face of the city. But beneath this beautiful veneer of frescoes and statuary lay a spiritual rot, a cancerous exaltation of man above God. The hallowed court of the Vicar of Christ became indistinguishable from that of its secular neighbors.
“At the beginning of the sixteenth century, the city of Rome, the seat of the Catholic Church, offered the spectacle of a great development of the arts but also that of a profound moral decadence. “In no other place did artistic creation have such a great development, in a sort of frenzy for novelty, for spectacular decorations; in no other place were so many basilicas restored and constructed, so many beautiful temples,” writes the historian Jacques Heers. He continues: “It was an exceptional flowering that owed everything absolutely to the ecclesiastical courts, the court of the sovereign pontiff, the courts of the cardinals and their families, of their clients and allies, of their bankers, money lenders, and suppliers.”44 The climate of the papal household was the same as all the other principal courts of Italy such as Naples, Venice, Florence, or Urbino, with an alternation of banquets, hunting, and pagan-flavored parties. The popes lived like princes, patrons of the arts, diplomats, leaders, and they seemed to be concerned with the temporal interests of their states more than with the supernatural good of souls.” (Mattei).
(That phrase, a frenzy for novelty, is one of the keys to unlocking the truth behind the plague that infects theology today).
Read this before continuing to understand how bankers and usury fit in to the perverse matrix:
“Shortly before his death in 1512, Julius II had convened the Fifth Lateran Council56 in order to discuss the reform of the life of the Church. The superior general of the Augustinians, Egidio of Viterbo, had said to the assembly that he saw “ignorance, ambition, shamelessness, and libertinism triumph in the Holy Place, where shameful vices ought to be carefully banished.” (Mattei)
The papal decadence reached its zenith with the elevation of Leo X, the first Medici to sit on the throne. This description of the ceremony serves as a perfect microcosm for the pagan excess that colored the Renaissance popes beginning with Sixtus IV:
Is it then any wonder, that Providence allowed the fissures in Western Christendom to truly splinter under this man? When Martin Luther nailed his theses’ into the door in Wittenberg, driving nails into the body of Mother Church herself.
Call it cosmic irony or divine justice, but when the great sack of Rome came in 1527, when the city was brought to her knees and her population slaughtered and deracinated, the humiliation occurred under Clement VII, another Medici. And with this blow, the Roman Renaissance died in a pool of her own blood. It was the Florentine courts of the Medici that conjured the “rebirth,” and it was under a Medici that this rinascimento would be laid to rest.
But it was not simply humanism and Protestantism that threatened the unity of Christendom in this period, but another heresy, an ancient heresy that had amassed power and influence in the east, and this external threat threatened to swallow Rome whole.
Islam.
The common theme that I am attempting to get you to pick up on, is that once one peers past the obfuscations, all these movements are simply recycled heresies under fresh coats of paint. Islam is not some alien religious sect. Islam is Arianism.
“From that time to the present a false prophet named Mohammed has appeared in their midst. This man, after having chanced upon the Old and New Testaments and likewise, it seems, having conversed with an Arian monk, devised his own heresy. Then, having insinuated himself into the good graces of the people by a show of seeming piety, he gave out that a certain book had been sent down to him from heaven.” (St John of Damascus).
Mohammed’s sect considers Christ to be a holy prophet and miracle worker, but with a heretical Christology akin to that of Arius’. When one analyses the Quran its easy to identify certain gnostic and other Christological heresies from the first couple hundred years of Christianity that seeped in. For example, Docetism. The muslims believed that Christ did not actually die on the cross, but used some illusory magic to convince the world he did. Once again, the inability to accept Christs death on the cross has led to insanity. “But we preach Christ crucified, unto the Jews a stumblingblock, and unto the Greeks foolishness.”
Indeed, when one peer past all the obfuscations, many of the movements that plague the world today are simply old Christian heresies with botox and facelifts. The only way to comprehend and contextualize the last 2000 years of human history, is to understand that each event and idealogy of the last two millennium are reactions to the cross of Golgotha.
The Jews and Muslims are therefore more alike than different, as both are people who believe themselves followers of the God of Abraham, but are unable to bear the idea of God dying on a tree. Marxism and all other utopian projects are profoundly influenced by the germ of Christian moral doctrine, but reject the metaphysical reality of the Logos, and therefore strive for a perverted paradise on earth, constantly looking for a messianic figure to deliver them. Constantly searching for a man to turn stone into loaves of bread. Through this lens, there is not a single nation on earth that has not been affected by the cascade of causality that was conjured up at the foot of the cross.
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It is then no wonder, that the man Providence raised to the position of Supreme Pontiff to combat an age threatened by all manners of heresy, was a grizzled and zealous Dominican inquisitor general. In an epoch where the Inquisition has become a dirty word, an embarrassing birthmark on the backside of Church history, Pope Pius V reminds us that it was the inquisitorial spirit that saved the church in the cinquecento.
It would have certainly confused the young Pius V, if he was granted a vision of our current age, and saw a Jesuit pope wearing a Dominican habit. This is because the familiar papal white, is actually the Dominican habit that Pius wore throughout his papacy, that was then adopted by all successive Popes. In the Roman Inquisition, the judges were almost all Dominican. The dominicans were called the Domini-canes, the dogs of the Lord. Virtuous, loyal, zealous, and could sniff out doctrinal error as a hound could sniff out blood.
The heretics promulgated their doctrines via clandestine networks that operated sub rosa. The Inquisition was not a singular historical event/entity, as there were several inquisitions throughout history that were all created to address particular doctrinal aberrations. Catholics today have been indoctrinated into viewing the inquisition as an unfortunate blemish upon the annals of Church history, unaware that they themselves have been influenced by modernist revisionism and protestant propaganda. Voltaire spoke of "that bloody tribunal, that dreadful memorial to monkish power," and this seems to now be the accepted opinion among the majority of Catholics. But this leyenda negra is the product of endless fallacious retellings conjured up by Hollywood and popular culture, that the average Catholic has uncritically internalized. The plot of the recent movie “The Popes Exorcist” tried to pin the entire Spanish inquisition on a demonically possessed priest lol.
But how could one of the greatest Saints of the last millennium have been a part of such a supposedly diabolic enterprise?
For this section, I will be quoting verbatim from this brilliant article that I have linked here.
It is no wonder that in an era marked by the ascendency of the synthesis of all Heresies, its promulgators would have a vested interest in slandering the institution that had kept their ideals bound to the abyss.
Religious “tolerance” has never been a Christian virtue. Forced conversions are indeed disastrous, but once an individual has entered into the ecclesia upon baptism they have no right to doctrinal dissent. And another of the great myths of the Inquisition is that its goal was the subjugation and forced conversion of individuals outside the church. No, the inquisition was strictly a clerical institution focused on subverters within the fold of the ecclesia. Clandestine agents from within the church were subverting her, cannibalizing her doctrine. The author of the aforementioned article finishes the paper with this:
St Pius V was the culmination of the inquisitorial spirit, a Dominican zealot, a spiritual surgeon who gently sutured the Chruches wounds back together.
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When Pius V ascended to the throne of Peter he quickly got to work in launching his holistic counter-offensive. One of his first acts was aimed at eliminating the decadence that had taken root within the Papal court. He immediately dismissed the papal court jester and forbade horse racing in St Peters Square. Top on his list of priorities was reforming the moral fabric of the city, and severe sanctions were enacted on all kinds of vices, including sodomy, adultery and blasphemy. He was accused of turning Rome into one massive monastery, an accusation that almost certainly pleased him. There was not even a hint of hypocrisy in his reforms, as his personal conduct was irreproachable. He had the soul of an ascetic and the mind of a tactician. The perfect combination to launch a spiritual counter-offensive.
Pius V needed spiritual soldiers to combat the doctrinal errors that were possessing the land, and so he quickly got to work reforming the office of Inquisition.
One of Pius’ chief concerns were the serpents hiding among the curia itself. The crypto protestants of the Spiritualist faction.
Once again, we are left face-to-face with a sobering reality. New heresies are but continuations of old ones. Revived by pride and a “frenzy for novelty.” The hubris inherent in spiritual novelty and mystical excess is nothing new, and is quite simply the result of mans inability to accept the beauty and perfection of a rigid faith. A faith whose God humbled himself through death on a cross. Old heresies are then dredged up from the muck of history so man can exalt himself above golgotha. Exoteric ritual performed in communion with hoi polloi is met with sneers and contempt by the enlightened elitists who prefer the esoteric power of their own will over, brotherhood with the plebs through Christ crucified.
The only thing that saved the purity of Christian doctrine in this period was Pius V's iron will and commitment to mercilessly rooting out the weeds among the nobility and princes of the Church. His dogmatic fixation with cleansing the church of those who would destroy it. Something that is needed today among the ranks of the clergy.
The harsh punishments and staunch commitment to reform that this Saint carried out would be decried as dangerous extremism today, a testament to the unfortunate victories made by Pius’ spiritual enemies in the last century of Church history. It was due to Pius that Rome did not succumb to Protestantism, and it was also due to Pius’(acting through the will of Providence) that Western Europe did not fall to the sword of Mohammed. Pius V formed a holy league to combat the Ottoman Turks who were close to full on imperial supremacy over the mediteranean, and were quickly advancing westward into Europe. A decisive naval battle occurred in Lepanto, which forever ended the Ottoman naval hegemony over the Meditteranean.
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There is much more to be said about Pius V, but I believe this introduction to be sufficient.
In conclusion, we must dissect the amorphous mass of errors that haunt the church today, and see them for what they are. Old heresies with new faces. Heresies that are engendered by proud men, men who must be rooted out from the church by a future Pontiff with the zealous intolerance of Pius V.
Every event in history is a reaction to the death and resurrection of Christ. Men in their religious impulse either reject or accept the humble nobility of Christ’s death, and their collective decisions orient the course of the world on the tumultuous seas of time. The shape of history is a cross, and Christ her Lord and Master.
Pray for a new Pius V on the throne of Peter.
Saint Pius V and the Hounds of God
I forgot to mention, most of the quote blocks come from Roberto de Mattei's book on the saint. It is excellent and I reccomend reading it