The obligation to obey the laws which God has imposed upon our conscience carries with it the power and the right to obey. Our rights thus are not given and cannot be taken away by such a State. They have their origin and authority in the supreme Author of our being. Their validity is bound up with the sovereign rights of God, and are therefore, absolute and inalienable. It is in this Divine right that we find the broad and strong foundation of our freedom and of all the rights of man.
Thus Socialism is antagonistic to human liberty. Inseparably bound up with it is a materialistic philosophy. In the name of science—a word more abused than liberty—its adherents claim the right to revise and revalue all standards of morality. Experience shows that it thrives and propagates best in the soil of materialism. Its natural allies are the Secularists. Its irreconcilable foe, and the most formidable obstacle to its progress, is the Catholic Church.
It is, in fact, not merely a party for social reform, but a wing of the irreligious army, operating among the working classes, doing its utmost to sow mistrust and hatred of religion and to excite the hope and belief that the amelioration of the condition of labor depends upon the success of materialism.
While thus a warning is in order to those who are led by its utterances, its greatest danger lies in the fact that it may do much mischief in spreading an irreligious spirit, and weakening the foundations of belief among men whom it may not capture to its economic heresies, but who permit themselves to be influenced by what it might term its philosophic doctrines.
MODERNISM.
Out of the multiplicity of religious sects and philosophical systems with which Europe was deluged at the beginning of the present century, came the new form of Modernism, which is, as the Holy Father has said, but the synthesis of all errors. That vague endeavor to reduce Christian life and teaching to the vagaries of modern thought found its exponents in Germany, Italy, France and England. Schell in Germany sounded the note, and Fogazzaro in Milan took it up, picturing it in his novel "Il Santo." In England it found favor with the unhappy Father Tyrrell, and in France, with the Abbe Loisy and Houtin. The latter, according to present reports has become reconciled with the Church.
The watchful eye of the present Pontiff, Pope Pius X., detected the nature and aims of the new sect before it had yet time to fasten itself upon the minds of the faithful. Accordingly, on September 16, 1907, he issued to the world his famous Encyclical, Pascendi Dominici gregis, treating of the errors of Modernism.
The Encyclical was divided into four parts as follows
I. The Errors of Modernism—Agnosticism—This error declares that the human reason is merely a phenomenon, and cannot raise itself to the knowledge of God. This negation offers free access to scientific atheism, which is an opposition to what Faith teaches.
Immanence—Agnosticism is the negative side of Modernism; immanence constitutes its positive constituent. This doctrine would have it, that religion is a fact and as such demands an explanation; this is not to be sought from without, but from within. Religious immanence thus places as the basis of faith the sensus cordis, or a feeling of the heart, taking its origin from a need of the Divine hidden in the folds of the subconscious.