ENCYCLICAL LETTER

New Zealand Tablet, 8 July 1909, Page 8

ENCYCLICAL LETTER

Of our Most Holy Father Pius X

BY DIVINE PROVIDENCE POPE

(Continued from last week.)

Anselm's Devotion to the Apostolic See. And if Anselm was great in works and in words if in his knowledge and his life, in contemplation and activity, in peace and strife, he secured splendid triumphs for the Church and great benefits for society, all this must be ascribed to his close union with Christ and the Church throughout the whole course of his life and ministry. Recalling all these things, Venerable Brothers,, with special interest during the solemn commemoration of the great Doctor, we shall find in them splendid examples for our admiration and imitation; nay, reflection on them will also furnish Us with strength and consolation amid the pressing cares of the government of the Church and of the salvation of souls, helping TJs never to fail in our duty of co-operating with all our strength in order that all things may be restored in Christ, that Christ may be formed in all souls, and especially in those which are the hope of the priesthood, of maintaining unswervingly the doctrine of the Church, of defending strenuously the liberty of the Spouse of Christ, the inviolability of her divine rights, and the plenitude of those safeguards which the protection of the Sacred Pontificate requires. The Evils of the Present Day. For you are aware, Venerable Brothers, and you have often lamented it with Us, how evil are the days on which we have fallen, and how iniquitous the conditions that have been forced upon Us. Even in the unspeakable sorrow We felt in the recent public disasters, Our wounds were opened afresh by the shameful charges invented against the clergy of being behindhand in rendering assistance after the calamity, by the obstacles raised to hide the beneficent action of the' Church on behalf of the afflicted, by the contempt shown even for her maternal care and forethought. We say nothing of many other things injurious to the Church, devised with treacherous cunning or flagrantly perpetrated in violation of all public right and in contempt of all natural equity and justice. Most grievous, too, is the thought that this has been done in countries in which the stream of civilisation has been most abundantly fed by the Church. For what more unnatural sight could be witnessed than that of some of those children whom the Church has nourished and cherished as her first-born, her flower and her strength, m .their rage turning "their weapons against the very bosom of the Mother that has loved them so much! And thero are other countries which give us but little cause for consolation, in which the same war, under, a different form, has either broken out already or is being prepared by dark machinations. For there is a movement in those nations whioh have benefited most from Christian civilisation to deprive the Church of her rights, to treat her as though she were not by nature and by right the perfect society that she is, instituted by Christ Himself, the. Redeemer of our nature, and to destroy her reign, which, although primarily and directly affecting souls, is not less helpful for their eternal salvation than for the welfare of human society; efforts of all kinds arS being made to supplant the kingdom of God by a reign of license under tho lying name of liberty. And to bring about by the rule of vices and lusts the triumph of the worst of all slaveries and bring the. people headlong to their ruin— for sin makes peoples wretched — the cry is ever raised: We will not have this man reign over us. Thus the religious Orders, always the strong shield and the ornament of the Church, and the promoters of the most salutary works of science and civilisation among uncivilised and civilised peoples, have been .driven out of Catholic countries; thus the works of Christian beneficence have been weakened and circumscribed as far as possible, thus the ministers of religion have been despised and mocked, and, wherever that was possible, reduced to powerlessness and inertia; the^pathn to knowledge and to the teaching office have been either closed to them or rendered extremely difficult, especially by gradually removing them from the instruction and education of youth; Catholic undertakings of public utility have been thwarted; distinguished laymen who openly profess their Catholic faith have been turned into ridicule, persecuted, kept in the background as belonging to an inferior and outcast class, until the coming of the day, which is being hastened by ever more iniquitous laws, when they are to be utterly ostracised from public affairs. And the authors of this war, cunning and pitiless as it is, boast

that they are waging it through love of liberty, civilisation, and* progress, and, were you to believe them, through a spirit of patriotism — in this lie too resembling their father, who was a murderer from the beginning , and xohen he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own, for he is a liar, ani raging with hate insatiable against God and the human race. Brazen-faced men these, seeking to create confusion by their words and to lay snares for the ears of the simple. No, it is not patriotism, or zealous care for the peoplo, or any other noble aim, or desire to promote good of any kind, that incites them to this bitter war, but Wind hatre-i which feeds their mad plan, to weaken the Church and exclude her from social life, which makes them proclaim her as dead, while they never cease to attack her — nay, after having despoiled her of all liberty, they do not hesitate in their brazen folly to taunt her with her powerlessness to do anything for the benefit of mankind or human government. From the same hate spring the cunning misrepresentations or the utter silence concerning the most manifest services of the Church and the Apostolic See, when they do not make of our services a cause of suspicion which with wily art they insinuate into the ears and the minds of the masses, spying and travestying everything said or done by the Church as though it concealed some impending danger for society, whereas the plain truth is that it is mainly from Christ through the Church that the progress of . real liberty and the purest civilisation has been derived. Concerning this war from' outside, waged by the enemy without, by which the Church is seen to be assailed on all sides, now in serried and open battle, now by cunning and by wily plots, We have frequently warned your vigilance, Venerable Brothers, and especially in the Allocution We delivered in the Consistory of December 16, 1907. The Intestine War on the Church. But with no less severity and sorrow hare We been obliged to denounce and to put down another species of war, intestine and domestic, and all the more disastrous the more hidden it is. Waged by unnatural children, nestling in the very bosom of the Church in order to rend it in silence, this war aims more directly at the very root and the soul of the Church. They are trying to corrupt the springs of Christian life and teaching, to scatter the sacred deposit of the faith, to overthrow the foundations of the divine constitution by their contempt for all authority, pontifical as well as episcopal, to put a new form oti the Church, new laws, new principles, according to the tenets of monstrous systems, in short to deface all the beauty of the Spouse of Christ for the empty glamor of a ne>v culture, falsely called science, against which the Apostlefrequently puts us on our guard : Beware lest any man cheat you by philosophy and vain deceit, according to the traditions of men, according to the elements of the world, and not according to Christ. By this figment of false philosophy and this shallow and fallacious erudition, joined with a most audacious system of criticism, some have been seduced and become vain in their thoughts, having rejected good conscience they have made shipwreck concerning the faith they are bein£ tossed about miserably on the waves of doubt, knowing not themselves at what port they must land; others, wasting both time and study, lose themselves in the investigation of abstruse trifling, and thus grow estranged from the study of divine things and of the real springs of doctrine. This hot-bed of error and perdition (which has come to be known commonly as modernism from its craving for unhealthy novelty), although denounced several times and unmasked by the very excesses of its. adepts, continues to be a most grave and deep evil. It lurks like poison in the vitals of modern society, estranged as this is from God and His Church, and it is especially eating its" way like a cancer among the young generations which are naturally the most inexperienced and heedless. It is not the result of solid study and true knowledge, for there can be" no real conflict between reason and faith. But it is the result of intellectual pride and of the pestiferous atmosphere that prevails of ignorance or confused knowledge of the things of religion, united with the stupid presumption of speaking about and discussing thenu And this deadly infection is further fomented by a spirit of incredulity and of rebellion against God, so that .those who are seized by the blind frenzy for novelty consider that they are all sufficient for themselves, and that they are at liberty to throw off either openly or by subterfuge the entire yoke of divine 'authority, fashioning for themselves according to their own caprice a vague, naturalistic individual religiosity, borrowing the name and some semblance of Christianity, but with none of its life and truth. Now, in all this it is not difficult to recognise one of the many forms of the eternal war waged against divine truth, and one that is all the more dangerous from the fact that its weapons are craftily concealed with a covering

of fictitious piety, ingenuous candor, and earnestness, in the hands of factious men who use them to reconcile things that are absolutely irreconcileable — viz., the extravagances of a fickle human science with divine faith, and the spirit of a frivolous world with the dignity and constancy of the Church. England and France in the Time of Anselm. But if you see 'all this, Venerable Brothers, and deplore it bitterly with Us, you are not therefore cast down or without all hope. You know of the great conflicts that other times have brought upon the Christian people, very different though they were from our own days. We have but to turn again to the age in which Anselm lived, so full of difficulties as it appears in the annals of the Church. Then, indeed, was it necessary to fight for the altar and the home, for the sanctity of public law, for liberty, civilisation, sound doctrine, of all of which the Church alone was .the teacher and the defender among the nations, to curb the violence of princes who arrogated to themselves the right of treading upon the most sacred liberties, to eradicate the vices, ignorance, and lincouthness of the people, not yet entirely stripped of their old barbarism and often enough refractory to the educating influence of the Church, to rouse a part of the clergy who had grown lax or lawless in their conduct, inasmuch as not unfrequently they were selected arbitrarily and according to a perverse system of election by the princes, and controlled by and bound to these in all things. Such was the state of things, notably in those countries on whose behalf Anselm especially labored, either by his teaching as master, by his example as religious, or by his assiduous vigilance and many-sided activity as Archbishop and Primate. For his great services were especially accomplished for the provinces of Gaul, which a few centuries before had fallen into the hands of the Normans, and by the islands of Britain, which only a few centuries before had come to the Church. In both countries the convulsions caused by revolutions within and wars without gave rise to looseness of discipline both among the rulers and their subjects, among the clergy and the people. Abuses like these were bitterly lamented by the great men of the time, such as Lanfranc, Anselm's master ani later his predecessor in the see of Canterbury, and -still-* more by the Roman Pontiffs, among whom it will suffice ' to mention here the courageous Gregory VII., the intrepid champion of Justice, unswerving defender of the rights of the Church, vigilant guardian and defender of the sanctity of the clergy. Anselm and the Bad Princes of His Time. Strong in their example and rivalling them in their zeal, Anselm also lamented the same evils, writing thus to a prince of his people and one who rejoiced to describe himself as his relation by blood and .affection : You see, my dearest Lord, how the Church of God, our Mother, whom God calls His Fair One and Mis Beloved Spouse, is trodden underfoot by bad princes, how she is placed in tribulation, for their eternal damnation by those to whom she was recommended by God as to protectors who would defend her, with what presumption they have usurped for their own uses the things that belong to her, the cruelty with which they despise and violate her religion and Her law.. Disdaining obedience to the decrees of the Apostolic 'See, mada for the defence of religion, they surely convict themselves of disobedience to the Apostle Peter, whose place he holds; nay, to Christ, who recommended His Church to Pet?r... Because they who refuse to be subject to the law of God are surejiy reputed the enemies of God. Thus wrote Anselm, and would that his words had been treasured by the successor and the .descendants of that most potent prince, and by the other sovereigns and peoples who were so loved and counselled and served by him. But persecution, exile, spoliation, the trials and toils of hard fighting, far from shaking, only rooted deeper Anselm's love for the Church and the Apostolic See. I fear no exile, or poverty or torments or death,- because while God strengthens me, for all these things my heart is prepared for the sake of the obedience due to the Apostolic See and the liberty of the Church of Christ, my Mother, he wrote to Our Predecessor, Paschal, amid his greatest difficulties. And if he has recourse to the Chair of Peter for protection and help, the sole reason is: lest through me' and on account -of me the constancy of ecclesiastical devotion and apostolic authority should ever be in the leastdegree weakened. And then he' gives his reason, which for Us is the badge of pastoral dignity and strength: I would' rather die, and while I live 1 would rather undergo utter in exile, rather than see the honor of the Church of God dimmed in the slightest degree on my account or through my example. That same honor, liberty, and purity of the Church is ever in his mind; he yearns for it with sighs, prayers, sacrifices; he works for it with all his might both in

vigorous resistance and in manly patience; and he defends it by his acts, his writings, his words. He recommends it in language strong and sweet to the brethren in religion, to the bishops, the clergy, and to all his faithful; but with more of severity to those princes who outraged it to the great injury of themselves and their subjects. His Zeal for the Liberty of the Church. These noble appeals for sacred liberty >have a timely echo in our days on the lips of those whom the Holy Ghost has placed to rule the Church of God — timely even though they were to find no hearing by reason of the decay of faith or the perversity of men or the blindness of prejudice. To Us, as you know well, Venerable Brothers, are especially addressed the words of the Lord: Cry out, give yourself no rest, raise your voice like a trumpet, and all the more that the Most High has made His void heard, in the trembling of nature and in tremendous calamities; the voice of the Lord shaking the earth, ringing in our ears a terrible warning and bringing homo" to us the hard lesson that all but the eternal is vanity, that we have not here a lasting city, but we seek one that is to come; but, also, a voice not only of justice, but of mercy and of wholesome reminder to the erring nations. In the midst of these public calamities it behoves us to cry aloud and make known the great truths of the faith not only to the people, to the humble, the afflicted, but to the powerful and the rich, to them that decide and govern the policy of nations, to make known to all the great truths which history confirms by its great and disastrous lessons, such as that sin makes the nations miserable, thit a most severe judgment shall be for them that bear rule. wioh the admonition of Psalm II. : And now, ye kings, understand; receive instruction, you that judge the earth. Serve the Lord with fear . . . embrace discipline leit at any time the Lord be angry, and you perish from th? just way. More bitter shall be the consequences of these threats when the vices of society are being multiplied, when the sin of rulers and of the people consists especially ; a the exclusion of God and in rebellion against the Church of Christ: that double social apostacy which is the deplorable fount of anarchy, corruption, and endless misery for the individual and for society.

(To be continued.)