Modernists That Have Left'

New Zealand Tablet, 12 August 1909, Page 1249

Modernists That Have Left '

A Wellington contemporary copies from a London newspaper the statement that several Continental ecclesiasts, with Modernist views, have during the present year ' left the Church of Rome.' We know of several whose exit from the Church of Rome took place as the result of the conscious eliminative action of the Church herself — she spat them out. Others left in anticipation of a similar impetus — they found in the Church no rest for the soles of the feet of those who would empty of real meaning some of the fundamental mysteries of the Christian faith. The implied suggestion that they left of their own full accord reminds us of a German fable which runneth thus: A great and venerable old church once harbored, in various holes and crannies, sundry bats and sparrows and jackdaws. The pastor of the church set at length about an overhaul of the massive walls. When the workers had gone, the bats and the sparrows and the jackdaws came back in search of their old dwellings. But every hole and cranny w"as filled up. Then said the bats and the sparrows and the jackdaws: 'Of what use now is this great building? Come, let us forsake this useless heap of stones.' And they left the ancient church. Pius X., the Chief Pastor on earth, closed up, by his Encyclical on Modern Errors, the holes and crannies in which sundry flighty intruders to our faith had taken shelter in the -walls of the Church of the Ages. And this is how Modernists came to ' leave ' the Church of Home. s