John Paul II's Legacy Lives On!

Pope Benedict XVI is John Paul II's Paisano. Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger is a true soldier of truth! The last Pope Benedict, XV's (1914-1922) first encyclical condemned errors by "modernist" scholars and their modern philosophical systems. Benedict XV, the name sake for this new Pope, did not restore to the church, these "modernist" scholars excommunicated by Pope Pius X.
Modernism was a term used by Pope Pius X to describe the doctrines of a group of theologians (chiefly Alfred Loisy and George Tyrell), notably the assumption that the Christian Church and its dogma are human institutions that have evolved in time like other institutions, and which are expressed like others in human documents that bear the character of their historical context, which can be profitably analyzed in just the way all institutions and texts are scrutinized.

In his encyclical Lamentabili Sane of July 1907, Pius X described Modernism as not so much a heresy, but rather the synthesis of all heresies. This description was used not because Modernism combined ideas from many earlier heresies, but because it undermined Catholic doctrine in a more fundamental way than most earlier heresies: instead of critiquing particular points of doctrine, or setting up a competing source of authority, it denied the idea of objective unchanging truth or any authoritative teaching. Modernism involved the evolution of dogma — a notion distinct from Cardinal Newman's teaching on the "development of doctrine", which he characterized in acceptably orthodox fashion as an unfolding in time of what was already implicit in Christ's initial teaching. In stating the Modernist view on evolution of dogma in order to condemn it, Pius X expressed this as: "Truth is no more unchangeable than man himself, for it evolves with him, in him and through him" (Lamentabili sane).

The New Pope's profound Homily of the Conclave's opening Mass reaffirms the Church's teachings at the beginning of the last century. The same lies and errors of Modernism have been recycled in our age. May God bless our new Pope Benedict XVI....