Oath Against Modernism
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The Oath against Modernism was issued by the Roman Catholic Pope, Saint Pius X, on September 1, 1910, and mandated that "all clergy, pastors, confessors, preachers, religious superiors, and professors in philosophical-theological seminaries" should swear to it.
The oath continued to be taken until July 1967 when the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith rescinded it. It is, however, still taken before priestly ordination by most traditionalist Roman Catholic clergy.
Previously Pius X had defined what he saw as the sin of Modernism in his encyclicals Pascendi Dominici gregis of 1907, and Lamentabili Sane.
When John Paul II issued the apostolic letter Ad Tuendam Fidem on church discipline, it provoked dissenters into claiming that the letter was a second oath against modernist thought.
[edit] Excerpts from the oath
To be sworn to by all clergy, pastors, confessors, preachers, religious superiors, and professors in philosophical-theological seminaries.
- And first of all, I profess that God, the origin and end of all things, can be known with certainty by the natural light of reason from the created world.
- Fourthly, I sincerely hold that the doctrine of faith was handed down to us from the apostles through the orthodox Fathers in exactly the same meaning and always in the same purport.
- Likewise, I reject that method of judging and interpreting Sacred Scripture which, departing from the tradition of the Church, the analogy of faith, and the norms of the Apostolic See
- I declare that I am completely opposed to the error of the modernists who hold that there is nothing divine in sacred tradition
- firmly hold, then, and shall hold to my dying breath the belief of the Fathers in the charism of truth, which certainly is, was, and always will be in the succession of the episcopacy from the apostles. The purpose of this is, then, not that dogma may be tailored according to what seems better and more suited to the culture of each age; rather, that the absolute and immutable truth preached by the apostles from the beginning may never be believed to be different, may never be understood in any other way.
I promise that I shall keep all these articles faithfully, entirely, and sincerely, and guard them inviolate, in no way deviating from them in teaching or in any way in word or in writing. Thus I promise, this I swear, so help me God. . .
