For those who have not read Qui Pluribus, or have forgotten its holy wisdom, it may be useful to ponder the meaning of these words before delving into the encyclical’s substance. Who was threatening the Catholic flocks? What were the threats against which Pope Pius IX was warning? How were the bishops supposed to guard their flocks? What harms would occur if the bishops failed in their duty?
Pius IX continued by identifying those who were threatening the Catholic flocks:
“Each of you has noticed, venerable brothers, that a very bitter and fearsome war against the whole Catholic commonwealth is being stirred up by men bound together in a lawless alliance. These men do not preserve sound doctrine, but turn their hearing from the truth. They eagerly attempt to produce from their darkness all sorts of prodigious beliefs, and then to magnify them with all their strength, and to publish them and spread them among ordinary people.”
So the enemies in question were those who “do not preserve sound doctrine, but turn their hearing from the truth.” The existence of these enemies would not have been so problematic were it not for the fact that they were attempting to spread their lies among Catholics. Even worse, Pius IX saw that these enemies of Catholic truth were quite skilled in promoting their lies:
“We shudder indeed and suffer bitter pain when We reflect on all their outlandish errors and their many harmful methods, plots and contrivances. These men use these means to spread their hatred for truth and light. They are experienced and skillful in deceit, which they use to set in motion their plans to quench peoples’ zeal for piety, justice and virtue, to corrupt morals, to cast all divine and human laws into confusion, and to weaken and even possibly overthrow the Catholic religion and civil society.”
Left unopposed, these enemies of Catholicism would deceive Catholics with their errors. Were that to happen, Catholic zeal for piety, justice, and virtue would be quenched; morals would be corrupted; divine and human laws would be cast into confusion; and, ultimately, the Catholic religion and society might be overthrown. If this was all we knew about Qui Pluribus, it would seem that his words might hold the key to why we today experience these great evils more than at any time in the history of the Church.
Although it may not excuse them in the judgment of God, many Catholics today have at least a reasonable excuse for not believing that the Faith is unchanging: they have seen their shepherds denying the immutable nature of the Faith in various ways for so long that they naturally assume it is subject to continuous change.
What, then, were the errors facing the Church in 1846? Pius IX explained that they stemmed from the false notion that the Catholic Faith is opposed to human reason:
“Without doubt, nothing more insane than such a doctrine, nothing more impious or more opposed to reason itself could be devised. For although faith is above reason, no real disagreement or opposition can ever be found between them; this is because both of them come from the same greatest source of unchanging and eternal truth, God. They give such reciprocal help to each other that true reason shows, maintains and protects the truth of the faith, while faith frees reason from all errors and wondrously enlightens, strengthens and perfects reason with the knowledge of divine matters.”
This gets to the heart of the problems afflicting so many Catholics today, who no longer believe that the Catholic Faith is unchanging, eternal, and above human reason. Although it may not excuse them in the judgment of God, many Catholics today have at least a reasonable excuse for not believing that the Faith is unchanging: they have seen their shepherds denying the immutable nature of the Faith in various ways for so long that they naturally assume it is subject to continuous change.
Pius IX then described a particular tactic of deceit with which we are all familiar:
“It is with no less deceit, venerable brothers, that other enemies of divine revelation, with reckless and sacrilegious effrontery, want to import the doctrine of human progress into the Catholic religion. They extol it with the highest praise, as if religion itself were not of God but the work of men, or a philosophical discovery which can be perfected by human means. . . Our holy religion was not invented by human reason, but was most mercifully revealed by God; therefore, one can quite easily understand that religion itself acquires all its power from the authority of God who made the revelation, and that it can never be arrived at or perfected by human reason.”
The notion of “human progress” has been the excuse for essentially all of the changes in the Church that we have seen since Vatican II. Yves Congar — the inspiration behind the ongoing Synod on Synodality — made this exceptionally clear in his Challenge to the Church: The Case of Archbishop Lefebvre:
“By the frankness and openness of its debates, the Council has put an end to what may be described as the inflexibility of the system. We take ‘system’ to mean a coherent set of codified teachings, casuistically-specified rules of procedure, a detailed and very hierarchic organization, means of control and surveillance, rubrics regulating worship — all this is the legacy of scholasticism, the Counter-reformation and the Catholic Restoration of the nineteenth century, subjected to an effective Roman discipline. It will be recalled that Pius XII is supposed to have said: ‘I will be the last Pope to keep all this going.’” (pp. 51-52)
Congar was effectively boasting that the Council had overturned Pius IX’s teaching that the Catholic Faith cannot be altered by importing insights derived from “human progress.” Professor Romano Amerio put the matter succinctly in his Iota Unum: A Study of Changes in the Catholic Church in the XXth Century: “Fr. Congar repeatedly states that the Church of Pius IX and Pius XII is finished” (p. 114).
Far from being a benefit or source of charity, the entire ecumenical movement is a hate crime against all Christians, who have been deprived of shepherds who adhere to Pius IX’s holy injunction to fight for the salvation of those entrusted to their care.
What, though, has been stolen from Catholics through this attack on the Church as it existed prior to Vatican II? We can get some idea of the loss by considering how rare it is to hear our shepherds describe the Catholic Faith the way Pius IX did in Qui Pluribus:
“This faith, which teaches for life and points towards salvation, which casts out all vices and is the fruitful mother and nurse of the virtues, has been established by the birth, life, death, resurrection, wisdom, wonders and prophecies of Christ Jesus, its divine author and perfector! Shining forth in all directions with the light of teaching from on high and enriched with the treasures of heavenly wealth, this faith grew famed and notable by the foretellings of so many prophets, the lustre of so many miracles, the steadfastness of so many martyrs, and the glory of so many saints! It made known the saving laws of Christ and, gaining in strength daily even when it was most cruelly persecuted, it made its way over the whole world by land and sea, from the sun’s rising to its setting, under the single standard of the Cross! The deceit of idols was cast down and the mist of errors was scattered. By the defeat of all kinds of enemies, this faith enlightened with divine knowledge all peoples, races and nations, no matter how barbarous and savage, or how different in character, morals, laws and ways of life. It brought them under the sweet yoke of Christ Himself by proclaiming peace and good tidings to all men!”
This is the Faith for which souls are willing to fight and die. This is the Faith that makes saints, and can stand up against all the threats of the worst villains to have ever lived. Michael Matt highlighted this aspect of Catholicism’s opposition to tyranny in his recent Remnant Underground:
“What is Traditional Catholicism? It is not liturgical preferences. . . . Is it about the social reign of Jesus Christ, which is inherently political? Absolutely, it always has been. If you get rid of the social reign of Jesus Christ, you are left with the Gulag. So Traditional Catholicism has always been at the heart of this from the start, which is why they always say that so long as you do not criticize what the regime does, we will even give you the Latin Mass: just don’t say there is objective truth; just don’t claim that your religion is the only truth; just don’t practice religious supremacism, which of course is what the Catholic Church is all about. There is only one true Church, outside of which there is no salvation.”
This is the Faith of all the saints, and it is completely opposed to the Faith promoted by Francis and his Synod on Synodality.
Indeed, we can even go so far as to say that this Faith of all the saints is entirely opposed to the religious beliefs that have prevailed among so many Catholics, including the majority of the hierarchy, since the Council. If we doubt this, we need only consider that Pius IX’s condemnation of religious indifferentism is essentially a criticism of the ecumenical movement that animated the Council:
“Also perverse is the shocking theory that it makes no difference to which religion one belongs, a theory which is greatly at variance even with reason. By means of this theory, those crafty men remove all distinction between virtue and vice, truth and error, honorable and vile action. They pretend that men can gain eternal salvation by the practice of any religion, as if there could ever be any sharing between justice and iniquity, any collaboration between light and darkness, or any agreement between Christ and Belial.”
This mentality condemned by Pius IX, and all of the pre-Vatican II popes, was deliberately fostered at Vatican II, especially in the Decree on Ecumenism, Unitatis Redintegratio:
“It follows that the separated Churches and Communities as such, though we believe them to be deficient in some respects, have been by no means deprived of significance and importance in the mystery of salvation. For the Spirit of Christ has not refrained from using them as means of salvation which derive their efficacy from the very fullness of grace and truth entrusted to the Church.”
Vatican II’s “conservative” defenders tell us that this simply reaffirms a teaching which even Pius IX would have accepted: that there are certain extraordinary circumstances (such as a baptized non-Catholic dying before the age of reason) in which a non-Catholic can be saved. But if that is what the document meant, why did it refrain from saying it clearly? What legitimate benefit could possibly result from creating an impression that non-Catholic churches are “significant” and “important” in the “mystery of salvation,” as though they were simply inferior locations on the Ark of Salvation?
Pius IX knew what great harms would follow from this type of dereliction of duty on the part of Catholic shepherds: “When ministers are ignorant or neglectful of their duty, then the morals of the people also immediately decline, Christian discipline grows slack, the practice of religion is dislodged and cast aside, and every vice and corruption is easily introduced into the Church.”
Far from being a benefit or source of charity, the entire ecumenical movement is a hate crime against all Christians, who have been deprived of shepherds who adhere to Pius IX’s holy injunction to fight for the salvation of those entrusted to their care:
“You must fight energetically, since you know very well what great wounds the undefiled Spouse of Christ Jesus has suffered, and how vigorous is the destructive attack of Her enemies. You must also care for and defend the Catholic faith with episcopal strength and see that the flock entrusted to you stands to the end firm and unmoved in the faith. For unless one preserves the faith entire and uninjured, he will without doubt perish forever. So, in accordance with your pastoral care, work assiduously to protect and preserve this faith.”
When the shepherds fail to defend the Faith, souls are lost and the entire Mystical Body of Christ suffers. And, far from the Liberal notion that we must tolerate errors, this duty to defend the Catholic Faith necessarily entails exposing and combatting the lies that threaten it:
“It is an act of great piety to expose the concealments of the impious and to defeat there the devil himself, whose slaves they are. Therefore We entreat you to use every means of revealing to your faithful people the many kinds of plot, pretense, error, deceit and contrivance which our enemies use. This will turn them carefully away from infectious books. Also exhort them unceasingly to flee from the sects and societies of the impious as from the presence of a serpent, earnestly avoiding everything which is at variance with the wholeness of faith, religion and morality.”
As Pius IX wrote, it is an act of great piety to combat the errors spread by the devil and his minions. Failing to protect people from errors that can lead them to hell is obviously far worse from a Catholic perspective than failing to protect them from poisons that can kill them; and yet so many of our supposed shepherds today insist on the freedom of all religious beliefs, except those professed by Pope Pius IX in 1846 and Traditional Catholics today.
Pius IX knew what great harms would follow from this type of dereliction of duty on the part of Catholic shepherds:
“When ministers are ignorant or neglectful of their duty, then the morals of the people also immediately decline, Christian discipline grows slack, the practice of religion is dislodged and cast aside, and every vice and corruption is easily introduced into the Church.”
These are the same toxic fruits we have seen from the Vatican II revolution, and true Catholics want no part of it. The only remedy is to return to the Faith of the saints, the unadulterated Catholic Faith defended by Blessed Pius IX in Qui Pluribus. And, as Pius IX wrote to conclude his first papal encyclical, we should ask the Blessed Virgin Mary to intercede with Her Son so that we may have the graces we need to fight as saints for the one true Faith:
“That the Lord may more readily respond to Us, let us call as intercessor Her who is always with Him, the most holy Virgin Mary, Immaculate Mother of God. She is the most sweet mother of us all; she is our mediatrix, advocate, firmest hope, and greatest source of confidence. Furthermore, her patronage with God is strongest and most efficacious.”
Immaculate Heart of Mary, pray for us!
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