Modernism and Feeneyism: Twin Errors Against Catholic Tradition

 

The Church betrayed from two sides: 
Modernism by dilution;
Feeneyism by mutilation. One dissolves the Faith into formless fluidity; the other hardens it into cold rigidity... 

Preamble: 

At the early phase of my adventure to look up the songs of praise sung by my Formators and Lecturers concerning the so-called Vatican II council in a seminary dressed in Catholic externals but Modernist in substance, I stumbled upon the writings of the Dimond brothers and the Feeneyite school. My Catholic antenna detected the red flag alert and I ceased delving further. 

Now, there are certain curiosities in history: enemies who, by strange paths, come to share the same hatred of the truth. My experience thus far proves that so it is today when two opposite distortions of the Faith — Modernism and Feeneyism — despite their differences, unite in one thing: a hostility toward the perennial teaching and ordered charity of Holy Mother Church, and hostility toward Catholics uncompromising in adhering to that perennial teaching and ordered charity.

Here I attempt to set forth, drawing from the Fathers, the Doctors, the Council of Trent, and the Magisterium before modernist Vatican council, the Catholic balance: the sacraments as necessary by ordinary means; God’s freedom and mercy in extraordinary cases; and the Church’s uncompromising condemnation of Modernist corruption.

1. Stating The Problem

• Modernism dilutes and relativizes divine truth; it makes dogma fluid, faith a moving thing dependent on new interpretations and human approval.
• Feeneyism, on the other hand, denies baptism of desire and blood, interpreting extra Ecclesiam nulla salus with a rigorism alien to the Fathers. From Fr. Leonard Feeney to the Dimond brothers, this mentality isolates one text, tears it from its living context, and freezes it into a rigid, lifeless idol. In so doing, it refuses the Catholic principle that God, when necessity prevents, can invisibly bestow the grace ordinarily conferred through the sacrament.

Thus the Church is betrayed from two sides: 

• Modernism by dilution, 
• Feeneyism by mutilation. One dissolves the Faith into formless fluidity; the other hardens it into cold rigidity. 
• Modernism denies the fixity of dogma; Feeneyism denies the breadth of mercy.
• Modernism empties doctrine into opinion; Feeneyism petrifies opinion into doctrine.

Both deny the Church’s breadth, balance, and ordered charity.

2. The Council of Trent: Firmness and Charity

Where do we find the balance? The Council of Trent provides it. 

It affirms the fundamental necessity and gratuity of justification and of the sacraments, 

while it acknowledges that the interior disposition and the desire of the soul have real moral and salvific force.

In these words a description of the Justification of a sinner is given as being a translation from that state in which a man is born a child of wrath to that state in which he is a child of grace… And this translation, since the promulgation of the Gospel, cannot be effected, without the laver of regeneration, or the desire thereof.” — Council of Trent, Sixth Session, Decree on Justification.

Trent thus insists that:

• Water Baptism is ordinarily necessary, 
• and yet it speaks expressly of the desire of Baptism (in re vel in voto) — a phrase that belongs to the Church’s own authoritative formulation and which opens the door to the well‑rooted theological doctrine known as the Baptism of Desire.

The Catechism declares, authentically interpreting the Council:

 “Should any unforeseen accident make it impossible for adults to be washed in the salutary waters, their intention and determination to receive Baptism and their repentance for past sins, together with faith working by charity, will avail them to grace and righteousness, which they would certainly have received in Baptism.”

Again: this teaching safeguards two truths:

1. The necessity of Baptism – Christ commanded it, and no man may despise it.

2. The mercy of God – He is not bound by the Sacraments, though we are.

Thus the Church, with the Fathers and Doctors, distinguishes between:

• The desire united to faith and charity, which can bring the grace of justification before the sacramental waters are reached.
• The Sacrament itself, which alone incorporates visibly into the Church and remits the temporal punishment of sin.

Let us, therefore, esteem the Sacrament highly, hasten to it for ourselves and our children, and rejoice that in cases of necessity God’s providence is not chained, but full of wisdom and mercy.

What is the takeaway here? That 

Baptism of desire does not make the Sacrament unnecessary, but rather shows the goodness of God who “wills all men to be saved” (1 Tim 2:4).

 

3. Baptism of Desire and the Church’s Liturgy

Holy Mother Church’s liturgy itself bears witness to her constant faith in Baptism of Desire (BOD) and, in extraordinary cases, Baptism of Blood (BOB). These doctrines are not speculative concessions but truths lived and celebrated by the Church through her Divine Worship.

• The Holy Innocents (Feast: Dec. 28) – Slain by Herod before they could confess Christ with their lips or receive baptismal water, the Church has always venerated them as martyrs. Their feast is celebrated with full liturgical honors as saints. St. Augustine declares:

 “They are rightly considered martyrs, because though they could not speak, yet by their death they confessed Christ.” (Sermon 10 on the Saints)

• St. Emerentiana (Feast: Jan. 23) – The foster-sister of St. Agnes, stoned to death while still a catechumen, is honored as a virgin and martyr in the Roman Martyrology. She had not received water baptism, yet the Church solemnly invokes her as a saint.
• St. Genesius of Arles the notary (Feast: Aug. 25) – Converted on stage while mocking Christian baptism, he professed faith in Christ and was immediately martyred. The Church recognizes him as baptized in his own blood.
• St. Victor of Braga (Feast: Apr. 12) – A catechumen who, when ordered to sacrifice to idols, professed Christ and was martyred before baptism. The Roman Martyrology includes him among the martyrs.

These celebrations are not accidental; they reveal that the Church in her public, infallible prayer acknowledges salvation and sanctity outside of water baptism when God Himself supplies through desire or martyrdom.

4. The Fathers and Doctors: Mercy, Desire, and the Heart

The Fathers teach that God sees the heart and may supply what is wanting in the sign when the soul truly seeks the grace.

• St. Ambrose, consoling the faithful after the sudden death of the catechumen Emperor Valentinian II, declared: “Did he not obtain the grace which he desired? Certainly, because he desired it, he has obtained it” (De obitu Valentiniani, 51–52).
• St. Thomas Aquinas develops this: when a man desires Baptism, though prevented by ill‑chance, God may sanctify inwardly the man whose will was to receive the sacrament.

“The sacrament of Baptism may be wanting to anyone in reality but not in desire... And such a man can obtain salvation without being actually baptized, on account of his desire for Baptism, which desire is the outcome of ‘faith that worketh by charity.’” — St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae (III, Q.68, a.2).

• St. Augustine teaches that while baptism is ordinarily necessary, God may supply its grace when the sacrament cannot be received. “Non privantur sacramento, si illud non contemptu, sed necessitate non habuerunt” — “They are not deprived of the sacrament if they lacked it not through contempt, but through necessity” (De Baptismo contra Donatistas, IV, 22).

• St. Alphonsus Liguori, Doctor of the Church, teaches plainly:

 “It is de fide that men are also saved by Baptism of desire—by an act of love of God or of contrition, along with the desire, at least implicit, for true Baptism of water, when it is not possible to receive this Sacrament in reality.” (Moral Theology, bk. 6, n. 95)

Thus, Holy Church, guided by her greatest theologians, has always acknowledged both the ordinary necessity of the sacrament and the extraordinary mercy of God. To deny either is to mutilate Catholic Tradition.

Yes. The Fathers and Doctors safeguard both the necessity of baptism and God’s sovereign freedom, excluding Modernist denial and Feeneyite rigorism alike. 

5. The Magisterium vs. Modernism

The Magisterium of the Catholic Church spoke, and continues to speak, with clarity and certainty against the spirit of error that sought/seeks to dissolve eternal dogma into the shifting sands of human opinion. Pope St. Pius X, discerning the poison at work, did not hesitate to identify Modernism as “the synthesis of all heresies” (Pascendi Dominici gregis, 1907).

Why such severity? Because Modernism is not merely one heresy among many, but a principle of destruction that corrodes all revealed truth. Yes. Modernism undermines the very possibility of fixed, objective revelation, thus validating every heresy in principle. In the Modernist framework: 

• Dogma is mutable: Modernists hold that dogma is not a fixed truth revealed by God and entrusted to the Church, but rather an expression of the religious sense of mankind, changing with culture and historical circumstances. In their view, truth is no longer divine and absolute, but merely symbolic and provisional.
• Faith is reduced to feeling: Revelation, according to them, is not God speaking to man, but man experiencing the divine in his own consciousness. This makes religion no longer about objective reality, but about subjective impressions — shifting as moods, nations, or generations shift.
• Church authority undermined: If dogma evolves with culture, then the Magisterium no longer safeguards a deposit received once for all (cf. Jude 3), but becomes a laboratory of experiments, following, accompanying, the world instead of teaching it. The Modernist program renders the Church indistinguishable from the sects of Protestantism, each with its own “spirit” and “development.”

The Magisterium, faithful to Christ’s promise, rejects such novelties. The Vatican Council taught with solemn definition that the meaning of sacred dogmas:

...is perpetually to be retained which our Holy Mother the Church has once declared, nor is that meaning ever to be departed from under the pretense or pretext of a deeper comprehension” (Dei Filius, ch. 4).

Thus, to accept Modernism is to deny the very possibility of divine truth. It makes faith into a sentiment, doctrine into opinion, and the Church into a debating society.

Against this, the Catholic stands firm with the Magisterium of all ages: 

• revelation is objective, immutable, divine, and entrusted to the Church as guardian, not inventor. 
• Christ has spoken once for all; His word is eternal, and His Church cannot betray it without ceasing to be His. 

6. Why the Two Errors Converge in Hatred

• Modernists despise the immutable deposit of faith in favor of continual reinterpretation; 
• Feeneyites despise the patient, balanced pastoral and theological judgments of the Church that allow for cases of necessity and God’s extraordinary providence. 

Each, in his way, attacks the Church’s moral and doctrinal economy.

• Modernists loosen doctrine into opinion and thus deny the solidity of what the Church teaches. They brand those who hold firmly to dogma as “rigid,” “uncharitable,” or “out of touch with the modern world.” 
• Their hatred is not merely for the truths themselves, but for the Catholics who refuse to yield an inch of divine teaching to human whim.
• Feeneyites, on the other hand, harden a single textual reading into an absolute that refuses the patristic and scholastic distinctions between ordinary and extraordinary means, and the classical distinction between merit and application of grace. They accuse faithful Catholics, who walk with the Church’s prudence, of “compromise,” “laxity,” or even of heresy. 
• In their zeal without knowledge, they condemn what the Magisterium has carefully safeguarded, mislabeling true fidelity as betrayal.

Thus both Modernists and Feeneyites, though opposed in appearance, converge in practice: 

• each sets himself against the living Tradition and against those Catholics who remain humbly docile to it. 
• They despise the Church’s wise balance, and they despise the faithful who live by it. One by excess of laxity, the other by excess of rigor, they strike at the heart of uncompromising Catholic fidelity.

7. Pastoral Consequences — How to Speak and Act

1. We must hold with charity and clarity to the ordinary necessity of the sacraments (Baptism, Penance, Eucharist) as instituted and commanded by Christ and taught by the Councils.

2. We must distinguish patiently between what the Church binds as ordinary and what God may, by His sovereign mercy, supply in extraordinary cases. Using the Fathers and Doctors — Augustine, Ambrose, Aquinas — to explain how interior desire and martyrdom have been accounted for in the Tradition.

3. We must reject Modernist relativizing of doctrine and the pseudo‑ecumenical and interreligious flattening of dogma. Yes. We must follow the Magisterium (e.g., Pascendi) in opposing doctrines that make faith a mere function of contemporary sensibility.

4. We must repel Feeneyite rigorism that would throw out the Fathers and the Council by insisting on an absolutism at odds with the Church’s own balanced formulations.

8. Texts for Further Readings

Anyone interested in reading up on the theme would find the following helpful:

• The Council of Trent — Decree on Justification (Sixth Session, ch. 4).
• Council of Trent (explanatory text, ch.8 reference on faith and justification). 
• St. Thomas Aquinas — Summa Theologiae, Third Part, Q.68, a.2 (on Baptism of desire).
• St. Ambrose — consolations on catechumens (as cited in the Scholastics).
• St. Augustine — On Baptism and City of God (on martyrdom and supply of sacraments).
• Pope St. Pius X — Pascendi Dominici Gregis (1907) on Modernism.

9. Summing Up

To those desirous of being, not only in name but in fact, faithful children of Holy Mother Church, these words are addressed:  

• Hold fast to the Rock. 
• Reject both the seduction that would dilute truth and the false zeal that would mutilate mercy. The Holy Church is at once firm and merciful — firm in doctrine, merciful in the application of God’s boundless providence.

May the Good Lord Who is the same yesterday, today, and forever, give unto us a faith steadfast and humble; deliver us from the pride that would alter His truth, and from the hardness of heart that would deny His mercy. Through Christ our Lord. Amen.