SARAH’S DYING CHURCH IN THE LIGHT OF PASCENDI DOMINICI GREGIS

 

What is dying is the Ecumenical, synodal impostor Church:
a structure born in the 1960s after a calculated infiltration and usurpation, nourished by ambiguity, sustained by novelty, and weakened by compromise with the modern world. The Catholic Church cannot die. 

Prologue: A Funeral Announced Too Soon

From time to time, voices arise within the visible structures of apostate Rome lamenting that “the Church is dying.” One such lament comes from the nominal “Cardinal” Robert Sarah, who attributes this supposed death to pastors “afraid to speak in all truth and clarity.”

He says: 

"The Church dying because her pastors are afraid to speak in all truth and clarity"

At first hearing, the words sound courageous. They appear orthodox. They suggest a man standing against the ruins, calling for fidelity. But appearances deceive. 

Make no mistake about this: the Catholic Church cannot die, nor even grow old, nor decay. She is indefectible, immortal as her Founder, preserved by the Holy Ghost until the end of time.

If, then, something is “dying,” it is not the Catholic Church.

What nominal “Cardinal” Sarah mourns; sincerely no doubts, but confusedly, is not the Mystical Body of Christ as defined by dogma, but a Modernist construct, the Ecumenical, synodal one-world pan-religious organism already diagnosed, condemned, and excommunicated in principle by Pope St. Pius X in Pascendi Dominici Gregis.

 The First Error: Confusing the Church with Her Eclipse

From its opening lines, Pascendi Dominici Gregis presupposes what Sarah’s statement obscures:

• The indefectibility of the Church
• The immutability of dogma
• The permanence of truth

St. Pius X writes not as a physician announcing a terminal diagnosis, but as a pope defending a divinely constituted society against internal enemies.

The entire encyclical rests on this axiom:

 What Christ founded cannot perish.

The Catholic Church does not become something else in history. She does not “adapt” her faith, worship, or morals to modern consciousness. She does not pass through evolutionary stages of doctrine.

Therefore, any phenomenon that:

• Can die, 
• Evolves into contradiction,
• Loses doctrinal identity,
• Dissolves into pastoral subjectivism,

cannot be the Church as such, but something operating within her visible structures.

This distinction is decisive:

• The Church does not die.
• Modernism does.

What is dying is the Ecumenical, synodal impostor Church:

a structure born in the 1960s after a calculated infiltration and usurpation, nourished by ambiguity, sustained by novelty, and weakened by compromise with the modern world.

To say “the Church is dying” without distinction is already a Modernist imprecision, condemned by Pius X as the very method of error: confusing terms, blurring definitions, and speaking poetically where dogma demands precision.

Pascendi’s Diagnosis: The Disease Was Named in 1907

In Pascendi Dominici Gregis, St. Pius X exposes Modernism as:

 “The synthesis of all heresies.”

He identifies its essential traits:

1. Agnosticism – denying the certainty of divine revelation.

2. Vital immanence – making religion a product of inner experience.

3. Evolution of dogma – claiming doctrines change with history.

4. Ambiguous language – saying orthodox words with heterodox meanings.

5. Double speech – one voice for the faithful, another for innovators.

Now compare this with the Ecumenical-synodal reality which nominal “Cardinal” Sarah inhabits and defends:

• A Church where religious liberty contradicts earlier magisterium.
• A Church where ecumenism suspends the necessity of conversion.
• A Church where the New Mass obscures the Sacrifice defined by Trent for Ecumenical reasons.
• A Church where pastoral practice routinely denies dogma in action.

St. Pius X already told us what happens next:

“Once Modernism has entered, it eats away the vitals of the Church like a cancer.”

A cancer does not kill the body instantly. It produces weakness, confusion, paralysis. But the body remains alive; unless one mistakes the tumor for the body itself.

The Second Error: Blaming Cowardice Instead of False Principles

Phony “Cardinal” Sarah says the Church is dying because pastors lack courage.

This is only half the truth, and therefore dangerous.

The deeper cause is not merely cowardice, but false doctrine enthroned as principle.

St. Pius X is explicit:

“The chief strength of the Modernists lies in the fact that they do not form an external body, but are found within the Church herself.” (Pascendi, §3)

The so-called “Pastors” are silent because:

• They were trained in Modernist seminaries.
• They absorbed condemned principles as “pastoral sensitivity.”
• They were taught to fear “rigidity” more than heresy.

You cannot cure a poisoned well by shouting at the thirsty.

St. Pius X writes (§38):

 “The Modernists hold that the formulas of faith are mutable… and must be adapted to the believer.”

From this principle follows an inevitable fear:

• Clarity exposes contradiction
• Dogmatic precision ends ambiguity
• Fixed definitions destroy the illusion of dialogue

Thus:

• The silence is not accidental. It is systemic.
• Ambiguity becomes necessary

• “Pastoral language” replaces doctrine

You see? Truth and clarity do not threaten the Church. They threaten modernism’s survival.

What is feared is not truth itself, but the collapse of a system built on vagueness.

The Third Error: Pretending the Old Remedies Still Work

Sarah calls for reverence, silence, tradition: yet without repudiating the conciliar foundations that destroyed these very things.

This is the tragedy of conservative modernism, already foreseen by Pius X:

“They present themselves as reformers of the Church, but in reality they are her most dangerous enemies.”

Why?

Because: 

• They lament the fruits while protecting the root.
• They criticize abuses while defending the principles that generate them.
• They speak of “Tradition” while accepting a council that contradicts it.

You cannot revive Catholic life while refusing Catholic dogma in its full integrity.

Indifferentism: The Engine of the Apparent “Death”

St. Pius X identifies the inner engine of this collapse (Pascendi, §26):

 “Truth is not immutable, but evolves with the religious sense.”

From this principle flows indifferentism:

• No doctrine is final
• No error is definitive
• No belief is exclusive

And the result, as Pius X warns (§39):

"Thus dogma is reduced to a mere symbol, adaptable to any meaning.”

This leads directly to:

• Loss of missionary zeal
• Collapse of moral authority
• Disintegration of ecclesial identity

This is what observers mistakenly describe as “the Church dying.”

But Pascendi clarifies the truth:

This is not the failure of Christ’s promises, but the logical end of doctrinal relativism.

Synodality: Authority Replaced by Collective Consciousness

 Condemning this Modernist mechanism in principle St. Pius X points out the modernist tenet that (§20):

“Religious authority derives from the collective conscience.”

What today is called:

• Synodality
• Listening to the People of God
• Discernment through dialogue

is nothing other than what Pascendi condemned as:

• Authority flowing upward
• Doctrine emerging from experience
• Truth determined by consensus

Such a system:

• Has no fixed center
• No permanent content
• No divine guarantee

 It must fragment.

 It must collapse.

That collapse is poetically labeled “death.”

Why the Catholic Church Lives While the Counterfeit Fails

There is no doubt: Modernism dies by its own logic. It carries within itself the principle of self-destruction, for it corrodes the very truths it must rely upon in order to exist.

St. Pius X states the matter with final clarity (Pascendi, §42):

"There is no part of Catholic truth which the Modernists do not corrupt.”

Modernism cannot preserve what it systematically undermines. By subjecting revelation to human consciousness, it denies divine certainty. By relativizing dogma, it removes all fixed meaning. By dissolving authority, it leaves no voice capable of teaching with binding force. A system that corrodes truth, meaning, and authority inevitably collapses, for it destroys the foundations upon which any church—true or false—must stand.

The Catholic Church, however, lives by entirely different principles:

• She does not depend on relevance, because her truth comes from God, not the age.
• She does not evolve into contradiction, because dogma unfolds without changing its substance.
• She does not fear condemning error, because charity without truth is betrayal, not mercy.

Thus, when Modernism weakens and fragments, it is not the Church that is failing. It is an impostor exhausting itself. The Catholic Church endures precisely because she refuses the logic that kills. She lives by truth, and truth does not decay.

 The Catholic Answer: The Church Lives - Outside the Illusion

The true Catholic response is simple, dogmatic, and unafraid:

• The Catholic Church is not dying.
• She has not changed.
• She has not lost her faith.
• She remains exactly what she was before Modernism was condemned.

What is dying is:

• The illusion of continuity where rupture reigns.
• The authority of lay-robed, phony, men who speak without jurisdiction.
• The credibility of a system built on ambiguity.

The faithful remnant; clinging to the Mass of all time, the Catechism of Trent, the dogmatic clarity of Pius X, are not witnesses of death, but guardians of life.

Final Conclusion: Choose the Living Church

According to the internal logic of Pascendi Dominici Gregis, what is today described as “the Church dying” is in truth the collapse of Modernism itself - a collapse foreseen, exposed, and judged by St. Pius X more than a century ago. The disease he named could only end in self-destruction, for error cannot sustain itself indefinitely.

St. Pius X did not call Catholics to sentimentality or despair.

He did not ask them to mourn a dying Church.

He commanded them to resist, to discern spirits, and to reject Modernism in its entirety, without compromise or nostalgia. His words remain definitive:

“The true friends of the people are neither revolutionaries nor innovators, but traditionalists.”

It must be clearly noted that the “traditionalists” St. Pius X speaks of are not the neo-traditionalists of today; those soaked, often unconsciously, in Modernist indifferentism, who imagine that the Catholic religion can peacefully coexist under the same roof with the new-order ecumenical, synodal, one-world pan-religion, as though both were legitimate expressions of the same faith.

St. Pius X did not mean:

• Catholics who accept doctrinal rupture while preserving aesthetics,
• Catholics who tolerate contradiction in the name of “unity,”
• Catholics who speak of ordinary and extraordinary “forms” as though truth itself had multiple rites and meanings.

Such a notion presupposes exactly what Pascendi condemns:

• that truth is flexible, worship is interchangeable, and contradiction can be baptized as diversity.

The true traditionalist, in the sense intended by St. Pius X, is one who:

• Holds that Catholic truth is exclusive, not complementary,
• Knows that error has no rights, only tolerance under necessity,
• Refuses the fiction that one faith can contain mutually opposed doctrines and rites without ceasing to be one.

To admit the permanent coexistence of Catholicism with a pan-religious system; each with its own “form” of worship, is not tradition; it is indifferentism with incense.

St. Pius X’s traditionalist defends continuity of truth, not pluralism of religions; identity of doctrine, not parallel expressions of contradiction. Anything less is not fidelity to tradition, but a refined accommodation to the very Modernism he condemned.

Therefore, when someone announces that “the Church is dying,” the Catholic response must be calm, precise, and doctrinal:

Which Church?

For the Catholic Church of Christ [though eclipsed, marginalized, and reduced to a faithful remnant] lives. She teaches the same truth, offers the same Sacrifice, condemns the same errors, and bears the same divine guarantees. She lives because Christ lives, and because His promises cannot fail.

If, alongside her, another church; born of novelty, sustained by ambiguity, and governed by modernist principles, is now weakening and fading, then this is neither tragedy nor surprise. It is natural and inevitable.

Let that counterfeit perish.

The Catholic Church endures.