The Most Pressing Need in the World Today: Restoring the Belief in Immutable Catholic Truth

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The Most Pressing Need in the World Today: Restoring the Belief in Immutable Catholic Truth

By:  Robert Morrison, Columnist [slightly adapted, red font emphasis mine] | August 11, 2024

“Then Jesus said to those Jews, who believed Him: If you continue in My word, you shall be My disciples indeed. And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” (John 8:31-32)

Commenting on this passage from the Gospel of St. John, St Augustine emphasized the unchanging, or immutable, nature of truth:

“The truth is unchangeable; it is the bread of the soul, refreshing others, without diminution to itself; changing him who eats into itself, itself not changed. This truth is the Word of God, which put on flesh for our sakes, and lay hid; not meaning to bury itself, but only to defer its manifestation, till its suffering in the body, for the ransoming of the body of sin, had taken place.” (from St. Thomas Aquinas, Catena Aurea)

Actual truth cannot change because the Word of God cannot change. St. Paul expressed the same reality in his letter to the Hebrews:

“Jesus Christ, yesterday, and today; and the same for ever. Be not led away with various and strange doctrines.” (Hebrews 13:8-9)

St. Paul warned us against being “led away with various and strange doctrines” because he recognized that this was a genuine threat to our Faith: there are those who will try to lead us away from God’s immutable truth. St. Paul went so far as to insist that one must cling to immutable truth even if it appears that reliable authority figures tell us that the truth must change:

“I wonder that you are so soon removed from him that called you into the grace of Christ, unto another gospel. Which is not another, only there are some that trouble you, and would pervert the gospel of Christ. But though we, or an angel from heaven, preach a gospel to you besides that which we have preached to you, let him be anathema. As we said before, so now I say again: If any one preach to you a gospel, besides that which you have received, let him be anathema.” (Galatians 1:6-9)

This is such a vital concept that St. Paul repeated it so as to avoid any misunderstanding. Nobody, not even St. Paul himself or an angel from heaven, can change the truth that the Apostles taught.

Of course it is the case that expressions of the Catholic Faith have developed in the centuries since St. Paul warned us against accepting changes to the Faith. As we know, the Church has been guided by the Holy Ghost to perfect the expressions of certain truths, often to clarify and expand upon the truths that Our Lord entrusted to His disciples for the sake of combatting heresies. In each instance, though, St. Paul and everyone else who understood Catholic truth would recognize that the legitimate development of particular expressions of the Faith always elaborate upon and clarify, rather than contradict, the truths they had taught.

Pope Pius XII was the last pope to firmly warn against the errors that threatened to lead Catholics to believe that the Faith could change to become something that contradicted what it had always been. His 1950 encyclical “Concerning Some False Opinions Threatening to Undermine the Foundations of Catholic Doctrine,” Humani Generis, he denounced the errors that had already started to find their way into Catholic books and seminaries:

“Such fictitious tenets of evolution which repudiate all that is absolute, firm and immutable, have paved the way for the new erroneous philosophy which, rivaling idealism, immanentism and pragmatism, has assumed the name of existentialism, since it concerns itself only with existence of individual things and neglects all consideration of their immutable essences. There is also a certain historicism, which attributing value only to the events of man's life, overthrows the foundation of all truth and absolute law, both on the level of philosophical speculations and especially to Christian dogmas.”

This last error — historicism — posits that truths of the Faith can evolve over time depending upon historical circumstances, such that what St. Paul considered to be immutable during his time may be different now because our world has changed. It should be clear that St. Paul would have found such an assertion to be preposterous, dangerous, and obviously contradicted by the plain terms of his warning.

Before considering two post-Vatican II manifestations of historicism below, it is worthwhile to see the way in which the error spread prior to the Council despite Pius XII’s warning in Humani Generis that historicism “overthrows the foundation of all truth and absolute law.” The following excerpt from the August 1993 SiSiNoNo explains so much about the crisis in the Catholic Church:

“Confirmation of this treachery comes to us today, from the very lips of those representing this New Theology. A mouthpiece of theirs is the journal Communio and in an article of November-December, 1990, the Jesuit Fr. Peter Henrici (born 1928) tells us that: . . . Behind that facade of official studies, modernist texts and tracts were secretly circulated to the most brilliant and promising seminarians. Those same modernist concepts, secretly passed around, would later reappear as the New Theology. Those who showed interest and promise in theology, would be given the modernist Fr. Henri de Lubac's book: The Supernatural - the most forbidden of forbidden books! Then they would receive another of his books, Corpus Mysticum. This was done to inculcate them with the principle that identical theological terms could have different meanings with the passage of time or when looked at in another context. Thus we say goodbye to unchanging divine and apostolic Tradition! Goodbye to the homogenous development of dogma! Goodbye to unchangeable truths!”

Yes, thanks to the insidious work of those who sought to spread what Pius XII had forbidden, the future priests were poisoned with the belief that “identical theological terms could have different meanings with the passage of time or when looked at in another context.” Although such a pernicious error can only have been devised by the father of lies, many well-meaning clerics allowed the foundations of their Faith to be overthrown by historicism. Two examples (chosen from among many) should suffice to demonstrate the extent of damage that has resulted from this catastrophe:


Vatican II and Religious Liberty.

It is beyond serious dispute that Vatican II’s Dignitatis Humanae said something fundamentally different from what the pre-Vatican II popes taught. As discussed in a previous article, Cardinal Ratzinger (the future Benedict XVI) likened Dignitatis Humanae and other Council documents to a “countersyllabus,” meaning that the Council’s key documents essentially promoted the errors that Pope Pius IX had condemned in his Syllabus of Errors, which accompanied the pope’s 1864 encyclical, Quanta Cura. In his They Have Uncrowned Him, Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre quoted Fr. Yves Congar’s explanation for how the architects of the Council’s documents justified their deviation from pre-Conciliar teaching by suggesting that the historical circumstances had evolved:

“Father John Courtney Murray, who belonged to the intellectual and religious elite, has shown that, materially saying quite the opposite from the Syllabus — this latter is from 1864 and it is, as Roger Aubert has proven, conditioned by precise historical circumstances — the Declaration [Dignitatis Humanae] was the consequence of the battle by which, in the face of Jacobism and the totalitarianisms, the Popes more and more strongly led the fight for the dignity of the liberty of the human person made to the image of God.” (p. 185)

So, Congar and Murray would argue, it might have been true for the popes to condemn religious liberty in their time, but times have changed. Archbishop Lefebvre rejected this historicist attempt to justify the rejection of what the Church had previously taught:

“On the contrary, we have seen that Roger Aubert and John Courtney Murray are themselves prisoners of the historicist prejudice which makes them erroneously relativize the doctrine of the Popes of the nineteenth century! In reality, the Popes have condemned religious liberty in itself, as a freedom that is absurd, ungodly, and leading the peoples to religious indifference. This condemnation remains, and, with the authority of the constant ordinary magisterium of the Church (if not of the extraordinary magisterium, with Quanta Cura), it weighs on the conciliar declaration.” (pp. 185-196)

Today we see the absolute absurdity of believing that the pre-Vatican II popes were speaking only for unique historical situations. Vatican II’s purported embrace of the freedom to openly practice all religions may not have had a direct practical effect in non-Catholic nations, but it erroneously signaled two things to the world. It falsely indicated that the Church no longer condemned the proposition that “liberty of conscience and worship is each man’s personal right,” which Quanta Cura had aptly described as the “liberty of perdition.” It also suggested that the Church had embraced the destructive historicism that Pius XII had condemned.


Bishop of Rome Document and Vatican I.

Thanks in large part to the tragic reality that historicism has destroyed the concept of immutable truth in the minds of many (perhaps most) clerics and theologians, the authors of the new Bishop of Rome document did not need to even attempt to mask their contempt for immutable Catholic truth. While we could cite numerous examples from the document, arguably the most explicit is in the call to reinterpret Vatican I in the light of the most liberal readings of Vatican II’s documents:

“Among the proposals expressed by the dialogues, the call for a Catholic ‘re-reception’ or official commentary of Vatican I seems particularly important. Assuming the hermeneutical rule that the dogmas of Vatican I must be read in the light of Vatican II, especially its teaching on the People of God (LG, chapter II) and collegiality (LG 22–23), some dialogues reflect that Vatican II did not explicitly interpret Vatican I but, while incorporating its teaching, complemented it (LG, chapter III, 18).”

Footnote 13 cited Cardinal Ratzinger on the need to reinterpret Vatican I:

“Joseph Ratzinger: ‘Just as within Holy Scripture there is the phenomenon of relecture [...], so likewise the individual dogmas and pronouncements of the Councils are not to be understood as isolated, but rather in the process of dogmatic–historical relecture within this unity of the history of faith. [...] That this insight is of fundamental significance for the interpretation of Vatican I, is obvious’, (Joseph Ratzinger, Das neue Volk Gottes: Entwürfe zur Ekklesiologie, 2nd ed. [Düsseldorf: Patmos, 1970], 140–141)”

This may surprise some Catholics, but we should recall that Henri de Lubac — who was a key proponent of historicism — had a tremendous influence of the future Benedict XVI. We can get a sense of de Lubac’s profound influence by reading the words of Cardinal Ratzinger’s 1988 forward to de Lubac’s famous book, Catholicism: Christ and the Common Destiny of Man:

“It is now almost forty years since, in late autumn of 1949, a friend gave me a copy of de Lubac’s book Catholicism. For me, the encounter with this book became an essential milestone on my theological journey. . . It was not only for me that de Lubac’s book marked such a turning point. It fascinated theologians in the fifties everywhere and his fundamental insights became the patrimony of theological reflection. The narrow-minded individualistic Christianity against which he strove is hardly our problem today. Everyone is teaching about the social dimension of dogma.”

Because, according to Cardinal Ratzinger, “everyone” was teaching de Lubac’s ideas in 1988, it should come as little surprise that relatively few Catholic clerics and theologians have any sense of the immutable nature of Catholic truth today.

Of course the most striking illustration of this failure to appreciate the immutable nature of Catholic truth is the ongoing Synod on Synodality — with its listening sessions to discern how to change Catholic teaching — but we can see an even more important example in Benedict XVI’s final address to the clergy of Rome. In it, the follower of de Lubac explained how various historical changes during his lifetime had led to theological changes. One of the most unfortunate comments related to the development of the pernicious teaching on ecumenism, which has effaced the teaching that there is no salvation outside the Church (absent standard exceptions):

“Finally, ecumenism. I do not want to enter now into these problems, but it was obvious – especially after the ‘passions’ suffered by Christians in the Nazi era – that Christians could find unity, or at least seek unity, yet it was also clear that God alone can bestow unity. And we are still following this path.”

According to Benedict XVI, the Nazi era caused theologians to rethink the teaching that the only path to unity was through a process of non-Catholics accepting immutable Catholic truth. But Pope Pius XII had condemned the key components of today’s ecumenical movement in Humani Generis, from 1950 (which was after the Nazi era). So perhaps it was “obvious” to some theological opportunists that the time was ripe to try to reshape fundamental Catholic teaching, but it was evidently obvious to Pius XII that Catholics had a duty to resist the false ecumenism that dominates Rome today. Unfortunately, we know which side prevailed at the Council.

Why is all of this important today? Historicism has caused the evil against which Pius XII had warned:

“There is also a certain historicism, which attributing value only to the events of man's life, overthrows the foundation of all truth and absolute law, both on the level of philosophical speculations and especially to Christian dogmas.”

The foundation of all truth and absolute law has been overthrown. Many Catholics rightly applauded Benedict XVI as he responded to the problems in the Church by trying to restore what his predecessors had demolished, but at best he was building on the same bad foundation. His conservative-leaning work masked the fact that the foundation of immutable truth continued to deteriorate.

When we abandon the foundation of immutable truth, we offend God and, in a sense, deserve to lose the helps He wants to give us to overcome the current crisis. Why, in other words, would He intervene to resolve any of our more visible problems if we remain content to live with the damaged foundation that is of itself a rejection of God’s truth? We can even see all that is happening in the Church and world today as a fitting punishment for the collective abandonment of His divine truth.

The edition of SiSiNoNo cited above argued that restoration can only come by going back to the foundation of immutable truth:

“From what we have just seen, it logically follows that true restoration can only come by traveling along in a reverse direction from the one which led to the rupture or breaking away from the Doctrinal Tradition of the Church: a return to constant and durable philosophy, and therefore to Scholastic Theology, therefore to the Dogmatic tradition of the Church in faithful obedience to the constant directives and teachings of the Magisterium of all the Popes.”

This is not nearly as difficult as it may seem. Unlike the political realm in which our voices and votes count for nothing, in God’s Holy Catholic Church those who tell the truth have the power to build while others are destroying. So long as we act with charity, we never have to fear “offending the authorities” if we insist on immutable Catholic truth and reject the errors contrary to it. And today we have more reason than ever to know that the pre-Vatican II popes were correct when they denounced the Modernist and Liberal errors: we know this because we see firsthand the same damage they said would occur when Catholics abandoned truth and embraced errors.

God is God. You cannot reject the holy and salutary truths He gave us without causing tremendous damage. We need saints, but we cannot have saints without the immutable Catholic Faith. We need a Catholic pope, but there is little hope of a Catholic pope until Catholics want immutable Catholic Faith. We need to overturn the godless schemes to erect a New World Order, but we can do that only with the immutable Catholic Faith God gave us. Hence, the most pressing need in the world today is to restore belief in the immutable Catholic Faith.

Immaculate Heart of Mary, pray for us!