In his One Hundred Years of Modernism, Fr. Dominique Bourmaud provided a sobering assessment of the way in which the architects of Vatican II so thoroughly disavowed Pius XII’s encyclical condemning the errors threatening the Church, Humani Generis:
“Humani Generis appeared in 1950. The year 1965 marked the closing of the Second Vatican Council, which cast doubt on the fundamental points reaffirmed by the Pope Pacelli. Never before had a dogmatic encyclical been so quickly and so completely disavowed by the very men who had fallen under its condemnation. How is it possible that the new theology, censured so solemnly and so definitively by Pius XII, in perfect accord with Pius X’s Pascendi, should have become the official theology of Vatican II and the post-conciliar Church?”
Before considering the various ways in which John XXIII and his Council rejected Humani Generis, it is worth pausing to consider what faithful Catholics during Pius XII’s pontificate would have thought about the …More