Dr. John Pilch and His Faithful St. Patrick's Cathedral, El Paso, Texas Followers: Their ilk have been around a long, long time!

Source: Tobin, Rt. Rev. Thomas J., translator. Giordini, Igino. Pius X A Country Priest. Milwaukee: The Bruce Publishing Company, 1954.

Adapted, colored and highlighted at will from pages: 145-148

"Under this name of Modernism, at the beginning of this [20th] century (as under the name of Protestantism), various doctrines and various religious attitudes held forth, all more or less at variance with the orthodox tradition and discipline of the Church. We may say that the current socioeconomic and political revolution was infiltrating into the very life of prayer. If Catholicism had allowed it [Modernism] to go unchecked it [ Roman Catholicism] would have become a sort of Protestantism: a mere noisy religious opinion, to be modified from generation to generation, to be changed from person to person, resolving itself at length into a system of natural ethics, wearing the trappings of traditional culture.

Such Protestant writers as Harnack who wrote The Essence of Chrisianity and a would-be Catholic critic of his, the French priest Father Loisy, author of The Gospel and the Church, seemed to agree upon one thing, as Giordini tells us:

"[B]oth Loisy and Harnack would do away with the Church as the social institution of Christ upon earth and relegate it to a future heaven. In affirming that Christ's consciousness of His messianic mission was an evolutionary thing, they denied His divinity, His divine Sonship.

"From his books, it is evident that for the author [Father Loisy] the divinity of Christ did not exist historically, that Christ Himself had no idea of it, that He was in error about His kingdom and that he never had the idea of founding a Church."

Our author, Igino Giordini goes on to contrast the Protestant Harnack's views of and those of the Tridentine Latin Mass-saying Father Loisy.

"For Harnack, Catholicism was an arbitrary addition to the Gospels; for Loisy it was an evitable consequence.

"Subsequently, in his book, The Fourth Gospel, Loisy rejected the historicity of the Gospel according to St. John and denied that St. John was its author. Here again he denied any connection between Christian dogma and historical sources. Later, in 1908, in his book, The Gospels, he will show himself to be nothing more that a rationalist; and he will be excommunicated.

"In this fashion, Loisy became in France [like poor Mr. Frank Gorman's Dr. John Pilch in the Diocese of El Paso, Texas, a century later! ] -- and to a certain extent in all Europe -- the standard-bearer of modernism; he, a priest who had aspired to be a bishop, and who, in reality, was trying to substitute gnosis (a seeking to know) for pistis ( faith ), skeptical criticism for dogma.

"But dangerous tendencies appeared also in the writings of other exegetes, philosophers, and ethnologists, such as Houtin, Laberthonniere, and LeRoy -- all three priests; as well as in the writings of laymen, such as Blondel: names which themselves indicate the multiform and multipartite character of Modernism, which, rather than being a heresy, a sickness, was a morbid state, a series of heresies, having in commmon that they all, in a mania for novelty, were bent, more or less hiddenly, in canceling out ecclesiastical tradition, the Bible, accepted truths, and the hierarchy of the [Roman Catholic] Church."

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Excerpt from: Day of the Ly'in Hos, the University of Texas at El Paso Story

"In all fairness to the University of Texas at El Paso, this academic equivalent to an ENRON of Texas-style continuing criminal enterprise was itself just as much a vicitim to what one shrewd female historian of the Catholic Church has called a spiritual necrosis as were the bulk of the Catholic churches and faithful of the Diocese of El Paso.

"And whether called by some other, more attractive name, such as, for example, religious apostasy,or cultural suicide, the effects of this condition are the same: a gradual weakening of the usual robust connection to reality enjoyed by most people throughout the world.

"Yet, here and now, in both areas of human drama and real life, the minority of losers were more than outweighed by the winners. It's just that in both cases the winners were down below, and the losers were up above: a classic example of what even Karl Marx may have had in mind when he talks about something like he may have called the pre-revolutionary state.

"Now, even Marx must have had to concede that this so-called pre-revolutionary state of his was potentially as dangerous as hell itself for those making suckers out of everybody else lower down.

"Unhappily, for the Diocese of El Paso's John Pilch Crowd and the hoods and clowns running UTEP, some basic mathematical numbers crunching going on twenty years ago led at least one foundation or the other to a sobering conclusion:

"¡ Hey, Familia! ¡Ora, MEChA! ¡Ora, DESTINO! ¡Ora, UTEP!"

"When dealing with demographic realities expessed in terms of units of population broken down into blocks equal to A: 10,000 fellow human beings [ UTEP] or B: equal to units of 100,000 human beings [ Catholic Diocese of El Paso, Texas ] the radicalization of as few as 5% of the people in each Unit A or 1% of the people in each Unit B can lead to some astounding changes in the previous power paradigm.

"You could just bet on it!"