A List of Commonly Heard Modernist Heresies
1) The Creation accounts in the Book of Genesis are merely allegorical, combining various "oral legends" from Eastern traditions. They are not literally true. This canard is taught in colleges and universities (a New Testament course I took at Saint John's University in Queens, New York, in February of 1970 taught this as a "fact" beyond question). This canard thus makes its way back down the Catholic "food chain" from colleges and universities and seminaries to Catholic high schools and religious education programs. Students of mine at a prominent Catholic high school on Long Island in 2002-2003 told me that they had been taught this in their religion classes. They had been taught also that there was no devil.
2) The Flood never occurred. (See my related article, Unintelligent Evolutionary Forces, for the way in which secular anthropological and scientific research has proved that the Flood did occur.)
3) The parting of the Red Sea occurred as a result of natural forces, not by the direct intervention of God Himself.
4) It is impossible to "prove" from Scripture that Our Lord was conceived by the power of the Holy Ghost in Our Lady's virginal and immaculate womb and thus born as a result of a virginal birth.
5) Our Lord did not know that He was both God and Man until after the Resurrection. He did not know what His mission was until He underwent His Passion and Death.
6) Our Lord never performed any miracles. Our Lord, for example, did not multiply the loaves and the fishes. He merely inspired the people to share what they had with them but were hoarding for themselves. This is a particularly popular canard that gets itself repeated from the pulpit and in classrooms hither and yon.
7) The Gospels do not contain historically accurate accounts of Our Lord's Passion. This bit of heresy was espoused by the Bishop of San Jose, California, the Most Reverend Patrick McGrath, shortly after Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, prompting Father Daniel Cooper of the Society of Saint Pius X to denounce formally Bishop McGrath's heresy.
8) Our Lord never rose from the dead. One Scripture professor at a major East Coast seminary taught in his class, according to a priest who spoke about this publicly from the pulpit in his parish in 1981, "You would have seen nothing if you placed a video camera in front of Jesus's tomb. He did not rise from the dead. It never happened." The pastor of a parish in that same diocese kept repeating "He did not rise, He did not rise" to a woman who cornered him on the issue in the late-1990s during an "adult education" course. This is heresy. Plain and simple. This is a denial of an article contained in the Creed itself. The priest is still in good standing and has the confidence of his bishop.
8[a]) The Gospels were not written by the men whose names they carry. They were written by the "Christian community" in the latter part of the the First Century, reflecting back on what "Jesus might have said had He been in their own circumstances." This was the gist of what was taught in a New Testament course at Holy Apostles Seminary by the late Archbishop of Hartford, Connecticut, John Francis Whealon, when I was a student of his in 1982-1983. Archbishop Whealon's embrace of the non-existent proof for this claim was dealt with by the late Father William Heidt, O.S.B., in his class on Hermeneutics: "It is critical for those who want to de-mythologize the Bible to place the writing of the first three Gospels in the latter part of First and the early part of the Second Centuries. Doing so makes it possible for them to say that Our Lord never said or did anything, that it was simply the "community" that tried to deal with their own problems by imagining what He might have said." Father Heidt suffered mightily for his fidelity to the truth of Sacred Scripture and thus his fidelity to the integrity of the Deposit of Faith. A book, written by a French priest named Michel Tresmontaine (the spelling of the last name may be off quite considerably), that I was asked to review in 1997 asserted, quite to the contrary of contemporary Scripture "scholars," that the Gospel of Saint Matthew may very well have been written as early as the end of the fourth decade of the First Century, that is, within seven years of Our Lord's Ascension to the Father's right hand in glory and the descent of the Holy Ghost upon the Apostles and our dear Blessed Mother on Pentecost Sunday.
9) The Acts of the Apostles does not contain historically reliable information.
10) Saint Paul is not the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews. This particular claim, made repeatedly by so-called Scripture scholars and enshrined in the Novus Ordo lectionary by a refusal to list Saint Paul as the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews, was the subject of a brief discourse by the late Father John A. Hardon, S.J., during a day of recollection in the City of New York in August of 1978: "Make no mistake about it: Saint Paul was the author of the Letter to the Hebrews. Do you hear me? Do I make myself clear? Let me repeat myself: Saint Paul is the author of the Letter to the Hebrews."
There are many, many other examples, obviously. These merely scratch the surface of the heresies that are mouthed from the pulpit and even find their way into diocesan and archdiocesan newspapers. And these particular examples are the fruit of the efforts by episcopal conferences such as the one in England, Wales and Scotland to "warn" Catholics about taking the Bible "too literally." The influence of so-called contemporary Catholic Biblical exegesis on the lives of ordinary Catholics has been devastatingly harmful. Even the aforementioned Archbishop Whealon, who was impressed with such alleged exegesis, said the following after two semesters of his reviewing the New Testament through the lens of the methodologies of the exegetes: "Forget about everything I have taught you. Just preach the Gospel." In other words, the faithful do not need to hear about the"Q" source for the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke). They need to learn how to keep the Word of God in cooperation with the graces won for the by the shedding of Our Lord's Most Precious Blood on the wood of the Holy Cross.
Unfortunately, however, the dissemination of the "research" of alleged "Biblical exegetes" is indeed preached to the people as, if you will, Gospel truth. Evolution is Gospel truth. The denial of the historicity of the very words and miracles of Our Lord is Gospel truth. Everything except the received teaching that has been handed down to us from the Apostles is considered to be Gospel truth. Presented in the context of a liturgy that knows no fixed, immutable bounds and thus puts into question the immutability of God while containing not one prayer reminding the faithful of the possibility that they could go to Hell for all eternity, the fruit of what is alleged to be contemporary "Scriptural research" is nothing but rotten.
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