Excerpt from PASCENDI DOMINICI GREGIS, 1907 by St. Pope Pius X
34. The result of this dismembering of the records [by the modernists referred to in the encyclical],
and this partition of them throughout the centuries is naturally
that the Scriptures can no longer be attributed to the authors whose names they bear. The Modernists have no
hesitation in affirming generally that these books, and especially the Pentateuch and the first three Gospels,
have been gradually formed from a primitive brief narration, by additions, by interpolations of theological or allegorical interpretations, or parts introduced only for the purpose of joining different passages together.
This means, to put it briefly and clearly, that in the Sacred Books we must admit a vital evolution,
springing from and corresponding with the evolution of faith. The traces of this evolution, they tell us, are so
visible in the books that one might almost write a history of it. Indeed, this history they actually do write,
and with such an easy assurance that one might believe them to have seen with their own eyes the writers at work through
the ages amplifying the Sacred Books. To aid them in this they call to their assistance that branch of criticism which
they call textual, and labor to show that such a fact or such a phrase is not in its right place,
adducing other arguments of the same kind. They seem, in fact, to have constructed for themselves certain types of
narration and discourses, upon which they base their assured verdict as to whether a thing is or is not out of place.
Let him who can judge how far they are qualified in this way to make such distinctions. To hear them descant of their works
on the Sacred Books, in which they have been able to discover so much that is defective, one would imagine that before
them nobody ever even turned over the pages of Scripture. The truth is that a whole multitude of Doctors, far superior to
them in genius, in erudition, in sanctity, have sifted the Sacred Books in every way, and so far from finding in them anything
blameworthy have thanked God more and more heartily the more deeply they have gone into them, for His divine
bounty in having vouchsafed to speak thus to men. Unfortunately. these great Doctors did not enjoy the same aids to
study that are possessed by the Modernists for they did not have for their rule and guide a philosophy borrowed
from the negation of God, and a criterion which consists of themselves .
A related subject is the 'humanizing' of the Bible, condemned by Bl. Pope Pius IX in the Syllabus of Errors, 1862:
7. The prophecies and miracles set forth and recorded in the Sacred Scriptures are the fiction of poets, and the mysteries of the Christian faith the result of philosophical investigations. In the books of the Old and the New Testament there are contained mythical inventions, and Jesus Christ is Himself a myth.
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