[Question]{.underline}: How can the apostate church claim to have the four marks of the Catholic Church?
[Answer:]{.underline} The term apostate has a precise meaning in Theology and Canon Law. It means the total abandonment of all Christian faith in someone who has been baptized (Canon 1325,§2, 1917 Code). Now it is clear that the modernists who have infiltrated their way into the hierarchy of the Catholic Church, have not abandoned all Christian faith. To the contrary, they proclaim themselves to be Catholics and to be faithful to the Church, all the while denying some aspects of the Catholic Faith, life and liturgy by their indifferentism, liberalism and naturalism. This is the technique of the modernists precisely condemned by St. Pius X in his encyclical Pascendi. They are determined to stay inside the Church, so as to change it from within, and not to leave it. Here lies all the confusion of the present crisis in the Church. Many are heretics, but they cannot be considered as formal heretics until they have demonstrated pertinacity, stubbornly denying a doctrine of Faith after they have been reproved by authority.
If it is true that the unity of the Church is obscured by the confusion of the present times, and the refusal of the modernists to condemn error, it is nevertheless perfectly clear from the constant teaching of the Church in the past. Moreover, as deficient as it may be in performing its duties, the visible hierarchy of the Church remains the proof of the exterior unity of the Church.
If the holiness of the Church is obscured by the naturalism of a teaching of social justice and the rights of man, nevertheless the supernatural teachings of 20 centuries of holy saints and Popes concerning the holy sacraments, and the holiness of the Mass cannot be denied.
The Catholicity of the Church is likewise obscured by the innumerable variations in modern belief and inculturation. The traditional Latin Mass was a perfect symbol of that universality. However, the deposit of the Faith remains the same, despite the betrayals of the modernists, to the Pope himself. Catholics still believe what Catholics have always and everywhere believed. Never could the modernists impose their philosophical ravings as points of faith, nor have they. This applies to religious liberty and ecumenism, presented by the modernists as obligatory, but in fact in no way a part of the deposit of the Faith, nor consequently of the universality of the Church. The question of apostolicity is not in question.
Consequently, if the modernist crisis does make it more difficult to identify the Roman Catholic Church as the only holder of the four marks of the Church, and does make it more difficult to convince souls to convert to the one true Church, it is nevertheless not at all impossible. The important question is that of distinguishing what is essential to these four marks, from the false human notions of weak, liberal, modernist Catholics, betraying more or less their position in the hierarchy. Christ never promised that every Catholic would be holy, nor that every Catholic would live in perfect union with every other Catholic, nor that there would never be infiltrators attempting to introduce their own notions in the name of the Faith. In fact, the history of the Church is the story of the constant efforts by its enemies, within and without, to undermine its unity, holiness and catholicity.
The present day attacks, culmination of over two centuries of revolution are not the proof that it is has lost its divine constitution, but precisely the proof that it has retained it. For otherwise, it could not possible have continued to exist, nor would it exist now. The Church is no less divine now in its unity, sanctity and universality, in the midst of this terrible Passion, than Christ was divine when dying on the Cross.
Answered by Father Peter Scott, SSPX.