Enc: Our Apostolic Mandate

What the Sillon exactly was, and what it stood for, will be made clear in the encyclical…. This letter was dated August 25, 1910. Why bring it to light again? Because the socio-political errors of contemporary Catholicism and their incidence on the life of the Church, take their origin in Sillonism. This Encyclical therefore, is terribly relevant to our won time; for the first time in the history of the Church, democratic ideas have won official recognition; even the Provincial of a religious order has to abide by the decisions of his “Council”! The poison has permeated every stratum of Church life.

…Pius X dealt a deathblow to Sillonism and its “democratic dreams,” as he himself put it. But whilst a movement may be destroyed, ideas cannot. So the Sillonist ideas continued to spread under different labels. By 1945 the Catholic world in its entirety had been infected. 1965 marked their official victory…Herein is Pius X’s famous line: “Indeed, the true friends of the people are neither revolutionaries, nor innovators, they are traditionalists.”

“As soon as the social question is being approached, it is a fashion in some quarters to first put aside the divinity of Jesus Christ, and then to mention only His unlimited clemency, His compassion of all human miseries, and His pressing exhortations to the love of our neighbor and the brotherhood of men.”

58 pp.