Leo XIV and the Popes: The origin of doctrine
Is doctrine the result of research and human processes, and a collective pursuit for truth—and is Leo XIV referring to Pope St Pius X when he says so?
Is doctrine the result of research and human processes, and a collective pursuit for truth?
Editors’ Notes
In a previous article, we began exploring Leo XIV’s emerging habit of appearing to allude, in a positive way, to errors condemned by the pre-conciliar magisterium.
In this piece, we shall continue this exploration, by looking at comments made by Leo XIV on Saturday 17 May 2025. We will see that…
Leo XIV’s basic rejection of the Church’s claims to have the truth and the answers for the resolution of social problems is contrary to what was clearly expressed in Rerum Novarum and Quadragesimo Anno.
His suggestion that doctrine arises from human research, discourse and processes was condemned in the decrees of Vatican I, Pascendi Dominici Gregis, and other documents.
His presentation of Christian education as “indoctrination” is contrary to the history of the Church and the teaching of Divini Illius Magistri.
Leo XIV, Audience with members of the ‘Centesimus Annus Pro Pontifice’ Foundation
Saturday 17 May 2025
You have the opportunity to show that the Church’s social doctrine, with its specific anthropological approach, seeks to encourage genuine engagement with social issues. It does not claim to possess a monopoly on truth, either in its analysis of problems or its proposal of concrete solutions. Where social questions are concerned, knowing how best to approach them is more important than providing immediate responses to why things happen or how to deal with them. The aim is to learn how to confront problems, for these are always different, since every generation is new, and faces new challenges, dreams and questions.
This is a fundamental aspect of our attempts to build a “culture of encounter” through dialogue and social friendship. For many of our contemporaries, the words “dialogue” and “doctrine” can seem incompatible. Perhaps when we hear the word “doctrine,” we tend to think of a set of ideas belonging to a religion. The word itself makes us feel less disposed to reflect, call things into question or seek new alternatives.
In the case of the Church’s social doctrine, we need to make clear that the word “doctrine” has another, more positive meaning, without which dialogue itself would be meaningless. “Doctrine” can be a synonym of “science,” “discipline” and “knowledge.” Understood in this way, doctrine appears as the product of research, and hence of hypotheses, discussions, progress and setbacks, all aimed at conveying a reliable, organized and systematic body of knowledge about a given issue. Consequently, a doctrine is not the same as an opinion, but is rather a common, collective and even multidisciplinary pursuit of truth.
“Indoctrination” is immoral. It stifles critical judgement and undermines the sacred freedom of respect for conscience, even if erroneous. It resists new notions and rejects movement, change or the evolution of ideas in the face of new problems. “Doctrine,” on the other hand, as a serious, serene and rigorous discourse, aims to teach us primarily how to approach problems and, even more importantly, how to approach people. It also helps us to make prudential judgements when confronted with challenges. Seriousness, rigour and serenity are what we must learn from every doctrine, including the Church’s social doctrine.
How does it compare with the teaching of Vatican I and the doctrine of Popes Leo XIII, St Pius X, and Pius XI?
Does the Church claim a monopoly on truth, especially in social questions?
Leo XIV
You have the opportunity to show that the Church’s social doctrine, with its specific anthropological approach, seeks to encourage genuine engagement with social issues. It does not claim to possess a monopoly on truth, either in its analysis of problems or its proposal of concrete solutions. Where social questions are concerned, knowing how best to approach them is more important than providing immediate responses to why things happen or how to deal with them. The aim is to learn how to confront problems, for these are always different, since every generation is new, and faces new challenges, dreams and questions.
Pope Pius XI, Quadragesimo Anno
2. […] Yet the Encyclical, On the Condition of Workers, compared with the rest had this special distinction that at a time when it was most opportune and actually necessary to do so, it laid down for all mankind the surest rules to solve aright that difficult problem of human relations called “the social question.” […]
7. In such a sharp conflict of mind, therefore, while the question at issue was being argued this way and that, nor always with calmness, all eyes as often before turned to the Chair of Peter, to that sacred depository of all truth whence words of salvation pour forth to all the world. And to the feet of Christ's Vicar on earth were flocking in unaccustomed numbers, men well versed in social questions, employers, and workers themselves, begging him with one voice to point out, finally, the safe road to them.
9. Therefore on the fifteenth day of May, 1891, that long awaited voice thundered forth; neither daunted by the arduousness of the problem nor weakened by age but with vigorous energy, it taught the whole human family to strike out in the social question upon new paths. […]
11. Since a problem was being treated “for which no satisfactory solution” is found “unless religion and the Church have been called upon to aid,” the Pope, clearly exercising his right and correctly holding that the guardianship of religion and the stewardship over those things that are closely bound up with it had been entrusted especially to him and relying solely upon the unchangeable principles drawn from the treasury of right reason and Divine Revelation, confidently and as one having authority, declared and proclaimed “the rights and duties within which the rich and the proletariat—those who furnish material things and those who furnish work—ought to be restricted in relation to each other,” and what the Church, heads of States and the people themselves directly concerned ought to do. […]
129. “Wherefore,” to use the words of Our Predecessor, “if human society is to be healed, only a return to Christian life and institutions will heal it.” For this alone can provide effective remedy for that excessive care for passing things that is the origin of all vices; and this alone can draw away men's eyes, fascinated by and wholly fixed on the changing things of the world, and raise them toward Heaven. Who would deny that human society is in most urgent need of this cure now? […]
136. No genuine cure can be furnished for this lamentable ruin of souls, which, so long as it continues, will frustrate all efforts to regenerate society, unless men return openly and sincerely to the teaching of the Gospel, to the precepts of Him Who alone has the words of everlasting life, words which will never pass away, even if Heaven and earth will pass away. All experts in social problems are seeking eagerly a structure so fashioned in accordance with the norms of reason that it can lead economic life back to sound and right order. But this order, which We Ourselves ardently long for and with all Our efforts promote, will be wholly defective and incomplete unless all the activities of men harmoniously unite to imitate and attain, in so far as it lies within human strength, the marvelous unity of the Divine plan. We mean that perfect order which the Church with great force and power preaches and which right human reason itself demands, that all things be directed to God as the first and supreme end of all created activity, and that all created good under God be considered as mere instruments to be used only in so far as they conduce to the attainment of the supreme end.
Does ‘doctrine’ arise as the product of research and collective human processes?
Although Leo XIV speaks in this passage of the Church’s social doctrine, his account also presents a view of doctrine in general—as the product of human discourse and methodological development.
Leo XIV
This is a fundamental aspect of our attempts to build a “culture of encounter” through dialogue and social friendship. For many of our contemporaries, the words “dialogue” and “doctrine” can seem incompatible. Perhaps when we hear the word “doctrine,” we tend to think of a set of ideas belonging to a religion. The word itself makes us feel less disposed to reflect, call things into question or seek new alternatives.
In the case of the Church’s social doctrine, we need to make clear that the word “doctrine” has another, more positive meaning, without which dialogue itself would be meaningless. “Doctrine” can be a synonym of “science,” “discipline” and “knowledge.”
Understood in this way, doctrine appears as the product of research, and hence of hypotheses, discussions, progress and setbacks, all aimed at conveying a reliable, organized and systematic body of knowledge about a given issue.
Leo XIV does not deny that there are certain truths that have been revealed to us by God, but neither does he affirm this. As a result, these words objectively convey the idea that doctrine is the result of a human process, rather than a matter of revealed truth.
Pius IX, Syllabus of Errors
Error 4
All the truths of religion proceed from the innate strength of human reason; hence reason is the ultimate standard by which man can and ought to arrive at the knowledge of all truths of every kind. — [Allocution “Maxima quidem,” June 9, 1862.] and Encyclical “Qui pluribus,” Nov. 9, 1846, etc.Error 8
As human reason is placed on a level with religion itself, so theological must be treated in the same manner as philosophical sciences. — Allocution “Singulari quadam,” Dec. 9, 1854.Error 9
All the dogmas of the Christian religion are indiscriminately the object of natural science or philosophy, and human reason, enlightened solely in an historical way, is able, by its own natural strength and principles, to attain to the true science of even the most abstruse dogmas; provided only that such dogmas be proposed to reason itself as its object. — Letters to the Archbishop of Munich, “Gravissimas inter,” Dec. 11, 1862, and “Tuas libenter,” Dec. 21, 1863.
Vatican I, Dei Filius
With this impiety spreading in every direction, it has come about, alas, that many even among the children of the catholic church have strayed from the path of genuine piety, and as the truth was gradually diluted in them, their catholic sensibility was weakened. Led away by diverse and strange teachings and confusing nature and grace, human knowledge and divine faith, they are found to distort the genuine sense of the dogmas which holy mother church holds and teaches, and to endanger the integrity and genuineness of the faith. […]
For the doctrine of the faith which God has revealed is put forward not as some philosophical discovery capable of being perfected by human intelligence, but as a divine deposit committed to the spouse of Christ to be faithfully protected and infallibly promulgated.
Pope St Pius X, Lamentabili Sane
Error 22
The dogmas the Church holds out as revealed are not truths which have fallen from heaven. They are an interpretation of religious facts which the human mind has acquired by laborious effort.Error 54
Dogmas, Sacraments and hierarchy, both their notion and reality, are only interpretations and evolutions of the Christian intelligence which have increased and perfected by an external series of additions the little germ latent in the Gospel.Error 59
Christ did not teach a determined body of doctrine applicable to all times and all men, but rather inaugurated a religious movement adapted or to be adapted to different times and places.
Pope St Pius X, Pascendi Dominici Gregis
7 […] Agnosticism is only the negative part of the system of the Modernists: the positive part consists in what they call vital immanence. Thus they advance from one to the other. Religion, whether natural or supernatural, must, like every other fact, admit of some explanation. But when natural theology has been destroyed, and the road to revelation closed by the rejection of the arguments of credibility, and all external revelation absolutely denied, it is clear that this explanation will be sought in vain outside of man himself. It must, therefore, be looked for in man; and since religion is a form of life, the explanation must certainly be found in the life of man. In this way is formulated the principle of religious immanence. […]
12. We have thus reached one of the principal points in the Modernist’s system, namely, the origin and the nature of dogma. For they place the origin of dogma in those primitive and simple formulas, which, under a certain aspect, are necessary to faith; for revelation, to be truly such, requires the clear knowledge of God in the consciousness. But dogma itself, they apparently hold, strictly consists in the secondary formulas. […]
21. Thus far We have touched upon the origin and nature of faith. But as faith has many branches, and chief among them the Church, dogma, worship, devotions, the Books which we call “sacred,” it concerns us to know what the Modernists teach concerning them. To begin with dogma, We have already indicated its origin and nature. Dogma is born of a sort of impulse or necessity by virtue of which the believer elaborates his thought so as to render it clearer to his own conscience and that of others. This elaboration consists entirely in the process of investigating and refining the primitive mental formula, not indeed in itself and according to any logical explanation, but according to circumstances, or vitally as the Modernists somewhat less intelligibly describe it.
Hence it happens that around this primitive formula secondary formulas, as We have already indicated, gradually continue to be formed, and these subsequently grouped into one body, or one doctrinal construction and further sanctioned by the public magisterium as responding to the common consciousness, are called dogma. Dogma is to be carefully distinguished from the speculations of theologians which, although not alive with the life of dogma, are not without their utility as serving both to harmonize religion with science and to remove opposition between them, and to illumine and defend religion from without, and it may be even to prepare the matter for future dogma. […]
25. […] The following is their conception of the magisterium of the Church: No religious society, they say, can be a real unit unless the religious conscience of its members be one, and also the formula which they adopt. But this double unity requires a kind of common mind whose office is to find and determine the formula that corresponds best with the common conscience; and it must have, moreover, an authority sufficient to enable it to impose on the community the formula which has been decided upon.
From the combination and, as it were, fusion of these two elements, the common mind which draws up the formula and the authority which imposes it, arises, according to the Modernists, the notion of the ecclesiastical magisterium. And, as this magisterium springs, in its last analysis, from the individual consciences and possesses its mandate of public utility for their benefit, it necessarily follows that the ecclesiastical magisterium must be dependent upon them, and should therefore be made to bow to the popular ideals.
To prevent individual consciences from expressing freely and openly the impulses they feel, to hinder criticism from urging forward dogma in the path of its necessary evolution, is not a legitimate use but an abuse of a power given for the public weal. […]
28. It is thus, Venerable Brethren, that for the Modernists, whether as authors or propagandists, there is to be nothing stable, nothing immutable in the Church. Nor, indeed, are they without forerunners in their doctrines, for it was of these that Our predecessor Pius IX wrote:
“These enemies of divine revelation extol human progress to the skies, and with rash and sacrilegious daring would have it introduced into the Catholic religion as if this religion were not the work of God but of man, or some kind of philosophical discovery susceptible of perfection by human efforts.”
On the subject of revelation and dogma in particular, the doctrine of the Modernists offers nothing new. We find it condemned in the Syllabus of Pius IX, where it is enunciated in these terms:
“Divine revelation is imperfect, and therefore subject to continual and indefinite progress, corresponding with the progress of human reason”;
… and condemned still more solemnly in the Vatican Council:
“The doctrine of the faith which God has revealed has not been proposed to human intelligences to be perfected by them as if it were a philosophical system, but as a divine deposit entrusted to the Spouse of Christ to be faithfully guarded and infallibly interpreted. Hence also that sense of the sacred dogmas is to be perpetually retained which our Holy Mother the Church has once declared, nor is this sense ever to be abandoned on plea or pretext of a more profound comprehension of the truth.”
Nor is the development of our knowledge, even concerning the faith, barred by this pronouncement; on the contrary, it is supported and maintained. For the same Council continues:
“Let intelligence and science and wisdom, therefore, increase and progress abundantly and vigorously in individuals, and in the mass, in the believer and in the whole Church, throughout the ages and the centuries—but only in its own kind, that is, according to the same dogma, the same sense, the same acceptation.”
Pope St Pius X, Sacrorum Antistitum (The Oath Against Modernism)
Fourthly, I sincerely hold that the doctrine of faith was handed down to us from the apostles through the orthodox Fathers in exactly the same meaning and always in the same purport. Therefore, I entirely reject the heretical misrepresentation that dogmas evolve and change from one meaning to another different from the one which the Church held previously. I also condemn every error according to which, in place of the divine deposit which has been given to the spouse of Christ to be carefully guarded by her, there is put a philosophical figment or product of a human conscience that has gradually been developed by human effort and will continue to develop indefinitely.
Fifthly, I hold with certainty and sincerely confess that faith is not a blind sentiment of religion welling up from the depths of the subconscious under the impulse of the heart and the motion of a will trained to morality; but faith is a genuine assent of the intellect to truth received by hearing from an external source. By this assent, because of the authority of the supremely truthful God, we believe to be true that which has been revealed and attested to by a personal God, our creator and lord.
Is doctrine “a common, collective and even multidisciplinary pursuit of truth”?
Leo XIV
Consequently, a doctrine is not the same as an opinion, but is rather a common, collective and even multidisciplinary pursuit of truth.
The idea that doctrine is any kind of “pursuit of truth” is beyond any comment here. However, the reference to “collectivity” recalls the words of Pope St Pius X:
Pope St Pius X, Pascendi Dominici Gregis
23. A wider field for comment is opened when we come to what the Modernist school has imagined to be the nature of the Church. They begin with the supposition that the Church has its birth in a double need; first, the need of the individual believer to communicate his faith to others, especially if he has had some original and special experience, and secondly, when the faith has become common to many, the need of the collectivity to form itself into a society and to guard, promote, and propagate the common good. What, then, is the Church? It is the product of the collective conscience, that is to say, of the association of individual consciences which, by virtue of the principle of vital permanence, depend all on one first believer, who for Catholics is Christ.
Now every society needs a directing authority to guide its members towards the common end, to foster prudently the elements of cohesion, which in a religious society are doctrine and worship. Hence the triple authority in the Catholic Church, disciplinary, dogmatic, liturgical. The nature of this authority is to be gathered from its origin, and its rights and duties from its nature. In past times it was a common error that authority came to the Church from without, that is to say directly from God; and it was then rightly held to be autocratic. But this conception has now grown obsolete. For in the same way as the Church is a vital emanation of the collectivity of consciences, so too authority emanates vitally from the Church itself. […]
27. […] Already we observe, Venerable Brethren, the introduction of that most pernicious doctrine which would make of the laity the factor of progress in the Church. Now it is by a species of covenant and compromise between these two forces of conservation and progress, that is to say between authority and individual consciences, that changes and advances take place. The individual consciences, or some of them, act on the collective conscience, which brings pressure to bear on the depositories of authority to make terms and to keep to them. […]
What is ‘indoctrination,’ and is it immoral?
Leo XIV
“Indoctrination” is immoral. It stifles critical judgement and undermines the sacred freedom of respect for conscience, even if erroneous. It resists new notions and rejects movement, change or the evolution of ideas in the face of new problems. “Doctrine,” on the other hand, as a serious, serene and rigorous discourse, aims to teach us primarily how to approach problems and, even more importantly, how to approach people. It also helps us to make prudential judgements when confronted with challenges. Seriousness, rigour and serenity are what we must learn from every doctrine, including the Church’s social doctrine.
As with the distinction between “proselytism” and “evangelisation,” we are faced here with either (a) a false dichotomy, or (b) a strawman of traditional education.
Such dichotomies are liable to send us down rabbit-holes, in which we argue over what Prevost meant by these words, and over definitions of good and bad forms of education in Christian doctrine.
Let us resist this trap, and instead note that in his encyclical on Christian Education, Pope Pius XI exposes this tendency to draw on true ideas, presented as a new discoveries, as means of overturning the stability of education and doctrine itself:
Pope Pius XI, Divini Illius Magistri
57. […] every Christian child or youth has a strict right to instruction in harmony with the teaching of the Church, the pillar and ground of truth. And whoever disturbs the pupil's Faith in any way, does him grave wrong, inasmuch as he abuses the trust which children place in their teachers, and takes unfair advantage of their inexperience and of their natural craving for unrestrained liberty, at once illusory and false. […]
60. Hence every form of pedagogic naturalism which in any way excludes or weakens supernatural Christian formation in the teaching of youth, is false. Every method of education founded, wholly or in part, on the denial or forgetfulness of original sin and of grace, and relying on the sole powers of human nature, is unsound. Such, generally speaking, are those modern systems bearing various names which appeal to a pretended self-government and unrestrained freedom on the part of the child, and which diminish or even suppress the teacher's authority and action, attributing to the child an exclusive primacy of initiative, and an activity independent of any higher law, natural or divine, in the work of his education.
61. If any of these terms are used, less properly, to denote the necessity of a gradually more active cooperation on the part of the pupil in his own education; if the intention is to banish from education despotism and violence, which, by the way, just punishment is not, this would be correct, but in no way new. It would mean only what has been taught and reduced to practice by the Church in traditional Christian education, in imitation of the method employed by God Himself towards His creatures, of whom He demands active cooperation according to the nature of each; for His Wisdom “reacheth from end to end mightily and ordereth all things sweetly.”
62. But alas! it is clear from the obvious meaning of the words and from experience, that what is intended by not a few, is the withdrawal of education from every sort of dependence on the divine law. So today we see, strange sight indeed, educators and philosophers who spend their lives in searching for a universal moral code of education, as if there existed no decalogue, no gospel law, no law even of nature stamped by God on the heart of man, promulgated by right reason, and codified in positive revelation by God Himself in the ten commandments. These innovators are wont to refer contemptuously to Christian education as “heteronomous,” “passive”, “obsolete,” because founded upon the authority of God and His holy law.
63. Such men are miserably deluded in their claim to emancipate, as they say, the child, while in reality they are making him the slave of his own blind pride and of his disorderly affections, which, as a logical consequence of this false system, come to be justified as legitimate demands of a so-called autonomous nature.
64. But what is worse is the claim, not only vain but false, irreverent and dangerous, to submit to research, experiment and conclusions of a purely natural and profane order, those matters of education which belong to the supernatural order; as for example questions of priestly or religious vocation, and in general the secret workings of grace which indeed elevate the natural powers, but are infinitely superior to them, and may nowise be subjected to physical laws, for “the Spirit breatheth where He will.”
Conclusion
It might be objected that the word doctrine admits several meanings, and that we are treating it as if it was only and always a synonym for dogma (instead of sometimes).
That objection misunderstands the issue. The problem is not that Leo XIV uses the word doctrine in a broader or looser sense; it is that he does so in a context which deliberately blurs the boundaries between doctrine as revealed truth and doctrine as evolving human discourse.
Nor can he be defended by saying that these words pertain only to the Church’s social doctrine. Even though the answers of social doctrine will be determined by the particular questions of the day, it too is bound by revealed principles, and cannot be treated as a sociological discipline open to endless evolution. As Pius XI teaches in Quadragesimo Anno, the Church has the right—and duty—to “lay down the surest rules” for resolving social questions, not merely to model openness to change.
Prevost’s language directly parallels the Modernist conception of doctrine condemned by St Pius X: dogma as a product of collective reflection, shaped by the needs and consciousness of each age.
By using the language of science and process without qualification, and by contrasting “indoctrination” with a supposedly open, humanistic understanding of doctrine, Leo XIV gives objective support to the idea that the Church’s teaching is a product of human research and processes, rather than a deposit of faith “once delivered to the saints” (Jude 1.3).
(This is to say nothing of Prevost’s idea that doctrine is a “common, collective and even multidisciplinary pursuit of truth” or “a serious, serene and rigorous discourse.” What can one say in answer to such words?)
Prevost does not explicitly state that it is therefore provisional, fallible, and subject to revision—but this is the logical corollary, to be developed at a later date by him, or by other writers.
To summarise the points, we have seen that on the 17 May 2025…
Leo XIV’s basic rejection of the Church’s claims to have the truth and the answers for the resolution of social problems is contrary to what was clearly expressed in Rerum Novarum and Quadragesimo Anno.
His suggestion that doctrine arises from human research, discourse and processes was condemned in the decrees of Vatican I, Pascendi Dominici Gregis, and other documents.
His presentation of Christian education as “indoctrination” is contrary to the history of the Church and the teaching of Divini Illius Magistri.
As a reminder, in the previous piece, we saw that on 16 May 2025…
Prevost’s reference to inter-religious efforts to secure “a climate of peace” (16 May) are contrary to Pope Pius X's Notre Charge Apostolique
His statement that the above “naturally requires full respect for religious freedom in every country,” (16 May) contrary to all the post-revolutionary and pre-conciliar popes.
His affirmation of religious experience as an “essential dimension of the human person” (16 May)—which is true in itself but in the context given, appears to be a reference to Pope Pius X's Pascendi Dominici Gregis, against the modernists—who, in the relevant place, also links it to the above point of religious liberty.
A picture is emerging. In short: words have consequences, and when someone defines doctrine in terms that align with condemned errors, he cannot hide behind the ambiguity of terminology.
While many are being distracted by his use of the names and vestments of pre-conciliar popes, Prevost has been specifically and systematically signalling—for those who know the pre-conciliar magisterium, and have ears to hear—that he rejects their teaching in its most fundamental aspects.
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Thanks for your patience and concision in cutting away all irrelevant material and underscoring the undeniable nature of Papa Prevost’s addresses.
Is Prevost a modernist that is clear in explaining his thinking or are you just great at editing his work and cutting to the chase?