The Desacralization of Salvation History: A Modernist Fairytale
The cited article from the National Catholic Register (March 14, 2026) reports on the forthcoming Fox Broadcasting series *The Faithful: Women of the Bible*, a three-week event dramatizing the stories of Sarah, Hagar, Rebekah, Leah, and Rachel. The production’s stated goal, as explained by showrunner René Echevarria, is to present these biblical narratives in an “emotionally grounded way,” focusing on the women’s “emotional lives” and their struggles with “complicated circumstances.” This approach, framed as a quest for “relatability” for modern audiences, represents a profound and dangerous capitulation to the naturalistic, rationalistic spirit condemned by the infallible Magisterium of the Catholic Church. It reduces the supernatural, divinely authored history of salvation to a mere collection of human interest stories, stripping Scripture of its doctrinal, sacramental, and eschatological significance. This series is not a work of Catholic art but a symptom of the theological bankruptcy of the post-conciliar era, where the sacred text is mined for therapeutic platitudes while its divine authority and salvific purpose are silently denied.
1. The Reduction of Sacred History to Psychological Humanism
The core error of the series is its foundational premise: that the primary lens for understanding the matriarchs of Genesis is their “emotional lives” and their status as “flawed, strong people dealing with extraordinary circumstances.” Echevarria states his “North Star” was to understand the women “on an emotional level.” This is a direct embrace of the Modernist heresy condemned by Pope St. Pius X in the encyclical *Pascendi Dominici gregis* and the decree *Lamentabili sane exitu*. Proposition 25 of *Lamentabili* anathematizes the view that “Faith, as assent of the mind, is ultimately based on a sum of probabilities.” The series replaces the *assent of faith* to revealed truth with a *psychological engagement* with fictionalized human drama.
The true Catholic approach to Scripture, as defined by the Council of Trent, is that it is a supernatural revelation authored by the Holy Spirit, containing “the truth of the faith and the rule of human morals” (Session IV, Decree on the Canon of Scripture). Its primary purpose is to teach “necessary for salvation” truths. The series’ focus on “what their lives were like” and “how they felt” is a deliberate sidestepping of the theological and typological truths these narratives convey. Sarah is not primarily a woman struggling with infertility; she is the type of the Church, the mother of nations, whose faith in God’s promise is extolled in Hebrews 11:11. Hagar is not merely a marginalized servant; her story prefigures the Old Covenant (Galatians 4:24-25). To ignore this supernatural dimension is to commit the error of “moderate rationalism” condemned in the *Syllabus of Errors* (Prop. 8-14), which treats theological subjects as mere objects of natural science or philosophy.
2. The Heresy of “Filling in the Blanks” and the Rejection of Divine Authorship
Echevarria explains the methodology: “The Bible can be very specific, but it can also be profound in its silences… We need to do the research to find out about life at that time to fill in those gaps.” This statement is a quintessential expression of the Modernist principle of “development of dogma” and the evolutionary view of revelation. It assumes that the sacred text is an incomplete, primitive human document requiring supplementation by the superior “research” and “understanding” of the modern mind.
This is precisely the error condemned by *Lamentabili*:
– **Prop. 9:** “The belief that God is the true Author of Holy Scripture is excessive naivety or ignorance.”
– **Prop. 12:** “An exegete who wishes to fruitfully engage in biblical studies should especially reject any preconceived opinion about the supernatural origin of Holy Scripture, which he should interpret just like other purely human documents.”
– **Prop. 14:** “In many narratives, the Evangelists did not report what actually happened, but what they thought would be of greater benefit to the recipients, even if it were false.”
The series’ methodology applies these condemned principles to the Old Testament. By claiming the right to “fill in the gaps” based on historical research, it implicitly denies the plenary inspiration and inerrancy of Scripture. The “silences” of Scripture are not gaps to be filled by human imagination but are doctrinally significant, as they direct the reader to the spiritual and allegorical senses which the Church alone, through her Magisterium, can authentically expound. The series’ approach is a return to the rationalist exegesis of the 19th century, which the *Syllabus* (Prop. 13) and *Lamentabili* (Prop. 1-8) roundly condemned as stemming from “the innate strength of human reason” rather than from divine revelation.
3. The Omission of the Supernatural Order and the Kingdom of Christ
The article and the series it promotes are utterly silent on the fundamental Catholic truth that the history of Genesis is the history of the Kingdom of Christ in its proto-evangelical form. Pope Pius XI, in the encyclical *Quas Primas* (1925), which established the feast of Christ the King, explicitly links the reign of Christ to the entire history of salvation: “His reign, namely, extends not only to Catholic nations… but His reign encompasses also all non-Christians, so that most truly the entire human race is subject to the authority of Jesus Christ.” The story of Abraham and the patriarchs is the story of the calling of a people to prepare the way for the Incarnate King. The promises to Sarah regarding Isaac are the promises of the supernatural life of grace, fulfilled in Christ.
The series’ exclusive focus on “emotional lives” and “complicated circumstances” is a deliberate omission of the supernatural. There is no mention of God’s covenant, the promise of the Redeemer (Genesis 3:15), the significance of circumcision as a sign of that covenant, or the typology of the sacrifices. This is the “secularism” or “laicism” that Pius XI identified as the plague of the modern world: “It began with the denial of Christ the Lord’s reign over all nations… and then slowly, the Christian religion began to be equated with other false religions.” By presenting these stories as universally relatable human dramas without explicit reference to their place in the economy of salvation and the Kingship of Christ, the series contributes to this very error. It treats the biblical characters as proto-Protestants or modern secularists, not as members of the one true Church in its nascent form, living under the Old Law which was a “pedagogue” to Christ (Galatians 3:24).
4. The Promotion of “Relatability” Over Doctrinal Truth
The repeated emphasis on “relatability” for modern audiences is a key indicator of the series’ Modernist foundation. Echevarria connects with his own infertility struggle. This subjective, emotional criterion for interpreting Scripture is the antithesis of the Catholic principle that Sacred Scripture must be interpreted within the “analogy of faith” (*analogia fidei*) and under the guidance of the Church’s living Magisterium. The *Syllabus of Errors* (Prop. 15, 16) condemns the idea that “every man is free to embrace and profess that religion which, guided by the light of reason, he shall consider true” and that “man may, in the observance of any religion whatever, find the way of eternal salvation.” The series’ methodology, by making the viewer’s personal emotional resonance the measure of the story’s value, implicitly endorses this indifferentist principle. It suggests that the truth of the Genesis narrative is validated not by its consistency with revealed doctrine and Church teaching, but by its ability to make a modern, perhaps non-practicing, viewer feel understood. This is the cult of man, the “anthropocentric” shift condemned by Pope Pius XII in *Humani generis* (1950), which places human experience and reason above the deposit of faith.
5. The Venue and the Post-Conciliar Context: A Perfect Symbiosis
That this series airs on the secular Fox network, and is reported by a mainstream Catholic news outlet without a whisper of critique, is profoundly symptomatic. It is a product of, and for, the “conciliar sect” and the world it embraces. In the pre-1958 Church, a dramatization of Sacred Scripture for a global audience would have been produced under the explicit guidance of the Holy Office, with the clear purpose of catechesis and the defense of the faith against errors. It would have been suffused with Catholic doctrine, the liturgical language of the Church, and an unambiguous presentation of the supernatural. Instead, we have a product of the “Church of the New Advent,” where Scripture is a cultural artifact to be “adapted” for a relativistic age. The showrunner’s statement that the series is about “the beginning of God’s unfolding story” is a vague, deist-sounding phrase that avoids the concrete, Catholic truth that this story finds its fulfillment in the sacrifice of the Cross and the Mass. The silence on the Mass, on the priesthood, on the Church as the continuation of Israel, is deafening. This is the “silence about supernatural matters” that is “the gravest accusation.”
Conclusion: A Tool of Apostasy
*The Faithful: Women of the Bible* is not a harmless dramatization. It is a sophisticated instrument of apostasy, operating on the principle that the sacred history of Genesis can be safely drained of its supernatural content and presented as a generic tale of human struggle. It teaches viewers to read Scripture through the lens of modern psychology, not through the lens of the four senses (literal, allegorical, moral, anagogical) defined by the Church. It promotes the Modernist error that doctrine “develops” and that our contemporary understanding allows us to “fill in the gaps” left by the “primitive” biblical authors. It replaces the *gloria Dei*—the glory of God and the manifestation of His Kingship in history—with the *gloria hominis*—the glorification of human emotional experience.
From the perspective of integral Catholic faith, which holds the doctrine of the Church before the revolution of 1958 as the sole and unchangeable rule, this series is an abomination. It collaborates with the “enemies within” (St. Pius X, *Pascendi*) by making the Bible palatable to a world that rejects the supernatural. It is a perfect illustration of the “diversion from apostasy” described in the analysis of the Fatima apparitions: focusing on external, relatable human stories while omitting the primary danger—the modernist apostasy that denies the very possibility of God acting decisively in history to establish His Kingdom. The faithful are called not to “relate” to the patriarchs as psychological case studies, but to venerate them as saints whose lives point unequivocally to Christ, and to submit their intellects to the infallible teaching authority of the Church which alone can interpret the Word of God. This series offers the opposite: a mirror for the viewer’s own sentiments, not a window into the saving truths of God.
Source:
New Biblical Series Depicts Book of Genesis Through Eyes of Its Best-Known Women (ncregister.com)
Date: 14.03.2026