The “Jesus Without Church” Fallacy and Its Modernist Roots
Portal Catholic News Agency reports on November 4, 2025, a survey by ACS Technologies claiming increased personal devotion to Jesus among U.S. Catholics alongside declining Mass attendance. The study celebrates that 71% now believe faith doesn’t require Mass participation, while 53% prefer “traditional worship experiences.” Terry Poplava of ACST Catholic frames this as “deepening personal faith” amid “persistent challenges” to parish life.
Sacramental Abandonment Masquerading as Piety
The survey’s central claim – that one can maintain a “personal relationship with Jesus” while rejecting the Church’s sacramental economy – constitutes formal heresy against the dogma Extra Ecclesiam Nulla Salus (Outside the Church There Is No Salvation). Pius XII’s Mystici Corporis Christi (1943) dogmatically declared: “Only those are to be included as members of the Church who have been baptized and profess the true faith, and who have not been so unfortunate as to separate themselves from the unity of the Body, or been excluded by legitimate authority for grave faults committed” (§22). The notion that the God-Man can be accessed apart from His Mystical Body reduces the Incarnation to Gnostic sentimentality.
This “Jesus without Church” paradigm directly echoes the Modernist heresy condemned in Pius X’s Lamentabili Sane (1907), which rejected the claim that “Revelation was merely man’s self-awareness of his relationship to God” (Proposition 20). The survey’s language of “personal relationship” mirrors the Protestant sola fide error, condemned at the Council of Trent (Session VI, Canon IX), which declared anathema anyone asserting “that the sinner is justified by faith alone” apart from the Church’s sacraments.
The Mass Crisis: From Sacrifice to Social Club
The report’s admission that only 49% “strongly agree” about Christ’s Resurrection exposes the rotten fruit of the Novus Ordo Missae. When the survey prioritizes “warm and friendly encounters” (63%) over sacramental validity (53%), it confirms the conciliar sect’s transformation of the Mass from propitiatory sacrifice to communal meal. Pius XII warned in Mediator Dei (1947): “The Church has no authority over the substance of the sacraments” (§58), yet the post-conciliar liturgy’s anthropocentrism has bred this sacramental indifference.
The most common reasons people reported were that religion is too focused on money, they have fallen out of the habit since COVID-19, religious people are too judgmental, and they do not trust religious leaders or organized religion.
These excuses reveal not “deepening faith,” but mass apostasy facilitated by modernist clergy. The Catechism of St. Pius X mandates: “To miss Mass on a Sunday or other holy day of obligation without a sufficient excuse is a mortal sin” (The Third Commandment, Q12). The 68% who claim a “personal relationship” while skipping Mass commit objective sacrilege, for as the Council of Trent taught: “If any one saith that faith alone is a sufficient preparation for receiving the sacrament of the most Holy Eucharist; let him be anathema” (Session XIII, Canon XI).
Traditional Aesthetics Without Traditional Faith
The survey’s finding that 53% prefer “traditional worship” while rejecting sacramental theology proves the conciliar sect’s ritual reforms have created a generation of aesthetic traditionalists devoid of doctrinal substance. As Pius XI stated in Quas Primas (1925): “When once men recognize, both in private and in public life, that Christ is King, society will at last receive the great blessings of real liberty, well-ordered discipline, peace and harmony” (§19). This “preference” for tradition without submission to the Church’s magisterium constitutes the very “indifferentism” condemned in Gregory XVI’s Mirari Vos (1832).
The report’s celebration of “authentic community” over sacraments confirms the triumph of the Nouvelle Théologie’s horizontalism. As the Holy Office decreed in 1947 (approved by Pius XII): “Those who minimize the social aspect of sin… or who consider that sin is only a self-determination of man against God and not also against the community, are in error” (Letter to Cardinal Cushing). The survey’s respondents have absorbed the conciliar sect’s false dichotomy between personal piety and ecclesial obedience.
Methodological Apostasy: The Survey’s Fatal Flaws
ACST Catholic’s survey methodology itself embodies modernist presuppositions. By treating Catholic doctrine as a matter of opinion (“72% somewhat and strongly agree” about the Resurrection), it reduces dogma to democratic consensus – precisely the error Pius IX condemned in the Syllabus of Errors: “Divine revelation is imperfect, and therefore subject to a continual and indefinite progress, corresponding with the advancement of human reason” (Proposition 5). The very act of polling laity about dogmatic truths inverts the hierarchy of faith, placing sensus fidelium above magisterial authority.
Moreover, the study’s framing of COVID-19 disruptions as legitimate excuses for missing Mass contradicts Canon 1248 of the 1917 Code, which permits absence only for “true impossibility” – a standard never met by government health mandates. The report’s silence on the eternal consequences of mortal sin (CCC 1035) exemplifies the conciliar sect’s abandonment of its judicial role.
Conclusion: The Antichurch’s Self-Inflicted Ruin
This survey unintentionally documents the conciliar sect’s theological bankruptcy. The “personal relationship” touted by 68% is not the unio mystica of saints, but the private judgment of heretics. As Leo XIII warned in Satis Cognitum (1896): “He who dissents even in one point from divinely revealed truth absolutely rejects all faith” (§9). The 71% who deny Mass’ necessity have ceased to be Catholic in any meaningful sense, for as the Athanasian Creed declares: “Whosoever will be saved, before all things it is necessary that he hold the Catholic Faith. Which Faith except every one do keep whole and undefiled, without doubt he shall perish everlastingly.”
These statistics reveal not renewal, but the final stages of the conciliar apostasy foretold in Pius X’s Pascendi Dominici Gregis: “The Modernists substitute for faith a sentimentally based religious experience” (§14). Until the hierarchy returns to the integrally Catholic faith – with its uncompromising ecclesiology, sacramental theology, and social reign of Christ the King – such surveys will merely chronicle the conciliar sect’s accelerating self-destruction.
Source:
Study explores ‘Jesus without Church’ paradox (catholicnewsagency.com)
Article date: 04.11.2025