I happened to be reading A Meditation on Modernism by Fr. Thomas Crean O.P., and realized that I’ve seen this sort of thing before — and it can be dangerous. First, read this description of how Modernists use the same words and give them different meanings:
But what particularly disturbed Pope Pius was that the Modernists continued to use the Catholic formulas of faith even when they had ceased to believe in them. Among themselves, they might interpret the Church’s doctrines in a purely ‘subjective’ way. But among non-Modernists they would continue to use the ordinary expressions of faith, no doubt justifying themselves by the thought that these formulas were, after all, true: that is, truly useful symbols.
For example, when a Catholic declares, ‘Christ is God’, he means just what he says. A Modernist, in using the same words, might mean, ‘in meeting Christ, or belonging to the community that he founded, one experiences the presence of the divine’. Again, if a Catholic says, ‘Christ was born of a Virgin’, he means exactly that. If a Modernist said it, he might mean ‘in contemplating Christ, one has a sense of radical newness, of something without a fully satisfying natural explanation’.
Bad, isn’t it?
Next, see what can happen when we do this same thing in our daily life:
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIAoxuKKn8c&feature=player_embedded
See? Dangerous.
