Nevertheless the temptation is strong to clarify complexity by dividing the wheat from the darnel, the light from the dark, 'us' from 'them’.
Accounts of the modernist crisis have suffered badly from this tendency. It is unfortunate, because the contemporary world of Catholic faith cannot be understood a profound crisis for Christian faith and theology without reference to it. It marked the painful and often tragic beginning of a rich and fruitful revival of Catholic life, thought and spirituality, which came to near fruition in the 1960s. However, this fruition came too late and contained the seeds of its own dissolution. Therein lies a clue to the disillusionment and confusion that are striking and disturbing aspects of the mood of contemporary Catholicism.
Modernism itself is really very hard to define. Even the name was conjured up to embrace a whole array of what were considered unacceptable ideas and subjects of study.
Broadly speaking, it can be explained with reference to three areas; as it tried to bring the tradition of Catholic belief into closer relation with modern outlooks in philosophy, history and social science.
The leading ideas in the movement were, firstly, an adoption of the critical view of the scriptures, which by the end of the nineteenth century were generally accepted outside the Catholic Church. The Scriptures were to be understood as the record of an unfolding of divine truth in history, but abandoning artificial attempts to harmonise inconsistencies, scholars recognised that the authors of the scriptural texts were subject to many of the limitations of other historians. In 1893, Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Providentissimus Deus seemed to give encouragement to this field of study, although it was really a warning to the more enterprising scholars. The second broad area of research was to set aside the intellectualism of the revived scholastic theology from the Middle Ages, and to find the essence of Christian faith in life and action, rather than an intellectual system or creed. Theologians such as Maurice Blondel in France studied and welcomed the pragmatism of William James and the work of Henri Bergson. Lastly, there was a serious interest in history and the historical process, in its ending rather than its origins. Scholars wrote that since the growth of the Church takes place under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, the essence of the Gospel will lie in its full expansion rather than in its primitive historic kernel. This line of study led to critical examination of the historic origins of the Gospel and the early Church. For traditionalists, the bible is a divine and holy book because the author is God, while any critical attitude assumes that the bible is of human origin.
During the nineteenth century, there had been a great deal of controversy on this very issue amongst Lutheran and Anglican scholars. In Germany, D. F. Strauss published The Life of Jesus Critically Examined. Essentially he said that the gospels are strange works that call for interpretation.
His understanding was that Jesus was a Jewish teacher and martyr whose life was mythicised by his followers with supernatural ideas from the Old Testament. So the whole of the supernatural in the gospels is not history but religious symbolism, which can be understood Popes of the 20th Century ing i (1878-1903) Leo XIII late ta (1903-14) St. Pius X The book had (1914-22) Benedict XV (1922-39) (1939-58) (1958-63) (1963-78) (1978) Pius XI Pius XII BL. John XHI Paul VI John Paul I John Paul II great success, but it cost Strauss his career. He never taught again, and his book could only be sold in England as an anti-religious work. Some Anglican scholars such as Edward Pusey and Benjamin Jowett from Oxford also got their fingers burned when they tried to introduce ideas similar to those of Strauss. But Strauss's old University at Tubingen in sof 58 Wurttemburg, which is one of the chief intellectual centres in Europe, became associated with new, liberal ways of looking at the scriptures.
Meanwhile, in the Catholic Church the orthodox had long had their eye on the historians. The German historians - especially those from the Catholic faculty at Tubingen - had opposed the infallibility decree at Vatican I. Yet the Roman Curia realised that it could not abandon biblical studies to the Protestants, and that was the reason for Pope Leo's encyclical. Unfortunately, few people of importance in Rome or Catholic academia knew enough to understand the premises and methodology of modern biblical exegesis and its related disciplines. The few who did were already suspect, like Abbe Alfred Loisy of the Paris Catholic Institute and Pere Albert Lagrange from the Biblical Study Centre in Jerusalem.
Pope Leo XIII never followed up his warnings by a systematic persecution, but his successor Pope Pius X did.
Many scholars were forced to make their submission.
Alfred Loisy, a Hebrew and Assyrian scholar whose book The Gospel and the Church was a reply to the great Protestant church historian Adolph von Hamack, was less pliant. Five of his works were placed on the Index of Prohibited Books in 1903 and he himself was excommunicated in 1908. Pope Pius was determined to prevent the clergy from being contaminated by the errors, as he saw them, of the historical and natural sciences. He wrote:
We will take the greatest care to safeguard our clergy from being caught up in the snares of modern scientific thought - a science that does not breathe the truths of Christ, but by its cunning and subtle arguments defiles the mind of the people with the errors of Rationalism and semi-Rationalism.
Hence, the condemnation did not stop at biblical scholars. Fr George Tyrell SJ, a Thomist scholar, was attacked because he upheld ‘the right of each age to adjust the historico-philosophical expression of Christianity to contemporary certainties, and thus to put an end to this utterly needless conflict between faith and science which is a mere theological bogey’. Tyrell was expelled from the Jesuits in 1906 and suspended from the sacraments the following year. He was given extreme unction on his deathbed in 1909, but denied burial in a Catholic cemetery.
His was one of many sad cases. (A priest who was present at the burial made a sign of the this was not an objection that could have been put at the time. And anyway, none of the leading participants in the modernist movement endorsed every theoretical position condemned in the decree. In that sense there were no Modernists, or there were as many Modernisms as there were Modernists. On the other hand, every one of the leading participants held some views that were touched by the condemnation. For all concerned, especially the more conservative, and those most deeply respectful of ecclesiastical authority, there were agonies undergone and a steep price paid.
The decree was followed two months later by the encydical Pascendi dominici gregis, which imposed a compulsory anti-modernist oath on all Catholic bishops, priests and teachers. It was the beginning of an antimodernist hunt that damaged many ecclesiastical careers.
In fact, the clergy were investigated thoroughly whilst laymen such as Blondel or Baron von Hiigel, were largely left alone. There were also notes made of those who were considered suspect, including the future popes Benedict XV.
Pope John, when elected in 1958, demanded to see his Holy Office file. With characteristic humour he returned it with the sentence on the cover: ‘Yes, but now we are infallible’.
A word chosen by Pope John XXIII to characterise that phase of the Catholic renaissance, which culminated in the Second Vatican Council, was aggiornamento (which means ‘brought up to date'.) If Catholic thought needed to be brought up to date, it must have fallen behind the times.
When did it begin to do so? Jesuit theologian Bernard Lonergan's answer was:
It began to do so at the end of the seventeenth century ... When modern science began, when the Enlightenment began, then the theologians began to reassure one another about their certainties.
Perhaps we can say that the twentieth-century Catholic renaissance (from the Modernist affair to Vatican IT) marked an heroic and largely successful attempt to bring ~ Catholicism ‘up to date’ with the world that came to birth between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. To those who had worked and suffered during the dark decades that followed the condemnation of Modernism it must have seemed as if that vision of a reformed Catholicism, critically engaged with the world in which the Gospel is proclaimed and embodied, had received official expression. It did so, however, just as the ‘modern’ world was beginning to disintegrate and disappear under the cross over Tyrell’s grave: for this act he was suspended a divinis by Bishop Peter Amigo of Heresy 22) ‘The dogmas the pressure of new forces, new problems, new patterns of association and framework of experience. Hence, early Southwark). Church holds out aspgvealed are exhilaration has since been followed In 1907 Pope Pius published not truths whi allen by back-pedalling and disarray. the decree Lamentabili, a sweeping If a cultural revolution-and- condemnation that distinguished from heave are an transformation born in the nineteenth sixty-five propositions of the inter of reli giou S fa cts century represented a profound crisis Modernist Heresy. (The United States Catholic bishops were very relieved to discover that ‘Americanism’, which had been regarded unfavourably in Rome, which human mind has acquired by laborious effort.’ for Christian faith and theology, it is not really surprising that we should find ourselves deprived of familiar landmarks, of conceptual and Lamentabili institutional securities. But maybe the was not one of them.) Broadly speaking, Modernism as Pius X saw it was the attempt to illuminate the history and teaching of Christianity by the elective use of academic disciplines that had been developed during and since the Enlightenment. But by denying objectivity in study, the decree inhibited the pursuit of truth wherever it might lead, and thus appeared to draw a distinction between faith and truth that went against the essence of St Paul's teaching. But Sof 58 darkness of the 'night battle’ is only one aspect of Gethsemane; part of the experience of the Christ who taught us, once and for all, the true attitude towards suffering. For Christian faithful, this can be a ground for hope and not for despair.
Michael Morton is a Catholic Priest serving in Sandbach, a member of the Sea of Faith Steering Committee and a member of the special working group on Doctrinal Diversity.