Modernism in the Catholic Church
The term modernism—generally used by critics of rather than adherents to positions associated with it—came to prominence in Pope Pius X's 1907 encyclical Pascendi Dominici gregis, where he condemned modernism as "the synthesis of all heresies".
[6] Although the so-called modernists did not form a uniform movement, they responded to a common grouping of religious problems which transcended Catholicism alone around 1900: first of all the problem of historicism, which seemed to render all historical forms of faith and tradition relative; secondly, through the reception of modern philosophers like Immanuel Kant, Maurice Blondel, and Henri Bergson, the neo-scholastic philosophical and theological framework set up by Pope Leo XIII had become fragile.
Pope Pius X reacted by excommunicating Murri in 1909, by dissolving Sangnier's Le Sillon movement in 1910, and by issuing the encyclical Singulari quadam in 1912 which clearly favoured the German Catholic workers' associations over and against the Christian Unions.
[11] Furthermore, antimodernists like Albert Maria Weiss OP,[12] and the Swiss Caspar Decurtins,[13] which were both favoured by Pius X, would even find "literary modernism" on the field of the Catholic belles-lettres which did not meet their standards of orthodoxy.
On the other hand, there was a great bandwidth of opinions within the "movement", from people ending up in rationalism (e.g. Marcel Hébert,[15] Albert Houtin, Alfred Loisy, Salvatore Minocchi, and Joseph Turmel)[16] to a mild religious reformism, even including neo-scholastic theologians like Romolo Murri.
[20] In the second half of the 19th century the term was also applied to theologians and intellectuals like Ignaz von Döllinger, St. George Jackson Mivart, John Zahm, and Franz Xaver Kraus who wanted to reconcile the Catholic faith with the standards of modern science and society in general.
In 1881, the Belgian economist Charles Périn, a conservative Catholic layman, published a volume titled Le modernisme dans l'église d'après les lettres inédites de La Mennais.
With notable exceptions like Richard Simon or the Bollandists, Catholic studies in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries had tended to avoid the use of critical methodology because of its rationalist tendencies.
[29] Following the French Revolution and the subsequentt coming to power of the Conservative Order, the Magisterium had enacted harsh condemnations against liberalism, rationalism, pantheism, panentheism, deism, indifferentism, socialism, communism and other popular philoosophies.
[34] In the same year, Church historian Ignaz von Döllinger invited about 100 German theologians to meet in Munich (Münchener Gelehrtenversammlung, 1863)[35] to discuss the state of Catholic theology.
[36] Döllinger's friend Charles de Montalembert gave two powerful speeches at the Catholic Congress in Malines that year too, insisting that the church had to reconcile itself with civil equality and religious freedom.
[37][38] On 8 December 1864 Pope Pius IX issued the encyclical Quanta cura, decrying what he considered significant errors afflicting the modern age.
[39] Some of these condemnations were aimed at anticlerical governments in various European countries, which were in the process of secularizing education and taking over Catholic schools, as well as suppressing religious orders and confiscating their property.
[51] “Hence it is most proper that Professors of Sacred Scripture and theologians should master those tongues in which the sacred Books were originally written,[52] and have a knowledge of natural science.”[53] He recommended that the student of scripture be first given a sound grounding in the interpretations of the Fathers such as Tertullian, Cyprian, Hilary, Ambrose, Leo the Great, Gregory the Great, Augustine and Jerome,[54] and understand what they interpreted literally, and what allegorically; and note what they lay down as belonging to faith and what is opinion.
Thus, he interfered in the lively discussion about biblical inspiration in France, where Maurice d'Hulst, founder of the Institut Catholique de Paris, had opted for a more open solution in his article on La question biblique.
[57] Not only exegetes of this école large were now in trouble, but also the prominent French theologian Alfred Loisy who worked for a thoroughly historical understanding of the Bible,[58] in order to open up spaces for theological reform.
[62] In 1890 the École Biblique, the first Catholic school specifically dedicated to the critical study of the bible, was established in Jerusalem by Dominican Marie-Joseph Lagrange.
Due to ongoing internal resistance, especially from the Master of the Sacred Palace, the papal theologian Alberto Lepidi OP, this Syllabus was published only in July 1907 as the decree Lamentabili sane exitu, which condemned sixty-five propositions from the field of biblical interpretation and the history of dogma.
Therefore, in the summer of 1907, another document was prepared in a small circle around the Pope and already in September 1907, Pius X promulgated the encyclical Pascendi dominici gregis, which formulated a synthesis of modernism and popularized the term itself.
[75] Pascendi described the "modernist" in seven "roles": as purely immanentist philosopher, as believer who relies only on their own religious experience, as theologian who understands dogma symbolically, as historian and biblical scholar who dissolves divine revelation by means of the historical-critical method into purely immanent processes of development, as apologete who justifies the Christian truth only from immanence, and as reformer who wants to change the church in a radical way.
The encyclical describes the modernist as an enemy of scholastic philosophy and theology and resistant to the teachings of the Magisterium; their moral qualities are curiosity, arrogance, ignorance, and falsehood.
Pascendi contained also disciplinary measures for the promotion of scholastic philosophy and theology in the seminaries, for the removal of suspect professors and candidates for the priesthood, for a more rigid censuring of publications and for the creation of an antimodernist control group in every diocese.
[80][81] Benigni also published the journal La Corrispondenza Romana/Correspondance de Rome, which initiated press campaigns against practical and social modernism throughout Europe.
",[84] Archbishop John Ireland of Saint Paul, Minnesota, became the hero of reformers in France (Félix Klein), Italy[85] and Germany (Herman Schell) in the 1890s.
The modernist controversy in the United States was thus initially dominated by the conflict on "Americanism", which after Pascendi was also presented as a "forerunner" of modernism in Catholic heresiology.
[93] The Holy Office, until 1930 under the guidance of Cardinal Rafael Merry del Val, continued to censure modernist theologians and rationalist exegesis was once again condemned by the Pontiff in his encyclical Spiritus Paraclitus.
[98] Garrigou-Lagrange, who was a professor of philosophy and theology at the Pontifical University of Saint Thomas Aquinas, Angelicum, is commonly held to have influenced the decision in 1942 to place the privately circulated book Une école de théologie: le Saulchoir (Étiolles-sur-Seine 1937) by Marie-Dominique Chenu OP[99] on the Vatican's "Index of Forbidden Books" as the culmination of a polemic within the Dominican Order between the Angelicum supporters of a speculative scholasticism and the French revival Thomists who were more attentive to historical hermeneutics, such as Yves Congar OP[100] At the beginning of the 1930s, Congar read the Mémoires of Loisy and realised that modernism had addressed problems in theology which were still not resolved by neo-scholastic theology.
[107] Despite his cautious openings on the issue of biblical criticism, Pius XII was suspicious of the new theological trends, which he feared could cause a modernist revival: in 1950, he published the encyclical Humani generis, in which he condemned "certain new intellectual currents" in the Church, accusing them of relativism and attacking them for reformulating dogmas in a way that was not consistent with Church tradition and for following biblical hermeneutics that deviated from the teachings of Providentissimus Deus, Spiritus Paraclitus and Divino afflante Spiritu.
[113] Following the Council, the more conservative supporters of Nouvelle théologie had important careers in the Church: Hans Urs von Balthasar, Jean Daniélou SJ, Yves Congar OP and Henri de Lubac SJ were made cardinals by Pope John Paul II, while Joseph Ratzinger was elected as Pope Benedict XVI in 2005.
The same could not be said for the more liberal members, who were gradually marginalised due to their extreme views: Hans Küng was stripped from his theological license by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in 1979 for questioning papal infallibility, while Edward Schillebeeckx OP was repeatedly condemned by the Congregation and even by Pope Paul VI himself (encyclical Mysterium fidei) due to his heterodox views about Christology and the eucharist.
