The Modernist Crisis (1893-1914)

A magisterial definition, not a sociological one

The word "Modernist" was almost never claimed by those whom Pius X condemned. Alfred Loisy, in his Simples reflexions on the decree and the encyclical (1908), accepts the use of the name without admitting its aptness^[1]. George Tyrrell, in his two open letters to the Times (30 September and 1 October 1907), turns the argument against the encyclical: it would only show that he is not a scholastic, which he already knew^[2]. Maurice Blondel, for his part, rejected as early as 1904, in his series History and Dogma (La Quinzaine, January-February 1904), both Loisy-style historicism and extrinsicism^[3]. Modernism, as an object, is first of all a magisterial construction: the doctrine which Pascendi extracts, by logical analysis, from a set of writings which it judges convergent in their presuppositions.

This precision does not invalidate the condemnation. The Magisterium has always proceeded in this way: isolating a thesis, examining it for itself, judging it conformable or not to the revealed deposit. As a pedagogical analogy — and not as a historical equivalence, each crisis having its own context — this approach may be compared with precedents: the Council of Nicaea facing Arius, Pope Leo I facing Monophysitism, the Council of Trent facing Luther. Pascendi applies a comparable approach to a more diffuse current of ideas: its adversary is not a person but a system, reconstructed as such in order to be combated as such.

Three central doctrines according to Pascendi

The encyclical Pascendi Dominici Gregis identifies, in paragraphs 6 to 14, three mutually supporting philosophical doctrines which form the core of the Modernist system^[4]:

• Agnosticism: human reason cannot reach God directly. Knowledge remains enclosed within phenomena; classical metaphysics, founded on causality and the analogy of being, is judged illegitimate. Consequence: exterior revelation (miracles, prophecies, the historical witness of the Gospel) is no longer a rational path of access to the supernatural.

• Vital immanence: if reason cannot reach God, then religion must be born elsewhere — in a "religious sentiment" immanent to human consciousness, arising from the subconscious as a response to a need of the soul. Dogma is no longer the formulation of a truth revealed from above, but the symbolic expression of an interior experience coming from below.

• Dogmatic symbolism (or "evolutionism of dogma"): dogmatic formulas are only relative symbols, adapted to an age, liable to vary according to the needs of religious sentiment. A dogma defined yesterday may be denied tomorrow without rupture, because its real meaning lies in the interior experience which it symbolises, not in its objective content.

These three doctrines, linked together, produce according to Pius X a total inversion of the relationship between faith and reason. Where the Catholic tradition holds the two orders distinct but harmonious — reason leading to the threshold of faith, faith receiving an objective revelation surpassing reason — Modernism makes faith a production of subjectivity, without rational support and without stable objective content.

"It follows that since the object of religion is God, faith, the principle and foundation of all religion, must rest in a certain interior sentiment, itself generated by the need of the divine." — Saint Pius X, Pascendi Dominici Gregis, 8 September 1907, no. 7^[5]

The famous formula: "synthesis of all heresies"

The most famous formula of the encyclical appears in paragraph 39, in the part devoted to the causes of Modernism:

"If anyone had set himself the task of gathering together all the errors that were ever broached against the faith and concentrating, as it were, their sap and substance in one, he could not have succeeded better." — Saint Pius X, Pascendi Dominici Gregis, no. 39^[6]

The expression "synthesis of all heresies" renders the Latin original omnium haereseon conlectum ("gathering of all heresies"), which the official French translation (vatican.va) renders for its part as "the rendezvous of all heresies"^[7]. It does not mean that each Modernist holds all heresies. It means that the structure of Modernism, taken as a system, rediscovers in a new form the principal earlier doctrinal deviations: the naturalism of the eighteenth century (God inaccessible to reason), liberal Protestant rationalism (faith reduced to a subjective sentiment), Hegelian evolutionism (relative historical truth), Romantic subjectivism (religion as self-expression). By combining them, Modernism produces, according to Pascendi, a "sum" which disarms the Catholic faith of all its classical supports.

The European intellectual crisis at the end of the nineteenth century

The Modernist crisis did not erupt in a vacuum. It presupposes half a century of intellectual upheavals which, in Protestant Europe first, had called into question the traditional foundations of the Christian faith:

• German historical criticism applied to the Bible, from David Strauss (The Life of Jesus, 1835) and Ferdinand Christian Baur to Adolf von Harnack (The Essence of Christianity, 1900);
• Darwinian evolutionism, which proposes a natural history without a Creator and overturns the reading of the creation narrative;
• Kantian philosophy, which makes classical metaphysics impossible by limiting knowledge to phenomena;
• the positivism of Auguste Comte and John Stuart Mill, which excludes the supernatural from the field of science;
• German historicism (Dilthey, Troeltsch), which relativises every truth to its historical context.

In the Protestant world, these currents produced theological liberalism: a Christianity reduced to an ethics of fraternity, without binding dogma, without miracles, without bodily resurrection. Adolf von Harnack, in Berlin, is its emblematic representative. In the Catholic world, some thinkers considered it urgent to answer these challenges on their own ground — through a Catholic historico-critical exegesis, a philosophy attentive to religious experience, a theology attentive to the movement of history. It is this desire, legitimate in itself, which opened the door to the current which Pius X would judge perverted.

Leo XIII and the prudent opening

Pope Leo XIII (1878-1903), the predecessor of Pius X, had taken note of these intellectual challenges through several measured but open acts:

• the encyclical Aeterni Patris of 4 August 1879, which restored Thomist philosophy as the common framework of Catholic teaching;
• the opening of the Vatican Archives to researchers in 1881;
• the encyclical Providentissimus Deus of 18 November 1893, which prudently authorises the use of critical methods in biblical exegesis while reaffirming scriptural inerrancy;
• the creation of the Pontifical Biblical Commission by the brief Vigilantiae studiique of 30 October 1902, to frame Catholic exegetical research.

It is in this space opened by Leo XIII that the first works of Alfred Loisy unfolded. But what Leo XIII intended as an opening framed by the Magisterium became, in some of his pupils, an autonomisation of research with respect to the received faith. The passage from Leo XIII to Pius X, in August 1903, marks the moment when Rome judged this autonomisation incompatible with the transmission of the revealed deposit.

Alfred Loisy (1857-1940), the emblematic figure

Alfred Firmin Loisy was born on 28 February 1857 at Ambrieres (Marne), into a peasant family. Ordained priest in 1879, he became professor of Sacred Scripture at the Institut catholique de Paris in 1889. A pupil of the orientalist Louis Duchesne and an attentive reader of German criticism, he rapidly developed theses judged audacious on the composition of the Pentateuch, the historicity of Genesis, the doctrinal development of the New Testament. In the article drawn from the last lesson of his course, published in his review L'Enseignement biblique in 1893, he summed up his critical position in five propositions, the principal ones denying the Mosaic origin of the Pentateuch and the literal historicity of the first chapters of Genesis, and affirming the unequal historical value of the two Testaments and the internal development of scriptural doctrine^[8].

Dismissed from his chair in 1893, Loisy withdrew to the teaching of Hebrew at the École pratique des hautes études. He published in November 1902 L'Évangile et l'Église, a work presented as a Catholic reply to Harnack — but which proposed, in fact, a profound recasting of Christology and ecclesiology. The emblematic formula of the book — "Jesus announced the Kingdom, and it is the Church that came" — sums up a broader thesis: the Catholic Church is a progressive historical construction, not the direct foundation of the historical Christ.

Five works of Loisy, including L'Évangile et l'Église, were placed on the Index in December 1903, two months after the election of Pius X. The condemnation worsened: Loisy was excommunicated vitandus on 7 March 1908, by decree of the Holy Office. He did not retract and obtained in 1909 the chair of history of religions at the Collège de France, which he would occupy until 1932. He died at Ceffonds (Haute-Marne) on 1 June 1940, without having been reconciled with the Church^[9].

"Jesus announced the Kingdom, and it is the Church that came." — Alfred Loisy, L'Évangile et l'Église, Picard, Paris, 1902, p. 155^[10]

This sentence, which seems innocuous, sums up the whole issue. If the Church was not willed by Christ as his explicit foundation but emerged from disappointed messianic expectation, then the sacramental structure, the Roman primacy, the episcopal hierarchy lose their guarantee of divine institution. Everything becomes historical evolution, hence revisable. That is exactly what Pascendi identifies as the practical consequence of "dogmatic symbolism": a Christianity without fixed objective foundation.

George Tyrrell (1861-1909), the Irish Jesuit

Born in Dublin on 6 February 1861, raised in the Church of Ireland (Anglican), George Tyrrell converted to Catholicism in 1879 and entered the Jesuits in 1880. Ordained priest in 1891, he taught at Stonyhurst College in England then published a series of noted spiritual writings (Nova et Vetera, Hard Sayings) before his positions shifted. His work Lex Orandi (1903) then Lex Credendi (1906) progressively displaced the centre of gravity of faith towards subjective religious experience^[11].

The occasion of the rupture was the accidental circulation of extracts from a "Letter to a university professor" (A Letter to a Professor, 1903), a confidential publication in which Tyrrell harshly criticised scholastic theology. Refusing the public retraction demanded by his superiors, he was expelled from the Society of Jesus on 19 February 1906. He remained a priest, without diocesan incardination, and published on 30 September and 1 October 1907 two open letters to the London Times denouncing Pascendi as the expression of an "infatuated scholastic theology"^[12].

The sanction fell: in October 1907, the Bishop of Southwark, Bishop Peter Amigo, deprived him of the sacraments (suspense a divinis); after Pascendi, Tyrrell was refused public Communion. Struck by grave kidney disease, he died at Storrington (Sussex) on 15 July 1909, aged 48. He made his confession and received the last Catholic sacraments in articulo mortis, but Bishop Amigo refused him solemn ecclesiastical funeral rites. He was buried in the Anglican cemetery of Storrington, outside the Catholic cemetery, his tomb bearing the Catholic inscription he had requested^[13].

The Tyrrell case illustrates a particularity of British Modernism: with him it is less a matter of audacious exegesis in Loisy's manner than of a mystique of experience which ends by dissolving dogmatic authority into religious subjectivity. The distinction between lex orandi and lex credendi, classically understood as the rooting of dogma in the prayer of the Church, becomes with him the primacy of experience over formula, of "feeling" over "knowing" — exactly what Pascendi identifies as vital immanence.

Ernesto Buonaiuti (1881-1946), the Italian Modernist

Ernesto Buonaiuti was born in Rome on 25 June 1881, son of a clerk of the pontifical railways. A brilliant pupil of the Roman Pontifical Seminary, he was ordained priest in 1903, at the age of 22, and appointed professor of Church history at the Seminary of the Apollinare in 1907 — a few months before Pascendi. With a group of friends, he anonymously wrote in 1908 the pamphlet Il programma dei modernisti (The Programme of the Modernists), an Italian reply to the encyclical, then the Lettere di un prete modernista (Letters of a Modernist Priest)^[14].

The repression was progressive. Excommunicated a first time in 1921 under Benedict XV, Buonaiuti was excommunicated vitandus by decree of the Holy Office on 25 January 1926, under Pius XI — the severest penalty of the canon law of the time. Every faithful was bound to avoid him; every church he entered had to be "reconciled" by a special rite. In 1929, after the Lateran agreements, he abandoned the cassock of his own accord. In 1931, the Italian State imposed on all university professors an oath of fidelity to the Fascist regime: Buonaiuti, an antifascist, refused to take it and was struck off his chair at the University of Rome^[15].

He died in Rome on 20 April 1946, shortly after the liberation, without having been reconciled with the Church. The Buonaiuti case is interesting for two reasons. First because it prolongs the Modernist crisis well after 1914: his successive excommunications under Benedict XV then Pius XI show that the antimodernist struggle remained active in Rome throughout the interwar period. Second because it combines doctrinal Modernism and courageous antifascism: the sequence shows that the profile of the condemned could be more complex than the simple opposition "Modernist against Magisterium".

Lucien Laberthonniere (1860-1932) and Edouard Le Roy (1870-1954)

Alongside Loisy and Tyrrell, two French figures were struck by the condemnations: the Oratorian Lucien Laberthonniere (1860-1932) and the mathematician and philosopher Edouard Le Roy (1870-1954)^[16].

Laberthonniere, priest of the Oratory of France, director of the Annales de philosophie chretienne from 1905 to 1913, developed a "philosophy of action" inspired by Maurice Blondel but radicalised towards a Christian immanence in which God manifests himself primarily in the interior movement of the will. His works Essais de philosophie religieuse (1903) and Le Realisme chretien et l'idealisme grec (1904) were placed on the Index in 1906. Deprived of teaching after Pascendi, forbidden to publish after 1913, he pursued a clandestine work and died a faithful but marginalised Catholic in 1932.

Edouard Le Roy, professor at the Collège de France from 1921, pupil of Henri Bergson whose philosophy he continued, published in 1905-1906 articles on dogma proposing a pragmatist reading: a dogma states less a speculative truth than it prescribes a practical attitude. His book Dogme et critique (1907) was put on the Index in 1907, shortly before Lamentabili. Le Roy formally retracted, remained a practising Catholic, succeeded Bergson at the Academie francaise in 1945. His case shows that not all French Modernists followed Loisy's path: retraction and ecclesial fidelity remained possible.

Friedrich von Hugel (1852-1925), the never-condemned intermediary

Born in Florence on 5 May 1852 to an Austrian diplomat and a Scottish mother converted to Catholicism, Friedrich von Hugel inherited the baronial title in 1870 and lived most of his life in London. A Catholic layman, practising, married, a father, he became one of the principal intellectual networks of European Modernism, in correspondence with Loisy, Tyrrell, the Protestant theologian Ernst Troeltsch, the German historian of religions Rudolf Eucken, the American philosopher William James^[17].

His position is complex. He personally supported Loisy and Tyrrell, multiplied discreet steps to soften the sanctions, circulated manuscripts throughout Europe; but he personally rejected the Modernist doctrine of faith-as-sentiment. His masterwork, The Mystical Element of Religion as Studied in Saint Catherine of Genoa and Her Friends (London, 1908, two volumes), proposes a threefold typology of authentic religion: institutional (visible Church, dogma, sacraments), intellectual (speculative theology), mystical (interior experience). He refuses the Modernist reductionism which would absorb the institutional into the mystical.

This doctrinal moderation earned him a protection which others did not have: none of his books was placed on the Index, and he was not excommunicated. But his complicity of friendship with Loisy and Tyrrell alienated the Curia's trust for decades. He died in London on 27 January 1925, regarded by many as a paradoxical figure: a Modernist by association, a Catholic by conviction and by work.

Maurice Blondel (1861-1949): the nuance that saves

The Blondel case is too often wrongly classed with Modernism. Maurice Blondel, philosopher born in Dijon on 2 November 1861, defended in 1893 at the Sorbonne his thesis L'Action, essai d'une critique de la vie et d'une science de la pratique — the first philosophical thesis in France on an explicitly religious theme since the Revolution^[18]. He taught at Aix-en-Provence from 1897 to 1927.

Blondel developed a philosophy of immanence as method, distinct from immanence as doctrine. The idea: to show man's openness to transcendence, one must start from the most concrete human experience — voluntary action — and show that it leads, by its very interior dynamism, to the demand for an Absolute who surpasses man. The method is immanent (analysing what man does), but what it reveals is transcendent (God as the necessary term of action).

Blondel explicitly opposed Loisy. His series of three articles in La Quinzaine in January-February 1904, entitled History and Dogma, frontally criticised "extrinsicism" (which detaches doctrine from history) AND Loisy-style "historicism" (which dissolves doctrine into the contingent). His central position — in substance, dogma as the meaning willed by Christ, progressively unfolded in the living consciousness of the Church — refuses both blind fideism and Modernist subjectivism^[19].

During the crisis, Blondel became suspect in certain intransigent Roman circles. But he was never condemned. His theological rehabilitation progressed over the twentieth century; Henri de Lubac, Yves Congar, Hans Urs von Balthasar would acknowledge their debt to him. He is the typical example of a thinker who sought to answer the challenges of modernity without falling into Modernism — exactly the path which Pascendi allowed, without always making it evident to the watchful eye of the censors.

Lamentabili sane exitu (3 July 1907): the syllabus

The first major act of the antimodernist combat is not an encyclical but a decree of the Holy Office, approved and confirmed by Pius X on 3 July 1907. Entitled Lamentabili sane exitu ("With truly lamentable results"), it condemns sixty-five propositions drawn from Modernist writings — above all those of Loisy, without explicitly naming him^[20].

The decree takes up the form of the famous Syllabus errorum of Pius IX (8 December 1864), with the same method: numbered enumeration of propositions, condemnation in block, without developed demonstration. The sixty-five propositions cover:

• biblical exegesis (propositions 1-26): the law of doctrinal evolution, the inexactness of the New Testament, the mythical character of certain Gospel narratives, the exclusively human nature of the historical Christ;
• the nature of revelation and dogma (propositions 22-26): doctrinal development as substantial evolution, the historical relativity of dogmatic formulas, subjective consciousness as criterion of truth;
• Christology (propositions 27-38): Christ allegedly had no consciousness of being the Messiah, did not know himself to be the Son of God in the strong sense, did not will to found a Church;
• the sacraments (propositions 39-51): they were allegedly not instituted directly by the historical Christ but evolved in the primitive Christian community;
• the Church and the papacy (propositions 52-65): progressive emergence, post-paschal historical construction, the authority of the pope as a contingent development.

Each proposition is condemned without nuance: the decree, approved and confirmed by Pius X, orders that the sixty-five propositions be held by all as condemned and proscribed^[21]. The syllabic form imposes a reading: one is Catholic, or one holds this proposition — not both. The nuance of university contexts is deliberately set aside.

Pascendi Dominici Gregis (8 September 1907): the systematisation

Two months later, on 8 September 1907, appeared the encyclical Pascendi Dominici Gregis ("To feed the Lord's flock"), a much longer and more architectured text. Where Lamentabili enumerates, Pascendi systematises. The text unfolds in two great parts^[22]:

• a theoretical exposition (nos. 1-52) which describes Modernism through six successive roles played by the Modernist: philosopher, believer, theologian, historian, critic, apologist, reformer. This presentation, methodologically skilful, shows how the philosophical presuppositions (agnosticism, vital immanence) command what follows: faith becomes sentiment, theology becomes symbolism, history becomes relativisation, apologetics becomes self-justification;
• a practical part (no. 53 to the end) which analyses the moral causes (intellectual pride, ignorance of scholasticism, unregulated curiosity) and prescribes the institutional remedies: restoration of Thomist philosophy in seminaries, prior censorship of publications, creation of diocesan vigilance councils, surveillance of seminaries, disciplinary sanctions against deviant teachers.

Four structuring passages deserve quotation, in the official English translation (vatican.va). First the stated method:

"It is of the utmost importance, above all, to present these same doctrines under one aspect, and to show the logical connection by which they are joined together." — Saint Pius X, Pascendi Dominici Gregis, no. 4^[23]

Then the analysis of immanence:

"In this sentiment, therefore, they find faith; but with faith and in faith, revelation too." — Saint Pius X, Pascendi Dominici Gregis, no. 8^[24]

Then the formula that became famous, at the end of the doctrinal exposition (no. 39 in the standard numbering):

"If anyone had set himself the task of gathering together all the errors that were ever broached against the faith and concentrating, as it were, their sap and substance in one, he could not have succeeded better." — Saint Pius X, Pascendi Dominici Gregis, no. 39^[25]

Finally the practical remedies:

"In seminaries where it may have been neglected, let the bishops impose the study of it and require its observance." — Saint Pius X, Pascendi Dominici Gregis, no. 45^[26]

"We therefore decree that in every diocese a Council of this kind, which We are pleased to name the Council of Vigilance, be instituted without delay." — Saint Pius X, Pascendi Dominici Gregis, no. 55^[27]

Sacrorum Antistitum (1 September 1910): the oath

The third major act is the motu proprio Sacrorum Antistitum, of 1 September 1910, which instituted the antimodernist oath. It was to be taken by^[28]:

• all clerics at the moment of their priestly ordination;
• all confessors, preachers, pastors;
• all religious superiors;
• all professors in seminaries of theology and philosophy;
• all candidates for the doctorate in the pontifical universities.

The oath, in Latin, comprises two parts. A positive profession of faith: firmly believing that God is knowable by natural reason from created things; recognising miracles and prophecies as valid exterior signs of Revelation; holding that the Church was instituted by the historical Christ himself; admitting that the deposit of faith remains substantially identical from century to century. And an explicit refutation of the theses condemned by Lamentabili and Pascendi, enumerated without ambiguity.

"I also reject that error of those who assert that the faith proposed by the Church may be opposed to history, and that Catholic dogmas, in the sense in which they are now understood, cannot be reconciled with the truer origins of the Christian religion." — Saint Pius X, Sacrorum Antistitum, formula of the oath, 1 September 1910^[29]

The oath remained in force for fifty-seven years. It was abrogated in 1967 by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith under Paul VI, which replaced it with a revised "Profession of faith" — the one pronounced today by bishops before their consecration. The abrogation is not a retrospective condemnation of the oath, but the recognition that the intellectual context has changed and that a less polemical formula now suffices. A few traditionalist groups (notably the Society of Saint Pius X) continue to impose it on their priests as a sign of doctrinal continuity.

Bishop Umberto Benigni and the "Sapiniere"

The application of the prescriptions of Pascendi — surveillance of publications, reporting of deviants — passed largely through a parallel, semi-official network, created in 1909 by Bishop Umberto Benigni (1862-1934), Under-Secretary of the Secretariat of State under Cardinal Rafael Merry del Val. This network took the name Sodalitium Pianum ("Fellowship of Pius", in honour of Pius X), known in France by its code name: La Sapiniere^[30].

The Sodalitium Pianum is not an official congregation. It is a private organisation whose members never exceeded fifty, scattered throughout Europe. Its methods are controversial: surveillance of the correspondence of suspects, opening and photographing of private letters, examination of bookshop registers to identify buyers of Modernist books, drafting of files on hundreds of European clerics and professors, secret correspondence in code^[31].

Among the persons placed under surveillance was a certain Angelo Roncalli, a young professor of ecclesiastical history at the Seminary of Bergamo — the future Saint John XXIII, pope of the Second Vatican Council. The network also conducted an inquiry on him, though he had nothing Modernist about him. The detail is eloquent: the antimodernist machine, by watching in all directions, also struck minds which had strictly nothing Modernist about them. This excess would end by justifying the dissolution.

Dissolution under Benedict XV (1921)

At the death of Pius X, on 20 August 1914, his successor Benedict XV (Giacomo Della Chiesa, pontificate 1914-1922) inherited a crisis whose management he judged counterproductive. He himself, when he was Archbishop of Bologna, had been troubled by the Sodalitium. Without disavowing Pascendi — which he confirmed in his encyclical Ad Beatissimi of 1 November 1914 — he opposed the excesses of the informers. Cardinal Pietro Gasparri, his Secretary of State, slowed the inquiries. The outbreak of the world war (August 1914) absorbed Roman energies towards pastoral and diplomatic urgency.

At the end of the year 1921, under the pontificate of Benedict XV, the Roman Curia officially dissolved the Sodalitium Pianum "on account of changed circumstances" — a diplomatic formula which avoids retrospective condemnation while putting an end to the organisation^[32]. Bishop Benigni was relieved of his functions and died in 1934, marked by his later rallying to the regime of Mussolini, a fact which would durably tarnish his memory.

The Dominican historian Yves Congar would later consider that the network survived informally, through persistent contacts between former members and certain curial bodies, into the first years of the Second World War^[33]. The official dissolution, in short, did not succeed in erasing a diffuse mentality of generalised suspicion, which would later contribute to the structural antimysticism of the twentieth century (cf. The Antimysticism of Certain Vatican Bodies).

Pontifical replies to historico-critical exegesis

One of the principal fronts of the Modernist crisis is biblical exegesis. The German historico-critical methods, transposed by Loisy and his school, seemed to weaken the inerrancy of Scripture as tradition understood it. The Roman reply was articulated in four successive acts^[34]:

• the encyclical Providentissimus Deus of Leo XIII of 18 November 1893, which recalls absolute scriptural inerrancy: "All the books of Scripture, without any exception, are entirely free from error";
• the creation of the Pontifical Biblical Commission by Leo XIII on 30 October 1902 (brief Vigilantiae), to frame Catholic exegetical research;
• a series of decrees of the Biblical Commission between 1905 and 1915, which decided concrete questions: Mosaic authenticity of the Pentateuch, historicity of the first three chapters of Genesis, Johannine authorship of the fourth Gospel, Pauline authorship of the Epistle to the Hebrews. All these decrees went in the conservative direction;
• the encyclical Spiritus Paraclitus of Benedict XV of 15 September 1920, which reaffirmed inerrancy in its full extension, in commemoration of the fifteenth centenary of the death of Saint Jerome.

This series of positions aimed to forbid Catholic exegetes from following Loisy. It had an intellectual cost: for half a century, Catholic exegesis withdrew to defensive positions, and would only dare reinvest the critical field with Divino Afflante Spiritu of Pius XII (30 September 1943), an encyclical which prudently reopened the use of historical methods without yielding anything on inerrancy.

Inerrancy and the limits of scientific discourse

The Catholic position on inerrancy is neither the Protestant fundamentalism which reads the Bible literally as a scientific manual, nor the Modernist historicism which dissolves scriptural truth into cultural relativity. It holds two conjoint affirmations:

• all Scripture is inspired by the Holy Spirit and therefore without error in everything it affirms — without restricting it to salvific truths alone: the subordinate clause of Dei Verbum 11 ("the truth which God wanted to have recorded [...] for the sake of our salvation") says why God had it recorded, not what inerrancy covers;
• Scripture uses diverse literary genres (historical narrative, poetry, parable, apocalypse, wisdom), and Catholic exegesis must identify the genre before judging truth.

This articulation, sketched by Providentissimus, deployed by Divino Afflante Spiritu in 1943, then taken up by Vatican II in the dogmatic constitution Dei Verbum (18 November 1965), is exactly what makes it possible to answer historico-critical challenges without yielding to Modernism. A Catholic reading of the crisis shows that the harshest acts (decrees of the Biblical Commission of 1905-1915) do not have the status of irreformable dogmatic definitions — and Rome has since left exegetes a wider liberty with regard to them (note of the secretary and under-secretary of the Commission, 1955). But this liberty is a permission, not a contrary obligation: the part which touches faith remains, and holding the traditional position — Moses author of the Pentateuch, John author of the fourth Gospel, substantial historicity of the narratives — remains perfectly legitimate.

The resurgence of a question

Forty-three years after Pascendi, on 12 August 1950, Pius XII published the encyclical Humani Generis ("Of the human race"), the first great magisterial intervention on doctrinal questions since the end of the classical Modernist crisis^[35]. The encyclical does not name Modernism, does not name any theologian, but it targets a current identified under the term "new theology" (nouvelle theologie in French in the Italian text) — an expression forged by the critics of this current, in particular the Dominican Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange in a famous article in the review Angelicum in 1946 ("La nouvelle theologie ou va-t-elle?").

The "new theology" covers, in a contested manner, a group of French Jesuit and Dominican theologians who sought to renew theology through a return to patristic sources, to existential philosophy, to contemporary experience. Among them are — often wrongly — Henri de Lubac (S.J., 1896-1991), Yves Congar (O.P., 1904-1995), Jean Danielou (S.J., 1905-1974), Marie-Dominique Chenu (O.P., 1895-1990), Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905-1988). One of them would become a cardinal under Paul VI (Danielou, 1969) and two under John Paul II (De Lubac, 1983; Congar, 1994), and all would play a major role at the Second Vatican Council.

The principal errors condemned

Humani Generis enumerates several deviations^[36]:

• the weakening of the objective meaning of dogmas in favour of their existential reformulation;
• philosophical immanentism which would reduce metaphysics to subjective experience;
• historicism which would relativise every truth to its context of emergence;
• philosophical evolutionism applied not only to biology but to all reality, including truth itself;
• anthropological polygenism which would deny the common descent of all men from Adam;
• the symbolic reading of the first chapters of Genesis reduced to a myth without historical value.

The most discussed passage concerns polygenism:

"For the faithful cannot embrace that opinion which maintains that either after Adam there existed on this earth true men who did not take their origin through natural generation from him as from the first parent of all, or that Adam signifies a certain number of first parents. Now it is in no way apparent how such an opinion can be reconciled with that which the sources of revealed truth and the documents of the Teaching Authority of the Church propose with regard to original sin." — Pius XII, Humani Generis, no. 37, 12 August 1950^[37]

On biological evolution in the strict sense, on the other hand, Pius XII shows himself more open than Pascendi on exegetical questions: he authorises scientific debate on bodily evolution, while reserving the immediate origin of the spiritual soul to direct divine creation (cf. The Garden of Eden and Original Sin for the development of these questions).

A contested target

Should Humani Generis be read as a condemnation of De Lubac, Congar and Danielou? The disciplinary sanctions which followed the encyclical suggest so: De Lubac was removed from teaching at Lyon in 1950; Congar was exiled to Cambridge then Jerusalem; Chenu had already been dismissed from the direction of the Saulchoir in 1942. But their works were not put on the Index after Humani Generis, and their persons were not excommunicated. Twenty years later, Vatican II would draw largely on their works, and Paul VI then John Paul II would make Danielou (1969), De Lubac (1983) and Congar (1994) cardinals; Balthasar, named to the cardinalate in 1988, died two days before the consistory.

The most solid interpretation is that Humani Generis targets tendencies more than persons, and that it invites prudence without globally condemning the "new theology". Humani Generis is therefore read in continuity with the whole Magisterium, not as an isolated rupture.

The neo-Modernism argument

One of the recurring reproaches addressed to the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965), notably in radical traditionalist circles, is to have reintroduced Modernism into the Church through the front door. Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre in his famous Declaration of 21 November 1974 would speak of a "Rome of neo-Modernist and neo-Protestant tendency" (cf. The Society of Saint Pius X).

The argument runs as follows: the theologians condemned or suspected under Humani Generis (De Lubac, Congar, Danielou) became experts at the Council, their ideas passed into the conciliar texts (Lumen Gentium on the Church as "people of God", Dei Verbum on biblical inspiration, Gaudium et Spes on dialogue with the world). Vatican II would therefore be a creeping rehabilitation of Modernism, in a softened form.

Catholic reply: hermeneutic of continuity

The Catholic reply is firm. It was formulated authoritatively by Benedict XVI in his address to the Roman Curia of 22 December 2005, setting out the distinction between a hermeneutic of discontinuity and rupture (which reads Vatican II as a new Church against the old) and a hermeneutic of reform in the continuity of the one Church as subject (which reads Vatican II as a homogeneous development of Tradition).

Concretely, Vatican II:

• reaffirms biblical inerrancy (Dei Verbum no. 11), the divinity of the historical Christ (Dei Verbum no. 4), the direct foundation of the Church by Christ (Lumen Gentium no. 5), the infallibility of the pope (Lumen Gentium no. 25);
• contradicts none of the major condemnations of Lamentabili and Pascendi;
• develops doctrine on questions where the pre-conciliar formulation remained insufficient (religious liberty, ecumenism, relations with non-Christian religions), without contradicting the deposit.

This does not mean that all post-conciliar interpretations were faithful. Saint Paul VI, in his address of 29 June 1972, denounced "the smoke of Satan" entered into the Church — a sentence pronounced precisely in the context of abuses of the liturgical reform and the collapse of catechesis. The Ratzingerian reading therefore distinguishes the Council itself, faithful to Tradition, and certain perverted post-conciliar applications, which may have replayed the Modernist scenario under other names. This distinction is central (cf. The Second Vatican Council).

Losses and gains

The Modernist crisis produced losses which the historian cannot deny:

• broken lives: Loisy excommunicated and bitter until his death; Tyrrell dead at 48 in unconsecrated ground; Laberthonniere condemned to editorial silence for twenty years; Buonaiuti wandering between antifascism and excommunication;
• a Catholic exegetical science set back for half a century, which would only truly recover its vitality after Divino Afflante Spiritu (1943);
• a lasting mentality of suspicion in certain Roman bodies, which would extend into the structural antimysticism of the years 1930-1970 (Padre Pio, Faustina, Valtorta, Yvonne-Aimee) — cf. the dedicated article Vatican Antimysticism;
• considerable collateral damage: Maurice Blondel wrongly suspected, the young Roncalli (future John XXIII) filed by the Sodalitium.

But it also produced gains which the historian must acknowledge:

• the preservation of the deposit: the central theses of the Catholic faith on inerrancy, the divinity of the historical Christ, the direct foundation of the Church, were defended at a moment when they were wavering in European liberal Protestantism;
• doctrinal clarification: Pascendi remains a remarkable text of philosophical analysis, which forces a clear articulation of the Catholic position against agnosticism and subjectivism;
• the identification of a real problem: the deformations of dogma by subjective religious sentiment, denounced by Pascendi, remain topical in certain contemporary milieus which reformulate faith as the expression of a "spirituality" without fixed content.

A legacy to be read with finesse

Intellectual history confirms the need to distinguish three levels in the Modernist crisis, on pain of falling into caricature:

• the doctrines condemned by Pascendi (agnosticism, vital immanence, dogmatic symbolism, evolution of dogma) remain objectively incompatible with the Catholic faith. Pascendi is a text of the ordinary pontifical Magisterium which remains normative on what it teaches;
• the condemned persons and works — Loisy, Tyrrell and Buonaiuti struck personally, works of Laberthonniere and Le Roy put on the Index — did indeed carry problematic theses, but each individual case mixes sincere conviction and clumsy expression. Moral judgment on persons belongs to God alone;
• the practical measures taken to apply Pascendi (Sodalitium, denunciations, excessive disciplinary sanctions) knew excesses which the Roman Curia itself would acknowledge by dissolving the Sodalitium in 1921. These excesses do not discredit the encyclical but show that the application of a magisterial act always requires the virtue of prudence.

This threefold distinction is exactly what the non-integrist Catholic reading defends: firmly holding the doctrinal content of Pascendi without absolutising its conjunctural applications; recognising the errors of the condemned Modernists without demonising their persons; honouring the defence of the deposit without excusing the policing excesses of the Sodalitium.

Present forms

The historical Modernism of 1907 is dead as an organised movement. But its philosophical presuppositions subsist in new forms in certain contemporary tendencies:

• radical liberation theology (old South-American form) which reduced faith to a political praxis was corrected by the Instructions of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (Libertatis nuntius in 1984, Libertatis conscientia in 1986);
• the pluralist theology of religions (Hick, Knitter, Dupuis) which reduces Christ to the status of one mediation among others was corrected by the declaration Dominus Iesus of 6 August 2000, signed by Cardinal Ratzinger;
• the deconstructionist readings of Christology which dissolve the divinity of Christ into myth or subjective experience replay exactly the Modernist scenario on agnosticism and immanence;
• the pastoralisms which present dogmas as "reformulations" liable to substantial evolution take up the dogmatic symbolism condemned by Pascendi.

Neo-Modernism and integral Catholicism

For a Catholic today, the central lesson of the Modernist crisis is neither to play at being "antimodernists" in the 1910 fashion, nor to minimise current doctrinal deviations. It is to hold together what Pascendi holds together:

• the transcendence of Revelation: God reveals himself objectively, in history, through Scripture and Tradition, under the guard of the living Magisterium;
• the intelligence of faith: natural reason can reach God (First Vatican Council, Dei Filius, 24 April 1870); the proofs of God's existence are not rhetorical artifices but real paths;
• the homogeneous development of dogma: according to the formula of Saint Vincent of Lerins in his Commonitorium (c. 434) — "in eodem scilicet dogmate, eodem sensu, eademque sententia" ("in the same dogma, the same sense, the same judgment"). Dogma develops; it does not turn into its contrary;
• respect for persons: one combats doctrines, not hearts; one criticises theses, not souls.

This articulation, which is exactly the position of Vatican II properly read, is the opposite both of obsessive antimodernist integrism and of diluted neo-Modernism. It is the Catholic hermeneutic in the full sense.

• The Second Vatican Council — reception and debates
• The Society of Saint Pius X and the alleged neo-Modernism
• Vatican Antimysticism (Holy Office, 1431-2025)
• The Garden of Eden and Original Sin — exegetical questions