David Schultenover S.J. is a Professor of History at Marquette University in the United States and he’s a specialist on the modernist crisis. He’s the author of a magnificent biography of one of the leading modernists, the Irish Jesuit George Tyrrell and also a book called ‘A View from Rome on the eve of the Modernist Crisis’. I asked him to begin by painting a picture of the wonderfully mad world of late 19th century Catholicism in Europe, with the Pope as the self-styled prisoner of the Vatican, Royalist pretenders, secret societies, the Dreyfus case, when some new religious order seemed to be created just about every other week, a period of enormous activity and intensity.
David Schultenover: It was, it was very complex and the church was in a very bad situation all over the place. And it largely reacted out of fear, very understandable fear, coming out of all the forces that were unleashed by the French Revolution. You know, all of the ideas that were promoted by the Enlightenment, ideas that centred around individual rights and various freedoms, freedom of thought, freedom of speech, limits on the power of governments and rule of law, free exchange of ideas, market economy, transparent system of government, accountability, participative government, all of those things, those values that were very foreign to the church’s own polity, the church’s own organisation, it’s own sense of itself.
Stephen Crittenden: Things – of course – that 100 years later we all take for granted.
David Schultenover: Yes, but at that time, they were ideas that were regarded as very dangerous, and for good reason, because they led to the overthrow of the monarchy, and with that, the overthrow of the church in France which was wedded to the monarchy, or the marriage of throne and altar idea. So that when the absolute monarchy fell with the French Revolution, so in the eyes of many of the leaders and intelligensia of France, so did the church, and everything the church stood for was almost kind of polar opposite of what the values of the French Revolution were, the values they’d fought for.
Stephen Crittenden: David Schultenover S.J.
So what were the specific intellectual issues that Pi us X and his followers were attacking? Marvin O’Connell is Emeritus Professor of History at Notre Dame University.
Marvin O’Connell: They were attacking what the Pope called ‘the movement of modernism’, a term which he invented really in the Encyclical. And what he was concerned about was what he called ‘a kind of consensus of heresies, all kinds of doctrines hostile to the Catholic church, all bound into one’, as he liked to say. Basically the matters that he was concerned with were on the one hand, philosophical and on the other hand I suppose you could say, literary, or specifically Biblical. On the philosophical front though he never mentioned Immanuel Kant’s name in the course of the Encyclical, he’s really after a kind of philosophical tradition which had grown up out of the Enlightenment and which at least in the 19th century, had come to have a sort of an attachment to what we might call imminentism.
I started off making a list of the sometimes hilarious typos eg imminentism for immanentism, Grennan for Renan, and more startlingly, Pentatuke for Pentateuch and Roger Hate instead of Haight. Then I came across what seemed to be a contentious and unattributed quotation which starts off ‘The Bishops have mounted on metaphors as witches on broomsticks’ – did I miss something or was the author of this quotation not given? It strives for a high scholarly level, difficult in a radio documentary, but instead ends up in a muddle which at times comes close to Catholic-bashing. Oh dear. Surely the Australians (because it is I think it is their ABC) can do better than this?
After one hundred years, modernism now seems so, well, not modern. All the exciting new theology makes modernism seem like a stale museum piece. It is only in bureauracies like the Episcopal Church that modernism seems to have any hold. At the end of the day modernism is passsing away and the Catholic Church is forever young.
Here’s the link to the encyclical St. Pius X wrote on modernism:
[url=http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/pius_x/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-x_enc_19070908_pascendi-dominici-gregis_en.html]PASCENDI DOMINICI GREGIS[/url]
The problem of imminentism was — and remains — very large and deep.
Henri Bergson’s idea of “Elan Vital” replaced a personal God in the minds of many 19th Century people who had come to take it for granted that such a God was not compatible with Reason. A blind “Life Force” was embedded in each person and living thing, so all were equally Divine. This is simply pantheism under some fancy theological language.
Pantheism is at the heart of most of the errors plaquing Christianiy today. The Pope nailed the problem. Unfortunately, the whole movement went underground, continued its teaching and succeeded in unleashing the virus that is killing us today