Modernism

Modernism was a movement in Catholic religious thought, and particularly in biblical criticism, that developed in the late nineteenth century and spent itself, as a distinctive movement, before World War I. It aimed at bringing Catholic traditions into closer accord with modern views in philosophy and in historical and other scholarship and with recent social and political views. Modernism ran parallel to liberal Protestantism; both tended to reject authority and rigid forms and, in their more extreme versions at least, to aspire to a kind of Christianized rationalism.

The kind of Christology and biblical exegesis undertaken in Germany by D. F. Strauss and in France by Ernest Renan, aided and encouraged by such philosophical currents as positivism and evolutionism, culminated in the late-nineteenth-century attempt to reconcile science with religion and historical criticism with belief. Renan's rejection of the supernatural, combined with his vague evolutionary religiosity, anticipated much that was to be written during the fifteen years following his death in 1892.

Modernism was represented in England by George Tyrrell, Friedrich von Hügel (a friend of Alfred Loisy), and Maude Petre; in Italy by Antonio Fogazzaro, Romolo Murri, and Salvatore Minocchi; and in Germany by Franz Xavier Kraus and Hermann Schnell. However, most of the controversy centered in France, on account of the writings and influence of Loisy, Édouard Le Roy, and Lucien Laberthonnière, who brought to their approach to religion the spirit of contemporary science and philosophy. Loisy, like Renan, rejected the supernatural and explained religion in terms of an immanent rather than a transcendent principle. Le Roy circumvented the difficulties inherent in Catholic dogmas by treating them as pragmatically true. Laberthonnière edited the Annales de philosophie chrétienne, a journal that was committed, according to its program, to a rationalistic interpretation of religion, recognizing "the duty to submit to reflection what we believe no less than what we do and think." The review's general policy favored the view that religion is progressively revealed, primitive revelation being only potentially complete. The maneuverings necessitated by the desire to reconcile faith and reason led to some inconsistency and self-contradiction.

From its inception, modernism was in constant trouble with the ecclesiastical authorities, but orthodoxy did not become militant until the accession of Pope Pius X in 1903. In 1907 the papal decree Lamentabili Sane Exitu, a collection of sixty-five condemned propositions aimed chiefly at Loisy, and the more general and philosophically grounded encyclical Pascendi Dominici Gregis, condemned the modernists' views. The requirement in 1910 that all clerics take the antimodernist oath, known as Sacrorum Antistitum, marked the end of the movement as such, although its spirit persisted and prospered in less rebellious forms.

Hügel, Baron Friedrich Von; Laberthonnière, Lucien; Le Roy, ÉDouard; Loisy, Alfred; Positivism; Rationalism; Renan, Joseph Ernest; Strauss, David Friedrich.

Riviere, J. Le modernisme dans l'église. Paris, 1929.

Vidler, A. R. The Modernist Movement in the Roman Church. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1934.

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