Modernity and Anti-Modernism, 1850–1910

Abstract

Abstract In the Catholic Church, the contest between modernity and anti-modernism achieved classical expression in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the Modernist Crisis. ‘Modernism’ denoted both a cultural experience as well as the pejoratively defined theology attacked by Pope Pius X in his 1907 encyclical Pascendi. Modernism’s defining feature, as a heresy of the modern age, was its failure to accept the magisterial answer to modernity in allegedly perennial truth as articulated by St Thomas Aquinas. In England, the Modernist Crisis was anticipated in difficulties faced by John Henry Newman in securing a hearing from an ascendant ultramontanism for the ways in which he connected revelation, ecclesiology, history, and the ecclesial agency of the laity. The Church’s response to modernity at Vatican II signalled an opportunity to reappraise this crisis, and to reinterpret the significant theological contributions of George Tyrrell, John Henry Newman, Friedrich von Hügel, and Maude Petre.