The Pope and the English Modernists

Abstract

The Pope and the English Modernists Lawrence Barmann P ope Pius X’s encyclical letter Pascendi dominici gregis of 1907 basically created a fictional modernism and then proceeded to annihilate the ideas and attitudes of those Catholics who had prompted the papal fiction and who were in fact a genuine threat to the narrow orthodoxy of late nineteenth century Roman Catholic teaching and to the authoritarianism that imposed it. After all, it was as early as 1864 that Pope Pius IX had condemned the idea that the pope should reconcile and align himself with progress, liberal ideas and contemporary civilization.1 Forty-three years later when Pius X became aware of some educated Roman Catholics, both clerical and lay, though mostly clerical, trying to relate the thought and experience of their day to the teaching and practice of their church, it is not surprising that he should have called them “modernists” and condemned them absolutely.2 His effort was mostly successful in that it stifled progressive thought within Roman Catholic circles for more than half a century.3 To understand the crisis that Pascendi created one must have some sense of both the ecclesial ideology of the ultramontanism that dominated Vatican policy and the thought and work of the so-called modernists, since the crisis was the result of their collision. This study will deal only with the crisis in England, though the crisis there 31 1. “Romanus Pontifex potest ac debet cum progressu, cum liberalismo et cum recenti civilitate sese reconciliare et componere.” Syllabus Pii IX, seu Collectio errorum in diversis Actis Pii IX proscriptorum, editus 8 December 1864 (Denzinger #2980). 2. “So [Giuseppe Melchior Sarto] said that he would be known as Pius X, in remembrance of the popes who had ‘fought with courage against the sects and the errors dominant in their time.’ This made it clear that the new reign was not to lose its militancy against the contemporary world.” Owen Chadwick, A History of the Popes 1830-1914 (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1998), 338. 3. “But now came the bad time—in some ways the worst time for the Church in the modern epoch. Fear led to suspicion, and suspicion led to abuse of power. Centralization intended to give the pope supreme authority in faith and morals, but had not meant to turn the Curia into a tyranny. With conservatives afraid of what was happening to the Bible and doctrine, lesser men could eject honourable scholars from their teaching posts or pastoral work, Pius X was personally afraid, and imagined secret heretics working to undermine the faith. . . . In 1910 he created an oath which all the clergy had to take, known to history as the anti-modernist oath. . . . The oath survived a surprisingly long time, long after the disappearance of the panic which produced it. It was abolished by Pope Paul VI in 1967.” Ibid., 355. was analogous to that in France and Italy as well. Contrary to the encyclical’s assertions , the modernists were not an organized group with evil intentions toward the Catholic Church; on the contrary, they were Catholics who loved their church and wanted it to be all that it was meant to be.4 When they came to realize that not only were they not able to help bring the ancient church out of its medieval slumbers, but were in fact repudiated by the church’s highest authority, the modernists reacted in differing ways. While many in France and Italy walked away or were driven from the church, those in England mostly remained, even when church authorities made remaining nearly impossible. At the time of the modernist conflict ultramontanism was the ruling orthodoxy in the Roman Catholic Church, and it ruled with an intellectual acuity in inverse proportion to the severity with which it was enforced. This ultramontanism was both a theological system and an authoritarianism centered in the papacy. The ultramontanism of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was different from that which the word originally designated. In 1863 Lord Acton observed that during “the period between the Reformation and the Revolution, Ultramontanism, like Gallicanism, was used as a party term. It designated the strict Roman system as developed...