Le Papauté contemporaine (XIXe-XXe siècles). Hommage au chanoine Roger Aubert, professeur émerité à l'université catholique de Louvain, pour ses 95 ans. Il Papato contemporaneo (secoli XIX-XX). Omaggio al canonico Roger Aubert, professore emerito all'Università cattolica di Lovanio, per i 95 anni (review)
- Le Papauté contemporaine (XIXe-XXe siècles). Hommage au chanoine Roger Aubert, professeur émerité à l'université catholique de Louvain, pour ses 95 ans. Il Papato contemporaneo (secoli XIX-XX). Omaggio al canonico Roger Aubert, professore emerito all'Università cattolica di Lovanio, per i 95 anni
No single historian can have helped our study of church history more than Roger Aubert of Louvain. This volume is a second Festschrift, but he died as it was being published. The collection is worthy of the exceptional mind it honors. Despite the title, it is not a history of modern papacy but articles that shed light on individual popes. Why was the illiberal Pius X so gentle with the liberal Cardinal Désiré-Joseph Mercier of Malines? How did popes cope with the movements for liturgical reform, from the influential monastic revival of Solesmes to the radicals of the later twentieth century? Why was Louis Billot, so conservative a cardinal and so influential a theologian, forced into resigning his eminence because he was friendly to Catholic Action? One of the editors, Marco Jačov, makes an important examination of what Pope Leo XIII tried to do about the Armenian massacres. We read of the troubles of Xavier [End Page 837] de Mérode before the Holy Office and are left with the conviction that it fussed. Émile Poulat gives as important an article as any by explaining the French "diocesan associations" formed after World War I to remedy the structural absurdities left by the ruthless disestablishment of 1905. We learn more of Alfred Loisy, the modernist, from the side of his enemies. Angelo Roncalli, the future Pope John XXIII, was nuncio in France after World War II and had a difficult time because several French bishops were "tainted" by their attitude to Vichy and the Resistance. But this future author of an ecclesiastical revolution is shown to be a very conservative nuncio. He also was often at Solesmes.
Naturally, communism looms large during the twentieth century. Nazism is less large, for none of the authors writes on Germany except in the most general of terms and with two exceptions, on the learned theologian and politician François-Xavier de Feller in the years before the overturning of the Holy Roman Empire by Napoleon; and a generation later, the nuncio in Vienna with Metternich, Michele Viale-Prelà—how to be rid of Josephism. The trials of Pope Pius XI with Russia are well documented.
There is a delightful chapter on the endeavors of Pius X to stop priests riding bicycles as failing in the due dignity of the clergy. Here also is a study of Cardinal Francis Spellman, thought to be the most influential American cardinal ever mainly because the Vatican badly needed the gifts of money that he was a master at collecting, and a study of the future Pius XI when he was nuncio in postwar Poland, an important subject that is still controversial.
The pope most prominent is Giovanni Montini/Pope Paul VI. We read of his work behind the scenes for the Second Vatican Council and of the Christian Democrat historian and political theorist Pietro Scoppola. An essay by Alberto Melloni is as frightening as history can be: a study of the kidnapping of the Italian prime minister Aldo Moro and the murder of his bodyguards. This reviewer was in Rome that night and can bear witness to the unique tensions in the city. The captive appealed not only to the Catholic politicians in power like the humane Francesco Cossiga but also to Paul VI, then in the...
