Divided Friends

Introduction

Introduction The Second Vatican Council’s Dogmatic Constitution on the Church (Lumen Gentium) begins with a chapter on “The Mystery of the Church.” Its opening line proclaims Christ the “light of all nations.” The Constitution goes on to describe the church as “in Christ as a sacrament or instrumental sign of intimate union with God and of the unity of all humanity.” This theme of the church as a kind of sacrament has characterized most Catholic ecclesiology in the second half of the twentieth century. Lumen Gentium’s opening emphasis on the church as sacrament (chapter 1) and the “People of God” deferred discussion of the “hierarchical structure of the Church” and the episcopate to chapter 3. During debates on Lumen Gentium, in a speech on October 1, 1963, the Cardinal Archbishop of Palermo, Ernesto Ruffini, attributed the very idea of the church as sacrament to George Tyrrell, excommunicated as a Modernist by Pope Pius X in 1908. Ruffini was outraged at the proposal that the Council’s solemn teaching on the church should begin in obvious Modernism. Monsignor Joseph Clifford Fenton, Catholic University of America professor and a Roman insider during the Council’s preparatory phase, believed that “the teaching in the first chapter of the new schema on the Church and the language are those of Tyrrell.” “May God preserve His Church from that chapter,” he prayed. “If it passes, it will be a great evil.”1 Fergus Kerr uses the responses of Fenton and Ruffini to the draft of Lumen Gentium to illuminate the reciprocal, mutually co-defining relationship of neo-Scholasticism and Modernism in the first half of the twentieth century. “The history of twentieth-century Catholic theology,” Kerr writes, “is the history of the attempted elimination of theological modernism, by censorship, sackings and excommunication —and the resurgence of issues that could not be repressed by xvii 1. History of Vatican II, vol. 3, eds. Giuseppe Alberigo and Joseph Komonchak (Maryknoll , N.Y./Leuven: Orbis/Peeters, 2000), 30, citing from Fenton’s Diary, September 24, 1963. xviii  Introduction such methods.” To Fenton and Ruffini, Chapter I of Lumen Gentium represented the latest such resurgence. Fenton’s teacher, Reginald GarrigouLagrange , OP, taught at the Angelicum in Rome for fifty-one years, from 1909 to 1960. He found an earlier resurgence of Modernism in the work of fellow Dominicans, Marie-Dominique Chenu and Yves Congar, and the Jesuit Henri de Lubac. Garrigou-Lagrange serves as Kerr’s “model Thomist” during this period.2 George Tyrrell’s friend and literary executor, Maude Petre, would perhaps have taken some wistful satisfaction at the consternation of Fenton and Ruffini in 1963. “No one can live within the Church at present,” Petre wrote just before her death in 1942, “without realizing that ‘Modernism’ has been absorbed as well as condemned.” Petre believed that it brought about “a larger spirit” and that “much is said which could not have been said had men like Loisy, Tyrrell, von Hügel not lived and spoken.”3 Going further than Petre, one contemporary French historian calls the modernist crisis the “intellectual matrix of contemporary Catholicism.”4 But what does such language mean? What issues define the irrepressible resurgence of which Kerr speaks? How have the issues raised by the thinkers involved in the modernist crisis been absorbed as well as condemned, and how is the modernist crisis our “intellectual matrix”? In his encyclical of September 8, 1907, Pascendi dominici gregis, Pope Pius X condemned Modernism as the “synthesis of all heresies.”5 The same paragraph contains one of the most compelling passages of the encyclical, speaking of sentiment and action as giving rise to “purely subjective truth.” 2. Fergus Kerr, Twentieth-Century Catholic Theologians: From Neoscholasticism to Nuptial Mysticism (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2007), 4–5; on Ruffini and Fenton, 7; on Garrigou-Lagrange, 10. On Garrigou, see also Aidan Nichols, OP, Reason with Piety: Garrigou-Lagrange in the Service of Catholic Thought (Naples, Fla.: Sapientia Press, 2008). 3. Maude Petre, Alfred Loisy: His Religious Significance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1944), 53–54. 4. “La crise moderniste constitue la matrice intellectuelle du catholicisme contemporain, dans la mesure précisement où elle se définit de relire le message fondateur à la lueur des connaissances scientifiques du siècle dernier [The modernist crisis constitutes the intellectual matrix of contemporary Catholicism precisely insofar as it is defined as a re-reading of the founding message in light of the scientific forms of knowledge of the last century].” Étienne Fouilloux, Une...