Divided Friends: Portraits of the Roman Catholic Modernist Crisis in the United States by William L. Portier (review)

William Portier, the Mary Ann Spearin Chair of Catholic Theology at the University of Dayton, examines the divergent responses of four American Roman Catholics during the Modernist crisis of the early twentieth century. They are John Slattery (1851–1926), Denis O’Connell (1849–1927), Joseph McSorley (1874–1963), and William L. Sullivan (1872–1935).

Slattery was a Josephite and an evangelist to African-Americans. He gradually became disillusioned with the church’s lack of support for his mission and could not find his way through doubts raised by the historical development of the church and its teachings. In 1906 he publicly renounced the priesthood. During the 1890s Denis O’Connell supported liberal reforms, but as the rector (1903–1909) of The Catholic University of America during the pontificate of Pius X he endeavored to be meticulously orthodox and opposed Modernism.

McSorley, a Paulist, served as George Tyrrell’s literary agent in the United States and Dorothy Day’s spiritual director during the early days of the Catholic Worker. He found his way through the Modernist crisis by focusing his studies on holiness and church history. For him “the church does not stand or fall with the persistence or decay of any debatable opinion; . . . her proper province is spiritual holiness” (305) and “Catholicism is not a bundle of formulas, but a life to be lived” (319). William L. Sullivan, also a Paulist, left the order (1909) and the church, married, and in 1911 became a Unitarian minister. Though McSorley and Sullivan were close associates, their approaches differed. McSorley tried to hold ideas together: Sullivan’s thinking was disjunctive. McSorley ignored scholasticism; Sullivan denounced it. They wound up taking quite different paths.

Portier’s approach is biographical. The book’s purpose is to illumine the issues that divided neo-Scholastic and Modernist theologies by telling the stories of these four men. The result is “a theologian’s narrative meditation on the relationship between theology and history” (13). His “meditation” challenges the frequent assertion that the turmoil in Europe had little effect in the United States, where supposedly practical and sometimes anti-intellectual Catholics were building an immigrant subculture, and it seeks to redeem “for Catholic theology in the United States the time between 1910 to 1965” (xxii). Objecting to the distortion that may result when an incident, such as the condemnation of Modernism, is isolated and subjected to intense scrutiny, Portier seeks to set the Modernist crisis within the larger story of the church’s interactions with developing political and intellectual freedom. He objects, for example, to the historians who consider Americanism to be a “phantom heresy” and examines the connections between developments during the closing decades of the nineteenth century and the controversies of the twentieth century. And, he argues, after Pascendi dominici gregis “Catholics in the United States did not stop thinking” (368). Though one school, neo-Scholasticism, “came perilously close to being identified with the faith,” “Catholic efforts in the social sciences, with their relevance to moral theology – and in the field of academic history, as exemplified by [John Tracy] Ellis – continued earlier attempts to address contemporary advances and needs from within the tradition” (ibid).

The book’s chapters are clustered into three sections. The first describes the issues crystallized by the 1907 encyclical Pascendi dominici gregis and introduces the cast of characters at work during the Modernist crisis. It does a nice job of helping the reader understand the overall controversy. The second treats the relationship between Slattery and O’Connell, giving greater attention to Slattery. The third discusses the relationship between McSorley and Sullivan. Given the explanations in section 1 and the narrative shape of the book, anyone with some background in theology and the history of modern Catholicism should find this book quite accessible. It is an interesting story – or, perhaps better, an interesting set of interlocking stories.

Divided Friends is carefully crafted...