By Those Who Knew Them: French Modernists Left, Right, and Center

3. Le Moderniste Malgré Lui, Pierre Batiffol

71  C h a p te r T h r ee Le Moderniste Malgré Lui Pier r e Batiffol C.J.T. Talar In a retrospective look in Témoins de la pensée catholique en France sous la IIIe république (1940), Pierre Fernessole extolled Pierre Batiffol’s orthodoxy: “[F]aced with the Modernist heresy, the Church had no defender of Catholic Truth more zealous, more authoritative , more effective than Mgr Batiffol.” However, he found it necessary immediately to add that “this role was too often misunderstood in certain Catholic circles.”1 Pierre Batiffol suffered a fate similar to that of the Dominican biblical scholar Marie-Joseph Lagrange, with whom he was closely associated.2 Attempting to mediate between Catholic tradition and modern criticism, they appeared from one side as Modernists in moderate’s clothing. In September 1906, several months prior to the condemnations of Modernism in the syllabus Lamentabili and the encyclical Pascendi, Batiffol was characterized to Cardinal Merry del Val as “more rationalist than Loisy and the Protestants themselves.”3 To the other side, Batiffol seemed not Modern1 . Pierre Fernessole, Témoins de pensée catholique en France sous la IIIe république (Paris : Beauchesne, 1940), 230. 2. Bernard Montagnes, “L’amitié Batiffol-Lagrange” in Bulletin de littérature ecclésiastique 98 (1997): 3–20. 3. Letter of Montagnini to Merry del Val, 24 September 1906, cited in Alfred Loisy, 72    t h e r i g h t ist enough. Alfred Loisy positioned Batiffol as holding more extreme views in private than he aired in public, but not so extreme as to place Batiffol within the Modernist camp: “Rome . . . never pardoned him for this crime of Modernism that he had not committed.”4 Rivière’s Batiffol Just as Albert Houtin’s La vie d’Alfred Loisy and Henri Bremond’s Un clerc qui n’a pas trahi yield two rather different Loisys, the memories of Jean Rivière when juxtaposed with Loisy’s Mémoires portray two Batiffols. The premature death of Batiffol in 1929 brought forth two articles from Rivière that were published shortly thereafter in the Revue apologétique.5 Reviewed, corrected, and expanded, they appeared as a small volume that claimed no pretense of being an adequate presentation of Batiffol’s life, but presented simply “a brief outline of the essential traits of his career and his work.”6 From the first page of his introduction, Rivière apprises his reader that it is necessary to account for the fact that Batiffol, “one of the most eminent representatives of ecclesiastical science,” had been “ordered to leave his post as rector of the Institut catholique at Toulouse” “despite the zeal that he had displayed against the nascent Modernism.”7 As is the Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire religieuse de notre temps, 3 vols. (Paris: Émile Nourry, 1931), 2: 604n. 4. Ibid., 604. 5. Jean Rivière, “Monseigneur Batiffol,” in Revue apologétique 48 (1929): 385–411, 513–25. Rivière studied with Batiffol at the Toulouse Institut catholique and became Batiffol ’s “favorite student.” See François Laplanche, Dictionnaire du monde religieux 9: Les sciences religieuses. Le XIXe siècle 1800–1914 (Paris: Beauchesne, 1996), 587–89. 6. Jean Rivière, Monseigneur Batiffol (1861–1929) (Paris: J. Gabalda, 1929), 5. 7. Ibid., 7. Already, the same year, in Le modernisme dans l’Église, Rivière had defended Batiffol. For the author, the fact that Modernism had been unmasked was the consequence of initiatives taken by courageous and lucid persons such as Batiffol; had he not been among the first to recognize and point out the real danger? His efforts, and those of like-minded theologians, bore fruit in the encyclical Pascendi, which synthesized their criticisms and checkmated the Modernists’ program. The less than satisfying nature of Rivière’s l e m o d e r n i s t e m a l g r é l u i     73 case with several other biographies in this volume, here too the biographer is an advocate. To a significant degree, Rivière’s advocacy took the form of establishing Batiffol’s credentials as a scholar whose research and publication met the critical standards of the Academy without, however, compromising his loyalty to the Church. In the first part of his study Rivière highlighted those aspects of his subject’s formation that contributed to Batiffol’s “loyal union between modern...