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

For decades following the 1907 papal condemnation of Modernism, the antimodernist encyclical Pascendi dominici gregis served as the basis for its definition. The major question became: Who was (or was not) a modernist according to the encyclical? Around the time of the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965) a different approach to modernist historiography became apparent. While the “top down” approach of Pascendi remained an important factor, scholars adopted a “bottom up” strategy, investigating via published work and private correspondence what reform-minded individuals themselves thought they were doing. This strategy not only served to expand the range of interest to include figures not previously considered, but also to reframe some of the issues. Divided Friends reflects this latter approach, building on previous revisionist studies by Christopher J. Kauffman, R. Scott Appleby, and others. Portier successfully employs two sets of intertwined biographical portraits to “dramatize the theological questions … more effectively than a conventional theological exposition” (xxii).

The focus on four paired figures—John R. Slattery and Denis O’Connell, William L. Sullivan and Joseph McSorley—has the expected result of extending and deepening our knowledge of these key individuals. Portier’s use of an autobiographical manuscript by Slattery deposited among the Albert Houtin papers at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France fills in gaps in Slattery’s life and sheds light on the elusive O’Connell (whose private papers were destroyed, making historians’ attempts to assess his theological positions and motives difficult). The inclusion of McSorley together with his fellow Paulist, Sullivan, reveals McSorley’s role in bringing George Tyrrell’s work into print in the United States (Tyrrell published more than twenty articles in U.S. periodicals between 1891 and 1906), while also drawing attention to the writings of other European reformers in American reviews. McSorley’s The Sacrament of Duty (1909) reflects an aspect of Modernism that has remained comparatively recessive: spirituality.

By setting these figures in their larger context—what occurred before the modernist crisis and what happened later, Portier makes an important contribution to revisionist efforts to position Modernism in relation to Americanism. The “phantom heresy” historiography of Americanism had the effect of dissociating Americanism from Modernism, portraying the former as practical and political in its core concerns and the latter as primarily intellectual in its outlook. Thus O’Connell, an ardent Americanist in the first part of his career, became an antimodernist in the second. Drawing on Slattery’s observations, matters grow more complex. Evidence of more substantive connections between O’Connell’s Americanist commitments and theological positions reflect Modernism. His life reveals in microcosm broader connections discernible between the two censured movements. Portier carefully notes points of discontinuity between Americanism and Modernism. For instance, these four figures (unlike the earlier generation of Ireland and Gibbons) had to address historical criticism’s effects on Christian origins and the relation of gospel and Church. But continuity is emphasized. For Americans in the Hecker tradition such as William Sullivan and Joseph McSorley, the strong sense of the Holy Spirit’s indwelling in the soul present in Isaac Hecker’s writings resonated with the new sense of immanence in apologetics and spirituality (11). Tyrrell’s approach in External Religion recalled for the young McSorley “Hecker’s account of the relationship between the life of the Holy Spirit in the soul and the outer working of the same Spirit in the church” (235). An Augustinian apologetic of the restless heart provided a link between Hecker and Maurice Blondel. Slattery and O’Connell associated greater freedom in political matters with Wissenschaft, the scientific spirit and practice associated with German universities. For both politics was inseparable from “the freedom to ask real theological questions about revelation, religious experience, and especially church history in a critical key” (132). More tellingly, the Holy See’s authorities made the same connection. Thus Portier can state, with a...