Who Were the Modernists?

Extract

People are beginning to realize that some of the ideas put forward since the Council have roots which go back to the Modernist movement at the turn of the century. Since Modernism was condemned by Pius X’s encyclical Pascendi Gregis in 1907, with unexampled severity, this raises some interesting questions. The history of Modernism is in for reappraisal and already the field is bristling with budding experts, mostly French and American. I am no expert and the views I express here are open to revision.

Modernism once seemed to me an interruption, almost an irrelevance, in the development of ideas in the Church. The link between the liberal Catholics of the nineteenth century and the general attitude which emerged at the recent Council is clear enough. The Council has reversed the views implicit in the famous Syllabus of Errors (1864); it has decided that ‘Christendom’ has gone for ever, that the Church must stop trying to govern the world and learn how to serve it. ‘A free Church in a free State’ has been enlarged into ‘a free Church in a free World’—an updated version, surely, of views first promoted by the unfortunate Lamennais and pursued with more caution by Montalembert and Lacordaire in France, the editors of the Rambler (Acton, Simpson, Newman) in England, and others elsewhere.

This element in the Second Vatican Council is the one most apparent to the world, which welcomes it, and perhaps it may be called Pope John’s line, for his view was pastoral: how to make the Gospel available to the modern world was his deepest concern and a favourite word was convivenza, which he preferred to ‘co-existence’.