Catholicism Contending with Modernity: Roman Catholic Modernism and Anti-Modernism in Historical Context

This book is a case study in the ongoing struggle of Christianity to define its relationship to modernity, examining representative Roman Catholic Modernists and anti-Modernists, exploring their relationship to their own historical context. Its aim is to counteract the tendency to lift the proposals made by the Modernists out of their setting and define them as a coherent, timeless philosophical/theological outlook, which should be avoided. The book seeks to correct the proclivity of some contemporary proponents of Modernist ideas to de-contextualize those ideas and recommend their endorsement without a critical reconsideration of historical changes. It sketches the nineteenth-century background of the Modernist crisis, identifying the problems that the church was facing at the beginning of the twentieth century; and offers a fresh perspective on the Modernist crisis, a perspective arising from the pioneering work undertaken by the Roman Catholic Modernism Working Group of the American Academy of Religion.

Table of Contents:
List of contributors; Acknowledgements; List of abbreviations; Note on the text; Introduction I: the modernist crisis Darrell Jodock; Introduction II: the modernists and the anti-modernists Darrell Jodock; Part I. The Late Nineteenth-Century Setting of Modernism and Anti-Modernism: 1. Vatican foreign policy and the origins of modernism Gary Lease; 2. Catholic anti-modernism: the ecclesial setting Paul Misner; 3. Theological and philosophical modernism Gabriel Daly; Part II. Maurice Blondel and Alfred Loisy In France: 4. Seeking transcendence in the modern world Phyllis Kaminski; 5. Blondel's Action and the problem of the university George Tavard; 6. The politics of Loisy's modernist theology Harvey Hill; 7. Innovation and biblical interpretation Charles Talar; Part III. Friedrich von Hügel and Maude Petre in England: 8. The modernist as mystic Lawrence Barmann; 9. English Catholicism and modernism Ellen Leonard; Part IV. Social Modernism and Anti-Modernism in France: 10. Social modernism: the case of the Semaines Sociales Peter Bernardi; 11. Anti-modernism and the elective affinities between politics and philosophy Michael Kerlin.

Review :
'This outstanding collections of essays will long remain essential reading for anyone interested in the history of twentieth-century Catholicism.' Michael Walsh, The Tablet