The Global Church Era · 1906-1962 · Rome, the Catholic world

The Catholic Church — Pius X to the Eve of the Council

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Era

The Global Church Era

Time Period

1906-1962

Region

Rome, the Catholic world

Status

Not yet available

About This Movement

In 1907 Rome moved against what it called modernism: the decree Lamentabili and the encyclical Pascendi condemned it, and in 1910 an anti-modernist oath was required of clergy and teachers. Alfred Loisy and George Tyrrell were at the centre of it. The argument was the same one about history, scripture and doctrine that would break American Protestantism apart in the 1920s, running inside Catholicism a generation earlier. Then it turned. Divino Afflante Spiritu, in 1943, reopened the biblical scholarship Pascendi had closed. The worker-priest experiment sent clergy into ordinary workplaces. The nouvelle théologie went back behind the manuals to the fathers and to the liturgy. All of that, contested at the time, became the seedbed of the council. And there were the wars, including the record of Pius XII, which has a historiography of its own and is still argued about.

In Its Own Record

Sources

The anti-modernist documents: Lamentabili and Pascendi Dominici Gregis (1907), and the anti-modernist oath (1910) (primary) — The period's defining texts; dates from standard reference.
Divino Afflante Spiritu (1943) (primary) — The reopening of Catholic biblical scholarship; date from standard reference.
The nouvelle théologie corpus and the worker-priest record (primary) — The council's seedbed, contested in its own time; details from standard reference.
Papal archives for the period, including the Pius XII wartime record (primary) — The Pius XII record carries its own contested historiography, which is noted here rather than resolved.