Shaun Kenney RELC 5559 Fr. Gerald Forgarty 21 May 2015

Tradition, Americanism, and Biblical Scholasticism

The Catholic Church in the United States during the latter half of the 19th century was

full of promise, with a growing Catholic population and a burgeoning academic reputation

among her European counterparts. By the end of the century, however, the green shoots of

indigenous scholarship peculiarly unique to the American experience would undergo an

intellectual retreat that in many ways still endures to the present day.

Tension grew in many areas between the more highly educated and more skittish

European traditionalism comfortably buffeted among Catholic majorities and still threatened

with the spectre of French revolution, and the comparatively more liberalized American Catholic

minority that equally flourished and struggled within a largely Protestant America that had

embraced the principles of a far different revolution. These fissures manifested themselves

particularly in two areas: the first, the Americanist crisis, and second, the field of biblical

scholarship. Neither of these two arenas were necessarily related to one another. However, the

resolution of first, Americanism, directly affected the intellectual life of the second.

The publication of Testem Benevolentiae as a means to quell concerns about

Americanism effectively served its purpose, if such a purpose ever formally existed in the

“phantom heresy” in terms of quelling a peculiarly American form of modernism. In the

aftermath, however, the concepts laid out were subsequently applied to the other growing issues

of concern among Catholics in the United States, specifically an appropriate view of Catholic

biblical scholarship. As such, properly managing this perceived problem resulted in methods that

included censorship, faculty suppression, and an effective stifling of biblical scholarship and any

consideration of new methodology as the debate over biblical criticism consumed the Church.

Compounded by the growing fear of Modernism and the lack of qualified professors to teach ­­

specifically at the Catholic Univeristy of America ­­ a true flowering of biblical scholarship in

America would take several decades to recover from the aftermath of the Americanist crisis.

This paper will seek to examine first the Americanist crisis and the various themes in

political, social, and religious life in the late 1800s that eventually lead Pope Leo XIII to issue

his Apostolic letter, Testem Benevolentiae. Then, it will examine the concepts contained in the

letter itself. Finally, it will discuss how those ideas were applied to the parallel, ongoing debate

in Catholic biblical academia and its ultimate conclusions and effects within the Church and the

realm of scholarship, as well as the publication of the Pius X’s encyclical against the Modernist

heresy.

First, to give some perspective, until 1908 the Catholic Church in America was still

considered a mission church, even though Catholics had been coming to America for three

centuries. Thus, the Vatican’s relationship with America was not as developed as her European

counterparts. Similarly, America’s founding and Constitution was considered at the time to be an

anomaly when compared with other European nations’ history and politics. Therefore, when the

Vatican dealt with issues pertaining to America, it did so without a full grasp of the concepts that

made America particularly unique ­­ identifying the American revolution as it did the French

revolution and all the other revolutionary movements of Europe: suspect, dangerous, and with a

reactionary instinct..

The clash between America and Europe is one of the first backdrops to the intersection of

Americanism and Catholic biblical scholarship. David Killian, in his examination of John

Spalding and Testem Benevolentiae, identified three prevalent themes:

“(1) The thriving, young, and atypical Catholic Church in the United States of America was beginning to make its influence felt in Europe and especially in France. (2) The United States government was making its economic and military power felt on the international scene (especially in its successful prosecution of the Spanish­American War); and at the same time it had largely recuperated from the internal malaise which had followed upon the end of the Civil War and the period of reconstruction. (3) A series of episcopal conflicts in the United States over such issues as education, immigration, racism, and American Catholic self­identity produced ideological polarities which involuntarily conspired with the issue of church­state relationships in French Catholic circles. This brought about an apparent connection between the progressive American spirit and that of the Frenchralliement on the one hand versus the conservative American spirit and the French refractaires on the other.” 1 Two concepts in particular set America apart from the Europeans; the first was the

organization of America’s civil government, while the second was her unique concept of

religious liberty.

With regard to civil government, the chief issue at hand was one of Church­State

relations, and the explanation of its proper role with the Church underwent several

transformations in the 1800s. This was precipitated by Pius IX’s “Syllabus of Errors” in 1864,

which included the following condemnation: “that the church should be separated from the state

and the state from the church”. Archbishop John McCloskey noted that such a pronouncement,

“places us in a state of apparent antagonism.” 2

1 KILLEN, David, “Americanism Revisited: John Spalding and Testem Benevolentiae”, The Harvard Theological Review, Vol. 66, No. 4 (Oct., 1973), p. 415. 2 FOGARTY, Gerald: “Nova et Vetara The Theology of Tradition in American Catholicism. The 1987 Marquette Theology Lecture”, pp. 17­18.

Bishop Felix Dupanloup of Orleans, France subsequently analyzed this statement and

suggested that “the Catholic ‘thesis’ was harmony between Church and State, which could be

achieved by a variety of ‘hypotheses’, one of which was a union between the two.” This would 3

give cover to the American Church for at least a little while. Yet over time, and especially after

Vatican I and emerging new concepts of tradition, the understanding of thesis and hypothesis

mutated. By 1890, the thesis­hypothesis concept, as applied to America, came to be defined in a

new way: “Now the Catholic thesis became the union of Church and State, whenever Catholics

were in a majority. The hypothesis was defined as the concrete historical situation that was to be

tolerated only as long as Catholics sought to realize the thesis.” Thus, American Catholics were 4

not a majority at the time, but perhaps someday that would be achieved.

Could that objective be obtained by immigration? A backdrop to the situation in which

Pope Leo XIII was treading water on the issue of church­state relations in America was the large

influx of immigrants to America, mainly Irish, Polish, and Italian ­­ and then also the

Eastern­rite Catholics. Perhaps Leo XIII was watching the numbers of Catholic immigrants to

see if they might indeed “become a majority”. Until at least as late as January 1895, Pope Leo

XIII did not outright denounce America’s Church­State relationship when he published

Longinqua Oceani. But he would do precisely this four years later. 5

Unfortunately, with regard to the Eastern­rite Catholics in America, both the liberal and

conservative prelates were at least unified in their wish that the Eastern­rites assimilate into the

Latin­rite because of the fear that their form of Catholicism was too foreign, even for America.

3 Ibid, p. 19. 4 FOGARTY, Gerald: “Reflections on the Centennial of "Testem Benevolentiae", U.S. Catholic Historian, Vol. 17, No. 1, Americanism and Americanization: Essays in Honor of Philip Gleason (Winter, 1999), p. 2. 5 Ibid, p.2.

This was especially true on the question of married clergy and thus the bishops united

themselves to be sensitive to American culture ­­ at the expense of many Eastern­rite Catholic

brethren. The bishop’s unity on this particular issue as well as the preference to assimilate the 6

Eastern­rites may have helped to reinforce to Pope Leo XIII that “Americanism” was indeed a

real thing that needed to be condemned by the end of the century. The irony is not lost that the

prelates’ appeal to Rome on this question is essence of the very criticism of American Catholics

being wedded to the Vatican that most of the American hierarchy tried to avoid.

Of equal concern to the Vatican was the concept of religious liberty. Most bishops saw

the protection of religious liberty as guaranteed by the Constitution, meaning that Catholics had

the freedom to do as they ought. The Vatican, on the other hand, became increasingly concerned

that that there was too much of an emphasis on liberty or individualism ­­ especially in a country

where Catholics were a minority status among Protestants ­­ which could prove dangerous

without the protections of the Church. As the European Church struggled to fight off the rise of

rationalism during the 19th century, the Holy See began to take an inward turn. By the end of 7

the century, Denis O’Connell’s speech on Americanism at the Friborg Congress in 1897 was

sufficient enough to really raise the alarm that rationalism was a problem in America too. “ To

speak, as O'Connell had, of the separation of Church and State and religious liberty seemed to

surrender the very rights the Church in Europe was seeking to defend from the usurpations of the

6 FOGARTY, Gerald: “The Vatican and the American Hierarchy from 1870 to 1965”, The Liturgical Press, 1982, pp. 61­64. 7 FOGARTY, Gerald: “Nova et Vetara: The Theology of Tradition in American Catholicism” The 1987 Marquette Theology Lecture, pp. 17­18.

European liberal State; it appeared to be an American form of the rationalism which the

European Church was trying to combat.” 8

Incidentally it was at that same Congress that many scholars presented new ideas in

biblical scholasticism, covering topics such as evolution and the authorship of the Pentateuch.

These presentations also seemed to suggest an emphasis on the human and human reason, which

the Holy See would, as will be seen, find problematic.

Thus in 1899, Pope Leo XIII issued his Apostolic letter, Testem Benevolentiae after

appointing a commission to study Americanism the previous summer. The letter was addressed 9

to James Cardinal Gibbons and was directly aimed to condemn the crisis, or sometimes called

the heresy, of Americanism which feared too much individualism in political, religious, and

intellectual realms. The first part of the letter spoke directly about the American Isaac Hecker,

founder of the Paulists, a convert to Catholicism. Hecker was considered forward­thinking as he

espoused the American concepts of religious liberty and separation of Church and State.

Obviously, these two ideas were uncomfortable to the Vatican, which viewed America, and the

Catholic Church within it, as an exception to the usual political and religious arrangement within

a nation.

Hecker had suggested that these two concepts were indeed favorable, even profitable, and

pointed to the thriving, growing Catholic church in America, especially in a nation of

Protestants, as proof of its compatibility with these concepts. He found allies with James

Cardinal Gibbons, Bishop John Ireland, and Monsignor Denis J. O'Connell. Nothing they

supported was explicitly opposed to Catholic teaching per se, but it was different enough from

8 FOGARTY, Gerald: “Reflections on the Centennial of "Testem Benevolentiae", U.S. Catholic Historian, Vol. 17, No. 1, Americanism and Americanization: Essays in Honor of Philip Gleason (Winter, 1999), p. 4. 9 FOGARTY, Gerald: “American Catholic Biblical Scholarship”, Harper and Row, 1989, p.66.

the norm that the Vatican took notice, laid it out, and then gently redirected this line of thinking:

10

Not only was there concern about Americanism among various members of the

hierarchy, Pope Leo XIII was responding as well to the popular reception Hecker’s biography

received in France. As Michael Cuneo wrote in his book on conservative and traditionalist

dissent in contemporary American Catholicism, it “served to increase Leo XIII's suspicion that

Americanism was yet another attempt, not so very different from the Gallicanisms of the past, to

assert the independence of a national church from Rome.” 11

With regard to the Church­State question, it is clear that the separation of Church and

State in America made Pope Leo XIII uneasy, reaffirming a preference that Leo XIII had 12

written in 1885 in the Encyclical, Immortale Dei where he championed, at the very least, that

Catholicism be given “preeminent legal standing” . In Testem Benevolentiae, Leo sought to 13

remind Catholics in America that foremost, “God has placed the center and foundation of unity

in the chair of Blessed Peter”.

Most everyday Catholics were likely not affected much by the Apostolic letter; in

addressing it to Gibbons, Pope Leo XIII was emphasizing its circulation specifically among the

bishops. It is clear that Leo sought to undercut the authority of the American hierarchy and

subdue Americanism, and he was successful in this endeavor. The fear of too much

individualism, both political and religious, in the American situation and the need to affirm the

10 Pope Leo XIII, Testem Benevolentiae. 11 CUNEO, Michael: “The Smoke of Satan”, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997, p. 24. 12 Pope Leo XIII, Testem Benevolentiae. 13 CUNEO, Michael: “The Smoke of Satan”, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997, p. 24.

Vatican’s place in the world, ultimately lead to an end of the Americanist crisis with this letter.

Europe at the end of the 19th century was not yet ready for American ideas.

But that was not all. Testem Benevolentiae also contained a section that set the stage for

its effect on Catholic biblical scholarship. As noted earlier, a new type of exegesis was emerging.

With the era of enlightenment and the use of scientific methods, some scholars had began to look

at the Bible in new ways. The Holy See, however, was a bit suspicious of the new methodology

and sought to defend the role of inspiration and the Church as “guarantor of the Holy Spirit” . 14

Thus, when Leo XIII addressed Hecker’s progressive ideas about the “natural virtues”, his letter

“reflected a low opinion of human nature without grace. Grace became rare and, with the

external guidance of the Church, was necessary for human nature to attain its end”. 15

As Killen points out in his article on John Spalding and Testem Benevolentiae,

“specifically the letter insists that the presence of the Holy Spirit to the individual cannot

eliminate the necessity for external third person guidance. The initiative of the individual is in

the last analysis to be subsumed to the established order of the church, and thus the natural

virtues and the active life, as effective as they might be, are never to be held in an esteem

equivalent to that of either the supernatural virtues or the passive life. Here then is where 16

Testem Benevolentiae would especially affect the world of biblical scholarship. Leo was

safeguarding any notions that “inspiration, like grace for the Americanists, would not be rare. 17

14 FOGARTY, Gerald: “Nova et Vetara: The Theology of Tradition in American Catholicism”, The 1987 Marquette Theology Lecture, p. 28. 15 Ibid, p. 31. 16 KILLEN, David, “Americanism Revisited: John Spalding and Testem Benevolentiae”, The Harvard Theological Review, Vol. 66, No. 4 (Oct., 1973), p. 444. 17 Ibid, p. 31.

Biblical scholars then must not use only natural criticism when studying scripture, but remember

that the books were divinely inspired.

How was Leo’s letter received? While writing about the American periodical press,

Samuel Thomas has observed that, “in general, both the nature and the paucity of comment on

the papal letter during the last years of Leo's reign and in the period papal letter during the last

years of Leo's reign and in the period immediately following his death tend to reaffirm an

observation made by the late Thomas T. McAvoy, C.S.C. None of the liberals, he said, changed

sides as a result of Testern Benevolentiae; rather, there was a generation of "armed silence." 18

This silence was seen almost immediately in the world of biblical scholarship. Within a

week of the publication of Testem Benevolentiae ­­ perhaps fittingly on the Feast of St. Thomas

Aquinas ­­ the Master General of the Dominicans, Father Fruhwirth, issued a letter to

Mary­Joseph Lagrange, one of the presenters at the aforementioned Friborg Congress and a

“modern” exegete who specifically studied and raised questions about the Mosaic authorship of

the Pentateuch. Fruhwirth told Lagrange that Leo had recently written to the Franciscans,

“warning them of the dangers of some of the modern tendencies in the study of Scripture.” 19

Fruhwirth also “ordered that every article to be published in the Revue biblique be first submitted

to Rome to be read by censors, whom he would choose.” 20

Like Lagrange, a similar instance of censorship was seen in the treatment of Sulpician

Francis Gigot, a professor at St. Mary’s Seminary in Baltimore. Gigot generally viewed tradition,

18 THOMAS, Samuel: “The American Periodical Press and the Apostolic Letter "Testem Benevolentiae", The Catholic Historical Review, Vol. 62, No. 3 (Jul., 1976), p. 421. 19 FOGARTY, Gerald: “American Catholic Biblical Scholarship”, Harper and Row, 1989, p. 71. 20 Ibid, p. 71.

“not so much as a deposit but as a process of handing on the living faith,” and during 21

1900­1901, was in the midst of publishing a three­volume study of Scripture. His first volume

seemingly had echoes of Lagrange, and thus the manuscript for his second volume was required

to be sent to Paris “for special censorship”. 22

In 1902, Leo XIII formed the Pontifical Biblical Commission, who studied Gigot’s work.

The Commission judged that his writing contained some objectionable passages which would

need to be revised and then subsequently approved by the censors in Paris. As Fogarty notes,

“the question now became the meaning of ‘the common teaching’ of Catholics” As it was 23

“commonly taught” that Moses was the author of the Pentateuch, this was the Holy See’s way to

reinforce what was affirmed at Trent and maintain the role of tradition over modern

methodology. Gigot’s plight with the censors dragged on for years; it was ultimately resolved

only in 1906 when Gigot and several other Sulpicians withdrew from their order, eliminating the

need for the continued censorship in Paris. Gigot subsequently published his second volume that

year.

By then, Gigot was teaching at Dunwoodie, an American university. For at least the first

couple of years, the more modern biblical exegetes in America did not feel the effects of Testem

Benevolentiae in their field as did their European counterparts. In fact, one of the more

progressive scholars in America, Charles Grannan, was appointed to the Pontifical Biblical

Commission; he was the only American. Unfortunately, two events would contribute to a 24

21 FOGARTY, Gerald: “Nova et Vetara: The Theology of Tradition in American Catholicism”. The 1987 Marquette Theology Lecture, p. 43. 22 Ibid, p. 45. 23 Ibid, p. 46. 24 FOGARTY, Gerald: “Biblical Scholarship at the Catholic University of America”, The Catholic Historical Review, Vol. 75, No. 4 (Oct., 1989), pp. 638.

change away from the more liberal approaches in America. First, “during the summer of 1903,

Leo XIII died and the election of his successor, Pius X, signalled the beginning of the campaign

against biblical criticism” . More influential was the appointment of Denis O’Connell as rector 25

of Catholic University. Grannan was a supporter of O’Connell’s and helped to get him

appointed; O’Connell was considered to be among the more “liberal” camp during the

Americanist crisis a few years earlier and Grannan a more “liberal” scholar. But O’Connell took

a more decidedly Roman approach in his leadership role at The Catholic University of America,

estranging Grannan and other of the progressive scholars by the end of his first year as rector.

O’Connell alienated more than just Grannan. In an unfortunate incident, he extended an

invitation to Henry Poels to be the Chair of Old Testament at Catholic University. Poels was 26

another modern scholar from Holland, who, like Grannan, was appointed to serve on the

Pontifical Biblical Commission. After meeting with him in Louvain, O’Connell seemed to

waiver on the appointment, so that Poels actually received two different letters of appointment

from the University; O’Connell also interfered with Poel’s rank and salary, and did not even

have a place ready for him when he arrived to teach. But Poels stayed. 27

Over the next few years, Poels’ writing would, as will be seen, draw antagonism from

American critics. Poels “argued for the development of doctrine and distinguished between the

Fathers as "witnesses of the Church" and as "scholars of their day," who were not writing as

historians in the twentieth­century sense.” Poels was concerned with a growing trend toward a 28

more conservative biblical scholarship that meant Scripture with a literal interpretation and a

25 Ibid, p. 638. 26 FOGARTY, Gerald: “American Catholic Biblical Scholarship”, Harper and Row, 1989, p. 84. 27 Ibid, pp. 84­85. 28 FOGARTY, Gerald: “Biblical Scholarship at the Catholic University of America”, The Catholic Historical Review, Vol. 75, No. 4 (Oct., 1989), pp. 639­640.

rejection of science. As such, Poels ­­ and also Grannan by this time ­­ were put under 29

suspicion by O’Connell by 1907. Poels was finally relieved of his position by 1910.

During this same time frame, Poels had also drawn the attention of Archbishop Diomede

Falconio, the apostolic delegate, who saw Poels as the epitome of problematic scholarship in

America, Falconio described how, ”in regard to the unlimited freedom of thought that is in vogue

in these states, we have need, more than elsewhere, of professors who are sincerely and

profoundly orthodox; otherwise, there is much to be feared in regard to the education of our

young ecclesiastics”. But Falconio was not the only one to be concerned with “orthodoxy”. The 30

Vatican’s Secretary of State, Merry del Val, exchanged letters with Falconio on the subject of

Henry Poels, insisting that “orthodox teachers conform their intellects to the decisions of the

Biblical Commission” , the Roman­centered biblical group that had earlier censured Gigot. 31

But Catholic University was not the only place for uneasy scholarship. At St. Bernard’s

Seminary in New York, a professor named Edward J. Hanna was deemed suspicious after

writing a series of articles to the New York Review. Hanna wrote about the human knowledge of

Jesus, which “attracted the attention of Rome”. One of Hanna’s faculty associates, Andrew

Breen, had contacted Rome about Hanna, for which Breen was rightly dismissed. But Hanna

“remained in the limbo of suspicion of heresy for several more years.” 32

By this time, Pius X has issued his famous encyclical, “Pascendi Dominici Gregis”, “On

the Doctrine of the Modernists” on September 8, 1907. This was published two months after Pius

29Ibid, p. 640. 30 FOGARTY, Gerald: “Biblical Scholarship at the Catholic University of America”, The Catholic Historical Review, Vol. 75, No. 4 (Oct., 1989), p. 643. 31 Ibid, p. 643­644. 32 FOGARTY, Gerald: “The Vatican and the American Hierarchy from 1870 to 1965”, The Liturgical Press, 1982, pp. 61­64.

X’s exhaustive list of sixty­five modernist errors, Lamentabili sane exitu. Pius’s encyclical was

considered to be an effort to safeguard the idea of tradition within the Church, which had grown

even more Roman­centered since Testem Benevolentiae nearly eight years ago. At this point, the

notion of tradition as a lived experience, as seen with the Church Fathers and more liberal

biblical scholars, was replaced by a Thomist tradition that reflected Trent. The Scholasticism that

Leo XIII sought to revive during his papacy was achieved by Pius X.

In fact, in one section (#38), where Pius X discusses scholastic versus modern theology,

he also brings up the subject of Americanism, thereby linking the two movements: “With regard

to morals, they adopt the principle of the Americanists, that the active virtues are more important

than the passive, both in the estimation in which they must be held and in the exercise of them.”

33

C. J. T. Talar described the way in which Pius therefore sought to protect the Church in

his encyclical: “The final portion set in place a series of control measures that would affect the

state of Catholic scholarship for decades to come. Catholic theologians, exegetes, historians and

philosophers, indeed Catholic intellectuals more largely (novels could find their way on to the

Index of Forbidden Books just as well as more scholarly writings), were put on notice that their

work would be subject to increased surveillance. And local ordinaries were given to understand

that they were accountable for strict censorship of publications within their dioceses and for the

institution and maintenance of councils of vigilance to enlarge the scope of scrutiny. The amount

of attention given to surveillance and sanction, and the rigor with which both could be applied,

33 PIUS X: “Pascendi Dominici Gregis”: September 8, 1907, paragraph 38.

serve as indicators of the anxiety induced by the Modernist crisis among official guardians of the

faith. 34

In America, the immediate impact of Pius’s Modernism encyclical was apparent foremost

in an episode concerning the publication of the New York Review and its associates. The Review

only lasted three years, from 1905­1908, and was the publication in which Edward Hanna’s

articles earned him scrutiny. But Rome was not suspicious of Hanna only; it became

apprehensive about the Review itself as well for publishing Hanna’s writings, and for an

advertisement for books written by a Jesuit priest, George Tyrell, who had been recently

excommunicated. The Review ceased publication in 1908, shortly after the encyclical was 35

issued. Though it officially cited money as the reason for its demise, the specter of Modernism 36

was the most likely. Pius’s suspicious of Hanna extended more widely to the Review, and then

even to Archbishop Farley, who sponsored an article written by Hanna for the Catholic

Encyclopedia. During the summer of 1908, “Archbishop Farley and Cardinal Gibbons both went

to Rome where they had to defend the American church against Merry Del Val’s charges that

Americanism was part of Modernism.” The dragnet further impacted Hanna himself as he was 37

rejected as co­adjutor Archbishop of San Francisco exactly one year after the Modernism

encyclical. As for the Review itself, scholarly journalism effectively died with it, “until 1940

with the founding of Theological Studies”, published by the Jesuits at Woodstock College. 38

34 TALAR, C. J. T.:“Pascendi dominici gregis: The Vatican Condemnation of Modernism”, U.S. Catholic Historian, Vol. 25, No. 1, Pascendi dominici gregis: 1907­2007: Centennial Essays on Responses to the Encyclical on Modernism (Winter, 2007), p. 1. 35 FOGARTY, Gerald: “American Catholic Biblical Scholarship”, Harper and Row, 1989, p. 132. 36 FOGARTY, Gerald: “The Vatican and the American Hierarchy from 1870 to 1965”, The Liturgical Press, 1982, pp. 192. 37 FOGARTY, Gerald: “American Catholic Biblical Scholarship”, Harper and Row, 1989, p. 132. 38 FOGARTY, Gerald: “The Vatican and the American Hierarchy from 1870 to 1965”, The Liturgical Press, 1982, pp. 193.

Besides the realm of journalism, suppression was seen in other forms. For instance, Rome

found ways to interfere with the hiring of faculty on the subject of biblical scholarship. As

mentioned earlier, Henry Poels was dismissed from Catholic University in April of 1910. At the

same time, the trustees recommended hiring Joseph David to replace him in Old Testament. Less

than two months later, in June, Merry del Val contacted Falconio to express that David’s

professorship “would not be received with pleasure by the Holy See.” And by September of 39

1910, Pius X issued his Oath against Modernism, “To be sworn to by all clergy, pastors,

confessors, preachers, religious superiors, and professors in philosophical ­theological

seminaries.” In it, Pius X called for oath­takers that they should “reject that method of judging

and interpreting Sacred Scripture which, departing from the tradition of the Church, the analogy

of faith, and the norms of the Apostolic See, embraces the misrepresentations of the rationalists

and with no prudence or restraint adopts textual criticism as the one and supreme norm.”

Although the oath didn’t specifically single out the historical critical approach, it did nonetheless

serve to effectively chill innovative biblical scholarship for decades; the oath was taken until

1967. As for Joseph David, his appointment controversy dragged on for two years, and he

ultimately was not offered a professorship.

Besides the oath, another reactionary tactic formed which involved spying and secrecy.

Monsignor Humberto Begigni formed an international group called “Sodalitium Pianum”, which

means, “the fellowship of Pius”. The group was “committed to rooting out all suspected

Modernists” Other supporters who were not necessarily members reported on “the suspected 40

39 FOGARTY, Gerald: “Biblical Scholarship at the Catholic University of America”, The Catholic Historical Review, Vol. 75, No. 4 (Oct., 1989), p. 644. 40FOGARTY, Gerald: “American Catholic Biblical Scholarship”, Harper and Row, 1989, p. 162.

heterodoxy of seminary professors and even bishops.” The group overall was small, but zealous 41

and clandestine, and represents the most extreme measures seen to combat Modernism. Its

activities wound down after several years, but Yves Congar suggests that it nevertheless

remained scantily intact until WWII. Though unrelated, it was around this same time that 42

biblical scholarship in America began its spring again.

How was it that that two papal writings within ten years had such an impact on the life of

the American Church? Testem Benevolentiae and Pascendi Dominici Gregis personified the

inward turn toward Rome that began with Vatican I and elevated her authority substantially.

In the latter part of the 1800’s, America represented new ideas in religion and politics,

but Europe was not quite ready for them; she was battling her own demise against rationalism. In

an effort to retain the relevance of the Holy See, it emphasized tradition as a deposit of faith and

a safeguard for orthodoxy, and papal pronouncements took a more authoritative role. Thus,

Testem Benevolentiae weakened the American Church just the nation was emerging in

prominence; Pascendi Dominici Gregis consequently subdued her intellectual life for a

generation. The real thawing finally began to occur after the publication of Divino Afflante

Spiritu by Pope Pius XII in 1943, and the formation of the Catholic Biblical Association. And

when Vatican II was called ­­ in a show of collegiality away from the Romanization since

Vatican I ­­ Americans were able to contribute substantially to the documents produced. Though

there will always be conflicts and various schools of theology, the Church in America has made

great strides since the end of the 19th century and has again begun to thrive.

41 Ibid, p. 169. 42 CONGAR, Yves: “My Journal of the Council”, English translation by Mary John Ronayne and Mary Cecily

Boulding, Liturgical Press, Collegeville, MN, 2012.