1. Almost a century after the papal condemnation, there is still no generally accepted definition of Modernism. To be sure, one can locate the roots of Modernism in the efforts of later nineteenth-century European Catholic scholars to revitalize Catholic theology and exegesis in the light of the advances then being made in such cognate disciplines as archaeology, anthropology, philosophy, literary criticism and ancient history. However, in the 1907 encyclical Pascendi Dominici Gregis, Pope Pius X artificially combined these disparate initiatives and presented Modernism as an organized subversive movement whose purpose was to leave “nothing stable, nothing immutable in the Church." Louvain historian Roger Aubert has identified three kinds of Modernism among Catholic scholars at the turn of the century. “Some manifestations…were perfectly legitimate,” he asserts. “Others, though made to appear dangerous by the baldness of their expression, were nevertheless sound in principle; and finally there were manifestations which verged on the heretical and which ended in some cases in becoming entirely devoid of Christian content.” Aubert, Roger, The Church in a Secularized Society(New York, 1978), p. 187. It was the mistaken notion that Modernism was an “internally coherent system expressing itself in a carefully concerted movement” that deprives the papal definition of much of its credibility, in the opinion of Irish Catholic theologian Gabriel Daly. Daly, Gabriel, Transcendence and immanence: A Study in Catholic Modernism and Integralism(Oxford, 1980), p. 3. On the other hand, while recognizing the artificiality of the papal synthesis , Anglican scholar Alec Vidier regarded Pascendi as “an extremely skilful articulation of the logical implications and outcome of ideas that were being canvassed and disseminated in the church at that time.” Vidier, Alec R., A Variety of Catholic Modernists(Cambridge, 1970), p. 16.Google Scholar
