John Ireland and the Modernist Controversy

Abstract

The effects of the condemnation of Modernism in the opening decades of the twentieth century were deep and far reaching. The Vatican, continuing its long-standing feud with doctrinal Modernism, took sharp, decisive action on 3 July 1907 when the Holy Office issued a syllabus, Lamentabili sane exitu, listing sixty-five condemned propositions taken mostly from the writings of the noted French theologian and exegete Alfred Loisy.1 Two months later, on 8 September, Pius X renewed the attack with his anti-Modernist encyclical, Pascendi Dominici gregis.2 The encyclical outlined and condemned “most attempts then being made by European Catholics, priests and laity, to incorporate the most recent nonscholastic research and scholarship into the development of theology and scripture studies.”