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By Those Who Knew Them illuminates the lives of several key figures involved in the modernist movement--the movement for intellectual and structural renewal in turn-of-the-century Catholicism. The historical reality of the movement is complex. On one hand, its members sought to bring the Church into more positive relationship with the modern world, in its thought and life. On the other hand, the members did not always have resources needed for the project, and some thinkers advocated positions that would have been corrosive of a transcendent faith. The portrait of Modernism given in Pius X's 1907 Pascendi both identified real problems and suggested an organization and coherence to the movement that it did not possess. In this impressively researched volume, the authors concentrate on French Modernists. Joseph Turmel and Marcel Hbert, on the left, accorded full authority to critical history and insisted that it discredited Catholic theology. Modernists of the right such as Pierre Batiffol believed in the possibility of reconciling history and theological orthodoxy without radical reformulation of teaching. Alfred Loisy and Archbishop Mignot, in the center, believed radical reformulation was necessary. The book extends beyond these subjects and encompasses their biographers and commentators, namely Flix Sartiaux, Albert Houtin, Jeane Rivire, Henri Bremond, and Louis Lacger. Most of these biographers were themselves active participants in the Modernist movement and were networked among each other in interesting ways. The authors argue that the configuration of the lives of figures prominent in the Modernist crisis sheds light not only upon those participants and their biographers, but upon the perception of Modernism itself by those who were involved.
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