Loisy's Theological Development

IN DECEMBER 1903 the Congregation of the Holy Office added five works of Alfred Loisy to its Index of Prohibited Books and made their author widely known. Up to this time the Abbe Loisy had written most of his articles and books for seminarians and priests, or for scholars engaged in his own field of biblical studies. He was hardly known to the general public of France; even the Catholic public had only recently begun to hear of him. He wrote about the Scriptures and the questions that critics, particularly in Germany, had been asking for over fifty years about their truth, authorship, and inspiration; and his readiness to accept many of the answers which the critics offered had put him squarely among a small group of Catholic scholars in Europe who wanted to adapt the Church's teaching to the contemporary world, to have the Church absorb, not reject, the results of scientific research that had a bearing on religion and especially on Christianity. Loisy's writing had caused trouble with his superiors before 1903. He had been forced to resign his chair of Scripture at the Institut Catholique of Paris in 1893; in 1900 the Archbishop of Paris forbade the Revue du clerge francais to publish anything he wrote. By that time what had reached the clergy, especially the younger priests, was through them beginning to reach the laity, and the publication by Loisy of several radical articles between 1898 and 1903 caused controversy in the Catholic press. The biblical question was being discussed outside merely clerical circles. The writers who shared Loisy's views on updating the Church's teaching and language were coming to be known as Modernists, and the volume and quality of Loisy's contributions to the movement made him their leader in the eyes of his superiors and of hostile publicists. The Roman condemnation brought him before a much wider public than he had reached up to then. He continued to write after 1903, and to write the same sort of criticism with the same vigor and persuasiveness as before; but now there were many more people alert to the discomfort being caused in the episcopal curias of France and in the Vatican by the new movement. In 1907, when Pius X issued his Encyclical Pascendi against Modernism, there could be no doubt in anyone's mind as to who was the leader of the French Modernists—they were even called Loisyists