Review of George Tyrrell and Catholic Modernism

This collection of strong contributions to Roman Catholic modernism studies originated from a laudable desire to commemorate George Tyrrell, a so-called modernist and former member of the English Province of the Society of Jesus, on the centenary of his death. Oliver Rafferty\u27s chapter I historically contextualizes what follows. The book\u27s centerpiece is Clara Ginther\u27s superb essay on Tyrrell\u27s seminal article, The Relation of Theology to Devotion (1899). Ginther smartly shows how this article gives his corpus coherence. Anthony Maher\u27s equally superb essay on Tyrrell\u27s ecclesiology flows from his understanding of devotion as rooted in religious experience, which, in Tyrrell\u27s case, was grounded in his Ignatian spirituality and Christology. For Tyrrell, religious experience is what primarily authorizes, a view that coheres with Blessed Cardinal John Henry Newman\u27s view of authority: It is, first of all, internal. Out of

Afterword

Today many books appear regarding Vatican II. Yet, only very few of them manage to locate this crucial event in the life of the twentieth century Roman Catholic Church against the broad horizon of both its prehistory and its aftermath. This book does just that. In seven chapters, this volume offers a survey of the evolution of Post-Enlightenment Catholicism, in the period spanning from ca. 1830 to the present, tying together the renewals proposed by the first and the Second Vatican Councils. Each phase in this evolution is discussed from a double angle: on the hand from the viewpoint of theological developments and milieu’s, and on the other hand from an institutional and Church historical perspective, thus binding together these two perspectives and tracing the evolutions within Catholicism in all their pluriformity