"Church and Age Unite!" - (Notre Dame Studies in American Catholicism) by R Scott Appleby (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

This comprehensive study offers the first book-length examination of the influence of modernism on the intellectual life of the American Catholic community at the beginning of the twentieth century. R. Scott Appleby chronicles the story from 1895, when American Catholic priest John Zahm attempted to reconcile post-Darwinian theories of evolution with Catholic theism, to 1910, when former priest and radical Modernist William L. Sullivan published his Letters to His Holiness Pope Pius X, repudiating Roman authority.

Appleby focuses on the ways in which certain priests, scientists, and scholars approached the vital topics of the day-human evolution, the salience of democratic principles and institutions for the vitality of Catholicism, the role of the will and intellect in the assent of faith-by appropriating the insights of the European Catholic Modernists. The Americans probed beyond the limits of the dominant Roman neo-scholasticism and retrieved models, images, and concepts from the apostolic and early medieval eras of church history. As the first experiment with a pluralism of methods and sources in American Catholic theology and philosophy, Appleby argues this was also an attempt to construct a viable Catholic apologetics that would speak to the experiences of American citizens. Because this enterprise resembled that of the condemned Europeans, the Americans also fell under a cloud of suspicion and original research was suspended for a generation.

Review Quotes

"... the first full-length intellectual history of Catholic Modernism, American style ... this volume can be read with profit by specialists and generalists alike." --The Catholic Historical Review

"...a core of American Catholic scholars have published studies on Modernism in its various manifestations. To this growing body of literature, Appleby has brought his own considerable research and insights. The result is the first full-length intellecual history of Catholic Modernism, American style." --Catholic Hisotrical Review

"Appleby has produced a remarkable book. It is the most comprehensive, nuanced, and clear picture yet of American Catholic modernism. It will quickly become and long remain the standard work." --Sociology of Religion

"Appleby makes a valuable contribution to the growing body of literature of Modernism in the U.S." --Theological Studies

"Historians of American Catholicism have been disposed to regard 'modernism' primarly as a European controversy, centering on such prominent intellectuals as the English Jesuit George Tyrrell and the french Abbé Alfred Loisy. Twenty years ago, however, in an influential articule, Michael Gannon asserted that 'counter-modernism' effectively repressed the first 'marked flowering of American Catholick clerical culture. R. Scott Appleby's book is an attempt to show what a handful of American scholar-priests in these years tried to do, how far they were influenced by prominent European modernists, why most of them abandoned scholarship in the wac of Pascendi, and why two of them (the Paulist William Sullivan, and the Josephite William Slattery) left the church." --American Historical Review

"R. Scott Appleby's study, Church and Age Unite: The Modernist Impulse in American Catholicism contains a thoughtful account of Zahm' s life and work. For anyone interested in a well documented and articulate account of the development of both Americanism and Modernism in American Catholicism, Appleby's book is strongly recommended." --Bulletin of the Catholic Record Society

"The real import of Appleby's book is its comprehensive and compassionate gathering of the strands of Catholic intellectual history from 1895-1910." --Horizons

"The strength of this book is not simply in its narrative, which is fast moving and interesting, but primarily in its analysis of the publications of its subjects, and thus as an example of American Catholic intellectual history. The positions of the Catholic modernist are treated at a level comparable to Hutchinson's handling of the Protestant modernists....this is an excellent book which brings clarity and completeness to a here-to-fore muddy and partial series of events." --American Catholic Historical Society

"This is a well-reasoned and clearly written contribution to American Catholick intellecutal history....Indeed, the great strength of the book is Appleby's contant attentiveness to the relationshipo between knowledge and ecclesiastical authority." --The Journal of Religion

About the Author

R. Scott Appleby is a professor of history at the University of Notre Dame and the Marilyn Keough Dean of the Keough School of Global Affairs. He served as John M. Regan, Jr., Director of the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies from 2000-2009, and is an American historian, focusing in global religion and its relationship to peace and conflict, integral human development, and comparative modern religion. He is the author of several books including Catholics in the American Century (Cornell University Press, 2012).