By JUDE DOUGHERTY
Shaw, Russell. Eight Popes and the Crisis of Modernity, San Francisco, Ignatius Press: 2019. To order, visit www.ignatius.com or call 1-800-651-1351.
This is a collection of essays on a subject Russell Shaw knows well, the papacy in the twentieth century. As a historian, the author is both profound and clear in his treatment of complex issues. One does not have to be a Catholic to appreciate this profile of a Church responding to an aggressive modernity. The book may also be read as a chronicle of a tumultuous period.
The book opens with an essay on Pius X, born Giuseppe Melchiorre Sarto in 1835. Following service as a parish priest and seminary professor, he was ordained bishop of Mantua by Pope Leo XIII in 1884 and nine years later was named cardinal, Patriarch of Venice.
He was elected Pope in 1903 and with his secretary, Rafael Merry del Val, he set about confronting head on the anticlerical rulers of France who had withdrawn recognition of Catholic universities, ordered Jesuits out of the country, and required seminarians to serve in the military. In France, churches were declared property of the state. Bishops and priests were forced out of their rectories, and seminarians out of their seminaries.
Whereas Leo XIII had pursued an accommodationist civic policy with respect to France, Pius X attacked what he called Modernism with all the intellectual tools at his disposal. The encyclical Lamentabili Sane Exitu was issued in 1907, condemning 65 proposition either taken directly from Modernist writings or implied by them.
The enemy was not wholly from without. Two outspoken advocates of Modernism were Fr. Alfred Loisy, a professor at the Institut Catholique, and Fr. George Tyrrell, an Irish-born Jesuit. Both were at the forefront of the new biblical interpretation movement, what the Germans called the Redaktionsgeschichte movement. Both priests were eventually excommunicated.
Lamentabili was followed by the Oath Against Modernism, promulgated in 1910. The oath was to be sworn to by all clergy, pastors, confessors, preachers, religious superiors, and professors in philosophical-theological seminaries.
The oath began: “I profess that God, the origin and end of all things, can be known with certainty by the natural light of reason from the created world, that is, from the visible world of creation, as a cause from its effects.” No one schooled in the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition, then as now, would have reservations about taking the oath.
Modernism may have begun among a loosely linked network of scholars and intellectuals who wanted to adapt Catholicism to the currents of secular thinking with respect to biblical studies, history, and other disciplines. But what was once the province of French academic salons and other European intellectual centers became in due course what is now the common creed of the academic world on both sides of the Atlantic and its media acolytes.
Space does not allow for a discussion of each papacy reviewed in Russell Shaw’s book. His well-researched studies of individual Pontiffs often provide surprising insights.
Charismatic And
Contemplative
The volume ends with a sketch of the papacy of John Paul II who lives in the memory of all who even briefly experienced his papacy. Russell Shaw presents John Paul as a charismatic and contemplative figure, as a poet and an athlete, and as an intellectual with a deeply held devotion to the Virgin Mary.
Karol Wojtyla was born in Wadowice to Emilia and Karol Joseph Wojtyla in 1920. His mother died in 1929, his father in 1941. Before World War II, Karol was a student of philosophy at the Jagiellonian University. When the Nazis took over Poland and closed the university, he continued his studies as an underground seminarian under the direction of Adam Sapieha.
Ordained a priest in 1946, Karol returned to Krakow where he performed pastoral work and served as a student chaplain, while continuing his studies at the Pontifical University of St. Thomas in Rome. Upon earning doctorates in philosophy and theology, he joined the faculty of philosophy at the Catholic University of Lublin.
In 1958, Pope Pius XII named him auxiliary bishop of Krakow. Six years later Pope Paul VI appointed him archbishop of Krakow. Bishop Wojtyla, it may be noted, attended all four sessions of the Second Vatican Council, where he reportedly exercised influence by speaking from the floor and by participating in the drafting of the council’s Pastoral Constitution on the Modern World, Gaudium et Spes, among other documents.
As a cardinal he traveled and lectured widely in Europe and North America and even went to Melbourne, Australia, in 1973 for the Eucharistic Congress. In 1976 he was chosen to preach the annual Easter retreat attended by Pope Paul VI and the Roman Curia, a series of lectures later published as The Sign of Contradiction. In the same year an English translation of his magisterial Osaba I Cyzn appeared as The Acting Person.
Following the unexpected death of Pope Paul VI, he was elected Pope, becoming the first non-Italian to hold the office since 1522. Given his travels and writing, he was not unknown. One may say that he was a natural to succeed Pope Paul VI and Pope John XXIII. In fact, weeks before his elevation to the Chair of Peter, some had predicted not only his election but the name he was to take.
On his homecoming visit to Poland in June 1979, his first visit after his election to the papacy, thirteen million people turned out to see him, hear him, and pray with him, including two million from his former diocese, Krakow. That visit, given its stimulating effects, both spiritual and patriotic, is generally credited with contributing to the collapse of the Soviet Union.
The former Professor Wojtyla, as Pope, continued to teach the Church Universal from the Chair of Peter. Four of his encyclicals are considered of lasting value: Centesimus Annus (1991), Veritatis Splendor (1993), Evangelium Vitae (1995), and Fides et Ratio (1998). He also commissioned and approved the new Catechism of the Catholic Church.
On May 13, 1981, as he was passing through the crowd at St. Peter’s Square, he was shot by a Turkish gunman, Mehmet Ali Agca. The gunman apparently acted at the direction of Bulgarian intelligence in a plot orchestrated by Soviet intelligence that, with reason, feared his influence.
The Pope’s recovery, Russell Shaw writes, was long and difficult. Eventually, he became afflicted with Parkinson’s disease, but even then, Shaw relates, “with trembling hands he continued to receive visitors until the final year before his death.”
As an epitaph, one may say, “He taught us how to live; and he showed us how to die.”
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