Personal Faith and Institutional Commitments: Roman Catholic Modernist and Anti-Modernist Autobiography

The Modernist controversy in the Roman Catholic Church at the turn of the nineteenth century was a complex mixture of intellectual argument and personal relationships. Some of the individuals involved lost their faith, while others deepened it. This book is the result of a complex interplay of many scholars working together. The essays examine the autobiographies of several important Modernists. They focus on the historical elements in which the individuals and the Christian community were involved as well as provide normative evaluations of the Modernists as Christians and fallible human beings.

This careful and well documented scholarship sheds an unusually clear light on both the broad historical context and the individual protagonists.