The Journal of Ecclesiastical History • Volume 63, Issue 03, July 2012 • pp. 641-641 La condanna del modernismo. Documenti, interpretazioni, conseguenze. Edited by Claus Arnold and Giovanni Vian. (I libri di Viella, 106,) Pp. 264. Rome: Viella, 2010. €30 (paper). 978 88 8334 440 4 by Alfonso Botti Over a hundred years since the pope condemned introduced, The various drafts of this are central to the religious reform movement this volume collects Judith Schepers’s article. The climate of suspicion contributions on aspects of the modernist controver- engendered by Pascendi is also well represented sy from specialists known throughout the academic by the case of Monsignor Fernando Rodolfi, bishop community, along with essays by younger historians. of Vicenza, which forms the subject of the closing Gnosticism (1907), a youthful work by the leading essay by Raffaella Perin. Perin relates how Rodolfi light of Italian modernism. Ernesto Buonaiuti, was in- was hounded for his doctrinal leanings and goes on vestigated by the Congregazione dell’lndice and it is to describe in rich detail both the hard-line antimod- to this debate that Annibale Zambarbieri devotes his ernism of the Vicenza clergy and the Roman sup- essay; while this throws new light on areas of cultural port for these sentiments in the person of the pope open-mindedness within the Roman Congregation himself and Cardinal Gaetano De Lai. As the editors (the Jesuit Gismondi is one example), it also serves rightly comment in their short introduction, the mod- to clear up certain episodes in Buonaiuti’s own life. ernist issue had delayed after-effects. Subsequent Clans Arnold, who edited the volume together with pontiffs (except for John XXIII) would continue the Giovanni Vian, goes into the tortuous drafting proc- refrain, especially in the defensive campaign which ess of Lamentabili sane exitu and the impact that would later rekindle ‘that minute pervasive call to this had on the Roman Curia, Arnold documents the discipline and rallying round the Holy Father that disgruntlement that this decree produced among the were the deliberate or partly uncontrolled effect of die-hards and Pius X, and how this last would shortly the early twentieth-century bout of wide-ranging be moved to voice his vituperation more forthrightly strictures’ (pp. 11-12). Not for nothing does the sub- in the encyclical Pascendi Giovanni Vian’s contribu- title of the volume allude to the ‘consequences’ of tion is to show in full detail how the French and Italian such condemnation, and not just interpretations and bishops toed the pontifical line of censure here; on a documentation. As the editors are well aware, it not pastoral level it would lead to a drastic clamp-down only whipped up a climate of fundamentalism and in- on areas of free-thinking within the Church. Not even tolerance, but left issues of hermeneutics, theology the utmost caution would contrive to keep such ar- and doctrine in vain expectation of an answer down eas open, as Giacomo Losito convincingly shows to the present day. in an essay on Laberthonnière and his ‘Annales de philosophie chretienne’. The fetters would tighten Alfonso Botti still further in 1910 when the antimodernist oath was University of Modena and Reggio Emilia.