Divided Friends
ISBN: 9780813221656
Platform/Publisher: Project MUSE / The Catholic University of America Press
Digital rights: Users: Unlimited; Printing: Chapters; Download: Chapters
Subjects: Modernist-fundamentalist controversy.; Modernism (Christian theology); Catholics; Americanism (Catholic controversy);

In two sets of intertwined biographical portraits, spanning two generations, Divided Friends dramatizes the theological issues of the modernist crisis, highlighting their personal dimensions and extensively reinterpreting their long-range effects. The four protagonists are Bishop Denis J. O?Connell, Josephite founder John R. Slattery, together with the Paulists William L. Sullivan and Joseph McSorley. Their lives span the decades from the Americanist crisis of the 1890s right up to the eve of Vatican II. In each set, one leaves the church and one stays. The two who leave come to see their former companions as fundamentally dishonest. Divided Friends entails a reinterpretation of the intellectual fallout from the modernist crisis and a reframing of the 20th century debate about Catholic intellectual life.

WILLIAM L. PORTIER is the Mary Ann Spearin Chair of Catholic Theology, University of Dayton and is the author of Issac Hecker and the First Vatican Council.

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