This is revisionist scholarship—in the best sense—on an impressive scale. Chappell argues that between 1920 and 1960 the Catholic Church became modern, and his book is a dense and carefully argued history of how (and why) that happened. But Chappell argues that the historical process effecting the modernization of Catholicism was not primarily shaped by the nouvelle théologie, the papal social encyclical tradition, historical-critical biblical scholarship, nor the Second Vatican Council (the “usual suspects” offered in a number of previous histories explaining how Catholicism became relevant to the twentieth century). Indeed, Chapell argues that while those narratives seemed intuitive and likely, the “process was faster, and darker” than those narratives would have us believe: “The Catholic [Church's] transition to modernity was less a stately procession than a harried scramble—a desperate bid for relevance in a Europe that was coming apart,” and was effected through the Church's interaction with fascism, antisemitism, debates over labor, and the intramural debates over the “reproductive family” and its place in the social order (2).

“The development of Catholic modernism,” the author announces at the very beginning of his book, “did not take place in the national spaces” of episcopal letters, conferences of theologians, or the efforts of Vatican nuncios (8); it rather emerged from lay leadership in labor unions, economists working for governments battling fascism on the right and communism on the left, and from political philosophers confronting the dark heritage of Catholicism's “Long nineteenth Century”—especially the heritage of Catholic anti-Semitism. Every chapter of the book therefore narrates how three individuals—one each from France, Germany, and Austria—effected Catholicism's change of heart in opposing modernity, most especially Tridentine Catholicism's resolute opposition to the split between the public sphere of politics and state policy and the private sphere of religion. The result, by 1960 (thus well before Vatican II) was a Church dedicated to religious pluralism, human rights, and the secular state as positive goods, and not threats to the Church's teaching authority. How did this happen?

Central to Chappell's narrative is his argument that, through the efforts of a relatively small group of Catholic leaders spanning the forty years in mid-century, Catholicism ceased fighting to overturn modernity (evinced in ecclesial documents like The Syllabus of Errors) and began agitating for distinctively Catholic forms of modernity, with tremendous success and important consequences for contemporary culture. And this relatively small group of leaders affected this epochal transition not through ecclesial teaching but through the circulation of ideas—ideas about social policy and economic planning, ideas about union organizing and the duties of women in the modern family, ideas about how the modern secular state needed to be independent from religious oversight. And these ideas were not coordinated by any central authority, like the Vatican; rather, Chappell's point is “to elucidate the ways in which intellectual transformation emerged from a specific constellation of problems and possibilities, some of which were more regional or local than they were national” (8). This is, then, intellectual history but intellectual history reconceived and reapplied in a robustly creative way.

And Chappell offers a number of surprising insights along the way. For instance, one of the tropes floated in past scholarship that it was only in the 1960s that the Catholic Church finally shed its devotion to the Middle Ages (with its unified vision of throne and altar and its commitment to Western European culture as both distinctively Christian and anti-Semitic). But the author offers compelling evidence that Catholic medievalism actually started disappearing in the 1930s, so that the fiercest intellectual debate inside the Catholic community “was not between Catholic modernism and Catholic medievalism but rather between two forms of Catholic modernism—two strategies linked with two moral and political economies, to dictate how the Church should try to shape the modern condition” (110).

“Paternal Catholic modernism” sought to place family issues and anti-communism at the very center of the Church's mission, but in the process ended up legitimating collaboration with authoritarian and anti-Semitic regimes in Spain, France, and Germany. Over against that style, “fraternal Catholic modernism” was modeled less on the role of the father in the family than on relationships of solidarity and cooperation modelled on the “equality of brothers.” Chappell argues that the “paternal” variety of modernism placed fatherhood and reproduction at the center of the family and of society, in the process turning “a community of love, sex, and spirituality” (the family) “into a community of law and reproduction, which [lent] itself to nationalist and racist abuse.” Its fraternal twin updated and modernized the older tradition of social Catholicism (with its deep distrust of the centralized state) to “arrive at a pluralist account of political life that made room for, and even celebrated, religious difference” (110). Catholicism in the latter half of the twentieth century followed the (second) fraternal path, and that—as has been said in another context—has made all the difference.

It was as part of this second—fraternal—form of Catholic modernism that figures like Jacques Maritain play a starring role in Chappell's narrative. The author does an especially effective job utilizing figures like Maritain to limn the internal debates that roiled Catholic intellectuals during the 1930s and 1940s. For instance, the author notes that it has been a well-known historical fact that Maritain had been a reactionary monarchist during the 1920s before emerging as the intellectual leader of Catholic antifascism in 1930s. What is not so well known—and what ends up being central to Chappell's story—is that Maritain's trajectory was a common one, “representing not so much an historical irony as an evolution” that many of Maritain's friends and conversation partners also took. And many of those friends and conversation partners were—like Maritain himself—“outsiders” to the Church, Protestant converts or former Jews. They were thus focused on a style of Catholicism that could plausibly include them: like Maritain himself (a convert married to a Jew), this think tank for what would become the fraternal brand of Catholic modernism “was more concerned with the revolutionary promise of Catholic doctrine than with the protection of a Catholic milieu supposedly under attack” (111).

Building on the intellectual groundwork undertaken by figures like Maritain, the emergence of “centrist” political parties in the decades after 1945 represented a new Catholic “take” on the relationship of church to state: political parties like the Popular Republican Movement in France, the Christian Democratic Union in Germany, and the Austrian Peoples’ Party were “self-consciously new, embracing interconfessionalism and pluralism in ways that had always proven elusive to Catholic parties” in the past. These political parties represented “the greatest political force in post-war Europe,” being “extraordinarily successful in gathering together Catholic, Protestant, and secular voters of the center-right like no previous political movement had ever done” (148). Chappell's narrative explores the crucial role of Catholic intellectuals and politicians in crafting these political coalitions dedicated to the political values of pluralism and the independent “secular state.” During the “Long 1950s,” Chappell convincingly argues that Catholics played a central role in the formation of a new Europe not by abandoning their social traditions but rather by reforming them along the lines of “fraternal Catholic modernism,” in the process creating a new style of thought and action that became Christian Democratic political principles, principles that effected continent-wide influence. It was this story, in the author's estimation, that offers the core narrative for understanding how the Catholic Church “became modern” between 1920 and 1960.

This is an excellent if demanding work, more than rewarding the effort it expects of its readers.