Soldiers of God in a Secular World examines the theological phenomenon of the nouvelle théologie that proved decisive in reorienting Catholic thought in the years before the Second Vatican Council. It promises to relate the “return to the sources,” or ressourcement, exemplified by figures such as the Jesuit Henri de Lubac and the Dominican Marie-Dominique Chenu, to both seismic changes in the Roman Catholic Church and a tumultuous century of political history that included three of France's five republics (the Third, followed by the authoritarian Vichy regime, then the Fourth and Fifth). Sarah Shortall aims to “show that the histories of modern theology and modern European thought are far more intertwined than previously imagined” (Shortall, 10), thereby demonstrating “the continuing political power of religion in a secular world” (11). To accomplish this goal, the author focuses on a handful of key Jesuit and Dominican theologians who sought to “carve out a public role for Catholicism in a secular, pluralist society” (257).

Shortall's book offers an insightful and original analysis of ressourcement that complements several recent studies on the fraught but productive relationship between Catholicism and modernity in the twentieth century. For example, Piotr Kosicki (Catholics on the Barricades, Yale University Press, 2018) has identified Chenu and his fellow Dominican Yves Congar not only as “promoting a return to early Christian practices,” but also as representing “a radical vanguard of Roman Catholicism” (Kosicki, 193–194). Giuliana Chamedes (A Twentieth Century Crusade, Harvard University Press, 2019) has portrayed de Lubac as a “dissident” not only for his patristic turn but also for opposing “the Vatican's anticommunist crusade” (Chamedes, 203, 227). And James Chappel (Catholic Modern, Harvard University Press, 2018) has offered a schema for Catholic responses to totalitarianism based on “twin varieties of Catholic modernism [fraternal and paternal] forged in the 1930s” (Chappel, 145). But while Shortall is in conversation with these and other scholars, her monograph is distinctive both in substance and tone.

Shortall's narrative begins with an explanation of how the progenitors of the nouvelle théologie spent their formative years as seminarians in exile in Belgium and the island of Jersey. She devotes particular attention to Jesuits such as de Lubac, Gaston Fessard, Yves de Montcheuil, and others who sought “to elaborate a theological vision capable of overcoming the growing gulf between the Church and French society” (Shortall, 20) by “reconnect[ing] the natural and supernatural orders” (40). The young theologians perceived a striking parallel in “the opposition between Catholicism and modernity that animated both neo-scholasticism and secular republicanism” (41). These Jesuits and their Dominican counterparts faced continual ecclesial censorship and silencing between the 1930s and 1950s, emerging from enforced obscurity only on the eve of Vatican II. In the meantime, they witnessed the dark years of World War II, the Nazi occupation, and the Holocaust. The story of spiritual resistance (e.g., the underground paper Témoignage chrétien) has been told elsewhere, but Shortall very evocatively depicts figures like de Lubac, Fessard and Pierre Chaillet as priests who envisioned themselves as “something like spiritual directors of the nation” (110), “transform[ing] the eschatological vision of the Church into a kind of critical counter-politics designed to do battle with totalitarian ideologies” (107).

Most of the above makes for an edifying story, but Shortall also makes important distinctions and sometimes untangles disagreements among key actors. For example, she explains at length the tension between the totalizing “mystical body of Christ” theology of de Lubac et al. and the “Thomist personalism advanced by [philosopher Jacques] Maritain, with its clear-cut distinctions between the spiritual and temporal planes” (82). One likewise finds an excellent exposition of the rift within the ressourcement camp itself, as a Dominican emphasis on incarnational theology led Chenu and others to embrace the postwar left, while the eschatological tendency of de Lubac, Fessard, etc. . . expressed itself more in a wariness regarding mundane politics. As for the rehabilitation of these theologians and their role in Vatican II, Shortall finds it unsurprising that “significant fissures began to emerge among the partisans of the nouvelle théologie at the council. . . in many ways the logical extension of the divisions that had emerged between the Dominican and Jesuit nouveaux théologiens after the war” (240). The author's keen analysis and judicious tone are evident when she argues that “de Lubac's critique of the ‘progressive’ interpretation of Vatican II looks less like a conservative backlash than the product of a much earlier turn from incarnation to eschatology, which emerged from the crucible of wartime occupation” (245).

This first-rate work of historical theology serves as an excellent introduction to key currents in French Catholic thought in the last century. The full title of this monograph also might lead the reader to expect a continual intertwining of theological and political history throughout its pages. In Soldiers of God in a Secular World, the attention to “twentieth-century French politics” is somewhat more episodic. The episodes Shortall narrates at length can be quite rewarding, particularly the early twentieth-century drama of laicization and the exile of religious congregations, as well as les années noires of the Occupation. Other crucial periods, for example the politically polarized Thirties, could have received more, deeper attention. That said, this is a finely crafted book that both contextualizes the nouvelle théologie and stakes a claim for its larger historical relevance. Shortall makes an essential and lasting contribution to our understanding of how in the middle of a tortured century Catholicism and modernity managed to arrive at, if not a perfect mutual understanding, at least a promising working relationship.