1. Introduction
In October of 1964, while the Second Vatican Council was still ongoing, the journal Blackfriars was transformed into the contemporary theological journal, New Blackfriars. Blackfriars began as a means of presenting the truths of the Catholic faith to an educated audience in the period after the Modernist Crisis.Footnote 1 This article examines apologetical material published in Blackfriars’ pre-Vatican II content prior to the journal’s transformation into New Blackfriars. This present article is not exhaustive in scope but focuses especially on the examples of Catholic apologetics in Blackfriars’ pages prior to and during the early years of the Second Vatican Council, beginning in the wake of the Modernist Crisis at the dawn of the twentieth century.Footnote 2 In what follows, I provide a flavor of the sort of apologetical work published in its pages. What we find through this brief study is that the apologetical tone and tenor of the publications slowed down after the Second World War. The earliest first two decades of Blackfriars witnessed its most focused apologetical publications, which ebbed as the journal approached the 1960s, the decade in which the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965) would be held.
In the editorial of the journal’s very first issue, we find a concise statement of its reason for being: ‘to state and defend truth’.Footnote 3 Blackfriars’ express purpose was apologetical, in defense of the truths of the Catholic faith, as the editors and editorial board understood it. Arriving on the scene a mere thirteen years after Pope St Pius X’s condemnation of Modernism in Pascendi Dominici Gregis, only ten years after the institution of the Oath Against Modernism, and only about six years after St Pius X’s death, Blackfriars’ explicit raison d’être was implicitly a part of the anti-modernist culture specifically among the Dominicans in England.Footnote 4 This indicates an anti-modernist attitude present among many English Catholic clerics of the time.Footnote 5 The overwhelming majority of Blackfriars’ articles, however, were less apologetical than its stated purpose for existence might indicate, and instead pertained more to Catholic responses to European political matters, various studies of Catholicism in different parts of the world, as well as diverse themes in art, literature, and history. This present study provides us a window into an understudied facet of English Catholic culture during roughly the first half of the twentieth century. One notable development in Blackfriars’ history is the slow decline of more apologetically oriented publications after the Second World War, such that very few of the articles in the 1950s or 1960s retained the apologetic tone or content as found in the first two decades of the journal’s existence.Footnote 6
2. A brief history of Blackfriars and its scope
Blackfriars has its origin in the aspirations of the Dominican provincial Fr Bede Jarrett (1881–1934).Footnote 7 Fr Jarrett took over the periodical Catholic Review and transformed it into a new journal, which would bear the name, Blackfriars, though, in fact, his new journal did not have any resemblance to Catholic Review.Footnote 8 Fr Jarrett, and those who supported his endeavor, expressed a desire to have a place to publish apologetical, theological, and related topics from within the broad Dominican and Thomistic Catholic tradition. The origins of this desire stem from St Pius X’s battle with Modernism, but the First World War slowed down any movement in this direction.Footnote 9
The aim of Blackfriars was expressly not to become an academic theological journal; rather, it was hoped to be an intellectual periodical aimed at educated readers and not have specialists as its primary audience.Footnote 10 Bernard Delany would later write:
As a Dominican publication whose editor was appointed by the Dominican authorities it would naturally be a medium for stating the teachings, ideals, and principles of the Dominican apostolate which is summed up in the sentence, ‘to state, teach and defend the truth of the Catholic faith by word of mouth and by the written and printed word’. If this gave it the character of a pulpit, it was to be remembered that it was to be an open-air pulpit which layfolk were to be invited to share, and heckling, within the limits of the game, was to be allowed. It took its Catholicism for granted and hoped to get a hearing from those among whom indifference or antipathy to Catholicism were equally taken for granted.Footnote 11
The very first editorial included language that hearkened back to the conflict over Modernism using warlike imagery to describe its purpose for being; Blackfriars was depicted as entering a ‘battlefield’.Footnote 12 In describing its hope to be an intellectual outlet to form and feed its readers, the first editorial criticized much of print media as harmful and compared reading such media to a ‘drug habit’:
Compulsory education has made us a race of readers. Whether this is for the good of real thought may well be doubted, since most people seem to read too much and think too little … the magazine and the sensational novel become the toilers’ means of escape from themselves and their dull surroundings ….Footnote 13
In contrast, this very first editorial clarified that: ‘Blackfriars will not seek to entertain or necessarily to edify its readers, but will take as its aim and endeavor to state and defend truth.’Footnote 14
In addition to a wide range of topical articles – art, literature, current European politics, economics, war – Blackfriars also included quite a few poems in the earliest years of its publication. Even some of the poetry occasionally served an apologetic function. In 1924, Blackfriars published a poem from almost three hundred years prior, in 1633, that was a catechetical and apologetical approach to defending Catholic teaching to Protestants.Footnote 15 The poem was entitled, ‘Catholike Questions to the Protestants’, each stanza of which was directed at Protestant challenges to Catholicism and the Catholic defense. Here is a brief sample:
I pray thee Protestant
beare with mee,
To aske thee questions
two or three:
And if an answere thou canst
make,
More of thy councaile I will take.Footnote 16
Then, after recounting different Protestant denominations with their different theological views, the poet asked:
3. Apologetical concerns: protestants, comparative religion, evolution, modernism, and the Bible
3.1. Protestants
The famous Catholic literary apologist G. K. Chesterton made a number of contributions to the pages of Blackfriars in the form of a multipart article entitled, ‘Where All Roads Lead’,Footnote 18 the answer to which for Chesterton was the Catholic Church. Most of Chesterton’s comments, and many of the subsequent apologetically focused articles in Blackfriars, were directed at Protestant challenges to Catholicism, and likewise, to Catholic challenges to Protestants. These concerned the matters of Catholic tradition,Footnote 19 the Blessed Virgin Mary,Footnote 20 and especially the institution of the papacy.Footnote 21 For example, the Dominican Henry St John wrote, in the context of Anglican and Catholic disputes, ‘Unless therefore the Papalist position is adopted, as it is by some, there can be for Anglicans no infallible teaching authority which can give its divinely safeguarded decision, when the sound learning of theologians and scientific historians has done its proper work’.Footnote 22 In 1928, Maisie Ward published a piece inspired by Chesterton wherein Ward challenged Protestantism, when she maintained, ‘… Protestantism never emphasises a truth except by means of denying some other truth …’.Footnote 23
Blackfriars’ works engaging Protestant traditions, and especially Anglicanism, were, on the whole, more apologetical than ecumenical. This is to be expected during the anti-modernist era that led up to the Second Vatican Council.Footnote 24 One example of this early apologetical, and even polemical, mode is from a 1926 article that appeared concerning the Protestant Reformation in which the author depicted Protestantism as a ‘religion of the book’.Footnote 25 In this contribution we read,
The “Reformation” was fundamentally a negative movement. It bound together any who had a grievance against the Church. The essential character of the revolt which found its leader in Luther was the refusal to accept the authority of Rome. In spite of many differences among themselves, this still unites the various sections of Protestantism.Footnote 26
Other articles would challenge Protestant historians on their reading of English history.Footnote 27
After World War II, it was more common to find articles in Blackfriars that were more appreciative of Protestants. In some of these later articles pertaining to Protestantism, the authors showed positive and praiseworthy attributes of Protestant traditions, from which Catholics could learn to emulate and also pointed out problems within Catholicism, giving Protestant critique its due. Benedict Nissen provided such an example in his 1948 article on Protestants.Footnote 28 The same is the case for Yves Congar who wrote an appreciative piece on Protestant sympathies with tradition in 1960.Footnote 29 At the same time, more apologetically focused articles concerning Protestantism continued to be published during these later years.Footnote 30
3.2. Comparative religion
Throughout its forty-four years of existence, a number of authors in Blackfriars took on the skeptical claims against religion coming from prominent psychologists, anthropologists, and philosophers, such as Sigmund Freud, James Frazer, E. B. Tylor, Friedrich Max Müller, and Karl Marx.Footnote 31 Sometimes the authors deconstructed their arguments, at other times they pointed out limits to their conclusions, and at other times they tried to use their phenomenological approaches to underscore the fittingness and universal appeal of aspects of Catholic teaching concerning priesthood and the Sacraments, especially the Eucharist.
In some of these articles, even early on in the 1920s, the authors attempted to redeploy the phenomenological approach to religion exemplified in these earliest theorists, as a way of defending Catholic teaching, and the Sacraments in particular.Footnote 32 This engagement with what was perceived as more skeptical scholarship from the academic study of religion was the one apologetical area that seemed to grow, not diminish, after the Second World War, as the multipart series on Frazer, Freud, Jung, and Marx which Victor White published in 1952. This may have had to do, in part, with the global concerns over Communism, which also filled the pages of Blackfriars, already by 1932, and the attendant widespread dissemination of these thinkers, especially Marx.Footnote 33
3.3. Evolution
The topics of biological evolution and of science may not be something we regularly associate with Catholic apologetics, and yet, many of the articles Blackfriars published on these topics throughout the 1920s through the 1960s included some apologetical aspects.Footnote 34 Already in 1920, Leslie Walker challenged the notion of human biological evolution, among related ideas, in an article pertaining ostensibly to psychology.Footnote 35 A few of the articles defended some form of biological evolution, but what now would be called a theistic evolutionary theory.Footnote 36 Many of the very few post-World War II articles on this theme took on a position of rapprochement with scientific theories in general, emphasizing how scientific findings were not doctrinal matters of faith, and how faith and science could be complementary, so long as neither oversteps its proper boundaries.Footnote 37
3.4. Modernism
The Modernist controversy seems to have been in the cultural backdrop of Blackfriars as a whole, and sometimes emerged within the journal’s articles more explicitly.Footnote 38 For the authors published in Blackfriars, the label ‘Modernist’ was not always limited to Catholics, but was sometimes applied outside to scholars from other traditions, usually Anglican, as in the case of one article from 1921 entitled, ‘Bishop Gore and the Anglican Modernists’.Footnote 39 The term ‘Modernist’ seemed to be applied in Blackfriars sometimes to biblical scholars and others who denied one or more traditional Catholic doctrines about Jesus or the Church within their biblical exegetical or historical works.Footnote 40
In 1928, an article was published reviewing the letters of Baron Friedrich von Hügel.Footnote 41 The articles that dealt with von Hügel in Blackfriars would lean in the sympathetic direction, but they were also critical of Modernism, and thus they either distanced von Hügel from other Modernists, such as George Tyrrell and Alfred Loisy, or else they criticized this period of von Hügel’s life when he was counted among their circle of friends. On the one hand, for example, the Dominican, Luke Walker, praised von Hügel’s published letters and sought to rehabilitate von Hügel’s reputation, distancing him from the Modernist controversy in which he had been embroiled. On the other hand, Walker explicitly lamented von Hügel’s own laudatory comments toward other Modernist figures such as Tyrrell. Walker wrote, ‘how sadly out of proportion he [von Hügel] saw both the men [the Modernists] and the movement [Modernism]! One gets the impression that for him the group to which he belonged were the only hope for the future of Catholicism’.Footnote 42
Walker later published an article using von Hügel in defense of the papacy.Footnote 43 Walker conceded that von Hügel fell into the Modernist error like Loisy and Tyrrell, who ‘fell into the trap’, that is, a ‘certain [Modernist] reading of biblical texts’.Footnote 44 Walker cautiously approved some of von Hügel’s arguments, but warned that, ‘one should not adopt all of his writings uncritically’.Footnote 45 In the end, though, Walker described von Hügel as ‘a profound thinker and a saintly man …’.Footnote 46
Von Hügel was again the subject of an article by Aelfric Manson in 1937.Footnote 47 Manson claimed that, ‘the Baron, although achieving an ever fuller orthodoxy, never eliminated certain heterodox elements in his statement of religion … his life seems to offer an example of what a “liberal” Catholic of the future might be …’.Footnote 48 Manson denied that von Hügel had ever truly been a Modernist.Footnote 49 Manson understood Modernism as something that was ‘not a matter of exegesis and criticism’, but rather was ‘a philosophy’.Footnote 50 He believed that Modernism ‘found its way into many Catholic minds at a period when theological and philosophical formation was poor. Originating in Protestant Germany with Schleiermacher’s theory of immanence … It amounts to a kind of pantheism and is destructive of all religion and worship’.Footnote 51 He described von Hügel as exercising a ‘considerable’ influence even outside of the Catholic ChurchFootnote 52 and stated that ‘humility was his most fundamental virtue’.Footnote 53
In 1944, four years after Alfred Loisy’s death, Hugh Pope wrote on Loisy reviewing Maude Petre’s biography.Footnote 54 He mentioned that Loisy’s L’Évangile et l’église ‘took the ecclesiastical world by storm’.Footnote 55 Pope confessed that reading Petre’s book, ‘the word “egoist”’ kept returning to his mind.Footnote 56 Marie-Joseph Lagrange emerged as the hero in the history of Modernism for Pope who wrote, ‘No one realised more clearly the dangerous character of the ideas so persistently advanced by Loisy than did the late Père Lagrange.’Footnote 57
In 1949, the editorial on the Devil still had Modernism in mind, which it linked with rationalism, and it blamed these twin movements for the decline in belief in the existence of the Devil.Footnote 58 In that editorial, we read:
Perhaps this reintroduction on the stage of modern consciousness of an almost forgotten personality may seem to many rather reactionary and childish. The rationalist and Modernist movements have until now been successful in repressing any personal spirit of evil, so that for many it seems to be merely a horrible medieval trick of frightening children off the forbidden path of sin.Footnote 59
In 1954, the then Bishop of Lancaster, Thomas Edward Flynn, published a laudatory article on Pope St Pius X, which dealt especially with his battle against Modernism.Footnote 60 He wrote of St Pius X’s ‘unmasking and destruction of Modernism’.Footnote 61 Flynn attributed St Pius X with exposing Modernism and for having ‘killed it outright’:
The name [Modernism] was unheard of before the Pope’s Pascendi encyclical of September 8th, 1907, in which the thing was descried. Most unsophisticated Catholics did not know of its existence and were open to its poisonous infiltration. Scholarly and apparently pious men were spreading the disease in books that were widely read. But as decree followed decree, and reprimands were followed by excommunications, and book after book was put on the Index, the Catholic world shook off its sleep and became aware of the danger. There were good and intelligent Catholics who thought that the attack was going too far, but the Pope knew that it was a war to the death and no quarter could be given to the enemy who continued to fight. Now we all know, and the modernists themselves have confessed, that Pius X not only showed Modernism for what it really was but killed it outright.Footnote 62
Flynn’s analysis of Modernism followed St Pius X’s treatment of it in his 1907 encyclical Pascendi Dominici Gregis Footnote 63:
The encyclical Pascendi showed that Modernism was a system involving philosophy, theology, history, criticism, apologetics and reform. Its philosophy was based on agnosticism which sets aside all proofs on the plane of reason, and an immanence which makes religious truth spring from ‘vital’ needs. The corresponding theology makes faith a perception of God in the depths of human nature; the development of dogma is due to the work of the intelligence on this primitive datum; the sacraments are the result of the need to give religion a palpable body and of the need for expansion; the Bible is the epitome of the experience of Israel and the first Christians; the Church is the fruit of collective consciousness; and its authority has no firmer basis than the sentiment of individuals.Footnote 64
Flynn understood St Pius X’s institution of the Oath Against Modernism as a beneficial defensive tacticFootnote 65: ‘To safeguard his flock he [Pius X] introduced the anti-modernist oath which all professors of ecclesiastical studies and all clergy who are appointed to positions of trust must take’.Footnote 66 He also seemed to think that St Pius X had so successfully dealt with Modernism that it was no longer an issue and thus, ‘… the Blessed Pius will always figure in Church history as the exterminator of Modernism …’.Footnote 67 Flynn understood Loisy to have been ‘a ringleader of the Modernists’ and Flynn at the same time depicted St Pius X as a compassionate father who, ‘wrote to his [Loisy’s] bishop advising that if M. Loisy moved one step towards him he should advance two steps toward the culprit’.Footnote 68
It seems that the earliest years of Blackfriars witnessed articles that represented the anti-modernist leanings of many English Catholic clergy of the time. As the decades moved on, the anti-modernism softened among most, with some notable exceptions, but authors were hesitant to embrace modernist figures in a way that many would after the Second Vatican Council. The case of von Hügel is a particularly interesting one in that many were sympathetic to von Hügel, but they remained opposed to condemned ‘modernism’. Thus, they either distanced von Hügel from the modernist movement, in which he was such a pivotal figure, or else they criticized that stage of his life.Footnote 69
3.5. Biblical apologetics
The work on Scripture in Blackfriars was not usually explicitly apologetical; and yet, there were often aspects that could be read as apologetical, either defending the trustworthiness of some aspect of Scripture, or else of Catholic interpretation, or of the biblical basis for some Catholic teaching. This makes sense since the modernist crisis, though having philosophical and theological aspects, was ignited by controversies over biblical interpretation.Footnote 70 One of the earliest examples of the apologetical tenor of the work on Scripture in Blackfriars was Luke Walker’s article, ‘The Song of Deborah’, published in multiple installments.Footnote 71 In this two-part series, Walker argued against Marcion’s rejection of the Old Testament, which was a notion that had returned to some corners of his roughly contemporary biblical scholarship.Footnote 72 Against such challenges, Walker underscored how Jesus can only properly be understood in the context of the Old Testament.Footnote 73 These are the sort of comments that would not likely be found in a scholarly article on a portion of the Book of Judges today and indicate an apologetical tone in portions of Walker’s article.
The famous Anglican priest convert to Catholicism, Ronald Knox, included a very tongue-in-cheek essay on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes series, in an attempt to parody historical biblical criticism, explicitly on issues pertaining to the Synoptic Problem.Footnote 74 Knox pointed out how easy it can be to misunderstand authors and thus how tentative such historical critical studies were of necessity, as when he defined such studies as, ‘the method by which we treat as significant what the author did not mean to be significant, by which we single out as essential what the author regarded as incidental’.Footnote 75 He provided as an example, ‘Thus, if one brings out a book on turnips, the modern scholar tries to discover from it whether the author was on good terms with his wife’.Footnote 76 In clear mockery of source-critical distinctions like ‘Deutero-Isaiah’, Knox wrote of ‘deutero-Watson’.Footnote 77
Some articles defended the Gospel of John’s historical value,Footnote 78 others defended the bodily resurrection of Jesus,Footnote 79 still others defended the primacy of Peter in the Gospel of Luke,Footnote 80 but many were not as explicitly apologetical. Blackfriars sometimes included works that were intended to be scholarly or scientific treatments of matters such as archaeology, but often included an aspect that may have been seen in some sense as apologetical, in that it defended some aspect of the biblical record.Footnote 81 See, for example, Luke Walker’s 1928 contribution correcting errors in biblical scholarly works on matters of topography.Footnote 82 In a review of a recent Anglican biblical commentary, Hugh Pope pointed out the ways in which the volume sowed the seeds of doubt regarding the Bible.Footnote 83
In 1961, Joseph Bourke wrote on Gnosticism.Footnote 84 Engaging the work of Rudolf Bultmann, Bourke challenged the notion that Christianity emerged from some pre-Christian Gnosticism. He maintained instead that Gnosticism came from Christianity, rather than vice versa.Footnote 85 Bourke wrote, ‘The fact that no Gnostic document ante-dates our canonical New Testament or any part of it supports the latter of these two views.’Footnote 86 Later in the same year, Bourke took on the question of archaeology and the history behind the Old Testament.Footnote 87 Here, he pointed out that, ‘Contemporary study of the Old Testament appears to be dominated by three trends, associated with three broad groups of scholars. For practical purposes these groups may legitimately be described as “schools”, but only in a sense broad enough to allow for the intellectual independence of each individual scholar.’Footnote 88 The third group were mostly archaeologists and philologists, such as William Foxwell Albright and Cyrus Gordon, who maintained that the archaeological record and documents ‘confirm the essential reliability of the Old Testament as a record truly reflecting the history and beliefs of a real people’.Footnote 89
In 1963, Sebastian Bullough published an article on the historical Jesus.Footnote 90 He mostly surveyed the history from Albert Schweizer including Reimarus and Wrede.Footnote 91 He commented that:
It was on the background of these discussions that Loisy’s ‘petit livre’ L’Évangile et l’Église appeared in 1902, with his call for the reconciliation of these findings with Catholic theology—and all the attendant difficulties of Modernism—and almost simultaneously Lagrange’s La Méthode Historique, also in 1902, insisting that the full literary, historical and archaeological investigations rendered possible by modern scholarship would certainly lead us to an understanding entirely consonant with the teaching of revelation in orthodox theology.Footnote 92
Not all of these articles in Blackfriars dealing with some aspect of the Bible and related literature were strictly apologetical, but they often contained elements of defending some traditional aspect of Catholic views on Scripture and Catholic doctrine grounded in Scripture.
4. Conclusion
As we can see, the various treatments of apologetical themes and topics in Blackfriars from its inception in 1920 to its transformation into New Blackfriars in October of 1964, in the midst of the Second Vatican Council, were both broad and nuanced. Some of the classic Catholic apologists, such as G. K. Chesterton, patronized the pages of Blackfriars with some of their literary apologetics. Most articles in Blackfriars were not apologetically focused, even though its mission was to proclaim and defend the ‘Truth’. When authors in Blackfriars did engage in apologetics, they did so by utilizing Church history, Scripture, and philosophy, in their various attempts at defending specific aspects of the Catholic faith. In general, however, the overall content of Blackfriars represented an attempt to bring a distinctly Catholic way of thinking to issues of contemporary relevance, whether apologetical in terms of Protestant interlocutors, or new findings in biblical studies, or else matters of politics, literature, or art.
The consistent editorial intentions throughout Blackfriars’ earliest history were to make contemporary theological, political, scriptural, and ecclesiological developments available to a wide intellectual reading audience. Blackfriars may have been inspired by the aftermath of the Modernist controversy, but its flavor and tone seemed to represent more that of the English Dominicans reflecting on world events and theological, scientific, historical, and philosophical arguments in the first half of the twentieth century.Footnote 93 This apologetics focus, although never disappearing completely, seemed to begin to decrease after the Second World War, as the Catholic Church moved toward the 1960s when the watershed event of the Second Vatican Council would take place.
