The historiography of US Catholic intellectual life during the critical period between 1889, when the Catholic University of America was founded in Washington, D.C., and 1910, when the worldwide oath against modernism was imposed by Pope Pius X, has reached a state of maturity sufficient to the task of revising, if not altogether deconstructing, the standard narrative. William Portier, an historical theologian who teaches at the University of Dayton, makes a significant contribution to this endeavor with Divided Friends, a successful, sometimes stunning, blend of biography (of four American priests whose lives were irrevocably altered by the Americanist and modernist crises), church history, the history of spirituality and deeply felt theological and ethical reflection on the tension between loyalty to the church and the demands of personal integrity.

“No one can live within the Church at present,” observed Maud Petre, the modernist sympathizer and friend of the excommunicated English Jesuit, George Tyrrell (d. 1909), “without realizing that ‘Modernism’ has been absorbed as well as condemned.” Convinced that Petre's statement, offered in 1942, applies to the twentieth century as a whole, Portier borrows his thesis from the French historian, Etienne Fouilloux, who judges the modernist crisis of 1907–1910 to be “the intellectual matrix of contemporary Catholicism.”

This is another way of saying that the original modernists, scattered across Europe with a handful of earnest, temporarily daring American disciples, were on to something. Vanquished by the papal condemnation of modernism as “the synthesis of all heresies” (Pascendi dominici gregis, 1907), they were not granted the luxury of digesting fully the new methods of historical and biblical criticism infiltrating a few Catholic seminaries and periodicals at the turn of the twentieth century, much less of sorting through the seemingly radical theological and ecclesiological implications of the critical “findings.” Subsequent generations would tend to that sifting. The retrieved nuggets of modernist truth informed the nouvelle theologie of the 1940s and 1950s, and helped to inspire the processes of ressourcement and aggiornamento, which received official blessing in the decrees of the Second Vatican Council.

Imagine the dilemma of the four priests profiled by Portier, each of whom was a disciple of Isaac Hecker (d. 1888), the founder of the Paulists, the first male religious community established in America. With Hecker, they were convinced that church-state separation, religious liberty and the “free market competition for souls” fostered by the American system constituted the ideal social platform for the Catholic evangelization of the United States. And, to varying degrees, each of these four “Americanists” also tended to emphasize the indwelling presence of the divine in the human soul, a tendency condemned as “vital immanence” in Pascendi, for it seemed to minimize the importance of “external religion,” not least the authority of the Roman Catholic magisterium.

When “Americanism” was condemned in 1899 (Testem Benevolentiae) and, again, when the heat was turned higher in 1907, with Pascendi, these priests were faced with a complicated moral choice. Denis O'Connell, rector of the Pontifical North American College and center of an international network of “liberal” Catholics, performed the most immediate and complete about-face as soon as Americanism fell into disfavor. Rewarded with promotion to bishop (of Richmond, Virginia, in 1903), he later became “the anti-modernist rector” of Catholic University. For his seeming careerism, O'Connell was duly excoriated by William Laurence Sullivan, a Paulist who passed rapidly from Americanism to modernism and, shortly thereafter, out of the priesthood and the Catholic Church altogether, into Unitarianism—leaving in his wake an angry denunciation of the moral hypocrisy, as he saw it, of his fellow liberals and of the papacy itself (Letters to His Holiness Pope Pius X, 1910).

John R. Slattery, a Josephite priest initially dedicated to the evangelization of blacks in America, which he found to be a frustrating vocation owing to the absence of episcopal support, also saw his faith fall away under the pressure of European modernist ideas and colleagues. Portier, relying on Slattery's unpublished autobiography (which Portier himself discovered) and on typically painstaking archival research, carefully pieces together the heretofore unknown trajectory and details of Slattery's “tragic” life.

If there is a hero in this bunch, it is the fourth of these “divided friends,” the Paulist Joseph McSorley, who weathered the storm, kept the faith, stuck with the priesthood and, in Portier's ardent appreciation, “emerged from the modernist crisis with his youthful ideals chastened but, despite Sullivan's recriminations, recognizably intact” (365). McSorley (d. 1963) outlived his three friends by 28 years or more. He extended and deepened Hecker's legacy, most notably through his decades of spiritual direction (of, among many others, Dorothy Day), study of Catholic history (about which he authored a leading textbook), and meditations on the Church's ascetical ideals and traditions (The Sacrament of Duty, 1909).

Weaving these four stories together, Portier manages to recast our understanding of the long-term importance of the modernist crisis, even as he corrects flawed interpretations of Americanism as a “phantom heresy,” Modernism as stillborn on American soil, with no intellectual legacy, and Catholic University of America as devoid of intellectual achievement in the wake of Pascendi. (CUA, Portier notes, was the world's first successful university for Anglophone Catholics.)

Divided Friends manages to accomplish four disparate goals without making the reader (too) dizzy. Filling gaps in the historical record, it provides a detailed, chronologically precise narrative of the unfolding and intertwined personal journeys of these four influential churchmen, two of whom (Slattery and McSorley) have been largely overlooked. Second, it traces across the Atlantic the arc of ideas that formed the trajectory of modernism loosely uniting dozens of European and American Catholic intellectuals at the turn of the twentieth century. Third, by citing modernism-influenced Catholic authors whose writings range across decades, it challenges a new generation of historians to explore the complex and largely understudied theological and spiritual legacy of modernism up to and beyond the Second Vatican Council.

Not least, this impressive work offers to all of us the example of a seasoned historian and thoughtful Catholic who is not afraid to raise the troubling and perplexing moral questions embedded in this tale of men of faith challenged to decide how, or whether, to remain loyal to an institution whose claims to divine inspiration and guidance they came to regard as ambiguous at best. For Sullivan and Slattery, such claims appeared delusional in the face of the papacy's morally suspect behavior. For McSorley, history was a reassuring testimony to the church's intriguing ability to foster holiness and produce saints. For Portier, it is a mirror reflecting back to us the questions of our own day, now clarified by the struggles of our predecessors.