This is a rich but challenging book for the historian of modern Catholicism as it is written primarily with philosophers and theologians in mind. The key concepts such as monophorism may well be unfamiliar and difficult to grasp, but Bernardi succeeds in putting an intellectual dispute between the Catholic philosopher Maurice Blondel and his critic, the French Jesuit Pedro Descoqs, at the heart of the history of the Modernist crisis and contemporary debates about the role of the Church in secular society. Bernardi has already contributed articles to front-line theological journals like Communio on Blondel and his understanding of the nature-grace relationship and on the related movement for liberation theology. In this study, he draws on and complements the scholarship of Paul Misner on Social Catholicism. Blondel's ‘philosophy of action’ emphasised human action as a moral and religious imperative here below in anticipation of the divine kingdom. Whereas Blondel favoured the sanctification of the world through active social Catholicism, ‘integralists’ saw in democratic Social Catholics part of the liberal, Modernist heresy afflicting the Church. Under the pen name ‘Testis’, Blondel spoke up for the Christian Democrats of the Semaines Sociales against those like Descoqs who defended an alliance with the political authoritarianism of Action Française. For Blondel, Charles Maurras was the true heretic, the atheist who turned Catholicism into ‘a war machine, an instrument of earthly reign’, suppressing true faith – ‘the spontaneous movement of souls’ – for the sake of a tyrannical ‘order’ (p. 132). As a history of ideas, this book glances ahead to the condemnation of Maurras by the Vatican in 1926 on these same grounds. However, historians might have liked more here on Catholic integralism and its poisoned fruits at Vichy which are glossed over in a single quotation from Henri de Lubac. In light of the return of the Lefebvrist controversy in our times, Bernardi's section on the Blondel dispute's post-Concilar echoes in the work of diverse figures from Boff to Ratzinger makes for fascinating reading. The fat footnotes are a joy throughout and the broad scholarship in this book is worthy of the author's family, the Society of Jesus, to which it is affectionately dedicated.