[199] a French Catholic, the Abbé Loisy, has made notable contributions
to the study of the New Testament and he was rewarded by major
excommunication in 1907.

Loisy is the most prominent figure in a growing movement within the
Catholic Church known as Modernism—a movement which some think is the
gravest crisis in the history of the Church since the thirteenth
century. The Modernists do not form an organized party; they have no
programme. They are devoted to the Church, to its traditions and
associations, but they look on Christianity as a religion which has
developed, and whose vitality depends upon its continuing to develop.
They are bent on reinterpreting the dogmas in the light of modern
science and criticism. The idea of development had already been applied
by Cardinal Newman to Catholic theology. He taught that it was a
natural, and therefore legitimate, development of the primitive creed.
But he did not draw the conclusion which the Modernists draw that if
Catholicism is not to lose its power of growth and die, it must
assimilate some of the results of modern thought. This is what they are
attempting to do for it.

Pope Pius X has made every effort to suppress the Modernists. In 1907
(July) he

[200] issued a decree denouncing various results of modern Biblical
criticism which are defended in Loisy’s works. The two fundamental
propositions that “the organic constitution of the Church is not
immutable, but that Christian society is subject, like every human
society, to a perpetual evolution,” and that “the dogmas which the
Church regards as revealed are not fallen from heaven but are an