Religion: Ultra-Modernist

One Sunday in 1905, two young Sorbonne students climbed hand in hand up the long, steep stairs to Paris' Sacré Coeur. They knocked at a door which was opened by a strange, shabby old man with a walrus mustache. Young Protestant Jacques Maritain and his Jewish wife Rai'ssa had come to old Roman Catholic Leon Bloy for help. The Maritains were heavyhearted with questions, and they believed that Bloy, the outcast scourge of complacent Christianity (TIME, April 14, 1947), might have some answers.

At the Sorbonne, Jacques and Raïssa Maritain had recoiled from the...

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