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Stunted Development. Some church historians now contend that the repressive measures of Pius X (who was proclaimed a saint in 1954) stunted Catholic intellectual development for a generation. Biblical experts were particularly suspect. For years Catholic exegetes were required to abide by the conservative judgments of the Pontifical Biblical Commission, set up at the beginning of the century; among its dicta was the ruling that Moses authored the Pentateuch—even though it contains an account of his death clearly penned centuries later. Not until Pius XII's 1943 encyclical, Divino Afflante Spiritu, were Catholic Biblicists able to study Scripture with the same freedom enjoyed by their Protestant counterparts.
Shortly before his death, Tyrrell wrote to a friend that "my failure and many another may pave the way for eventual success." Today, Loisy's argument that the Bible must be scrutinized in the light of scholarship is an accepted premise of Scripture experts; Tyrrell's proclamation that the church needs to restate its faith in the language and terms of modern man is a common place on the lips of Popes. Whatever their specific errors—and most of their writings look terribly dated today—the modernists have a fair claim to be regarded as genuine precursors of the Second Vatican Council.
* Among other things, the 600-word oath requires seminarians to state that they believe in miracles and also in rational proofs of God's existence, and that they "totally reject the heretical notion of the evolution of dogmas."