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In 1893 Pope Leo XIII cautiously encouraged Catholic scholars to join in the scientific investigation of Scripture begun by Protestant Germany's "Higher Critics." It was a false dawn. Under Leo's successor, Pius X (1903-14). church officials took arms against the heresy of modernism—which taught that Catholic dogma should be revised in the light of progress made by science and philosophy —and Bible scholars proved to be handy targets. Some found their writings placed on the Index; the top Catholic scholar of his day, Dominican Father Marie Joseph Lagrange, was dismissed from his teaching posts and for a time forbidden to pursue his critical investigations.
The Magna Carta. Catholic Bible experts began catching up with the rest of the scholarly world after 1943, when Pius XII issued his encyclical Divino Afflante Spiritu. Written largely by German Jesuit Augustin Bea, now the cardinal in charge of Rome's Secretariat for Promoting Christian Unity, the encyclical encouraged Catholics to study the historical background of Scripture, and to use modern critical techniques developed by Protestant and Jewish scholars. Bible scholars hailed the encyclical as their Magna Carta; conservative theologians thought it an open invitation to a modernist revival.
The conservatives took out their wrath in the kind of paper warfare scholars love: footnote-stippled articles in somber technical journals that few laymen ever see. Their principal target was Rome's Jesuit-run Pontifical Biblical Institute, one of the two institutions in the world where Catholics can get a degree to teach Scripture.* In a series of finger-wagging papers, monsignori attached to Rome's Curia—principally Paolo Cecchetti, Antonino Romeo and Antonio Piolanti—began hinting that certain teachers at the
Biblicum were skirting heresy. The attack was picked up by the arch-conservative American Ecclesiastical Review, edited by Monsignor Joseph Fenton of Catholic University, which began publishing articles that charged certain U.S. scholars with endangering the faith.
Well-placed Enemies. Father Ernest Vogt, rector of the Biblicum, dismissed the attacks as "systematically deformed calumnies"; yet it soon became clear that his enemies were well placed. In 1961 the Holy Office issued a monitum (warning) against excesses in Catholic Scriptural interpretation. Last June the Holy Office ordered two of the Biblicum's New Testament scholars, Jesuit Fathers Maximilian Zerwick and Stanislaus Lyonnet, suspended from their teaching assignments. At a victory celebration in a Rome pensione that night, one Curia official gleefully said: "This time we shall break their monopoly." Every bishop arriving in Rome for the Vatican Council last fall was handed a pamphlet, written by Monsignor Francesco Spadafora of the conservative Lateran University, asking that the fathers condemn the methods employed by Biblical critics.
The principal charge against the Biblical scholars is that they use in New Testament studies a technique called "form criticism," which was developed during the 1920s by such German Protestants as Martin Dibelius and Rudolf Bultmann.