to represent to himself the history of the Bible and of religion. Since
the Holy See was not satisfied, Loisy sent three further declarations to
Rome; the last, despatched on the 17th of March, was addressed to the
pope himself, and remained unanswered. And at the end of March Loisy
gave up his lectureship, as he declared, "on his own initiative, in view
of the pacification of minds in the Catholic Church." In the July
following he moved into a little house, built for him by his pupil and
friend, the Assyriologist François Thureau Dangin, within the latter's
park at Garnay, by Dreux. Here he continued his important reviews,
notably in the _Revue d'histoire et de littérature religieuses_, and
published _Morceaux d'exégèse_ (1906), six further sections of his
synoptic commentary. In April 1907 he returned to his native Lorraine,
to Ceffonds by Montier-en-Der, and to his relatives there.
Five recent Roman decisions are doubtless aimed primarily at Loisy's
teaching. The Biblical Commission, soon enlarged so as to swamp the
original critical members, and which had become the simple mouthpiece of
its presiding cardinals, issued two decrees. The first, on the 27th of
June 1906, affirmed, with some significant but unworkable reservations,
the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch; and the second (29th of May
1907) strenuously maintained the Apostolic Zebedean authorship of the
fourth Gospel, and the strictly historical character of the events and
speeches recorded therein. The Inquisition, by its decree _Lamentabili
sane_ (2nd of July 1907), condemned sixty-five propositions concerning
the Church's _magisterium_; biblical inspiration and interpretation; the
synoptic and fourth Gospels; revelation and dogma; Christ's divinity,
human knowledge and resurrection; and the historical origin and growth
of the Sacraments, the Church and the Creed. And some forty of these
propositions represent, more or less accurately, certain sentences or
ideas of Loisy, when torn from their context and their reasons. The
encyclical _Pascendi Dominici Gregis_ (Sept. 6th, 1907), probably the
longest and most argumentative papal utterance extant, also aims
primarily at Loisy, although here the vehemently scholastic redactor's
determination to piece together a strictly coherent, complete a priori
system of "Modernism" and his self-imposed restriction to medieval
categories of thought as the vehicles for describing essentially modern
discoveries and requirements of mind, make the identification of precise
authors and passages very difficult. And on the 21st of November 1907 a
papal _motu proprio_ declared all the decisions of the Biblical
Commission, past and future, to be as binding upon the conscience as
decrees of the Roman Congregations.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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