Between 1890 and 1910 the Roman Catholic Church underwent a severe moral and intellectual crisis. A group of progressive Catholic scholars, later dubbed the 'modernists', challenged the authority of official Catholic teaching in many areas, basing their ideas on contemporary movements generally. The official reaction was at first discouraging and then openly hostile - most of the modernists were forced to leave the Church and their writings were placed in the Index. As one might expect, the accounts of the crisis by those who were closely involved in it are generally strongly partisan; moreover, its effects are still evident in present disputes in the Church but in 1972 the time came for an objective historical assessment of the major figures of the crisis as a means for understanding the movement as a whole. In this authoritative study Dr Barmann reconstructs in detail von Hugel's involvement in the modernist movement, particularly in England and rejects the received explanations of his survival in the Church.
