When Giuseppe Sarto was elected pope on August 4, 1903, the crisis that was shaking the world of Biblical exegesis, albeit limited to a small number of savants, was nonetheless to have far-reaching consequences for the universal Church. In fact, the Biblical question is intimately tied to the modernist crisis, as the case of Alfred Loisy bears witness. Clearly, Biblical modernism did not appear out of nowhere. It was the product of a long intellectual evolution that, over the course of the 19th century, united and melded two apparently antinomic currents of thought. On the one hand we find the...
