Sarah Shortall. <i>Soldiers of God in a Secular World: Catholic Theology and Twentieth-Century French Politics</i>.

Religion has assumed a more prominent place in histories of twentieth-century Europe in recent decades. Yet few historians have tackled theology, which is seen to exist outside and apart from intellectual and political history. In Soldiers of God in a Secular World, Sarah Shortall aims to rectify this omission by exploring the theological formation, work, and contribution of the French Jesuits and Dominicans associated with the “new theology” of the post-1945 period. She does so by placing the men in the larger context of Catholic thought and intertwining them with critical episodes in France’s twentieth-century intellectual and political history. Shortall divides her narrative into three sections that progress chronologically. The book’s first section traces the priests’ formative years, set against the backdrop of the Third Republic’s anticlerical campaign, the First World War, the crisis within the church over Action Française, and the rise of Catholic Action. Shortall’s Jesuit and Dominican protagonists took different routes to theological innovation. Jesuits such as Henri de Lubac and Gaston Fessard discovered the gulf between the church and ordinary French men during their military service on the western front and returned home determined to search out new theological solutions. Forced to pursue their studies in exile, at the Maison Saint-Louis on Jersey, they appreciated how the neo-scholasticism then in favor had consigned the church to its own intellectual exile. The men established their own parallel curriculum and study group, convinced that Catholic thought needed to participate more fully in modern intellectual life. In the process, they developed friendships that would sustain them over decades as they worked to renovate Catholic thought. The undervalued importance of friendship for intellectual creation is one of Shortall’s arguments. The situation was somewhat different for the book’s Dominicans, including Yves Congar. Although they, too, pursued their studies in exile, at Le Saulchoir in Belgium, the Dominicans were taught by clerics, especially Marie-Dominique Chenu, who were themselves searching for new theological paths.

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