Reading in the long twentieth century

 I suppose I kept the reading in Lent post noncommital enough so that I don't have to reframe my resolutions.   I said I was going to revisit some of my old sources, especially St Francis de Sales, and I am doing that, though slowly.        Then I mentioned that I was going to read A Secular Age by Charles Taylor, and After Aquinas by Fergus Kerr.   And I am/will be doing that too, but currently those books are both in hiatus.

Instead, I took up Twentieth Century Catholic Theologians by Fergus Kerr, which is easier to read than After Aquinas.   Its focus is the theologians whose lives spanned the 20th century, more or less.   All of the ones discussed were somewhat controversial before Vatican II Council, and afterwards, they can be divided into basically two categories:   the ones whose work was more or less recognized and affirmed in the Council documents, and those who continued on a trajectory that eventually got them into further controversy after the Council.     Because of his focus, Kerr's book sheds some light on the Council's project that is hard to find elsewhere in the rather tired "conservative" and "progressive" framework devised by Catholic journalists at the time.  

I also started rereading an old book from my shelves, called The Intellectual Life, by AG Sertillanges.      It's actually pretty good Lenten reading, adding up to a general examination of conscience, in some ways.      He does not compartmentalize -- study and intellectual work are closely related to the moral and spiritual life and even to the ordinary healthy practices and mundane responsibilities of one's ordinary life.  

Finally, I'm slowly rereading Diary of a Country Priest by Georges Bernanos.     Larry Chapp on GaudiumetSpes22 often refers to the novel, particularly its opening lines on the boredom of the priest's parishioners.   So I am rereading, to see how the French countryside of the 1930s compares to the post-Vatican II American parish of nearly a century later.   

There is a commonality here, which I notice but can't really put into words yet.    Sertillanges and Bernanos and Fergus Kerr, as well as the theologians he portrays in his book, all began their lives in or just aftter what has been called "the long 19th century" (I heard the term in John O'Malley's book, where he extends it all the way to when the Council was called).   Charles Taylor too fits in this time frame if you stretch it a bit to the period right after WW1.