Roman Catholicism at a Crossroads

When the Irish Jesuit theologian George Tyrrell died in 1909, he was putting the finishing touches to his last book, Christianity at the Crossroads. The argument of the book – the same one that had got him into trouble, both with the Jesuits and with the pope, leading to his expulsion from the order in 1906 and his excommunication in 1907 – was that the Church had arrived at a juncture where two roads diverged, and its life and fidelity depended on it taking the second, ‘modernist’ one.