ABSTRACT
George Henry Tyrrell, the former Jesuit who was excommunicated for his public criticism of Pope Pius X’s encyclical Pascendi dominici gregis, claims to have received his theological method from John Henry Newman. The fact is, from one fateful day in 1885 when, as a callow seminarian, Tyrrell opened A Grammar of Assent, he became and ever remained, as he described it, “a devout disciple of Newman.” Thus, with Newman, Tyrrell could not advocate a liberal approach to apologetics that would in any way compromise the dogmatic and infallible principles of Roman Catholicism. If one is to accept Tyrrell’s own valuation of his indebtedness to Newman, one can date his first contact with modernism to his first reading of Newman in 1885. In an article of 1899, “A Point of Apologetic,” Tyrrell explicitly distinguished A Grammar of Assent from scholasticism. Less than a year after Tyrrell reviewed Balfour, he published his first rationale for Newmanian apologetics.
