Anthony Maher's homage to George Tyrrell (1861–1909) begins and ends at Tyrrell's grave site in St. Mary Cemetery, Storrington, West Sussex. The picture Maher paints, clearing the moss, brushing splattered soil from the engraved chalice and host Tyrrell requested on his gravestone (pictured at 372), is emblematic of the task Maher sets himself, “to pedestal the life of this forgotten Jesuit” and “to restore his legacy” (xxi) as an Ignatian, pastoral theologian whose prophetic vision anticipates both Vatican II and the pastoral revolution of Pope Francis. Since Tyrrell's thought is inseparable from his life, Maher combines “biography, history, theology, and advocacy” (xxvi). The stormy petrel, a seabird to which Tyrrell has been aptly compared, adorns the book's cover. Tyrrell is a “modernist martyr” (23) and “a muzzled theological genius” (13). Maher's effort to set the record straight unfolds in three parts: Tyrrell's life, theology, and legacy.

Tyrrell's collision course with increasingly intransigent church authorities over the last nine years of his life makes this “a tragic human story of a priest theologian.” Part 1 frames the story with reference to three church documents: the English bishops’ “A Joint Pastoral Letter on the Church and Liberal Catholicism” (1900), Pope Pius X's encyclical against “Modernism,” Pascendi dominici gregis (1907), and Cardinal Mercier's 1908 Lenten pastoral letter. Tyrrell's outraged published responses to these magisterial acts made him an ecclesial pariah and marginalized his thought. Part 1 ends arguing that since Tyrrell was never technically excommunicated and had received the church's last rites, only vindictiveness denied him a Catholic burial.

Part 2 devotes nine of the book's fifteen chapters to Tyrrell's theology. It is Maher's impassioned letter to systematic theologians, urging them to draw their own hearts into their work as Tyrrell did, to recognize the priority of devotion to theology (Newman), and the radically pastoral nature of doctrine (Pope Francis). In the course of these chapters, Maher locates Tyrrell with respect to contemporary movements in practical, contextual, and liberation theologies, likening him, sometimes with too heavy a hand, to various contemporary figures, most often to fellow Ignatian theologian Karl Rahner. For the beauty of Tyrrell's prose and the depth of his religious sense, nothing surpasses “The Relation of Theology to Devotion,” published in The Month in 1899. But this was only one stop on his pilgrimage. Ignatius and Newman had seeped deep into Tyrrell's soul, but Loisy and Blondel sharpened his questions as he navigated between liberal Protestant “sentimentalism” and neo-Scholastic rationalism. With only his real (in Newman's term) sense of a mystic Christ and the church to keep him from the abyss, Tyrrell represents a raw Catholic encounter with modern science and sensibility.

Maher's encyclopedic command of Tyrrell's nineteen books and hundreds of articles, along with judicious quotations, gives contemporary theologians access to Tyrrell's thought. Part 2 zeros in on his incarnational/sacramental Spirit Christology and ecclesiology, emphasizing the congruence between Tyrrell on lex orandi, lex credendi, and contemporary approaches to the sensus fidelium and its relation to authority in the church. Here Maher can't resist saying that “Tyrrell could almost be the author of [Leonardo Boff's] Church, Charism, and Power (1985)” (235n6).

“Were I to wait till I could find censors advanced enough … ,” Tyrrell wrote to a friend in 1900, “I would have to wait at least 100 hundred years” (279n1). Part 3 on Tyrrell's legacy argues that Vatican II sanctioned Tyrrell's conception of the church and that his life and work constitute “a significant moment in the church's preparation for Vatican II” (335) and a “prolegomenon to post-conciliar theology” (303).

“In no small measure,” Maher concludes, “Vatican II is the reception of the Modernist ecclesial agenda” (366). Anthony Maher is a man with a mission. Had he been less provocative in his use of the vexed term Modernist, that mission might be more likely to succeed. Nevertheless, I truly hope that it does. His book deserves to be widely read, especially by the systematic theologians to whom it is addressed. It belongs in academic libraries and graduate courses on contemporary theology.