Marie-Dominique Chenu demonstrates how this once condemned theologian influenced the major shifts of twentieth-century Catholicism and reveals the relevance of his thought for contemporary theology. In 1942, historian Marie-Dominique Chenu was removed from his teaching position at Le Saulchoir, the French Dominican school of theology, and his groundbreaking new publication was placed on the Catholic Church’s Index of Forbidden Books. Yet only two decades later, the Catholic hierarchy embraced many of his ideas at the Second Vatican Council. Although Chenu’s pioneering work helped to usher in a new era, his influence on the Catholic Church remains overlooked and underexplored. Drawing upon extensive new archival research, Mary Kate Holman provides a captivating account of Chenu’s life and how his theology contributed to the church’s opening to the modern world and shaped the next generation of theologians. Holman presents the distinctive elements of Chenu’s theology, identifies his major contributions to contemporary Catholic theology, and proposes a constructive retrieval of his thought for a renewed ecclesiology in the twenty-first century. “A unique and necessary contribution to understand the last century of history of Catholic thinking: Chenu was at the center of the early repressions of theologians by the Holy Office during the twentieth century.” ―Massimo Faggioli, author of A Council for the Global Church “Mary Kate Holman’s outstanding book on the French theologian, historian, and pastor reveals profound discoveries and far-reaching perspectives for a church in synodal transformation.” ―Michael Quisinsky, author of Marie-Dominique Chenu: Weg-Werk-Wirkung Mary Kate Holman is an assistant professor of religious studies at Fairfield University. I argue that it was the historical consciousness of Chenu’s approach that served as an initially threatening, but ultimately distinctive, contribution to Catholic theology, challenging the prevailing neo-scholastic paradigm of seminary education at the time. This historical method for theological reflection, particularly evident in Chenu’s contextual approach to Thomas Aquinas, laid the foundation for his socially engaged theology. His writings from 1920 to 1942 convey a strong conviction that theologizing in the present requires an understanding of how earlier thinkers engaged with their own world. The interrelated dimensions of history and social engagement, subversive when Chenu first articulated them but somewhat self-evident in contemporary discourse, would develop into cornerstones of his life and thought. After situating Chenu in the social, intellectual, and ecclesial context of early twentieth century Catholic Europe, this chapter traces the influences on Chenu’s early thought that equipped him to reimagine the prevailing neo-scholastic paradigm of seminary education. It then turns to A School of Theology , Chenu’s watershed work, as an explicit statement of the innovative theological method and pedagogy he coordinated at the Saulchoir. Contemporary historians grant great significance to this short work as “the most unabashedly programmatic statement” of the ressourcement movement and “the programme itself” for nouvelle théologie , but the original French has been out of print for decades, and was only translated into English in 2023. A close reading of this text reveals the distinctive underpinnings of Chenu’s historically-oriented theology, which would rock the Catholic intellectual landscape first in its vociferous condemnation from Rome, and then more lastingly in the gradual paradigm shifts of the next few decades. Finally, the text’s fraught reception presents a central chapter in Chenu’s vexed relationship with ecclesiastical authority, a lifelong result of his engaged theological method. Context: History, Authority, and “Modernism Chenu’s historically conscious approach to theology, and to the work of Thomas Aquinas in particular, was largely a reaction against the officially sanctioned neo-scholasticism that dominated the ecclesial intellectual landscape of the early twentieth century. In the century prior to Chenu’s intellectual coming-of-age, the cultural, political, and moral trajectories of the modern world seemed to many to be irreconcilable with the institutional Catholic Church. As contemporary historians like Gerd-Rainer Horn, Jürgen Mettepenningen, Étienne Fouilloux, and Pierre Colin have shown, this era of tumult exacerbated the authoritarian impulses of the Roman hierarchy, creating an atmosphere of suspicion and stifling institutionalism. Seeking to assert the church’s authority in the face of an increasing loss of political power, Pope Pius IX condemned any openness to the ideas of so-called modernity in the 1864 Syllabus of Errors, concluding the document with the infamous last error, “That the Roman Pontiff can and should reconcile himself and make peace with progress, with Liberalism, and with modern culture.” The Firs