[Fr. George]Tyrrell writes with gusto. He was a journalist, not a scholar, as he might have agreed in Through Scylla and Charybdis (1907) he sympathizes with a symbolic approach to religious truth, which deprives the concept of truth of its meaning; and in the posthumous Christianity at the Cross-Roads he envisages Christianity as developing into a universal religion In these books he moves well beyond Catholic orthodoxy In Medievalism, however, he raised real questions, albeit in an inflammatory manner They would have to be dealt with: governance in the Church; the dignity and role of laity; and the concepts of experience and tradition as loci of truth.

He was not forgotten at Vatican II. On 1 October 1963, in a powerful speech, Ernesto Ruffini, Cardinal Archbishop of Palermo, a major figure at the Council, informed the assembly that the idea of the Church as a sacrament came from Tyrrell. He was probably indebted to Joseph C Fenton, the most eminent American theologian at the Council, who complained that the whole of the first chapter of: Lumen Gentium, the docuмent on the nature of the Church, was composed in the language of Tyrrell. That the Church as hierarchical institution (chapter 3) should be treated after the Church as mystery (chapter 1) and as people of God (chapter 2) would surely have seemed to Tyrrell a good way of laying out the doctrine That the likes of Ruffini and Fenton, significant members of the ultramontanist minority at Vatican II, should find Lumen Gentium to reek of modernist heresy is, however, a salutary thought. (18)

Footnote 18
 G Alberigo and J A Komonchak (eds) History of Vatican 11, vol III The Mature Council Second Period and Intersesiion September 1963-September 1964 (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, and Leuven: Peelers 2000): 50 (Ruffini), 30 (Fenton)