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Modernism in the Catholic Church

Overview

Since the 19th century, there have been attempts to reconcile Catholicism with modern culture, specifically an understanding of the Bible and Sacred Tradition in light of the historical-critical method and new philosophical and political developments of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

The term modernism—generally used by its critics rather than by adherents of positions associated with it—came to prominence in Pope Pius X's 1907 encyclical Pascendi Dominici gregis, where he condemned modernism as "the synthesis of all heresies".

Writing in the Catholic Encyclopedia in 1911, the Jesuit Arthur Vermeersch gave a definition of modernism in the perspective of the Catholic heresiology of his time:"In general we may say that modernism aims at that radical transformation of human thought in relation to God, man, the world, and life, here and hereafter, which was prepared by Humanism and eighteenth-century philosophy, and solemnly promulgated at the French Revolution."The modernist movement was influenced and accompanied by Protestant theologians and clergy like Paul Sabatier and Heinrich Julius Holtzmann. On the other hand, modernist theologians were critical of Protestant theology and engaged in Catholic apologetics against a Protestant understanding of Christianity, as in the famous attack of Alfred Loisy in L'Évangile et l'Église (1902) on Adolf von Harnack's Das Wesen des Christentums (1900). The modernist movement has a parallel in the Church of England where the journal The Modern Churchman was founded in 1911.

The controversy on modernism was prominent in French and British intellectual circles and to a lesser extent in Italy, but in one way or another concerned most of Europe and the Americas. Pope Pius X saw modernism as a universal threat which required a global reaction.

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

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CHAP. XVIII.--27. On the question of baptism, then, I think that I have argued at sufficient length; and since this is a most manifest schism which is called by the name of the Donatists, it only remains that on the subject of baptism we should believe with pious faith what the universal Church maintains, apart from the sacrilege of schism. And yet, if within the Church different men still held different opinions on…
of Hippo Augustine, Writings in Connection with the Donatist Controversy
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The former cogitates its object either by means of pure transcendental conceptions, as an ens originarium, realissimum, ens entium, and is termed transcendental theology; or, by means of a conception derived from the nature of our own mind, as a supreme intelligence, and must then be entitled natural theology. The person who believes in a transcendental theology alone, is termed a deist; he who acknowledges the…
Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason
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The Catholic Church achieved, during the Middle Ages, the most organic society and the most harmonious inner synthesis of instinct, mind, and spirit, that the Western world has ever known. St. Francis, Thomas Aquinas, and Dante represent its summit as regards individual development.
Bertrand Russell, Why Men Fight
Close in meaning to Modernism in the Catholic Church; the term itself is not named.
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Modernism in the Catholic Church

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