Modernism in the Catholic Church

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Modernism in the Catholic Church describes attempts to reconcile Catholicism with modern culture,^[1] specifically an understanding of the Bible and Catholic 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 critics of rather than adherents to positions associated with it—came to prominence in Pope Pius X's 1907 encyclical Pascendi Dominici gregis. The Pope condemned modernism as "the synthesis of all heresies".^[2]

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."^[3]

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 apologetics of the Catholic Church 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).^[4] 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 North America.^[5] Pope Pius X saw modernism as a universal threat which required a global reaction.^[6]