Catholicism and Modernism

Transition.

The 1940s were a decade of momentous change for Catholicism in the United States. Traditional Catholicism was challenged on every front: liturgical, philosophical, and organizational. The Catholic Church in general became more worldly, liberal, and egalitarian. Modernism, a catchall term that signified the multiple and diverse forces arrayed against tradition, confronted and transformed American Catholicism. This confrontation was long delayed. Unlike other churches, the Catholic Church failed to come to adequate terms with concepts and ideas that had transformed other theologies in the nineteenth century. Evolutionary theory, for example, restructured American Protestantism at the turn of the century. When Father John A. Zahm of Notre Dame University attempted a synthesis of Darwinism and Catholicism in 1896, the Vatican had him silenced. After World War II a reckoning with modernism could no longer be avoided. This...

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