Sister Farley and Rehabilitation
Beginning with the papacy of St. Pius X, Catholic thought was dominated by two core ideas. The first idea was a rejection of "Modernism," a catch-all term that referred to the "modern" ideas that had come into prominence in the 19th and early 20th Century--democracy, Communism, industrial capitalism, the nation-state, modern scientific developments, etc. All of this, in Pope Pius X's view, was bad and must be rejected by Catholics in toto . The other big idea was that of the Scholastic manual--essentially a compendium of Catholic theology and thought that purported to provide comprehensive answers to all of the questions you might want to ask. Not surprisingly, this era in Catholicism presented a vision of Church that was almost entirely static and unchanging. After World War II, a group of French and German Catholic thinkers came on the scene and were grouped under the heading of " Nouvelle Theologie " or New Theology. These thinkers believed t...