Modernism was a movement in Catholic religious thought, and particularly in biblical criticism, that developed in the late nineteenth century and spent itself, as a distinctive movement, before World War I. It aimed at bringing Catholic traditions into closer accord with modern views in philosophy and in historical and other scholarship and with recent social and political views. Modernism ran parallel to liberal Protestantism; both tended to reject authority and rigid forms and, in their more extreme versions at least, to aspire to a kind of Christianized rationalism.

The kind of Christology and biblical exegesis undertaken in Germany by D. F. Strauss and in France by Ernest Renan, aided and encouraged by such philosophical currents as positivism and evolutionism, culminated in the late-nineteenth-century attempt to reconcile science with religion and historical criticism with belief. Renan's rejection of the supernatural, combined with his vague evolutionary religiosity, anticipated much that...