Mark said: “Having said that, I really think that there must have been deep, underlying problems (like “Modernism” and “indifferentism” and “Americanism” — a la “Testem Benevolentiae Nostrae”, that is) for a number of years prior to Vatican II.”
Livius is near squarely on point. I can’t write well today, but last year I conducted quite a bit of research to see if I could identify precisely what the problem was. The result of that research was to identify the Transcendental movement as the core of the problem and oddly, it was a problem never successfully addressed by the Church. Pope Pius, I believe, (working from memory here) did address it and its spawn, “secular humanism”, but never effectively.
I could probably write a book on this subject but very few if any would be interested. Bishop Fulton Sheen “got it” and wrote concerning Pope Pius 1907 encyclical, (a synthesis of all heresies called Modernism by Pope Pius in his 1907 encyclical “Pascendi Dominici Gregis);
“Modern philosophy has seen the birth of a new nation of God...It is God in evolution. God ‘is’ not. He ‘becomes.’ In the beginning was not the Lord, but in the beginning was ‘Movement.’ From this movement God is born by successive creations. As the world progresses, He progresses; as the world acquires perfection, He acquires perfection. (Moreover) man is a necessary step in the evolution of God. Just as man came from the beast, God will come from man...”
I could go on but the clear problem is the embrace of Darwinian evolution and its “fit” into the human centric philosophies.
Unless and until the Church squarely addresses this problem, matters will only worsen. And part of the progress of that descent is found in recent articles wherein authors discuss a fact newly found to them, i.e., that a majority of “Americans” don’t believe in anything.
Think about that for a moment and the examples of the effects of profound disbelief in anything other than the importance of constant consumerism and you will find such things as people being shot and killed...........for their Nike tennis shoes.
Without God at the Center of all existence, human kind descends into Paganism, or worse, Nihilism.
The result of that research was to identify the Transcendental movement as the core of the problem and oddly, it was a problem never successfully addressed by the Church.
You have hit something that I've never seen offered before as the source of the problem, but something that is very true (at least in the US). Transcendentalism had a big influence on 19th century American Protestants. We're talking about mainstream Protestant denominations and people such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, btw, not about Southern Baptists or the revival movements of Upstate New York (which spawned Mormonism!).
Some American converts were Transcendentalists, such as Orestes Brownson, and other Catholics who wanted to reach out to unchurched or Protestant Americans adopted some of the language and even some of the philosophical underpinnings of this movement. This eventually resulted in the strain of Modernism known as Americanism.
It wasn't necessarily combatted in the right way, because, for one thing, Europeans didn't know a thing about Transcendentalism and didn't think Americans were capable of rational thought anyway. The result was that they made crude attempts to suppress it and also that they regarded any American as suspect but at the same time not worthy of a rational examination.
Isaac Hecker, founder of the Paulists, for example, struggled with being called an Americanist, although he was not. He wanted to get out and preach the Gospel to Americans in ways that they understood, such as street corner preaching, but the group that he founded was extremely orthodox. (This was before Vatican II - the Paulists went into a tailspin after Vatican II and Isaac Hecker would have rejected them out of hand had he lived to see it.) At the same time, others of his contemporaries were dreaming of a Church that would be perfectly acceptable to mainstream Protestant Americans, that would not have any trace of "immigrant" devotional practices, and that would not separate Catholics in any way from what they perceived as "real" American life.
But I think the European - that is, Rome's - ignorance of this problem was what allowed it to fester and end up by silently spreading its infection throughout the American Church. Obviously, classic Modernism, combined with a heavy leftist tilt in European social thought, was still a problem in Europe at the time of Vatican II, so it was not entirely the fault of the US. But I think that many of the worst of the so-called "reforms," particularly in the area of the liturgy and also, oddly enough, in Eucharistic theology, resulted from the influence of Americans who were influenced by Americanism, which was in turn influenced by Transcendentalism.
Synopsis: Phenomena exist only insofar as the mind perceives them as ideas The ultimate reality (the thing-in-itself, "ding an sich") cannot be experienced by the human mind We experience the world as we perceive it through our (human) nature We cannot know how things are in themselves We cannot know the objects of the world, but only our perceptions of such objects...
When you speak of “transcendentalism”, are you talking about “vital immanence” as was described in Pascendi?