We used to have our own cognate to "
fundamentalism" in Catholicism as well, although I don't remember it and neither do my parents, as it was pre-1960s Vatican II (I'm rather more of a spring chick than that).
My grandfather's generation cannot actually recall it either (he's in his late 80s) given that it was predominantly a continental affair, particularly in France with the
Action Francaise movement. It never caught on in Britain where the church, since the late nineteenth century, has been aligned with the trade unionist and Christian socialist wing of thought.
However, I learned about this "sect" - if you can call it that, given its not really organised - from interactions with other Catholics online, who had come under the influence of this fossilized movement. For some inexplicable reason, it seems to have lingered on in a tiny intellectual-elitist academic subculture in America (which struck me as peculiar, given that the US Catholic church was never influenced by the original Anti-Modernist theology but actively resisted it at the time), where it's labelled "
Integralism". A convert to Catholicism from Protestant Christianity, a Harvard law professor called Adrian Vermuele, is it's most infamous proponent today.
As with the Protestant variety, it didn't really exist as a coherent, grassroots phenomenon prior to the late nineteenth century, when the German theologians of the
religionsgeschichtliche Schul at the University of Gottingen began to engage in textual historical criticism of the Bible.
Unlike the Protestant version, it also lasted for only a couple of decades into the 20th century before practically vanishing as an intellectual force after the Second World War (the world bishops of the Second Vatican Council condemned most of it's articles as heretical) and was never as "pervasive" given that we aren't a
sola scriptura faith tradition (so we can't, by definition even at our most fundamentalist, be "bible-bashers").
In Catholicism the slow process of softening this new Anti-Modernist movement started with Pope Leo XIII promulgating the encyclical
Providentissimus Deus in 1893, after authorizing the
École Biblique in 1892, the first Catholic school specifically dedicated to the critical study of the bible.
The Anti-Modernist movement in the Catholic Church was, however, quashed by the Second Vatican Council from 1963-1965 under the progressive reforms of Pope St. John XXIII:
Second Vatican Council - Wikipedia
Today, those who still adhere to its principles are looked upon as akin to dinosaurs.
In 2011 Pope Benedict XVI condemned the ideology: "
forms of religious integralism exploit religious freedom to disguise hidden interests, such as the subversion of the established order or the grip on power of a single group. Fanaticism, contrary to human dignity can never be justified, even less so in the name of religion."
Its contemporary adherents cloak their arguments under more subtle critiques of the barrenness of liberalism - both politically and economically. The reason is that they advocate “strategic
raillement”: "
working within the liberal order in order to eventually supersede it altogether with an integralist regime". Often they are economically "left-wing" - so-called "Tradinistas" - because they adopt the traditional Catholic critique of capitalism and laissez-faire as part of their rejection of "liberalism".
Integralism tends to have narrow focus on a series of encyclicals (namely by Gregory XVI, Pius IX, and Leo XIII) from the nineteenth century that critique elements of 'modernism', failing to place these in the wider context of the church's sacred tradition and earlier theological traditions. This distorts the tradition by elevating one particular, time-conditioned articulation of doctrine in a given, contingent historical context over against later development in a different one & earlier witnesses to the tradition that don't espouse this framework either.
The implication of their paradigm is that the state should be confessional. By contrast,
Dignitatis Humanae (Vatican II's decree on freedom) affirms that: “
the state exceeds the limits of its authority, if it takes upon itself to direct or to prevent religious activity.”
And if we look to Pope Nicholas I in his directive to the Bulgars in 866 we find that he tells the Khan of those who refuse Christianity: "
violence should by no means be inflicted upon them to make them believe. For everything which is not voluntary, cannot be good".
And earlier than him, the church father Tertullian in the 3rd century:
"It is only just and a privilege inherent in human nature that every person should be able to worship according to his own convictions; the religious practice of one person neither harms nor helps another. It is not part of religion to coerce religious practice, for it is by choice not coercion that we should be led to religion."
He was the first person to articulate religious liberty as a "human right". The Emperor Constantine, first Christian ruler of Rome, then enshrined this in the
Edict of Milan (313): "
we thought to arrange that no one whatsoever should be denied the opportunity to give his heart to the observance of the Christian religion, or of that religion which he should think best for himself".
So I consider it to be a distortion of both the Catholic and Christian tradition with a very selective reading of history. Thankfully, it hardly exists today.
