Vincent Zapletal and the question of the modernization strategies in the Catholic Church at the beginning of the 20th century

Abstract

The most important problems of the development of religious society are the moments of development, changes, i.e. the questions of continuity and discontinuity. The Catholic Church has experienced several paradigm shifts, mainly successful, but the phenomenon of the so-called modernist crisis of the first decades of the 20th century is one of these unsuccessful attempts to change the paradigm. From the point of view of social history, this crisis provides remarkable material where the strategies and mechanisms can be studied of how the community seeks to promote or prevent change, what the motives of actors were and the impacts of the chosen solution. In the following study, using the example of a Czech modernizing priest, we will show what game fields the men thinking in this way had at that time, which strategies they chose, and in what their potential success or failure lay, what impacts the power-driven stopping of the modernization efforts and the subsequent period of stagnation had. The phenomenon of the modernist and antimodernist crises does not concern only the Catholic Church, many processes and transformations in a series of moments anticipates or follows the development of other segments of European society.