Zusammenfassung / Abstract
“‘Religious indifferentism’ – ‘false irenicism’ – ‘new modernism’. A worrying assessment by the Sanctum Officium regarding the development of German Catholicism in the 1950s” – In the 1950s, the Roman Sanctum Officium took an increasingly critical view of the religious and ecclesiastical situation in West Germany, and this was soon discussed under the code-name ‘Indifferentismo Religioso’. The term served as a ‘container’ into which all those phenomena deemed to pose a threat to the faith could be categorised. In its usage, the term is reminiscent of the catchphrase ‘Modernism’ from the years after 1900. Was the intention to characterise the manifold manifestations of a changing era as a ‘new Modernism’? This diagnosis forms part of a longer series of magisterial pronouncements (the Monitum of the Sanctum Officium of 1948; the Instructio of 1949/50; the encyclical Humani generis of 1950), which, a few years after the Second World War, reveal an overall pessimistic view of the contemporary world. One cannot deny their diagnostic acumen or realism, yet the mentality of distancing oneself from social developments and, above all, reacting defensively on the surface rather than seeking an internal engagement with the phenomena (and problems) pointed backwards.