I cannot stress enough the importance of seeing things through the lens of the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity. This ideal forms the prayer, "Thy Kingdom Come, Thy Will Be Done".
Garrigou-Lagrange in his book, Reality, A Synthesis of Thomistic Thought, warns us through other authors, as well as his own admonitions, to seek a philosophical viewpoint which underlines the Catholic Faith.
Here we may well listen to Pierre Charles, S. J.: "In favor of the history of dogma, and in discredit of metaphysics, an extremely virulent relativism had been, almost without notice, introduced into the teaching of doctrine. Psychology replaced ontology. Subjectivism was substituted for revelation. History inherited the place of dogma. The difference between Catholics and Protestants seemed reduced to a mere practical attitude in regard to the papacy. To arrest and correct this baneful and slippery attitude, Pius X had the proper gesture, brusk and definitive. Anglican modernism today shows all too well the frightening consequences to which, without the intervention of the Holy See, doctrinal relativism might have led us.
To many Catholics stew in anti-intellectualism, as if pursuing the rational impeded their growth to perfection. The opposite, which is the reliance on experience, leads to the gross errors of Protestantism.
"Papal condemnation has brought to light, in many Catholic theologians, a gaping void: the lack of philosophy. They shared the positivistic disdain for metaphysical speculation. Sometimes they proclaimed a highly questionable fideism. Fashion led them to ridicule philosophy, to jeer at its vocabulary, to contrast its infatuated audacity with the modesty of scientific hypotheses. The pope, by describing and synthesizing the modernistic error, compelled theology to re-examine, not so much particular problems, but rather fundamental religious notions, so skillfully distorted by the school of innovators. The philosophic bone-structure began to reappear ever more clearly as indispensable for the entire theological organism." [1350]
More later....
More later....