Catholicism and modernity

[Black_Rose]

I posted this in the Big Bang thread and I decided not to pursue the topic at greater length in order not to derail the thread:

How has the Catholic Church influence the politics and epistemology of the Enlightenment? I do remember that Occam of the Franciscans introduced Occam’s razor which preferred parsimony over extraneous elements when choosing competing explanations. Surely the monasteries preserved some elements of Latin and Greek civilization during the so-called Dark Ages of Western Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire through illuminated manuscripts in their libraries, but one can also attribute some of this preservation due to the work of Arabic scholars during the Islamic golden age. But wasn’t a main point of the Enlightenment, the embodiment of Western Civilization’s embrace of modernity, due to the merchant bourgeois who were prosperous from their commercial activities seeking liberation religious authority and respect of their property acquired through those activities from monarchic authority? Regarding capitalism, why doesn’t Calvinism receive more credit from that institution instead of Catholicism for its emphasis on outward material success as a signal for being among the predestined elect?

I posted that in response of a poster citing Thomas E. Woods’ How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization. My response was only a paragraph and I did not go in depth; I only sought to elicit a response providing some insight about the Catholic Church and its relation to “modernity”. In the paragraph, I have conflated modernity with the European Enlightenment since this view is predominant in Western culture even though it is overtly whiggish. This thread is not only an invitation to discuss the relation of Roman Catholicism with “modernity”, but I also encourage posters to discuss the meaning of the “modernity” and explore “modernity” in comparison to other issues beyond religious such as politics, science, and ethics (e.g. modernity and imperialism; modernity and globalization/the nation state; modernity and economic nationalism/free trade; modernity and science and technology; modernity and socialism/capitalism).

For a refresher course on history and a view of Western Enlightenment from Henry CK Liu’s “The Enlightenment and Modernity” (and the other articles in the series “The Abduction of Modernity” that can be found in the left-hand frame).