If there is a position that is relatively common in what is commonly known as progressivism, is the idea that the Catholic Church is an institution retrograde and conservative, a fierce enemy of modernity. The case is that while this may be true around the positions that it takes the Church, the case is that the social process that is behind it is not for nothing. But worry centrally by the content of the doctrines to establish modernity does not seem very accurate.
One of the most notorious characteristics of the Catholic Church is that, anything you say, comes from an argument -usually quite well-developed. Arguments that tend to have good internal consistency because they come from a body of basic doctrinal (and, in fact, a ‘methodology’ argumentative) coherent and streamlined. Thomism, digase what is said of him, is a coherent body, and has been part of the ‘style’ of catholic thought during their few centuries. In other words, any doctrine that comes from the Church is a doctrine reasoned.
Another feature is the generation of the doctrinal arguments. Although perhaps now it is less than above, the doctrine is made to the councils. And a council is a collective organization where what you do is deliberate to reach a decision that is binding on the community. Now, what a collective discussion, or a discussion, an argument, is not -perhaps – part of what is supposed to modernity? In fact, the science-which is one of the institutions distinctive of modernity – definitely not working in an individual way, but precisely through a discussion group.
In fact, it is worth mentioning that catholicism has not been a religion to be very adept in mysticism. By the way that there are mystics in the Church, but returning to the example of thomism: A Church that chooses as the basis of his doctrine that kind of argument and that it was in the scholasticism that he found his intellectual style basic, has certainly not had an approach very strong mysticism.
Now, a collective process of discussion reasoned away from the mysticism. It sounds quite modern as structure and as practice. And that is, in the end, what is important.