'A more common opinion is that the crisis in the Church is due to a failure to adapt to a progressing modern civilization and that the crisis should be overcome by an opening or, in the expression of John XXIII, an aggiornamento of the spirit of religion, bringing it into harmony with the spirit of the age.
It should be remembered in this regard that the Church penetrates the world from its very nature as its leaven, and it can be seen historically to have influenced every facet of the world's life: did it not prescribe even such things as calendars and food? So great did this influence become that the Church was accused of encroaching on temporal matters to the point where a purging or removal of its influence was allegedly needed. The fact is, that the Church's adaptation to its circumstances in the world is a law of its being, established by a God who Himself condescended to become man, and it is also a law of history, shown by the Church's continually increasing or decreasing influence on the world's affairs.
This adaptation, however, which pertains to the very nature of the Church, does not consist in the Church's conforming itself to the world: Nolite conformari huic saeculo, but rather in adjusting its own contradiction of the world to various historical circumstances; changing that inevitable contrariety without setting it aside. Thus, when confronted with paganism, Christianity displayed an opposing excellence of its own, overcoming polytheism, idolatry, the slavery of the senses and the lust for fame and power by raising the whole of earthly life to a theotropic goal never even imagined by the ancients. Nevertheless, in giving expression to their antagonism to the world, Christians lived in the world as beings having an earthly purpose. In the Letter to Diognetus they appear as indistinguishable from pagans in all the ordinary practices of life.
Analogously, when confronted by the barbarians the Church did not adopt barbarism, but clad herself in civilization; in the thirteenth century when confronted with violence and greed she took on the spirit of meekness and poverty in the great Franciscan movement; she did not adopt renascent Aristotelianism but forcefully rejected the doctrines of the mortality of the soul, the eternity of the world, the creativity of the creature and the denial of Providence, thus opposing all the essential errors of the Gentiles. Given the fact that these are the principal tenets of Aristotelianism, scholasticism could be called a dearistotelianizing Aristotelianism. Tommaso Campanella sees an allegorical allusion to this process in the cutting of the hair and nails of the fair woman taken prisoner. Later still, the Church did not adapt to Lutheran subjectivism by subjectivizing Scripture and religion in general, but by reforming, that is, formulating anew, her own principle of authority. Lastly, in the nineteenth century storms of rationalism and scientism, she did not adjust by watering or narrowing down the deposit of faith but by condemning the principle of the independence of reason. When the subjectivist impulse reappeared in Modernism, the Church did not accept it either but blocked it and reproved it.
One can therefore conclude to a general rule that while Catholicism's antagonism to the world is unchanging, the forms of the antagonism change when the state of the world requires a change in that opposition to be declared and maintained on particular points of belief or in particular historical circumstances. Thus the Church exalts poverty when the world (and the Church herself) worships riches, mortification of the flesh when the world follows the enticements of the three appetites, reason when the world turns to illogicality and sentimentalism, faith when the world is swollen with the pride of knowledge.
The contemporary Church, by contrast, is on the lookout for "points of convergence between the Church's thinking and the mentality characteristic of our time."'
(Romano Amerio, Iota Unum: A Study of Changes in the Catholic Church in the Twentieth Century)
