Slow methodical doctrinal change keeps religious unity while satisfying intellectual demands

Evidence

The Jesuits have undoubtedly been the major architects of this equilibrium, and it order to preserve it they have given the Church a progressive forward movement which has tended to allow the demands of science and philosophy to be to a certain extent satisfied. But the rhythm of the movement has been so slow and methodical that the changes have passed unobserved by the mass of the simple, although they appear “revolutionary” and demagogic to the “integralists”. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1187

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘integralists’ — those who reject any change to doctrine — prefigure the absolutist/orthodoxy positions that recur in contemporary religious and political discourse. — connects to: Fromm read Christian doctrine shifts as products of socioeconomic change — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 327