Many tenets of the contemporary Catholic Church would be heretical according to the traditional Catholic doctrine: free Bible interpretation, freedom of religion, ecumenism, modernism, the rejection of the Vulgate and of the Tridentine Mass…
The Catholic Church is nowadays substantially a different church (the most notable Protestant church ever been?). And not even a solid one, but a transitional one, since it is apparent that more modern/Protestant principles, such as the acceptance of divorce and the rejection of clerical celibacy, are not unlikely to be introduced in the near future.
We may ask ourselves: has this state of being mainly been determined by a free internal evolution or has it been forced by external constraints?
The first explanation, however influential, is not decisive: the main reason, the elephant in the room, is that the Catholic Church lost World War II. Yes, you can lose a war even if you are neutral.
30 September 1943, the day of the Divino afflante Spiritu (the Catholic version of the Japanese emperor’s Humanity Declaration), marks the fall of the Catholic Church; or, from a different perspective, the beginning of what we may call its American captivity.
The American bombing of San Lorenzo, Rome, on 19 July and 13 August 1943 determined both the military capitulation of the Kingdom of Italy and the ideological capitulation of the Catholic Church.
Catholicism, proper Catholicism, is a totalitarian ideology (as pointed out in the 1949 bestseller American Freedom and Catholic Power), and should be considered one of the great losers of the 20th century, together with Fascism and Communism.
In 1943 the Catholic Church understood that there was no place for it in the new world ruled by the United States of America, so it has been trying to adapt to the new environment ever since, embracing modernity, human rights and democracy, at the cost of losing its soul. A modern and democratic catholic is like a pacifist and feminist muslim: not a proper one.
Its current condition is the product of this ongoing metamorphosis, even more painful and desperate for the Catholics since they are not clearly conscious of it.
This idea is not supported by any historian: it is fictional. We have written it not to teach you history, but to let you know a historical interpretation popular in our constructed culture.
Il Vento d'Oriente 