What Is Catholic Fundamentalism? by Eduardo J. Echeverria

By Eduardo J. Echeverria, The Catholic Thing, April 8, 2025

Eduardo J. Echeverria is Professor of Philosophy and Systematic Theology at Sacred Heart Major Seminary, Detroit. His publications include Pope Francis: The Legacy of Vatican II Revised and Expanded Second Edition (Lectio Publishing, Hobe Sound, FL, 2019) and Revelation, History, and Truth: A Hermeneutics of Dogma. (2018). His new book is Are We Together? A Roman Catholic Analyzes Evangelical Protestants.

In his recent book, Catholic Fundamentalism in America, Mark S. Massa, SJ, claims that five characteristics mark a “fundamentalist.”

• A “sectarian [resistance to] dialogue and collaboration.”

• Overemphasis on the institutional model of the Church such that fundamentalism identifies the Kingdom of God with the institution of the Roman Catholic Church.

• An “a-historical understanding” of Church teaching such that “the meaning of Christianity, in which development was not possible because it represented apostasy from faith once delivered.” (This point is so basic to Massa’s understanding of Catholic fundamentalism that he takes it to be the “controlling metaphor of Catholic doctrine as the ‘Deposit’ of faith [that] seems to imply an unchanging (and unchangeable) list of positivist propositions that cannot develop or ‘unfold’ over time.” ….