Jesuit Superior General: Fr. Adolfo Nicolás
"Religion involves first of all a sensitivity to, an openness to, the dimensions of transcendence, of depth, of gratuity, of beauty that underlie our human experiences," Nicolás said.
Hmm…religion as experience. Where have we heard this before? As Fr. J. M. Bampton, S.J. explains:
In the Catholic sense, Revelation is something external, something that comes to the soul from without, from the oral teaching of Christ and the Church, and Faith is acceptance of that Revelation. In the Modernist sense, Revelation is wholly internal, a psychological experience, and Faith is the soul's response to it. To the Catholic, Revelation is statement, and Faith is belief in the statement made. To the Modernist, Revelation and Faith are experience.{4} To the Catholic, the content of Revelation, which is the object of Faith, is truth addressed to the intelligence. To the Modernist, it is truth addressed to the feelings, to the emotional faculty. That brings religion perilously near to Matthew Arnold's definition of religion: "Morality touched with emotion."