Key ideas have been liberty, egalitarianism, rationalism, and the like. During this period, the Church has remained outside of these major movements and has clearly recognized modernism as a major threat - indeed, often a heresy. Nevertheless, the Church has made her peace with important positive modern contributions, such as religious liberty, science, and democracy. The postmodern represents the major intellectual changes of the last fifty years. Postmodernism is a natural extension of modern ideas fueled by a hostility to the very ideas from which it springs.
Postmodernism dissolves the modern certainties, using modern logic itself.
Postmodernism can best be understood as a kind of morbid modernism. Nietzsche was perhaps the first modern thinker to lay the groundwork of post-modernism. Although the Church officially holds on to its premodern orthodoxy, the practice of Catholicism has been, understandably enough, greatly affected for years by modern, and now postmodern, mentalities. The antihierarchical sentiments in the Church are classic expressions of modernism's hostility to any form of authority. The focus on sex education is a modern emphasis, while the rejection of any clear moral teaching of doctrine is postmodern.