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This article presents “Catholic humanism” as the form of Christian humanism that contributed to the modernisation of the Catholic Church during the first half of the twentieth century and formed a generation of intellectuals and politicians who, after the Second World War, took responsibility for the democratic reconstruction of Europe. Having abandoned the theocratic conception of Vatican I and in spite of its antimodernist obsession, the Catholic Church pursued the project of reconstructing a “new Christendom” in society; the mobilisation of believers and the crisis of the European conscience revealed a different Church, one more rooted in history. Another characteristic of Christian humanism was the awareness that a new sense of personal freedom had to ripen within the Church, in order to contribute to its reform without betraying its unity.