 Within Roman Catholicism, by contrast, greater weight has characteristically been given to the classic arguments for God’s existence. (It is, however, doubtful that these arguments were historically ever intended as freestanding proofs that would be convincing to atheists. For an illuminating discussion of the functions of such arguments in pre-modern and early-modern contexts, see Clayton, Parts II and III.) This theological division thus represents part of the context for the debate over fideism. It is interesting in this connection to note that the Roman Catholic Magisterium has repeatedly condemned fideism. Absent from the documents of Vatican I, the term makes what seems to be its first appearance in a papal encyclical in 1907, in Pius X’s Pascendi Dominici Gregis (see Other Internet Resources), where fideism is referenced in the context of a more sweeping critique of “modernist”  theology.[2]  More recently, in the 1998 encyclical Fides et Ratio (see Other Internet Resources), John Paul II warned of “a resurgence of fideism, which fails to recognize the importance of rational knowledge and philosophical discourse for the understanding of faith, indeed for the very possibility of belief in God” (§55), and in Caritas In Veritate (2009, see Other Internet Resources), his third encyclical, Benedict XVI writes, “Truth frees charity from the constraints of an emotionalism that deprives it of relational and social content, and of a fideism that deprives it of human and universal breathing-space” (§3). This emphasis on reason in general, and on natural theology in particular, may help in part to explain how the term “fideism” has come to function within Roman Catholic theology largely as a term of opprobrium.