The experience of the interaction of catholic missiology and ethnography in the works of W. Schmidt

This publication examines the gradual change in the attitude of the Roman Catholic Church towards the religious studies of secular scholars in the first half of the 20th century. During this period, many works appeared, in which the ecclesiastical view of the essence 92 Христианское чтение № 3, 2018 of religion was sharply criticized. At the same time, among Roman Catholic scholars there was a growing interest in the study of non-Christian peoples. Among them, the Austrian religious scholar Priest Wilhelm Schmidt is particularly distinguished for his attempt to defend church positions in the sphere of religious studies. At the same time, he relied not only on biblical evidence but mainly on data from the actively developing science of ethnography. To W. Schmidt belong a number of initiatives aimed at realizing this idea. At first, Rome was deeply distrustful of the ideas of W. Schmidt, but later the Pope himself became a supporter of an approach where secular and ecclesiastical science enter into fruitful cooperation. It is important to note that, as a Roman Catholic clergyman, W. Schmidt managed to maintain the status of an objective researcher of religious phenomena