Excellent article. Thanks for sharing. I have always been intrigued by the question: «Why did God allow Protestantism?»
But, when reading your text, one has the impression that modernity is a phenomenon that appeared in the history of mankind independently from Christianity. Protestantism learned how to deal with it while Catholicism dragged its feet.
But modernity is not independent from Christianity. Modernity is simply secular Protestantism or, even better, pure Protestantism when you take as many Catholic elements as you can.
When you take the tenets of Protestantism until their logical conclusion, you get modernity. The rejection of hierarchy (every believer is a priest and has the authority to interpret the Bible) was in Luther and leads to equality, non-discrimination, liberty, relativism, democracy and the rejection of God as a supreme authority. It took some centuries to derive all the implications but the seed was in Luther (although Luther didn’t realize).
So I don’t think God created Protestantism to deal with modernity, because there would have not been modernity without Protestantism.
Am I wrong? What are your ideas about that? I take this opportunity to thank you for your writings, which are always enlightening.