>>24847143 (OP)
There's actually a trend in Catholic intellectual circles of reading idealism and phenomenology (direct offshoot of idealism) and using them to interpret Aquinas or other scholastics. This is what John Paul II was all about, for example. He wasn't a Thomist per se, he was a Husserlian.
>>24847464
Exactly. Idealism is, philosophically, a reaction against many things which Catholics already consider to be le bad. You could almost call it post-modern because they try to look 'past' and beyond the Enlightenment. I don't mean to radically oversimplify things. But anyone who is interested in philosophy and has a working brain thinks the idealists were geniuses, even if they are not idealists themselves.