The instant outrage the tableau aroused — right or wrong — tells a larger story about something that has happened in Catholic life across the last four decades. But it has not been the only recent indicator.

In a January report on religious liberty the U.S. bishops told us somewhat alarmingly of their concern that "the very lives of people of faith" are threatened in the United States.

Cardinal Timothy Dolan inveighed in June against New York's proposed Nonpublic Dignity for All Students Act with complaints about "bullying" Catholics and forcing Catholics to "toe the line on "gender ideology."

One of the first attacks leveled at Kamala Harris once she became the presumptive Democratic nominee for president was that she "hates what [Catholics] believe."

We Catholics have come to prize a little too much being outsiders set against the culture and the world. Quite often, Catholics seem crouched defensively as though the church were under constant attack.

That's not a coincidence. For several decades, Catholics in the U.S. have been taught to see the world as a hostile place set against us, and to think of ourselves as a "sign of contradiction" set against that world.

This point of view has been nurtured within the church for two generations. Forty years can make it seem like Catholics always have seen our relationship with the world this way. We have not. And, in fact, that idea does not reflect our tradition very well.

The world as a partner

No matter how the 1962-65 Second Vatican Council called the church to turn toward and embrace the world — indeed, no matter how St. Augustine reminded us that our faith "does not repeal or abolish" the laws and norms of the world in which we make our earthly pilgrimage — we Catholics insist more and more on what historian Leslie Woodcock Tentler has called "Catholic difference."

We have come to be intoxicated by being different, standing apart, and the idea that the world is out to get Catholics.

It was not always this way. Vatican II itself proved that while the world is not the same as the Church, the Church can and must see the world as a partner.

The world is the field of salvation given to the church (Matthew 13:38).

A sign of contradiction

A temptation to stand apart from the world has always dogged the Church. The last 40 years have seen Catholics succumb thoroughly to that temptation, desiring to be a "sign of contradiction."

That phrasing — "sign of contradiction" — deserves particular attention. We find it in the Gospel of Luke (2:34) and in the Acts of the Apostles (28:22).

But the phrase came into its recent popularity during the John Paul II papacy. He used the phrase as early as a 1979 Angelus message, three months after his election.

But Pope John Paul began to speak of Catholics as a sign of contradiction to the world with considerable frequency after 1987.

A quick search of the Vatican website discloses 45 uses of the phrase "sign of contradiction" during the John Paul II papacy, 39 of which came in 1987 or later.

The Seventh General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops which took place in October 1987 may well have been the turning point that gave so much life to that oppositional, "sign of contradiction" narrative that we live with even today.

Addressing "the vocation and mission of the lay faithful in the church and the world," the synod took up the most neuralgic questions that had dogged the church since Vatican II.

They included the role of women and the participation of laypeople more generally in church leadership.

In 1987, NCR described that synod as the "first clear test of strength between papal loyalists and post-Vatican II church leaders" — we might say, between those who preferred to restrain the Council's reforms and those who intended to press them forward.

Looking back, it seems clear that those who preferred to restrain the Council prevailed, and something shifted in the church after the 1987 synod.

The influence of leaders like Milwaukee's Archbishop Rembert Weakland and Chicago's Cardinal Joseph Bernardin waned.

Others like Boston's Cardinal Bernard Law and New York's Cardinal John O'Connor ascended, and the overall trajectory of the U.S. bishops has traced the path of their influence since 1987.

It seems inescapable that under Pope John Paul the church began to embrace its identity as a "sign of contradiction," a church in opposition to the world. Read more

• Steven P. Millies is professor of public theology and director of The Bernardin Center at Catholic Theological Union in Chicago.

Faith is our experience of God and belief is our attempt to express that experience in words and symbols.

When we attempt to describe our experiences of God, we necessarily express ourselves in the symbols, words, and rituals that are products of our culture.

All of our concepts and all of our experiential interpretations are shaped to a great extent by the culture and the language out of which they emerge.

There is no belief without culture; but there can be a culture without belief. This, of course, is the situation in which many people find themselves today: in a belief desert.

Right now a lot of my friends are talking about the Pew Research Center's recent report "Modeling the Future of Religion in America".

That September 13th report predicts that, if current religious membership trends continue, Christians could make up less than half of the US population within a few decades.

It estimates that in 2020, about 64% of US Americans were Christian but that by 2070 that figure could well be at about 54% or lower.

The rise of the "nones"

The group that continues to expand is what we call the religious "nones" - those people who, when asked about their religious identity, describe themselves as atheists, agnostics or "nothing in particular."

Researchers suggest that the United States may very well be following the path taken, over the last 50 years, by many countries in Western Europe, countries that once had overwhelmingly Christian majorities but no longer do.

In Great Britain, for example, the "nones" had already surpassed Christians; and they became the largest group in 2009.

In the Netherlands, the Christian exodus accelerated in the 1970s. Today about 47% of Dutch adults say they are Christian. And in Belgium, where I currently live, we have a population of about 11.58 million.

Just under 60% say they are Christian (most of them Roman Catholic) but less than 5% of them go to church regularly. Many unused churches are being converted into apartments, stores, bars, and restaurants.

Some observers blame secularisation for our current situation.

As a historical theologian, I understand the process of secularisation; but blaming secularisation is far too simple.

As my friend and Leuven graduate, Ron Rolheiser, often observed, "Bad attitudes towards the Church feed off bad Church practices."

For example: Catholic teaching still forbids women from becoming deacons, priests, bishops, cardinals or popes, misinterpreting Jesus' and his disciples' maleness as sanctioning an all-male liturgy and clergy. (Of course there were women disciples and women apostles.)

The Church also condemns homosexual acts as a sin and considers gay individuals as "intrinsically disordered."

People lose interest in institutional religion when they find that the Church's expressions of belief and what they hear from the pulpit no longer resonate with their minds, their hearts, and contemporary life experience.

When a religion speaks more in the name of authority than with the voice of compassion, it becomes meaningless.

Moving our spiritual journey forwards

We need to find ways to understand the Divine presence, not "up there" or "out there" but "here and now" at the center of all reality, because that is where we live, love, and think.

Perhaps we need to disconnect regularly from our cellphones and drop our earbuds. We need meditation times. We need a truly contemporary spirituality.

Animated by the life, message, and spirit of Jesus, we can then move ahead in our life journeys and accompany others in their own life journeys.

There are good examples if we look closely.

A Catholic pastor, whom I visited this summer, holds contemporary faith discussions in his home. He invites young women and men in their twenties and thirties to share, discuss, and reflect together with him about their faith and their life experiences.

Some other priests whom I know, and a good handful of bishops, are trying to "rebuild the church" by returning to a 1950's style Catholicism.

They now have Latin Masses, done with their backs to the congregation. Many of these are also contemporary book-banners. History warns us, of course, that people who ban books also ban people.

A healthy spiritual journey moves forwards not backwards.

Nostalgia is fun for a while, but there is no virtue in turning-back the clock. To become a religious child again would mean to abandon the capacity to think and make one's own judgments on the basis of critical principles.

That is why the upsurge of fundamentalism today is so dangerous. It is a narrow and closed vision, which most-often nurtures fear and aggression.

Valuing the past, but not living in the past

Thinking about our human life journey, I have always been greatly concerned about education. We must insist that broad-based and honest information be passed on to the next generation.

But I am particularly concerned about the formation of teachers.

Most students who fall in love with learning do that not because of their instructional materials and school curriculum but because they encountered a teacher who encouraged them to think - to reflect on life, to ask questions, and to search for answers.

When pondering our belief today we need to hear and to help people hear the "call" of the Sacred. We do this by interpreting and thereby re-creating the meaning and power of religious language.

The truly contemporary believer has one foot anchored in contemporary life and religious consciousness and the other in historical critical consciousness. We value the past but we don't live in the past.

Our communities of faith — our churches — should be centers of excellence where people can speak courageously about their awareness of the Divine Presence and where continuing dialogue and collaboration are patterns of life.

When we explore our belief - when we reflect in depth about our faith experiences - we necessarily express ourselves in the symbols, words, and rituals which are products of our culture. We also look for resonance and dialogue with tradition: with the theological expressions of earlier cultures.

Truly authentic Christian belief, of course, can never be simply the expression of one's individual and subjective experience. We are a community of believers - a faith community. We need each other.

Expressions of belief are the result of deep reflection about my faith experience, your own faith experience, and the faith experience of the community. As I told one of my bishop friends: "We need you but you also need us!"

Belief relies on culture but can never become locked within a particular culture. Nor can it just unthinkingly venerate any particular culture. Some Roman Catholic Church leaders, for instance, are locked in a late medieval culture and still dress and think that way.

Nevertheless, when belief becomes so locked within a particular culture that it is hardly distinguishable from it, we are on the road to idolatry.

Christian belief, because its focus is on what lies within and yet beyond our culture, is continually engaged in critical reflection and critique of the contemporary and previous cultures. Critical thinking is a Christian virtue. Growth is part of life.

And so we continue our journey.

• John Alonso Dick is a historical theologian and former academic dean at the American College, KU Leuven (Belgium) and professor at the KU Leuven and the University of Ghent. His latest book is Jean Jadot: Paul's Man in Washington (Another Voice Publications, 2021).
• First published in La-Croix International. Republished with permission.

The biggest religious stories of our times—the stories of retreat and resurgence—are both outworkings of the Reformation.

Retreat

The industrialised, liberal West is living through an epochal, unprecedented wave of secularization.

We've had several centuries of increasingly nominal religious adherence, punctuated by revivals, but our modern phenomenon—of rapidly growing swathes of society claiming that they have no religion—is new.

This isn't because religion has collapsed intellectually: the purely intellectual case against Christianity looked considerably stronger in 1900 than it does now, and in any case, we've surely learned by now that intellectual arguments don't have much purchase on how we actually live our lives.

Instead, it has collapsed morally.

In the wake of World War II, our culture has become deeply committed to humanist ethics, to the point where it neither needs nor especially values religious ones any more.

Once the most potent moral figure in the Western imagination was Jesus. Now it is Hitler, who taught our age what absolute evil is.

But that humanist ethic is built on the moral bedrock of Christian and Jewish ethics, which assume—unlike, say, ancient Rome—that slavery and cruelty are bad, and that compassion and human equality are good.

So we are abandoning our inherited religious culture because it doesn't live up to its own values, and we're doing so using the tools that that culture itself has taught us.

That is, in effect, a re-run of the Reformation.

And like the original Reformation, the outcome hangs in the balance.

Is this a case of a revolution eating itself, a self-destructive pursuit of impossible purity?

Or is it a re-formation, an authentic attempt to lay hold of what was truest about the faith we've always held?

Or both?

Then there is resurgence

For half a century, two very different religious forces have been sweeping across the globe.

Jihadist Islam might look like the Reformation's heir: public, attention-grabbing, focused on political power, male-dominated, ready to use violence and to celebrate martyrdom.

But we cannot map Christianity's conflicts easily onto Islam, with its own distinct deep logic and culture.

But Pentecostal, renewalist Christianity—chiefly but not entirely Protestant—is something else: usually apolitical, shunning a public role, unstructured and informal, often spreading through family networks and women's influence.

While jihadism has been transfixing the world, Pentecostalism has quietly become the religion of half of Africa, a quarter of Latin America, and rapidly growing populations in East Asia before outsiders have really noticed.

It has done it by offering, not revolution tomorrow, but salvation and spiritual transformation for individuals here and now.

So a new religious movement is preaching a radically simplified and democratized gospel of salvation, promising to restore Christianity to its ancient origins and in the process creating something new.

That, too, is a re-run of the Reformation. Continue reading

• Image: MentalFloss

Basically, it's a system of principles that guides human life in accordance with our nature and our good, insofar as those can be known by natural reason.

It thereby promotes life the way it evidently ought to be, based on what we are and how the world is, from the standpoint of an intelligent, thoughtful, and well-intentioned person.

It's much the same, at least in basic concept, as what classical Western thinkers called life in accordance with nature and reason, and the classical Chinese called the Tao (that is, the "Way").

We might think of it as a system that aims at moral and social health and well-being—which, like physical health, can at least in principle be largely understood apart from revelation.

For that reason, natural law has seemed to many Catholic thinkers the obvious basis for a society that would be pluralistic but nonetheless just, humane, and open to the specific contributions of Christianity.

There's something to that view. Grace completes rather than replaces nature, so natural law includes basic principles of Christian morality.

Also, political life depends on discussion and willing cooperation based on common beliefs. It would be best if those beliefs reflected the whole truth about man and the world—and politics were therefore Catholic—but people who run things today don't accept that and don't seem likely to do so any time soon.

Even so, it might be possible for a governing consensus to form around the principles or at least concept of natural law.

The idea of government in accordance with man's nature and natural good could then give discussion a reference point and some degree of coherence even though disagreements over important issues would remain. Continue reading

Sources:

• The Catholic World Report, from an article by James Kalb, a lawyer, independent scholar, and Catholic convert who lives in Brooklyn, New York.
• Image: The Evening, Caspar David Friedrich, Wikimedia Commons.

The Bible is extremely weird in places: monsters with horns on their horns, men wrestling with angels, devils entering pigs, floods covering the whole Earth, people rising from the dead. For some, this weirdness is its very weakness.

Such stuff obviously couldn't have really happened. It's just fiction, they scoff angrily, dismissing the whole thing as rubbish. But I often find the weird bits the best.

Why can't the imagination be used to tell the truth - maybe not empirical truth, but something else. A truth about the human condition perhaps.

Saturday is the 50th anniversary of Doctor Who. And tonight's birthday show, The Day of the Doctor, continues the story of a man/god (a deus homo, in Anselm's words), aided by various companions, all seeking to save humanity from various dark catastrophes - often from those sinister religious fundamentalists, the Daleks, and their cult of Skaro. Continue reading.

Giles Fraser is priest-in-charge at St Mary's Newington in south London and the former canon chancellor of St Paul's Cathedral.

Source: Loose Canon, The Guardian

Image: The Guardian

However, outside of Europe, modernity is emerging without secularism. In modernised India for example the organisation of public space and the place of religion in it is quite different. The historian Dipesh Chakrabarty has suggested that Indian history challenges western conceptions at their core. Given that India became "modern" without it secularism, do we in fact need the concept of "secularism" at all?

While religious experience and practice seemed to be declining in many parts of the world there was no need to question western presumptions, says Lois Lee. The the impact of the realisation that decline in religion is not inevitable is hard to overstate. "It amounts to a dethroning of one of the longest-held and deepest-seated aspects of modern understandings and identities. It has led to one of the most profound shifts in general and academic thought about what modernity means and how it can be conducted most progressively," she says.

Read Lois Lee in the Guardian

Image: The Guardian

Fr Michael MacGreil told the Irish Catholic that with the current state of religion in the world and the advance of secularisation, religions "cannot afford the luxury of not coming together".

MacGreil said he would like to see more serious religious correspondents in the media.

"There are no real religious issues being discussed in mainstream media. There is a real danger that by not discussing religion at all, people are rejecting religion out of ignorance and are suffering from spiritual malnutrition".

He said the establishment of a General Ecumenical Council "would herald a very important step in the revival of religion, and thereby, the enhancement of the quality of life of all the people. It would also open the way for effective Christian-Jewish-Muslim dialogue, which I believe is essential for the future of world justice and peace."

"I am looking forward to the day when a Christian Council comes together, and in the long-term a council that includes Christians, Jews and Muslims coming together, for the good name of religion," he said.

Sources

• The Irish Catholic