The Bishop of Bruges, Belgium, Mgsr. Jef De Kesel, was reported by the Dutch website,
Rknieuws.net, as offering the following grim prognosis on the strategy of "openness to the modern world" set by Vatican II (translation by
In Caelo):
The renewal that the Council had heralded so promising, has not come to pass, at least not to the scale that people had imagined. The Council pleaded for a greater openness to modern culture. And rightly so. But modern culture unavoidably means a secular culture and a secular culture equally unavoidably means a non-Christian culture. That is something that the Council and the following post-conciliar renewal has insufficiently recognised. On the contrary, it sooner thought that openness to modern culture would lead to a return to an admittedly modern, but yet also Christian culture. Which did not happen. Which obviously did not happen. A much more fundamental process of change in western culture was what it was about. It was not, and still is not only about a Church which was to adapt to the new culture. It was about this culture, as a culture, bidding farewell to Christianity. And for Christianity this does not mean the end, but the end of a status that it had had here for centuries: that of a cultural religion, the religion that grounded culture and held it together and was therefore universally recognised and accepted. The Council itself could do nothing about this process of change, which was not on the agenda of the Council. It is a process of change that started long before the Council and which continued after the Council. The question remains not so much how the Church should continue to adapt to modern culture, but what it means to be Church in a modern and therefore thoroughly secular, non-Christian world.
We continue to think that, if the Church would reach out to modern culture, that that culture would once again stand up for her. We are still searching for the adapted liturgy of the new language which would finally solve the problem of the loss of relevance of Christianity. But it remains to be seen if we will ever find it. In that way we keep on suffering from a fundamental and unspoken frustration in our pastoral work, our way of being Church and of Church renewal.
It is not right that a Church which consistently modernises would again convince everyone. It is hard and painful to accept that the Gospel is no longer considered relevant for everyone. A Church that is more consistently adapted to modernity will not lead to a return to the past. It will never again be like the past. In a lengthy process of which Vaticanum II was merely a symptom, the west had not only bid farewell to a certain unadapted form of Christian, but has Christianity steadily ceased to be the cultural religion of western civilisation.
[Hat tip to Pascal at Rorate Caeli]
About as concise and accurate a summation as I've heard uttered by a leader. Encouragingly forthright summation of a discouraging situation.
ReplyDeleteIt sounds to me like the Bishop of Bruges may have been reading his Rahner.
ReplyDeleteLike Rahner, he says that the Church must accept its diminished status in secular society. Like Rahner, he suggests that our “fundamental and unspoken frustration” as Catholics stems not from our marginalization and growing impotence within the culture, but from our refusal to accept that marginalization, which, in Rahner’s words, is a “must,” in the same sense that the crucifixion was a “must,” and that the “the poor you have always with you” is a “must”.
Msgr De Kesel concludes that “a Church that is more consistently adapted to modernity will not lead to a return to the past.” Rahner would certainly agree. But the devil is in the details.
For Rahner, that “more consistent adaptation” would result in the blurring of lines within the Church: “the Church of the diaspora, if it is to remain alive at all, will be a Church of active members, a Church of the laity: a laity conscious of itself as bearing the Church in itself, as constituting her, and not simply being an object for her, ie, the clergy, to look after.” Along with its expanded job description of “ecclesiastical duties”, the New Laity would have “rights” – they would certainly not be “people to whom orders are given . . . and who are expected to count it an honour to be allowed to do something for the hierarchical Church, meaning the clergy.” For shame, in this day and age! Rahner’s Church of the Diaspora might be a church run along the lines of, say, the New York State legislature, with the pope as governor.
Of course, none of this is to negate the fundamental insight that the Church is approaching a state of diaspora even in the land of purple mountains and fruited plains. Further, it is not to say that De Kesel would agree with Rahner point by point on this subject. It is only to suggest that we are in a very tricky area here, and I am not exactly sure what Msgr De Kesel is getting at.
Ralph,
ReplyDeleteIt would be a mistake to think that Bp De Kesel has any sort of traditionalist sympathies. As New Catholic reported over at Rorate Caeli some time back, De Kesel once "placed celibacy and the status of women within the church under debate," and also "sees the church as blind to the suffering of abused victims."
You may be right, then, that he may have been reading his Rahner. It is interesting, nonetheless, that his assessment of the renewal heralded by Vatican II almost could have been written by a traditionalist.
Philip,
ReplyDeleteThe definitive event in the Roman Empire's history viz the Church was the act of making Her legal, but it was preceded by various other events. Is the good bishop asserting that we are already in a post-Christian world and that therefore:
1) we need to behave like missionaries instead of stewards?
or
2) we must accept that Christianity is less relevant to the world, regardless of how much we want the situation to be otherwise? (To use an analogy, the Church is no longer "first wife"?)
or
3) post-Christianity, like pre-Christianity, is only a passing fad, to be endured like a two-year-old temper tantrum;
or
4) the reason that the Council's renewal remains unfinished is that we've switched patients, as it were, now doing surgery on a corpse: we were trying to enact reform to become more meaningful to the world of the semireligious, but our world is now profoundly antireligious?
God bless,
Chris
Good information, PP. Still, I disagree a bit. The whole point for me is that anyone can remark upon what should be obvious, that Catholicism is being marginalized by contemporary culture, and that the pressure of that marginalization acts as de facto diaspora, in which Catholic unity weakens, and finally dissipates.
ReplyDeleteHaving made that observation, however, do they regard it as good news? Do they intend to use it as a basis for pushing upon the remnant all the tawdry, still-unrealized "reforms" of the post V2 miasma? That was surely Rahner's intention. After all, for him, most of the saints in heaven will be protestants, pagans, and atheists who have gotten there by means of the Invincible Ignorance bullet train.
But MacIntryre's, or Fellay's reactions to the marginalization and de facto diaspora would be quite different.
That's why I wonder if this Whig-Augustinian thing is quite the right template for the current situation.
In any event, thanks for the great book recommendations of the last couple weeks.
"Whig Augustinian" ... Nice.
ReplyDeleteMore than meets the eye, it seems. A good example if how hyper-complex things get in these confused times.
ReplyDelete