Catholicism

Richard P. McBrien

• Publisher: HarperOne
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780062302168
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Dénominations chrétiennes

A new study edition of the classic that has sold over 150, 000 copies.

PART ONE

Human Existence

THE first theological question we ask ourselves is “Who am I?” or “Who are we?” It is precisely in our attempt to come to terms with the meaning of our own lives that we raise the question of God, of Christ, of Church, and of Christian moral behavior.

We raise the question of God because we seek the deepest and surest foundation of meaning that we can find.

We raise the question of Christ because we seek some concrete, personal, historical expression of that foundation of meaning. Christ is our way of getting in touch with God.

We raise the question of the Church because we seek some institutional and communitarian expression of Christ as the personification of ultimate meaning. The Church is our way of getting in touch with Christ.

And we raise the question of Christian existence because we seek some experiential verification of the meaning we embrace. Christian living is the way we express our relationship with the Church, with Christ, and ultimately with God.

But we start with the question of ourselves, with the question of human existence. It is, after all, we who have come to a belief in God, in Christ as the Word of God, and in the Church as the Body of Christ. It is we who seek to find meaning and order in our lives and in our world. Since all theological questions begin with us, as the ones who raise the questions in the first place, theology cannot afford to take for granted the questioner if it really hopes to understand both the questions we ask and the answers we have been fashioning in response.

Accordingly, chapter 3 offers a description of the human situation today, a situation which poses particular kinds of questions and demands particular kinds of answers. We live in a so-called modern world. (The word modern is used here in its conventional sense, and not by way of contrast with what some philosophers and theologians call the “postmodern” world.) In what does modernity consist, and how does it affect our self-understanding?

Chapter 4 explores the range of answers which have emerged in the modern world. Under the umbrella term of anthropology, the chapter considers in sequence the understandings of human existence which have been developed in the natural and social sciences, in philosophy, in theology, and in the official teachings of the Catholic Church.

Chapter 5 actually attempts a coherent theology of human existence (or theological anthropology) by examining the biblical, doctrinal, and theological meaning of the human person, and specifically an understanding of nature, grace, and Original Sin.

A theological anthropology sums up the whole of theology, for in our understanding of human existence we progressively articulate our understanding of God, of Christ, of redemption, of Church, of the moral and spiritual life. No aspect of theology is untouched by our anthropology. Therefore, no theology can begin without immediate attention to the question of human existence.

Nonspecialist readers (the majority, for whom this book is written) should be advised that chapters 4 and 5 are particularly difficult because of the complexity and multidisciplinary nature of the material. The fact that the material is also highly compressed compounds the problem. But the issues addressed in these two chapters are utterly basic, and one hopes that whatever extra energy and patience are expended in working through the material will have been worth the effort.

III

The Human Condition Today

“THE SIGNS OF THE TIMES”

Like most ecclesiastical declarations emanating from the Vatican (the tiny independent state which is home to the Catholic Church’s central administrative offices), the documents of the Second Vatican Council are known by the first two words in the original Latin text. Thus, the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church is called Lumen gentium (“Light of Nations”) and the Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation is called Dei verbum (“The Word of God”). But the conciliar documents are also identified by their general titles (the other designation given in the preceding examples).

The general title for the council’s only “pastoral” constitution is of particular significance. Known on the one hand as Gaudium et spes (“Joy and Hope”), it is also commonly cited as the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World. The preposition in is exceedingly important. The constitution is not about the Church and the modern world, but about the Church in the modern world. The former construction would have emphasized the separation of the Church from the world, as if the Church were somehow different from, even at odds with, the human community at large. The title that was adopted emphasizes the integration of Church and world. The Church is not the non-world. The Church is not something completely apart from the world. Rather, the Church is in the world, and the world is in the Church.

Even here, in so seemingly trivial a matter, one can perhaps appreciate a basic difference in the traditional theological approaches of Catholicism and much of Protestantism. As mentioned in chapter 2, Protestantism tends to emphasize the dialectical. Affirmation is set against negation, “Yes” against “No,” the divine against the human, the Church against the world. Catholicism, on the other hand, emphasizes the analogical. Realities are more similar than dissimilar. The Church and the world are more alike than different. In the words of the Pastoral Constitution: “In their proper spheres, the political community and the Church are mutually independent and self-governing. Yet, by a different title, each serves the personal and social vocation of the same human beings” (n. 76).

The Pastoral Constitution itself emerged from the deliberate collaboration of two of the most important Catholic leaders in the twentieth century, Pope John XXIII and Cardinal Leo-Jozef Suenens, Archbishop of Malines-Brussels in Belgium. On Christmas day, 1961, Pope John formally convoked the council in a constitution entitled Humanae Salutis (“Of Human Salvation”). The document used the phrase “signs of the times” (which had been previously limited, by reason of its biblical origins, to the frightening events that are to precede the end of the world) in an entirely optimistic sense. Pope John would employ the term in the same positive manner more than a year later in his encyclical Pacem in Terris (“Peace on Earth”). Developments are occurring in human history, he said, which the Christian ought not necessarily shrink from, fear, or resist. They are perhaps instruments of divine revelation. God may be summoning us to recognize new challenges and to devise new ways of meeting these challenges. God may be calling us to conversion in its deepest meaning, a change of mind and of heart (Mark 1:15).

“Indeed,” the pope wrote, “we make ours the recommendation of Jesus that one should know how to distinguish the ‘signs of the times’ (Matthew 16:4), and we seem to see now, in the midst of so much darkness, a few indications which augur well for the fate of the Church and of humanity.”

Soon after the pope’s official convocation of Vatican II, Cardinal Suenens issued a pastoral letter for the Catholics of his archdiocese on the state of the Church and the opportunities open to it. Pope John saw the letter and advised Suenens that it represented his own views exactly. The influence of the Suenens letter on the pope’s opening speech to the council on October 11, 1962, was pronounced. Pope John dismissed the worries of those “prophets of gloom, who are always forecasting disaster, as if the end of the world were at hand.” Divine Providence, he declared, is “leading us to a new order of human relations” in accordance with “God’s superior and inscrutable designs.” This new order is one founded on unity: the unity of the entire Church and of all humankind. The council, therefore, must be attentive to both kinds of unity. Its focus cannot be exclusively on the inner life of the Church.

Less than two months later, on December 4, 1962, Cardinal Suenens addressed the council as its first session (of four) moved toward adjournment. We need to do more, he urged his brother bishops, than examine the mystery of the Church as it is in itself (ad intra). We must also reflect on its relationship with the world at large (ad extra). Indeed, he proposed this as the basis for a restructuring of the council’s agenda. Commentators have interpreted Cardinal Suenens’s speech to have been a crucial turning point in the history of the council, and certainly for the genesis of the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World. He had submitted an advance copy of his text to the pope, whose health was now a matter of serious and widespread concern (he died the following June). The cardinal was called to the Vatican by Archbishop Angelo Dell’Acqua, of the Secretariat of State’s office, and informed that “Pope John fully approved [the] text. Indeed he had read it in bed and had added a few remarks of his own, writing them in the margin in Italian” (L.J. Suenens, Memories and Hopes, Dublin: Veritas, 1992, p. 87). The speech received the unanimous endorsement of the council, and in an address the next day Cardinal Montini of Milan (who would succeed Pope John to the papacy as Paul VI) gave his own full support to Suenens’s proposal.

And so a unique kind of ecclesiastical document was produced, a “pastoral constitution,” in which the Church is said to have the “duty of scrutinizing the signs of the times and of interpreting them in the light of the Gospel…. We must therefore recognize and understand the world in which we live, its expectations, its longings, and its often dramatic characteristics” (n. 4).

Again, the approach was thoroughly and distinctively Catholic. It bore a view of the world as having come from the creative hand of God, as having been redeemed and renewed by Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit, as embodying now the presence and activity of God (manifested in the “signs of the times”), and as being destined for eternal glory. Theologically, the Pastoral Constitution called for a “method of correlation,” that is, “of scrutinizing the signs of the times and of interpreting them in the light of the gospel” (n. 4).

But what are the principal characteristics of the modern world? What is the present human condition, of which the Church is an integral part and for which it has an abiding missionary responsibility?

THE MODERN WORLD

First, a word about the adjective modern and the notion of “modernity.” Both words are used here and throughout the book in their conventional senses, and not as some contemporary philosophers and theologians use them, that is, by way of contrast with “postmodern” and “postmodernity.” Modern consciousness, they insist, pins all its hopes on rational consciousness, as manifested especially in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. Postmodern consciousness, on the other hand, suspects the optimism concealed in Western notions of reason. Among the great pioneers of postmodernity (discussed in chapter 4) are Kierkegaard, Darwin, Marx, Freud, and especially Nietzsche. All challenged, in different ways, the illusion that reality is utterly manageable if only reason is free to act upon it. (See David Tracy, Plurality and Ambiguity: Hermeneutics, Religion, Hope, San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987.)

A World of Change

It has been pointed out that if the last fifty thousand years of human existence are divided into lifetimes of approximately sixty-two years each, there have been about 800 lifetimes. Of these 800, 650 were spent in caves. Only during the last 70 lifetimes has it been possible to communicate through the written word, and only during the last 6 lifetimes has the human community had access to the printed word. Only during the last 4 lifetimes have we been able to measure time precisely, and only in the last 2 have we had the use of an electric motor. And within the same lifetime, our own, we have seen part of the world pass successively from agriculture as the primary form of human labor, to the manual labor of factories, and then to the so-called white-collar labor of salespersons, administrators, educators, communicators, engineers, computer specialists, and so forth.

In the meantime the world’s population has experienced explosive, almost incomprehensible, growth over the past century. More than one hundred years ago only four cities had populations of a million or more. By 1900 there were 19; by 1960, 141. Just over ten years later the urban population had doubled again. By 1990 there were 351 cities with million-plus populations, including 140 in Asia, 53 in Europe, and 43 in North America.

The same kind of accelerated change has occurred in the area of transportation. In the year 6000 B.C. the camel caravan provided the fastest transportation over long distances: about eight miles per hour (what a moderately quick jogger covers in about the same time). It was not until about 1600 B.C. that, with the invention of the chariot, the speed of travel increased from eight to twenty miles per hour. This “record” was to stand for several thousand years. The first steam locomotive, introduced in 1825, reached a speed of only thirteen miles per hour, and the great sailing ships of the same period were half again as slow. Not until the nineteenth century, with improvements in the steam engine, did we attain speeds of 100 miles per hour. And it had taken the human race thousands upon thousands, even millions, of years to do it. What is perhaps more remarkable is that it then took only fifty-eight years to quadruple that limit, so that by 1938 planes were breaking the 400-MPH. figure. In another twenty-five years even that seemed modest, as the new jets doubled the mark. And then by the 1960s rockets approached speeds...