MODERN CULTURE is NOT NEUTRAL
Rev. James V. Schall:
[quote]
The study of Tracey Rowland on the relation of culture to Thomism and more particularly to the adequacy of the treatment of culture in
Gaudium et spes of Vatican II, however, causes me to reaffirm this position about incompatibility of modern culture and Catholicism but to look at its problematic in quite a new way. I understand that the
spirit of renewal has, in effect, insisted that the project be one, wherever possible, of accommodating Catholicism to modernity. It has not been seen, as perhaps it should have been, as a profound critique of modernity itself by Catholicism. Rowland shows quite clearly that serious deficiencies in intellectual acumen were present within Catholicism and in the minds of many fathers in Vatican II.
Gaudium et spes’ understanding of how its basic teachings related to a cultural milieu, infused, as it was, with unattended to and alien philosophic premises, was at least innocent, when not positively faulty and erroneous...
What is argued by Rowland is not that Catholic theological and philosophical principles are not in fact directly pertinent to the crisis of both liberalism and post-modernity, but that these principles have not been argued well within the Magisterium or by many of the theologians and philosophers who claim to be following its terms. Not realizing the depths to which a living culture can be penetrated by religious or philosophic principles or ways of acting that prevent any understanding of transcendent principles, an intelligent understanding of Catholicism, using such cultural principles, would be impossible.
The subsequent enthusiasm to
conform to or
open oneself to modern culture, so much associated with
Gaudium et spes, was not, therefore, a project without serious danger to any future of a Catholic culture, let alone to the proper understanding of Catholicism embedded within any culture, even those outside the modern Western orbit. These latter cultures are now themselves increasingly related to modern ideas and practices often summed up, rather naively, under the vague and over-used term
globalization. Hence, this analysis of culture has become not merely a problem of the Western tradition, but also it has become a missionary problem in which, as in the case, say, of liberation theology, its very terminology was rooted in this same philosophical problem of culture as articulated in specifically modern philosophy.
The central thesis of this most erudite and well-argued book is, contrary to many assumptions of the Fathers at Vatican II, that modern culture is
not neutral but replete with customs, laws, ideas, and assumptions that either are difficult or impossible to reconcile with classical Catholic orthodoxy. This conclusion means that the famous project of
opening the Church to specifically
modern culture did not and could not result in any new evangelization or success in making Catholicism more acceptable to the modern mind. In fact, this opening to modern culture undermined many of the basic assumptions by which understanding and living the faith was possible. The conversion did not go from modernity to Catholicism, but from Catholicism in modernity, even though many of the words used were traditional ones with a specific theological meanings if understood in their proper contexts.
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