The Statement of Ed Balls and Post-Vatican II Evangelisation
Editorial FAITH Magazine May-June 2010 - Further Material
The Cultural Background
Post-1960s inculturation strategy
The vision of a renewed "English Catholicism", touched on by Cardinal Murphy-O'Connor in the debate on 2 March, has great strengths. Our very foundation in Pope Gregory's commission to St Augustine of Canterbury encouraged a degree of respect for and development upon the rites and buildings of the "angelic" pagan Angles whom the Pope had met in Rome. Moreover, the Church has a political dimension, and in a fallen world politics are rarely clear-cut. Although the Church's Magisterium is guided by the Holy Spirit, there is no guarantee that the prudential judgements made by those wielding authority in the Church will have a favourable outcome. The timing and manner of these judgements are open to question. We might think of the Pope's excommunication of Elizabeth I, the Cartesian-inspired, long-term rejection of science's impact upon metaphysics, the early 20th-century "Fortress Vatican" mentality, Pope Pius XIPs war-time pronouncements, the Dutch bishops' condemnation of Nazism, and of course modern bishops' dealings with those among their "sons" who have been involved in abuse.
The Second Vatican Council was concerned with our interaction with modern culture. In its opening speech Pope John XXIII affirmed beautifully that "that which most interests the Council is that the sacred deposit of Christian doctrine is safeguarded and taught in a more effective manner". In the last quarter of the 20th century Cardinal Hume brought his attractive spirituality, as well as his significant establishment links, to this task of inculturation. It is known that he was interested in moving the Church "centre-stage" in British society, and away from the partly Irish "ghetto" of the first half of the 20th century. His achievements in the 1990s in education and prison reform, as well as his wide popularity, were seen as partial successes in this regard.[3]
In further support of such an approach is the fact that much in modern British culture, and indeed state education, is good. The post-Enlightenment philosophical "turn to the subject" has brought to fruition good aspects of the Christian-inspired re-discovery of the "rights of man". The recognition of the value of each person's experience, the focusing upon individual I needs of school pupils, and the political fostering of certain rights for disabled people are encouraging examples.
The "anti-life mentality"
However, while the Church was seeking such harmonious developments another current swept across Western society in the wake of the 1960s. Pope John Paul II called it the "culture of death". This too was spurred on by Enlightenment thinking, though its philosophical roots, we would argue, go back to the dualism at the foundations of Western civilisation. George Weigel insightfully depicts the First World War as the "trapgate" of Europe's 20th-century "rage of self-mutilation".
As Pope Benedict has been bringing out with increasing clarity, the associated removal of the Christian God from popular discourse is radically undermining the Western social fabric. In this context our culture's positive values appear as parasites upon the dying Christian body politic. This was what Benedict meant when, in an address to an EU delegation, he laid the blame for this state of affairs on the modern inability to see traditional European values as "a coherent whole which is ordered and expressed historically on the basis of a precise anthropological vision".
At break-neck speed the family is being redefined; the Freudian will to pleasure is dethroning human life as the purpose of sex and of the universe. Millions of unborn babies are just the most obvious sacrifice to the new gods of this brave new world.
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