The Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World (Gaudium et Spes) was the only document of Vatican II which was born of the Council itself. It owed its origin to Cardinal Suenens’ speech during the first session calling for a schema examining the Church's relationship with the world (ad extra) which would compliment the constitution reflecting on the Church itself (ad intra).Footnote ¹ Initial discussion of the text during the third session of the Council was largely favourable, but many were critical. The text brought before the Fathers in the fourth session was much improved.

After an introductory section, the document is constructed in two parts: a general section consisting of four chapters, and a final section examining what were considered to be urgent problems. It is here that the question of culture is explored (53–62). The Fathers grounded their understanding of culture in the nature of the human person:

Gaudium et Spes develops this classical, Arnoldian, view of culture as self‐cultivation, ‘the best that has been thought and known in the world’,Footnote ² linking it with a more empirical sociological or ethnographical descriptive approach, as well as going on to acknowledge a ‘plurality of cultures’ existing side by side in the world (53). The following sections speak positively about cultural developments in the modern world which introduce a new age in human history, the progress of science and technology shaping the creation of mass culture and a new humanism (54–55), yet go on to warn that unchecked development can lead to an ‘undermining of the wisdom of the ancestors and [an] endangering [of] the native characteristics of peoples’, a blunting of our sense of wonder and a narrowing of vision in a purely secular humanism (56).

Gaudium et Spes goes on to offer a more theological understanding of culture, reflecting that the human task of building up the world is part of God's call to human beings (57) but emphasises that ‘the church, which has been sent to all peoples of whatever age and region, is not connected exclusively and inseparably to any race or nation’ (58). Taking up the theme of section 22: ‘Christ the Lord, Christ the new Adam, in the very revelation of the mystery of the Father and of his love, fully reveals the human being to himself and brings to light his high calling’ (Gaudium et spes, 22), a text which was to become central to the teaching of John Paul II, and to be quoted in many of his encyclical letters, the document offers an appraisal of the contribution of the church to culture. Here are the first intimations of the need for a profound dialogue between Church and culture which has become central to the task of the Church in the decades following the Council.

A companion document to Gaudium et Spes is the Decree on the Missionary Activity of the Church (Ad gentes). It was first presented to the Council Fathers during the third session of the Council on November 6^th, rather unusually by Paul VI himself who made history by participating on the floor of the Council as one of the Council Fathers, although no particular significance should be made of this for the document in question. It was, however, an embarrassment for the Pope that after two and a half days of discussion, the Fathers called for a drastic revision of the text, and, as was becoming customary, it was returned to a commission for rewriting. Underlying this unease was a feeling that the Council was not giving sufficient weight to the notion of mission that lay at the heart of the Church, and that the document concentrated too narrowly on an older emphasis on ‘mission territories’. A revised version was presented to the Fathers for four days of further discussion, breaking into the debate on the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World during the fourth session on October 1965, finally being ratified by the Fathers on the last formal session of the Council on December 7^th 1965.

Building on the insights of Lumen Gentium, promulgated the previous year, Ad gentes acknowledges the Church to be ‘the universal sacrament of salvation’,Footnote ³ and proclaims the pilgrim Church as ‘missionary by nature’,Footnote ⁴ but insists that this missionary endeavour must be based on a ‘profound interior renewal’.Footnote ⁵ An added emphasis on the role of the laity, already enshrined in chapter 2 of Lumen gentium, came to be included in the document at the last minute. The Latin American theologian, Leonardo Boff comments:

Ad gentes, echoing the discussion of inculturation in Gaudium et Spes, relates it specifically to missionary work. Gaudium et Spes and Ad gentes reveal two interrelated dialogues central to the theme, and we need to explore them both: a dialogue between Church and other religious traditions, and a more general dialogue between faith and particular societies.

The first and perhaps greatest example of inculturation is to be found in the transition of Christianity from the world of Judaism to the subtle complexities of the Greco‐Roman world. Far from being monolithic such inculturation represents an engagement with many cultures, as Gaudium et Spes makes clear. Taught by the Greek, Latin and Syriac Fathers the Church ‘learned early in its history to express the Christian message in concepts and language of different peoples and tried to clarify it in the light of the wisdom of their philosophies.Footnote ⁷ It was an attempt to adapt the Gospel to the understanding of all people and the requirements of the learned (Gaudium et Spes, 44). In the words of the Congregation for Catholic Education's 1990 document, Instruction in the Study of the Fathers of the Church in the Formation of Priests:

Such a transition ‘stimulated the fathers to deepen the faith and illustrate it rationally with the aid of the best categories of thought in the philosophies of their times, [a process giving birth] to theological science and defin[ing] some coordinates and norms of procedure’.Footnote ⁹ In the first place, the Fathers recognize the central role of Scripture interpreted by the Church's tradition. This remains a predominate norm ‘for judging human wisdom and distinguishing truth from error’.Footnote ¹⁰ This allows Christianity to acknowledge the genuine truth to be found in its interlocutor. As Augustine says in his De Doctrina Christiana:

This, in turn, allows Christianity to deepen its own understanding and to find new ways of articulating the faith ‘with an appropriate openness of spirit towards new needs and new cultural circumstances’.Footnote ¹² A final theme is the necessary acknowledgement of a appropriate agnosticism, which allows the recognition and honouring of mystery. Theologians were above all prayerful people ‘making use not only of the resources of reason, but, also, more properly, of the religious resources gained through their affective existential knowledge, anchored in intimate union with Christ, nourished by prayer and sustained by grace and the gifts of the Holy Spirit’.Footnote ¹³ These norms, fired in the crucible of the early Church, become the fundamental principles underlying and guiding the whole process of inculturation. Witness is more effective than mere words in so far as it gives flesh and blood to words, and grounds them in the heart.

The topic had already come to the fore as a central theme in Paul VI's first encyclical letter, Ecclesiam Suam (1964) in which the Pope calls for a dialogue with the world: ‘all things human are our concern. We share with the whole of the human race a common nature, a common life, with all its gifts and problems’ (97).Footnote ¹⁴ While recognizing the Church is not immune from the tidal wave of change transforming the world for good and ill, he stresses the fact that the Church cannot escape from the world for it ‘is deeply rooted in the world. [The Church] exists in the world and draws its members from the world. It derives from it a wealth of human culture’ (26). Dialogue calls first, however, for a striving ‘for clearer and deeper sense of self‐awareness, of its mission in the world remaining demands that they be extended to others and shared with others (64). This is also a process of ‘careful and attentive listening’: merely to remain true to the faith is not enough… [for] we believe that it is a duty of the Church at the present moment to strive toward a clearer and deeper awareness of itself and its mission in the world, and of the treasury of truth to which it is heir and custodian’ (18). Paul insists that:

Paul returned to the theme in what was possibly one of the best texts of his pontificate, the Apostolic Exhortation on Evangelization, Evangelii Numtiandi (1975).Footnote ¹⁵ While delicately expressing his esteem for non‐Christian religions as

he insists ‘the respectful presentation of Christ and his Kingdom is more than the evangelizer's right; it is his duty’ (80). Respect ‘for the religious and spiritual situation for those being evangelized’, ‘for consciences and convictions which must not be treated in a harsh manner’; ‘a concern not to wound’ remains the keynote (79). We must ‘transform culture from within’ (18).

A document from the Secretariat for non‐Christians, ‘The Attitude of the Church towards Followers of Other Religions’ (May 10^th 1984) develops the theme.Footnote ¹⁶ It collects together a series of positive references to other religions from the Council documents: in other religions, it finds ‘elements which are true and good’ (Optatum Totius, 16); ‘precious things both religious and human’ (Gaudium et Spes, 92); ‘seeds of contemplation’ (Ad Gentes, 18); ‘elements of truth and grace’ (Ad Gentes, 9); ‘seeds of the Word’ (Ad Gentes, 11, 15); ‘rays of the truth which illuminate all humankind’ (Nostra Aetate, 2).Footnote ¹⁷

This document goes on to outline seven different forms dialogue might take: ‘dialogue of life’ being ‘a manner of acting’, a courteous living side by side with others, ‘leaving room for the other person's identity, modes of expression and values’ (29) – one thinks particularly of the Cistercian monks at Tibhirine, Algeria, who were murdered in 1996; ‘dialogue in daily life’ represented by the Christian living out of gospel values in the ‘environment in which one lives and works’ (30); ‘dialogue of works’ in which we work together with others for humanitarian, social, economic or political goals (31); ‘collaboration’, working together for social justice (32); a theological ‘dialogue of experts’ (33); a deepening of such dialogue to the level of ‘comprehension’ leading to a mutual ‘understanding and appreciation of each other's spiritual values and cultural categories’ (34); and, in conclusion, ‘the dialogue of religious experience’ ‘ a sharing of prayer, contemplation, faith and duty, as well as their expressions and ways of searching for the Absolute’ (35).

This document has been taken up in and given further focus and depth in a later text from the Pontifical Council for Inter‐religious Dialogue, ‘Dialogue and Proclamation’ (May 19^th 1991).Footnote ¹⁸ Here we see how inter‐religious dialogue and culture might be understood to complement each other:

Of course, the Church does not stand outside this circle, and must be grateful for the necessarily abrasive criticisms of secular culture, as we have seen in recent years in, for example, the child abuse scandal. As the document continues: ‘through dialogue [Christians] may be moved to give up ingrained prejudices, to revise preconceived ideas, and even sometimes to allow the understanding of faith to be purified… their faith will gain new dimensions as thy discover the active presence of the mystery of Jesus Christ beyond the visible boundaries of the Church and of the Christian fold’ (49–50).

This esteem for those with whom we are in dialogue is already clear in John Paul II's first encyclical, Redemptor Hominis (1979). Grounding his thought firmly on the text of Gaudium et Spes, and quoting it frequently, he reveals his passionate concern for human dignity (12). While acknowledging progress, he identifies the dangers of modern society, standing forcefully against anything which diminishes what it means to be truly human: moral, economic, social, militaristic – ‘the “materialisms” of our age’. For John Paul, inculturation,Footnote ²⁰ the call to be ‘ever more human’ (Gaudium et Spes, 38), is rooted in the Incarnation and cannot be understood without it:

In his 1980 address to UNESCO in Paris John Paul develops a theme touched on only in passing in Redemptor Hominis, that of the relationship between being and having, familiar in the work of Gabriel Marcel.Footnote ²¹ This is central understanding of the role culture plays: ‘culture is the specific way of human existence… the human being lives a really human life thanks to culture… culture is that through which the human being as human, becomes more human, “is” more, has more access to being’ (6–7). What a human being has is subservient, merely relative, to who he or she is, important only in so far as such having contributes to a deeper awareness of being more fully human.

The Pope suggests that we can understand the meaning of culture only ‘through the complete human being, through the whole reality of his subjectivity. Culture is that point at which matter and spirit interpenetrate:

Without this constant play between the dialectic of spirit and matter we cannot adequate express or live out the true meaning of culture. For John Paul, there is a fundamental link between the message of Christ, which the Church lives out and proclaims, and the human being in his/her very humanity (10). The Pope is concerned at the apparent de‐humanization of human beings in an education which privileges the sphere of ‘having’ above that of ‘being’ seemingly inherent in ‘developing technological civilizations’ driven primarily by economic interests and which contribute ‘to a growing lack of confidence with regard to [our] own humanity’ (13).

It is the Church's mission to promote the search for truth which lies at the heart of the human quest: ‘the human being who “is more”, thanks to what s/he “has”, and to what s/he “possesses”, must know how to possess, that is, to order and administer the means s/he possesses, for his/her own good and for the common good’ (17). The Pope praises those who strive towards a disinterested pursuit of truth and the rich developments of modern science, a ‘historical process [which] has reached in our age possibilities previously unknown; it has opened to human intelligence horizons hitherto unsuspected’ (19). This remarkable scientific achievement, however, is not without its dangers when it can be manipulated to provide tools for inappropriate manipulation and destruction.

This is something developed a little more fully in John Paul II's reflection on the Church in Africa after the special Synod held about situation of African Christianity in 1995. The incarnation of the Word must be understood as: ‘a mystery which took place in history, in clearly defined circumstances of time and place, amidst a people with its own culture… [and that because the incarnation] was complete and concrete [it] was also an incarnation in a particular culture’.Footnote ²² Such a position involves both ‘insertion’ and ‘transformation’ (59). Following the logic appropriate to the mystery of redemption, the Pope claims that every culture ‘needs to be transformed by Gospel values in the light of the Paschal Mystery. It is by looking at the Mystery of the Incarnation and of the Redemption that the values and counter‐values of cultures are to be discerned’ and he goes on to say that ‘the Spirit, who on the natural level is the true source of wisdom of the peoples, leads the Church with a supernatural light into knowledge of the whole truth (61).Footnote ²³ This is a theme which reverberates throughout the writings of John Paul II. In his encyclical celebrating Cyril and Methodius he pointed out that these apostles of the Slavic nations wanted the one word of God ‘to be made accessible in each civilization's own form of expression’,Footnote ²⁴ just as in his address to the Aboriginal Peoples of Australia he emphasized that ‘Jesus calls you to accept his words and his values into your own culture’.Footnote ²⁵ The Pope sums up his position in his celebrated encyclical on Ecumenism; ‘by its nature the content of faith… must be translated into all cultures’.Footnote ²⁶

Cardinal Ratzinger, as he then was, considerably reinterpretes this theme in a series of papers which together must be regarded as something of a tour de force and represent his developing critique of what he later call ‘the dictatorship of relativism’.Footnote ²⁷ In a speech delivered in Hong Kong in March 1993,Footnote ²⁸ the Cardinal reveals his profound unease about such dialogue between cultures. He ponders the fundamental question, ‘Is there truth for man, truth which is accessible and belongs to everyone, or are we destined, through various symbols, ever just to catch a glimpse of a mystery which is never really unveiled to us?’ exploring how this might work out in language reminiscent of Romano Gaurdini:

Excepting only ‘the modern European concept of a culture in which culture appears as its own domain distinct from, or even in opposition to, religion’ he argues that religion provides ‘the determining core’ of culture. Thus it might seem that the attempt to implant Christian values into another cultural context will by removing from a culture the religion which begets it and replacing it with Christianity both are irreparably damaged. But the Cardinal also argues that all cultures are orientated to a ‘universal human disposition towards the truth’,Footnote ³⁰ and so:

This ‘common truth’ cannot be discovered by the individual in isolation; it belongs to a rich vein found only in the heart of community as it meets other cultures in the continuum of history:

Far from arguing that Christian faith lives parasitically, always taking its shape from the cultural milieu it inhabits, the Cardinal argues that is no such thing as ‘naked faith’, faith unclothed in culture for ‘God [has] bound himself to a history which is now also his and one which we cannot cast off’. Faith cannot exist in the abstract but creates a culture around itself, ‘a living and cultural community which we call “the people of God”‘ existing in history and having a history of its own.

‘The people of God’ is unique in so far as it is a community which also exists in different cultures allowing Christians ‘to live in two cultural worlds, his historic culture and the new one of faith, both of which permeate him’. Neither assimilates the one to the other; they exist in a state of creative and fruitful tension. For this reason, the Cardinal prefers to speak of ‘the meeting of cultures’ or ‘inter‐culturality’ rather than ‘interculturation’ for he argues that the concept of ‘a faith stripped of culture… transplanted into a religiously indifferent culture whereby two subjects, formally unknown to each other, meet and fuse’ is false. Christianity always meets the other as a fully shaped culture, purifying and being purified by the culture it encounters. Such a process is possible because ‘despite all the differences of his history and social constructs… human beings are themselves touched in the depth of his existence be truth’. As we journey through history, truth calls the human family to acknowledge and celebrate its essential unity. Cardinal Ratzinger does not underestimate the difficulty of the task. As he insists this cannot be something pursued merely as a scholarly endeavour, important as this remains, but ‘a process of lived faith is necessary which creates the capacity for encounter in truth’.

Cardinal Ratzinger brings to the fore a theme which is not absent from the previous documents I have examined: the central role played by conversion:

It would be simplistic to overlook the ‘negative factor in human existence’, the alienation which cuts human beings from the truth and divides them from one another. Joseph Ratzinger introduces a note of caution and further develops this in an address given to the presidents of the Doctrinal Commissions of the Bishops’ Conferences of Latin America in Guadalajara in 1996.Footnote ³¹ He rightly warns of the serious danger in a world challenged by relativism of misconstruing the meaning of dialogue: ‘in the relativist meaning, ‘to dialogue’ means to put one's own position, i.e. one's faith, on the same level as the convictions of others without recognizing in principle more truth in it than that which is attributed to the opinion of others’.Footnote ³² Cardinal Ratzinger argues, the post‐Enlightenment world fails to acknowledge the call to unity which belongs to the heart of each culture but instead accepts different cultures as discrete, complementary, or even contradictory, expressions of what it means to be human, but remaining equal in value. Christian values, in turn, are no longer lived out in the warp and weft of history and are reduced to personal idiosyncrasies belonging merely to the private sphere.

Cardinal Ratzinger, now Benedict XVI, completes his reflections on the relationship between faith and cultures by focussing particularly on the situation of Europe in four short but magisterial addresses: at the University of Regensburg;Footnote ³³ at the Collège des Bernardins,Footnote ³⁴ Paris; at Westminster Hall, London;Footnote ³⁵ and finally, at the Reichstag, Berlin.Footnote ³⁶

It is something of a shame that so many listeners to Benedict's reflection on faith and reason on his visit to Regensburg allowed themselves to be distracted by his most unfortunate remarks associating Islam with violence. The Pope might have done better to restrict his critique to his later attack on late mediaeval nominalist philosophy which discusses the irrationalism of a voluntarist position within Christianity in which we can know only God's will, a view which could be regarded as echoing Ibn Hazm's claim that ‘God is not bound even by his own word’. Benedict's point is that because we can acknowledge an appropriate dialogue between faith and reason, we can claim that ‘not acting reasonably is contrary to God's nature’ and thus ‘violence is [to be considered] incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the soul’.

For Benedict, ‘the encounter between the Biblical message and Greek thought did not happen by chance’; it is something integral to the gospel message itself, revealing ‘an intrinsic necessity of a rapprochement between Biblical faith and Greek inquiry’, He prioritizes in particular the Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures known as the Septuagint as ‘an independent textual witness and a distinct and important step in the history of revelation’ which binds Greek and Hebrew thought with an unbreakable bond, ‘an encounter of faith and reason’. Thus he can argue that:

While accepting willingly Benedict's criticism of, for example, von Harnack's call for the dehellenization of Christianity, and a return to the unadulterated ‘simplicity of the gospel’, and admiring his claim that we must challenge the claims of positivistic reason for ‘listening to the great experiences and insights of the religious traditions of humanity, and those of the Christian faith in particular, is a source of knowledge, and to ignore it would be an unacceptable restriction of our listening and responding, again’, I hazard the opinion that such a position surely does not need to be as tightly tied into the specific world of Greek inquiry as the Pope suggests. Benedict appears to elide, and thus to over‐simplify, the two stages of this complex inter‐cultural dialogue: the re‐envisioning of the Hebrew in terms of Greek culture, and a further transition from Greek into Latin. The English patristics scholar, G.L Prestige, makes an important point:

It remains legitimate to challenge Benedict's vision of the unity of all cultures. For both the Pope and for Newman religious truth must be approached in a spirit of homage:Footnote ³⁸ it is received. Yet even though adherents of a religious faith have the certitude (to use Newman's word) that they live in the truth, it is appropriate that such truth remains open to a constant process of testing, purification and re‐interpretation. Benedict seems to ignore the necessary element of the apophatic in any discourse about God. Dialogue with other cultures, and the possibility of expressing belief in other terms, hard though this might be, cannot be altogether ruled out.

In Paris (2009), the Pope, reflecting on the origins of western monasticism and its close relationship with the roots of European culture, sees the search for God as laid down in a path formed by ‘the shared word’, a word which makes us attentive to the mystery of God in God's very depths and attentive to one another. The culture of Monasticism was the ‘seeking [of] the definitive behind the provisional’.

Two further speeches complete this body of work: Benedict's address in Westminster Hall (2010), and his address to the Reichstag the following year. Both of these speeches invoke the claims of natural law as reflecting ‘the Catholic tradition [which] maintains that the objective morns governing right action are accessible to reason, prescinding from the content of revelation’. In Westminster the Pope shows his esteem for the British tradition of common law and points out that the Church's task then is not to propose concrete solutions, acts as a ‘corrective’, ‘to help purify and shed light upon the application of reason to the discovery of objective moral principles’. This demands a constant and ongoing dialogue between faith and reason at every level of national life. Benedict takes up the theme again in Berlin by addressing the question: ‘how do we recognize what is right?’. He points out that ‘the question of how to recognize what is truly right and thus to serve justice when framing laws has never been simple, and today in view of the vast extent of our knowledge and our capacity, it has become still harder’ and argues that the Christianity has never proposed a revealed law to the state, but has followed those philosophers who find the true sources of law in human nature and in reason. He reasserts the claims of natural law arguing that the human being is ‘not merely self‐creating freedom’, but ‘his will is rightly ordered if he respects his nature, listens to it and accepts himself for who he is, as one who did not create himself’. Benedict takes his stand on the fact that the idea of human rights, the idea of the equality if all people before the law, the recognition of the inviolability of human dignity rest on the conviction that there is a creator God, and that our ‘cultural memory is shaped by these rational insights’.

Pope Benedict offers an impressive case against the positivism which he considers to be undermining contemporary culture, but again his argument leave me hesitant. If we follow John Paul II in taking Gaudium et Spes 22 as our starting point, it is not simply in a rational code of ethics, however exalted, but it is in Christ that we discover our true humanity: ‘the risen Christ is the principle of Christian morality’.Footnote ³⁹ This morality is certainly consonant with, and far from contradicting, the natural law but remains always subject to the mystery of Christ. Benedict rather surprisingly reasserts that ‘ought’ follows from ‘is’ (agere sequitur esse), a thesis often dismissed in a post‐Kantian world as the naturalistic fallacy.Footnote ⁴⁰ Benedict's understanding of natural law appears to incline towards a somewhat dated and static rationality, an essentialism which disassociates it from the continuum of history and the tradition of Christian living. As James Keenan comments, even on the natural level:

Here we have a strong plea, in spite of Pope Benedict's reservations, to continue to engage in a profound dialogue between faith and culture shaped both by religion and by society, a dialogue about which the Church has reflected so creatively in the decades following Vatican II.