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Church and Culture: Protestant and Catholic Modernities

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2024

Anthony J. Carroll SJ
Anthony J. Carroll SJ*
Affiliation:
Heythrop College, University of London. Heythrop College
*
Kensington Square, London W8 5HQ, Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

This article reviews the church and culture relationship developed in Gaudium et Spes and Lumen Gentium and proposes a Catholic account of modernity as a way in which the contemporary mission of the church in today's culture can be creatively and faithfully carried forward. After an initial outlining of the definitions of church and culture proposed by the Vatican documents, I then go on to position my proposal of a Catholic modernity in relation to some important current accounts of the church and culture relationship that tend towards a rejection of secular culture. I argue that Protestant accounts of modernity have dominated in philosophical and sociological theories and draw on my previous work on Max Weber to illustrate the significance of this for developing a Catholic account of modernity. I conclude by sketching some of the important issues which would need to be addressed in formulating a systematic account of a Catholic modernity.

Keywords

CatholicProtestantCultureModernityVatican II
Type
Original Articles
Information
New Blackfriars , Volume 90 , Issue 1026 , March 2009 , pp. 163 - 177
Copyright
© The author 2009. Journal compilation © The Dominican Council/Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2009

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References

1 See Taylor, Charles, A Secular Age (Cambridge, Mass., and London, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007) p. 29Google Scholar.

2 Cf. Oviedo, Lluis, ‘Should we say that the Second Vatican Council has failed?’, Heythrop Journal, Vol. 49, No 5, September 2008, pp. 716–730CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 For some background to the concept of culture and its relation to theology, see Heythrop Institute for Religion, Ethics and Public Life, On the Way to Life: Contemporary Culture and Theological Development as a Framework for Catholic Education, Catechesis and Formation (London, CES, 2005)Google Scholar Part I; and Tanner, Kathryn, Theories of Culture. A New Agenda for Theology (Minneapolis, Fortress Press, 1997) pp. 3–58Google Scholar. See also Niebuhr, H. Richard, Christ and Culture (New York, Evanston, and London, Harper and Row, 1951)Google Scholar.

4 “bona naturae valoresque colendo” GS 53. All quotes from Vatican I and II documents are taken (with minor modifications of the English translation) from Tanner, Norman P. SJ, (ed.), Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils. Vol. II (Trent–Vatican II) (London and Washington, Sheed and Ward and Georgetown University Press, 1990)Google Scholar.

5 “sensu generali indicantur omnia quibus homo multifarias dotes animi corporisque perpolit atque explicat.”Ibid., 53.

6 The development of an ecological awareness and of the term “ecological conversion” is one which has emerged after the Second Vatican Council especially in the conferences and writings of the late Popes Paul VI and John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI. I am grateful to Peter J. Conley for making me aware of this increasingly important issue in papal social teaching.

7 “ipsum orbem terrarium cognitione et labore in suam potestatem redigere studet.”Ibid., 53.

8 “vitam socialem, tam in familia quam in tota consortione civili, progressu morum institutorumque humaniorem reddit.”Ibid., 53.

9 “denique magnas experientias spirituales atque appetitiones decursu temporum in operibus suis exprimit, communicat atque conservat, ut ad profectum multorum, quinimmo totius generis humani, inserviant.”Ibid., 53.

10 Cf. GS, 57.

11 Cf. GS, 58.

12 Cf. First Vatican Council, Chapter IV., On Faith and Reason.

13 Cf. GS, 59.

14 O'Donovan, Oliver, Common Objects of Love: Moral Reflection and the Shaping of Community (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2000) pp. 24, 63Google Scholar.

15 Markus, Robert A., Christianity and the Secular (Notre Dame, Indiana, University of Notre Dame Press, 2006) pp. 65–66Google Scholar.

16 Markus, op cit., p. 91.

17 LG, 5.

18 LG, 1.

19 LG, 2–5.

20 “De indole eschatologica ecclesiae peregrinates eiusque unione cum ecclesia coelesti”. LG, chapter 7.

21 LG, chapter 3.

22 See LG, 31.

23 For an analysis of the various dimensions to the Vatican II understanding of the church, see Dulles, Avery, Models of the Church (Expanded Edition, New York, Doubleday, 2002)Google Scholar.

24 This seems to me to be the attitude behind Tracey Rowland's interesting account of Vatican II in Culture and the Thomist Tradition: After Vatican II (London, Routledge, 2003). Even the political theology of Oliver O'Donnovan, which attempts to provide a theological account of political authority, leaves insufficient theological room for secular culture, though, unlike John Milbank, he does find a positive theological place in his account of the Kingship of Christ for the secular as the place-holder for the necessary social space required for the church to accomplish its mission. See O'Donnovan, Oliver, The Desire of the Nations. Rediscovering the Roots of Political Theology (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press) p. 146Google Scholar. For a critical reading of O'Donovan's work, see McEvoy, James Gerard, ‘A Dialogue with Oliver O'Donovan about Church and Government’, Heythrop Journal, Vol. 48, No 6, November 2007, pp. 952–71CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

25 See Anthony J. Carroll,,Religious Symbols in Public Institutions', The Way, 43, 80–93; Anthony J. Carroll, ‘Secularisation and European Identity’, Institute Series 1, Heythrop, pp. 25–39.

26 See Prothero, Stephen, Religious Literacy. What Every American Needs to Know-And Doesn't (New York, Harper One, 2007) pp. 1–25Google Scholar.

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28 For an excellent interpretation of GS and its prior schemas which argues that this document represents a paradigm shift in the relation between the Catholic Church to modernity seeing this new relation as one of dialogue rather than the former condemnation, see James McEvoy, ‘Church and World at the Second Vatican Council: The Significance of Gaudium et Spes’, Pacifica, 19, Issues 1, February 2006, pp. 37–57.

29 For an analysis of the use of the term “world” in GS, see Nirappel, Antony, ‘Towards the Definition of the term “World” in “Gaudium et Spes”’, Ephemerides Theologicae Lovanienses, Tomus 48, 1972, pp. 89–126Google Scholar.

30 See Heythrop Institute for Religion, Ethics and Public Life, On the Way to Life: Contemporary Culture and Theological Development as a Framework for Catholic Education, Catechesis, and Formation (London, Catholic Education Service, 2005) pp. 39–41Google Scholar.

31 For a fuller discussion of this point, see my Protestant Modernity. Weber, Secularisation, and Protestantism (Scranton and London, University of Scranton Press, 2007)Google Scholar.

32 The German word used here by Weber is “Entzauberung”, which literally means ‘de-magification.’ It is used by Weber to signify the elimination of magic from the world by scientific rationality.

33 See Protestant Modernity, pp. 107–12 and 167–76.

34 See Taylor, Charles, Sources of The Self. The Making of Modern Identity, Cambridge (Cambridge University Press, 1989) pp. 211–47Google Scholar.

35 Blackbourne, David, The Long Nineteenth Century. 1780–1918, London (Fontana Press, 1997) p. 293Google Scholar.

36 O'Malley, John, Trent And All That. Renaming Catholicism in the Early Modern Era (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2000) p. 3Google Scholar.

37 See O'Malley, pp. 126–34.

38 O' Malley, p. 15.

39 See O' Malley, p. 27.

40 The more recent theories of “confessionalisation” and “social disciplining” have done much to recast some of these one-sided views of Catholicism. See, for example, Reinhard, Wolfgang, ‘Gegenreformation als Modernisierung? Prologomena zu einer Theorie des konfessionellen Zeitalters’, in Archive for Reformation History, vol. 68, 1977, 226–52CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and ‘Was ist katholische Konfessionalisierung?’ in Die katholische Konfessionalisierung: Wissenschaftliches Symposium der Gesellschaft zur Herausgabe des Corpus Catholicorum und des Vereins für Reformgeschichte, 1993, (ed.) Wolfgang Reinhard and Heinz Schilling (Gütersloher Verlagshaus and Münster, Aschendorf, 1995) pp. 419–52. See also O' Malley, op cit., pp. 108–17.

41 See Wolfgang Reinhard, 1977, pp. 231, 240. Here Reinhard is drawing on earlier work produced by the English historian Evennet, H.O. in his The Spirit of the Counter Reformation (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1951) pp. 3, 20Google Scholar.

42 It should be noted that there has been some interest in the Baroque period in the social sciences, however this has been mainly to compare crises in the late seventeenth-century with crises in late modernity, rather than to consider the importance of Catholicism as a confessional influence on modernity See Buck-Glucksmann, Christine, La raison baroque, Baudelaire à Benjamin (Paris, Galilée, 1984)Google Scholar.

43 Casanova, José, Public Religions in the Modern World (Chicago, Chicago University Press, 1994)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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45 See Norris, Pippa and Ingelhart, Ronald, Sacred and Secular. Religion and Politics Worldwide (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

46 See Jenkins, Philip, The Next Christendom. The Coming of Global Christianity (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2002'CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

47 See Drury, M.A., “Anti-Catholicism in Germany, Britain, and the United States: A Review and Critique of Recent Scholarship', in The American Society of Church History, vol. 70, No. 1, March 2001, pp. 98–131CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

48 See Ludger Honnefelder, ‘Die ethische Rationalität des mittelalterlichen Naturrechts. Max Webers und Ernst Troeltschs Deutung des Mittelalterlichen Naturrechts und die Bedeutung der Lehre vom natürlichen Gesetz bei Thomas von Aquin’, in Schluchter, Wolfgang (ed.) Max Webers Sicht des okzidalen Christentums (Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp, 1988) pp. 254–75Google Scholar.

49 See Giuseppe Alberigo (ed.) History of Vatican II, vol. V, “Transition to a New Age” (New York, Orbis Books, and Peeters, Leuven, 2006) pp. 573–644.

50 On this issue, see James McEvoy, ‘Church and World at the Second Vatican Council’, and Antony Nirappel, ‘Towards the Definition of the Term “World” in “Gaudium et Spes”’op. cit.

51 See Malley, John W. O', The First Jesuits (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1994) pp. 46–47Google Scholar.

52 See Dupré, Louis, Passage to Modernity. An Essay in the Hermeneutics of Nature and Culture (New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1993) pp. 224–26Google Scholar.

53 On this point, see Charles Taylor, A Secular Age, especially Part I, ‘The Work of Reform’ in which he describes Protestant and Catholic sources of reform and discipline contributing to the emergence of our secular age of modernity.

54 For a critique of Charles Taylor's A Secular Age that argues in neglecting other accounts of modernity beyond the “North Atlantic World” he is unable to formulate even a Western account (as these have been shaped by other non-Western societies), see Hurd, Elizabeth Shakman, Political Theory, vol. 36, June 2008, pp. 490–91Google Scholar.