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22-02-2016 | Symposium: The Two Pluralisms: A New Paradigm, Part Two

Modernity, Pluralism, and Catholicism

Author: George Weigel

Published in: Society | Issue 2/2016

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Abstract

Over the past century and a quarter, the Catholic Church has passed through four phases in its response to modernity: rejection; the search for a modus vivendi; accommodation; and a critique of modernity from within. The net result of this development has been the recovery of the Church’s understanding of itself as an evangelical or missionary enterprise.

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The classic work here is Robert A. Graham, S.J., Vatican Diplomacy: A Study of Church and State on the International Plane (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959).

See Gertrude Himmelfarb, The Roads to Modernity: The British, French, and American Enlightenments (New York: Alfred A., Knopf, 2004).

See Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400–1580 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992).

See Michael Gross, The War Against Catholicism: Liberalism and the Anti-Catholic Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), and Owen Chadwick, A History of the Popes 1830–1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 254–265 and 285–303.

J.N.D. Kelly, The Oxford Dictionary of Popes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 308.

At one point in his brief exile, Pius IX became the first pope to set foot on sovereign American territory, when he visited U.S.S. Constitution, popularly known as Old Ironsides, which was then keeping a watch on European affairs at the Italian harbor of Gaeta. When the armed forces of the Risorgimento closed in on the remaining papal forces at the Porta Pia, Pius IX ordered his troops to fire one volley over the heads of their Italian foes “for honor’s sake” and then lay down their arms.

See Russell Hittinger, “Two Modernisms, Two Thomisms: Reflections on the Centenary of Pius X’s Letter Against the Modernists,” Nova et Vetera 5:4 (2007), pp. 843–880, and Russell Hittinger, “Pope Leo XIII,” in The Teachings of Modern Roman Catholicism on Law, Politics, and Human Nature, John Witte, Jr., and Frank S. Alexander, eds. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), pp. 39–75.

I describe the broad outlines of the evolution of this tradition in Against the Grain: Christianity and Democracy, War and Peace (New York: Crossroad, 2008), pp. 11–36.

See George Weigel, Soul of the World: Notes on the Future of Public Catholicism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996), pp. 99–124.

See, for example, John XXIII’s noteworthy opening address to the Council, Gaudet Mater Ecclesia: https://jakomonchak.files.wordpress.com/2012/10/john-xxiii-opening-speech.pdf.

For more on what the Pastoral Constitution “missed,” see George Weigel, “Rescuing Gaudium et Spes: The New Humanism of John Paul II,” Nova et Vetera 8:2 (2010), pp. 251–67.

David Bentley Hart, “Religion in America: Ancient and Modern,” The New Criterion, March 2004, p. 16.

Gaudium et Spes 36

See John Courtney Murray, We Hold These Truths: Catholic Reflections on the American Proposition (Garden City, New York: Doubleday Image Books, 1964), pp. 17–35, 126–139.

On Centesimus Annus, Veritatis Splendor, and Evangelium Vitae, see George Weigel, Witness to Hope: The Biography of Pope John Paul II (New York: HarperCollins, 1999), pp. 612–19, 688–698, and 757–760; on Ecclesia in Europa, see George Weigel, The End and the Beginning: Pope John Paul II—The Victory of Freedom, the Last Years, the Legacy (New York: Doubleday, 2010), pp. 337–341.

As I wrote at the time, this would seem to mean that nothing of positive consequence for twenty-first century European public life had happened between Marcus Aurelius and Descartes, which was an awfully long time for nothing to have happened.

See J.H. H. Weiler, Un’Europa cristiana? Un saggio esplorativo (Milano: Biblioteca Universale Rizoli, 2003).

`See http://w2.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/en/speeches/2006/september/ documents/hf_ben-xvi_spe_20060912_university-regensburg.html

See http://w2.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/en/speeches/2008/september/documents/hf_ben-xvi_spe_20080912_parigi-cultura.html

See http://w2.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/en/speeches/2010/september/documents/hf_ben-xvi_spe_20100917_societa-civile.html

See http://w2.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/en/speeches/2011/september/documents/hf_ben-xvi_spe_20110922_reichstag-berlin.html

Owen Chadwick, The Secularization of the European Mind in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975).

On the German situation, see Dietrich von Hildebrand, My Battle Against Hitler: Faith, Truth, and Defiance in the Shadow of the Third Reich (New York: Image, 2015). On the anti-liberal, anti-pluralist vision of the French Ècole Nationale des Cadres, see John Hellman, The Knight-Monks of Vichy France: Uriage, 1940–45 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997).

For a more detailed discussion of this shift in Catholic self-understanding, rhe roots of which also go back to the Leonine Revolution described above, see George Weigel, Evangelical Catholicism: Deep Reform in the Twenty-First Century Church (New York: Basic Books, 2013). The afterword to the 2014 paperback edition of Evangelical Catholicism explores the role of Pope Francis in this Catholic paradigm shift, both as archbishop of Buenos Aires and as pope.

Title: Modernity, Pluralism, and Catholicism
Author: George Weigel
Publication date: 22-02-2016
Publisher: Springer US
Published in: Society / Issue 2/2016
Print ISSN: 0147-2011
Electronic ISSN: 1936-4725
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12115-016-9992-9

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