A recent post on Sandro Magister's blog was entitled, "There is a vaccine for the virus that infects the Church." This post is so good that I had to read it three times, back to back, and then made my own summary notes of what he is saying. Here goes.
The secular movement in the world is advancing while the Church diminishes. This is happening in tandem with the eclipse of the conservative paradigm in the West (which promotes duties before rights.)
This eclipse has also entered into the life of the Church. But whereas conservatives has sought to reinvigorate this paradigm, the pandemic has revealed that it is not simply the form of Christianity that is at stake, but much more fundamental issues.
Looking back to the time of the Second Vatican Council, we saw the secularising agenda imposing itself on the Church through all its issues, contraception, divorce, homosexual union, feminism etc. In other words, secular values and issues took centre stage in the life of the Church and pushed the Christian life to the margins.
JPII and B16 tried to save the key issues of the Council (Revelation, the Church, Xt in the Liturgy, and seeking an adequate anthropology) and also of the Enlightenment (human dignity and freedom.)
B16 was aware of how Christendom (9th to 15th Centuries) provided the best context for the Enlightenment. That the organic unity of faith and life enabled Christian values to flower. What then happened was that the culture took those values and re-established them on the basis of reason, and left the Christian life behind. This was the Enlightenment.
B16 spoke of how "Gaudium et Spes" was the Council looking specifically at the correspondence between Christianity and the Enlightenment, revisiting the Enlightenment to seek a new relationship with the world (presumably for an evangelising and formative purpose.)
B16 also spoke of how, in putting God into the purely subjective realm, the Enlightenment actually wounded human reason - reason eventually gave up on itself - in spite of the historical fact that the search for God is the foundation of any good culture.
So, in ancient Greece God was unknown, yet people searched for him. Today, following the impact of Christian revelation on humanity, much of it has given up on God and itself!
Pope Francis, on the other hand, has set aside both Christianity and the Enlightenment; we are all the same, without God or Christian values. All we need to do is be brothers to one another.
Even so, Francis supports the subjectivisation or impoverishment of reason, by promoting the Church's focus on issues (rather than the Christian life.)
Magister notes that the conservative wing of the Church is actually in tune with the Enlightenment, through its support of individual freedoms.
The result of all this is that Christians are again a small minority, as they were in the first centuries.
He specifies that today's Christian minority has the same options as those in early centuries:
1. To conform to the dominant culture.
2. To close yourself off from it.
3. To escape to a new homeland.
4. To enter into a strongly critical relationship with the world and exercise a cultural influence on it.
The 4th approach is the one that the Church took in the early centuries.
In history, he says, we can see 'metaphysical mutations' (radical transformations of the collective vision of the world):
1. Christianity asserting itself in the strongly pagan Roman Empire.
2. The dissolution of Christendom in favour of a secular and materialist culture.
How, he asks, will today's dominant culture proceed? We don't know.
What we do know is that we need to keep the Christian heritage intact, so that we can re-propose it in the modern empire and regenerate it from the teaching of the first Christians and the Fathers of the Church. End.
This article is so extraordinary that I will post my own comments on it next.
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