Two thousand years after its founding, the Catholic Church is in an era much like that of the Apostles, confronting a society with a different vision than its own, Msgr. James Shea said in a talk last week at the Pontifical College Josephinum.
He said this should not frighten the Church because it presents an opportunity for apostolic witness and the building of a distinctively Christian cultural vision and way of life, making the truths of the Gospel more attractive in comparison with the beliefs of the surrounding culture.
Msgr. Shea, president of the University of Mary in Bismarck, North Dakota, spoke to about 200 people at the Josephinum on Wednesday, March 30 on the subject “Preparing the Church for the Postmodern World” as part of the Josephinum’s “Building Spiritual Bridges to the Community” series. He also spoke to seminarians at the college the following day.
He began his talk with C.S. Lewis’ description of Christianity as “a fighting religion … (that) thinks God made the world – that space and time, heat and cold, and all the colors and tastes, and all the animals and vegetables, are things that God made up out of His head as a man makes up a story.
“But it also thinks that a great many things have gone wrong with the world that God made, and that God insists, and insists very loudly, on our putting them right again.”
Msgr. Shea said that spirit of challenging the world resulted in the success of Christianity despite persecution in its earliest days, ultimately leading to the Roman Emperor Constantine’s giving Christianity legal status in the Roman Empire in the year 313.
He said that for the next several centuries, the imaginative vision of society in the Western world was founded on “a Christendom mode of engagement” – one in which “society goes forward under the imaginative vision and narrative provided by Christianity, whatever the specific policy concerning its establishment may be.”
But beginning in the Enlightenment era of the late 17th and 18th centuries and continuing today, technology has brought tremendous change to society and its view of Christianity.
“A culture that was once deeply Christian has been slowly ridding itself of Christianity,” Msgr. Shea said. “We are in the midst of a technological revolution that has radically changed the way people live. Our view of ourselves is very different. The rhythm of life is much different.
“A hundred years ago, that rhythm was closer to the way it was in the time of Christ than the life of a hundred years ago is to the way we live today. … Our age has devised a way in which the murder of a child is considered a moral good. It has developed technology that can recreate a human from the ground up.”
In its beginnings, “Christianity presented a new way of seeing everything. It brought an effervescence,” he said. “Today we need an intellectual revival, a vision of reality similar to that of the original Christendom mode, with the ramifications of living that vision.
“Every society has a moral and spiritual vision, the soil in which societal instruments take root and grow,” Msgr. Shea said. In the Church’s earliest days, this was what he described as an apostolic mode. That was followed by the Christendom mode, and again today the Church is in an apostolic era, he said.
Msgr. Shea said that while the Church flourished during the Christendom era, it also became complacent, being mainly concerned about maintenance of its institutions while many Christians grew lukewarm in their faith. The very strength of the Church also was a cause of weakness.
“The great sin of a Christendom culture is hypocrisy, pretending to be more interested in God and virtue than one is,” Msgr. Shea said. “Professing Christianity is the norm. Living the faith as a genuine disciple is the exception.
“In an apostolic situation, because the Church is not the major influence in the society’s vision, the need is not mainly for maintenance,” he said. “It is rather for apostolic witness and the building of a distinctively Christian cultural vision and way of life.
“In such a time the Church understands herself to be vastly different from the world around her, needing to make her way against hostility or apathy, unable to count on the wider society. Such a cultural stance brings with it certain advantages, as well as certain challenges.
“Because one has to pay a serious price for the faith in an apostolic time, there is less hypocrisy than in a Christendom age. The life of faith is more intense and therefore more attractive, more evidently life-changing. The great adventure of Christianity is more palpable. Its contours show up with greater clarity, and the Gospel attracts many high-hearted people who have a strong desire for God and for goodness.
“In an apostolic age, there is by necessity greater purity of intention in priests and bishops, which makes for truer and more dynamic leadership,” Msgr. Shea said. “A higher standard of holiness among the clergy is more natural and easier to sustain.
“Confessing Christ in the face of hostility even to the point of martyrdom has always been accounted the greatest of Christian blessings, the most privileged way to imitate Christ, but it is hard to come by in a Christendom age.
“In an apostolic age, the possibility of suffering for the faith, even undergoing martyrdom, is present, as a heroic spirit of witnessing with courage animates the whole of the Church,” he said.
However, in an apostolic age, “the benefits that accrue in a Christendom culture are not present. Error in all its forms, doctrinal and moral, is rife. In such a cultural atmosphere, it can be difficult for Christians to sustain their own spiritual and moral vision,” Msgr. Shea said.
“Material advantages are offered to those who make peace with the non-Christian majority, and the attractiveness of the ruling vision is hard to resist, especially for the most vulnerable. Among other problems, it becomes harder to raise children in the faith.
“Precisely because of the high cost of discipleship, the great temptation in an apostolic age is not to hypocrisy, but to cowardice. While in Christendom people are tempted to profess more faith and virtue than they possess, in an apostolic age they are tempted to profess less. Open apostasy motivated by fear becomes more common.”
Msgr. Shea also said that because of the bitterness of the spiritual climate, some believers are tempted to develop an overly rigorous attitude or to abandon confronting the wider culture with the Gospel.
“The most catastrophic thing the Church can do today is to think it can do business as usual when the times have changed so much,” he said, citing Belgium, Spain, Ireland and the Canadian province of Quebec as examples of places where Catholicism was once dominant in the culture and secularism seems to have taken its place.
“We need new strategies in times like these for a conversion of the mind, to reignite a sense of the great high adventure of what it means to follow Jesus. Young people in our time are desperate for a vision of this kind. You can see that from the popularity of Marvel comics, Harry Potter, The Chronicles of Narnia and The Lord of the Rings.
“Our advantage is that the secular imaginative vision makes all kinds of promises but doesn’t keep a single one of them. If we can spend our time articulating the thrill of living our life with Christ, that’s how we will change our age,” Msgr. Shea said.
His talk, which was scheduled to begin at 7 p.m., was delayed for 90 minutes because of mechanical problems that delayed his flight from Bismarck to Minneapolis for three hours and weather delays affecting his flight from Minneapolis to Columbus.