AN AGENDA FOR THE CHURCH:

The Next Pope...and Why He Matters to All of Us (George Weigel, EPPC, 1/12/2005)
Orrin commented on this piece below, but I want to add my two cents.

Three large-scale issues are already under discussion within the College of Cardinals and among other senior churchmen, and will certainly weigh heavily in the conclaves's deliberations, in the next pontificate, and in the Catholic Church's interface with the 21st century world. The first of these is the virtual collapse of Christianity in its historic heartland - western Europe.

How to deal with militant secularism in the advanced countries may well be the most important issue facing the Church. It is no coincidence that the rise of social welfare states has created a selfish and passive population that finds no inspiration in the Christian message of love and active suffering. The Church must re-examine its own tendency to advocate the social welfare state, and must generate a stronger response to secularism that can be the basis for a re-evangelization of Europe and secular America.

The second great issue is the Church's response to the multi-faceted challenge posed by the rise of militant Islam.

The challenge of militant Islam is of geopolitical importance; the survival of Christianity in the Holy Land is of symbolic importance; and the Vatican feels a great responsibility to ease the oppression of Christians in Muslim lands. But the main issue is the rise of freedom in the Muslim world. Ideally the Church would become an evangelist for the liberation of captives in all the world, and a partner with America in the effort to spread democracy and freedom, as JPII was a partner with the U.S. in defeating Communism in Europe. There was a missed opportunity at the time of the Iraq War to speak up for the liberation of captives, defense of the oppressed being a responsibility the Church inherits from Moses.

However, the fight against militant Islam is already half-won, and may be won by the United States even without the Church's help. Equally if not more important for the Church is the need for evangelization in Africa, where a commitment to Christian morality can help rescue hundreds of millions from lives of brutality and despair. Also important is evangelization in East Asia, where modernization and the loss of respect for Confucian and Buddhist morality is creating an epidemic of adultery, promiscuity, abortion, divorce and the refusal to have children. Millions there are looking to Christianity to fill the moral vacuum, even while despotic states such as China seek to suppress Christianity as an ideological competitor.

And the third involves the questions posed by the biotech revolution.

This is merely a subset of the life issues, which loom large as they get to the heart of the division between Christianity -- which treats all persons equally -- and atheism -- which usually values people for their utility. Abortion, euthanasia, cloning (and its concomitant discarding of embryos), and other life issues all need a vigorous treatment as well as refinement of the Church's message, which has been diluted by the opposition to the death penalty (which is a softening of the Church's historic hostility to murder).

Questions of the Church's intellectual discipline will also be discussed in the next conclave ... Then there is a question that may or may not come up in the prattiche, the general congregations, and the conclave deliberations of the cardinal-electors, but which, in my judgment, should be addressed: and that is the question of the Church's diplomacy, or, to be more precise, the set of ideas that have guided the "foreign policy" of the Holy See for more than two generations now.

The Church's diplomacy has been derailed through the strong influence of European secular ideologies; it has been too "realist," and too little informed by Biblical principles. Weigel is right to link this to the question of the Church's intellectual discipline. It is all about courage: do Church leaders have the faith and guts to be genuinely countercultural, to preach the gospel without fear and without fine calculations of the consequences?

The Holy See will continue to insist, as it must, that the nation-state is not necessarily the final or ultimate form of political organization. But unless that insistence is coupled with a serious moral critique of the current corruptions of the U.N. system - a critique that must hold open the question of whether some other form of international organization is not desirable - then the Holy See will, unfortunately, sound ever more like a somewhat more restrained World Council of Churches.... The Holy See could help facilitate the development of [a better moral] grammar and vocabulary - if it is prepared to re-examine certain aspects of its position that seem, to some minds, more reflective of conventional European political sentiment than of what was once referred to as "Catholic international relations theory."

Indeed. Quite possibly, as Weigel hints, the Vatican diplomatic corps has been seeking a power to balance the power of national states, knowing that checks and balances are essential to the achievement of a good world order. However, they have looked in the wrong direction: they should look toward the people of the world to provide that check, by empowering ordinary citizens, rather than toward a supranational body that is even further removed from the people than their own governments. Here, the Vatican would greatly benefit from a more American and less European sensibility.

This is a time pregnant with opportunity for the Church's new leadership. Let us pray that the Holy Spirit will guide the cardinals to the best choice.

Posted by Paul Jaminet at April 5, 2005 4:43 PM