When I was young it was common to hear people refer to the Church of England as a broad church, going from the Ritualists (more Roman than the Romans, it was said), through the broad churchmen, down to the Evangelicals (more Methodist than the Methodists my grandmother used to say, after she joined the C of E). The same is true, in spades, for the Catholic Church. In the latest edition of the Catholic Herald Dr Stephen Bullivant has spoken (and written) about the Syro-Malabar Catholics and their new cathedral in Preston. There are, he tells us, some 40,000 Indian Syro-Malabar Catholics in the UK. I was at Walsingham last year when about 15,000 of them came on pilgrimage; it was an awe-inspiring sight – a reminder that the Catholic Church is a global federation of two dozen churches. It is a sign of our insularity that we so often forget this. The Eastern and Oriental Catholic Churches have about 18 million members, and a history of them would amount to a history of global Catholicism. Many of these churches owe their existence to the desire for unity with Rome. Where schism has occurred, the instinct to unity has brought some communities back into the fold. In many ways the creation of the Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham to allow former Anglicans to come back into communion with Rome, bringing with them their own liturgical patrimony, is another example of this tendency.
The Catholic Church is indeed more ‘Catholic’ than many of us appreciate, and when we conduct our arguments about what the ‘Church’ allows, we often fail to appreciate that its rules are often shaped by different cultural contexts. Much of the problem some in the West have with Pope Francis comes, I suspect, from his different cultural context as an Argentinian. He did not grow up with a faith in unalloyed capitalism, neither did he imbibe an admiration for the American system with his mother’s milk. He grew up with a distrust of ‘Yankee imperialism’, and his experience of ‘democracy’ is not that of those of us in countries with systems founded on an Anglo-Saxon model. Although we hear much of a globalised world, it is not so globalised that an Argentinian will have had the same societal experiences as someone from North America.
This pontificate is, perhaps, a sign of what is to come as the long Western domination of the Catholic Church begins to change in response to demographic trends. As vocations and church attendance declines in the West, they are growing elsewhere, and this is bound to have its effect. To old men set in their ways it might seem that the only way to respond is to point out that ‘Africans’ are ‘backward’ and to imagine they will ‘catch up’. But that is to fall for a version of the old cultural imperialism myth. Though one would hardly notice it from a media keen to play up Pope Francis as a liberal, his criticism of ‘gender ideology’ was cast in terms of ‘ideological colonisation’. Like other prominent Catholics from outside Western Europe and the USA, he does not buy into the currently fashionable views on things which you will not find British, European or American Cardinals questioning. It is easy to lose sight of this if we construe him solely in terms of our own ‘culture wars’.
The time was when the West took the faith to the rest of the world (after a period in which it was taken to it), but the time may be coming when the rest of the world will return the privilege by reminding us of what is constant in our own tradition.
I like this piece, C. I hope the admin and prep are going well at the moment.
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Thank you Nicholas. I ought to have checked whether anything else was up to go before posting! Getting ready. This week is one of farewells – and then the wide horizon beckons.
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Don’t worry about it. I hope you find the change bearable: I find change quite stressful myself. I shall be teaching a completely different subject come September.
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Having been where I am for 37 years, I could never, I think, be accused of seeking change! But the new job is one which offers opportunities to do something for the Church, which is what makes it appealing. I hope the new subject goes well.
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I shall be teaching philosophy including the debate between Copleston and Russell.
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At least that’s a splendid example for the students 🙂
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🙂
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Is it really the Western European vs. the rest of Catholic Tradition that is causing ripples in the Catholic world?
It may with some but I think more significant is the fact that Catholic Culture is defined at its core by holding the same moral values ensconced in Doctrine and lived out in practice.
When morals and doctrine are opposed by practice we have chaos and confusion. And here is where Pope Francis resides; in the storm of confusion. In fact, he likes the storm; a ‘messy’ Chuch he extols and a ‘messy Church he is creating.
Confusion abounds and it is not Northern Hemisphere vs. Southern Himsphere but rather a placating of a fallen world at the expense of Catholic Culture itself; a culture which was already under attack.
I do wonder if this will be the knock-out punch that will cause those few who were raised to abide in their Catholic Cutlure to take refuge and denounce this world that Francis seems keen on embracing.
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I think he has inherited a messy church. The German Cardinals are not young men, neither are their British or Belgian or French counterparts, and ditto the US – and so many of them are complicit in trying to get the Church to conform with modern Western mores – and that is why I think this shapes itself up the way it does. It is not the ‘Global South’ which wants to conform to the ways, not of ‘this world’ but of ‘this Western world’. It was not from the South that gender ideology came, neither was it the source of feminist ideology of Communism. I’d be tempted to say that in the West traditional Catholic culture was badly wounded, and certainly badly defended by too many bishops. But reinforcements from the South may save the day yet.
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I might add to the catalogue the dangers posed by existentialism and nihilism, which are also western phenomena. Unfortunately, we don’t teach people the origin of many of the ideas found in pop culture. They seem to be accepted as “intuitively true” or some such. A failure to teach critical thinking has created a generation of people looking for answers and finding no means to separate truth from lies.
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Very true, Nicholas. That ‘world’ to which so many want us to conform, is a creation of the USA and Western Europe.
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Sometimes it feels like Romans 1 is repeating itself – “professing themselves wise, they became fools”.
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I think the world has often conformed to that description.
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Indeed. I find it disturbing how persuasive such arguments can be. I also find myself wondering also how these movements relate to spiritual warfare.
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There’s a good interview here which might interest you:
http://www.ticenter.net/interview-fr-thomas-joseph-white-o-p/
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Cardinal Sarah is certainly among those who could bring Catholicism back from the brink . . . but Pope Francis is not among that group. In fact, he is one of the aging modernist, socialist (Peronst), ideological purveyors of a deconstructed Church. One need only look to his appointments to career advancing positions and the mistreatment of those who oppose his views. It is rather petty really.
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The verdict is, I think, more mixed. I can’t imagine a British, American or European bishop speaking as he has of gender ideology – and few speak out as much as he does on abortion and the family. In some areas, yes, he has taken on the ideological fashions of the West, but not in all areas.
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In word you are right . . . in deed you are mistaken.
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Ive been working in los angeles for th last 7 weeks and had nothing but my chess set and a radio. So, I listened to Immaculate Heart Radio a few times. Very sincere people who want to live a Christ like life. They are also sincerely unsaved. The saved personally know Jesus and and woyld never worship a Queen of Heaven. The CC claims the Mass makes them saved. Lots of verbiage to prove their point. The bottom line is….they walk into the catholic service unsaved and the walk out unsaved.
Jesus is standing at your door and hes knocking. Open and let him in.
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I am sure the digital detox did you good. But it still has not enabled you to understand that Jesus meant what he said when he founded a Church and said the gates of hell would not prevail against it.
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