Looking into the Future Through His Eyes: John Paul II, the Catholic Church, and the Crisis of the West
The age of the ethnic or national transmission of Catholic faith – the age of Catholicism transmitted by a kind of genetic inheritance or osmosis – is over everywhere in the Western world.
Weigel:
This profound and challenging vision of a Catholic future in which every Catholic is a missionary and every place is mission territory is taking some time for Catholics to grasp, especially in what have been comfortably Catholic societies and cultures for centuries. And yet Catholics must understand that we are living in apostolic times, not Christendom times. Christendom in the West is over.
The patriarchate of Rome has not even begun to recover from the consequences of the development of the imperial papacy.
prestige
loss of scale and accountability that resulted in clericalized institutionalism, feminism, loss of leadership
In order to be the Church of the New Evangelization, Catholicism must renew and reform itself. Let me indicate very briefly two such lines of reform that seem to me especially urgent in Poland.
To be the Church of the New Evangelization requires a deep reform of Polish seminaries and Polish theological education. The priests of the future in Poland are all going to have to be missionaries, whether they’re priests living in and working from religious communities, or priests living and working as diocesan clergy in parishes. Every man who imagines that he has a priestly vocation in the Polish Catholicism of the 21st century must understand that he will, of necessity, be living a missionary vocation. That means that priestly formation in diocesan seminaries and religious houses must be formation for mission. The notion of the priesthood as a privileged career of providing sacramental services can no longer be the dominant notion of the priesthood in the West; it cannot be the driving image of the priesthood of the future in the United States, and I do not think it can be the idea that shapes the Polish Catholic priesthood of the future. Priests of the twenty-first century who think that their primary task is to maintain the Church’s institutional life – priests who do not think of themselves as missionary apostles – will eventually find themselves being museum-keepers.
Secondly, this Church of the New Evangelization in Poland must be a public church, but not a partisan church. It must be a Catholicism fully engaged in culture and in society, offering the truths that it is privileged bear to the public conversation about public goods. But the Catholic Church of the future in Poland, or elsewhere, cannot be a partisan church identified with any particular political party, political faction, political tendency, or political philosophy. Whenever the Church has done this in modern history, serious trouble for the Church’s primary evangelical mission follows.
Regarding the reform of seminaries and theological education: what exactly does Weigel want in terms of forming priests? That they shouldn't be bureaucrats? Do the men seeking Holy Orders in Poland give credible witnesses as Christian men? What good will it do for these priests to be missionaries if they cannot make Christianity attractive to men?
Weigel says that the Latin churches need to refrain from being partisan. But to be in support of the state (and require obedience to the authorities of the state) is to be partisan in favor of the state. Will the Latin churches recognize that anyone advocating a breaking up of the state is presenting a legitimate political view?
If the root of the cultural incoherence of the West is a loss of faith in the God of the Bible (the Jerusalemic foundation of the Western civilizational project), then the Church of the New Evangelization – the Church of the future, according to John Paul II – is critically important to the rescue of the Western civilizational project. For it is the Church of the New Evangelization, in its work of proclaiming the Gospel and in its public witness, that will help Western civilization recover “Jerusalem,” and thereby recover “Athens” and the cultural confidence that reason can grasp the truth of things – which is essential to defending the rule of law against coercion in the name of skepticism and relativism.
By being a Church converting the world to the truths of biblical faith, the Catholic Church is also reconverting the world to reason and reason’s capacity to order human affairs. The two go together. By being a Church permanently in mission – the Church John Paul II envisioned during the Great Jubilee of 2000, the Church that he described in Redemptoris Missio, and Novo Millennio Ineunte – Catholicism will both fulfill the Great Commission and offer Western civilization a path beyond this crisis of incoherence.
The loss of faith and sin are fundamental problems, but they are always the fundamental problems. Can the churches of the patriarchate of Rome effectively evangelize given its institutional inertia, degradation of ecclesial culture, and capitulation to liberalism and feminism? The mess that the patriarchate finds itself in will not be addressed until its leaders are humble enough to receive insight into the causes.
