A New Dawn, or the Fading of the Light? Culture and Evangelization Today

By John C. Gallagher C.S.B.

Parents are disheartened when their children fall away from religious practice. Pastoral workers wonder how they can get people to take religion seriously. Something is at work that is puzzling; but we can learn something useful about it. A crucial factor is the role of culture. To have faith is an act of individual responsibility, but it can also be influenced by life around us. For example, popular opinion or concentration on making a fortune can make us deaf to any message about what lies beyond our immediate concerns. This book is the fruit of the author’s extensive study of how cultural forces influence attitudes. Calling on long experience lecturing and in pastoral ministry, he shows how cultural factors influence religious belief in our times and how ordinary believers can be active participants in creating a culture that opens us to God’s word.

• Language: English
• Publisher: WestBow Press
• Release date: Dec 5, 2019
• ISBN: 9781973679400

John C. Gallagher C.S.B.

John Gallagher, a Roman Catholic priest and moral theologian, has had a special interest in the influence of cultural factors on moral beliefs. More recently he has examined the influence of culture on evangelization. This book shows how pastoral ministers, parents and other evangelisers can communicate the gospel message more effectively if they understand the influence of culture.

Book preview

PART ONE

Situating the Issue

There are several issues that should be clarified before we proceed to the discussion of the interaction between evangelization and culture.

CHAPTER ONE

Dealing with Faith and Culture

I. The Drama of Our Time

F or some decades Catholics in North America, like many other Christians in the Western world, have worried about the decline in regular practice of religion ³, a decline that took place earlier in parts of Europe, where Christianity had flourished for centuries. The ancients, aware that a change of many people in a particular direction at more-or-less the same time does not happen by chance, might have explained such a development as the work of an evil spirit. Moderns are more likely to understand the change in terms of a more proximate cause—namely, the influence of culture. The two explanations are not mutually exclusive.

Culture in this context refers to all those things that we learn from others and that constitute a common rather than an individual or private reality.⁴ If I learn by personal experience that it is best to let sleeping dogs lie, that is not cultural learning. Nor would it be cultural learning if you learn a secret recipe from your mother, at least if it is truly a secret just between the two of you.

Thus defined, culture is an exceedingly broad reality. It includes language, most academic learning, ethical systems, economic practices, work habits, the way the young and the elderly are treated, the workings of political institutions, child-raising practices, literature, how we measure time, and on and on. Using this wide definition, it appears likely that any general development of a group of people in a particular direction will be a result of cultural forces. The alternative, it seems, is to attribute it to chance or to the intervention of some force outside of normal human affairs.

The 1974 Synod of Bishops of the Catholic Church assembled in Rome to consider the issue of evangelization. Permeating their discussion was the stark fact that in much of the Western world fewer and fewer people were attending Mass regularly, and many people who had been raised as Catholics no longer considered themselves to be such. Left with the task of bringing order and focus to the array of ideas raised by the participants at the synod, Pope Paul VI authored the apostolic exhortation Evangelii nuntiandi. In section 20 of that document he declared:

What matters is to evangelize man’s culture and cultures (not in a purely decorative way, as it were, by applying a thin veneer, but in a vital way, in depth and right to their very roots) … The split between the Gospel and culture is without a doubt the drama of our time, just as it was of other times. Therefore every effort must be made to ensure the full evangelization of culture, or more correctly of cultures. They have to be regenerated by an encounter with the Gospel.

Since Evangelii nuntiandi, zealous pastors and others alarmed at the apparent decline of religious practice have continued to encourage and lead efforts to revive that practice by such measures as bible classes, working for social justice, and fostering prayer and adult education in the faith. Though such efforts are usually not directed consciously to evangelization of the culture, when they’re successful they will influence the culture. In spite of such efforts, in most of the parts of the world that have been Christian for many centuries there is a widening gap between Christian ideals and prevailing ideas and attitudes. This is manifest in the multiplication of issues such as abortion and assisted suicide in which the traditional Christian teaching is being challenged. Often it is those who count themselves as Christian who are rejecting the traditional Christian teaching.

II. A Complex Topic

Most intellectual disciplines provide introductions to the discipline. A book called An Introduction to Biology, for example, would explain the accepted methods, scope, and divisions of that science. No such introductory tools present themselves for the study of culture. It is not that studies in culture are lacking. Quite the contrary, many of the most influential writers in the Western world have had a great deal to say about it. Karl Marx’s dialectical materialism is a theory about how the material conditions of life and the technology used to satisfy needs will determine everything else in the culture. A dominant theme of the great English Catholic historian Christopher Dawson was how Christianity, and especially Catholicism, has shaped the civilization of Europe. Marshal McLuhan explored the influence of media of communications on culture. Ernst Cassirer, Eric Voegelin, Reinhold Niebuhr, Jacques Ellul, Michel Foucault, and Charles Taylor, to name only a few, have all had something important and profound to say about culture.

A study of some of these writers would make a fascinating program for a liberal arts program, and it would be interesting to see how such authors would be assigned to the different university departments that might claim sponsorship of the program. Important students of culture have come from diverse academic fields, and it seems that most scholars who have contributed significantly to the study of culture broke away from the limits of their special discipline in order to come to grips with this vast subject. One would be hard pressed to write an Introduction to Culture that would adequately explain the basic principles to which all the various authors subscribe. Rather than the subject of a particular academic discipline, culture seems to be a dimension involved in the proper understanding of many diverse disciplines, and those many disciplines, in turn, have particular things to say about culture.

III. Historical Contexts for Enculturation

Moving from the general study of culture to the study of culture in relation to faith,⁵ the topic remains complex. A book by Marcello de Carvalho Azeveda, S.J⁶ illustrates the point. This informative work was prepared for a meeting of Jesuits in Rome to discuss enculturation. Azeveda argues that the gulf between the Catholic Church and the modern world is largely the result of the Church not engaging with the culture—a culture in modern times dominated by the rapid expansion of technologies. Azeveda believes that the Church remained mainly negative in relation to developments in the modern world until the Second Vatican Council, at which point it at least expressed the desire to reengage with the modern world. A more recent article on Azeveda’s book⁷ condenses his thesis into the following statement: while the Church engaged with the prevailing culture for the first three centuries, the Church closed in on itself with the advent of Christian emperors, beginning with Constantine, and only reengaged with the culture during the Second Vatican Council. This summary may not do justice to Azeveda’s thesis, but that is not my interest in it here. I use it only to show how concentrating on one aspect of the relation of Christianity to culture leads to a narrow view of what the relationship entails. I have adopted a wider view. Christianity has been reacting to the prevailing cultures in every century, sometimes by learning from them, sometimes by rejecting them, sometimes by reaching new insights and attitudes as a result of the interaction.

The Church cannot avoid engaging with culture in one way or another. This engagement does not normally begin with intellectuals. The principle "quidquid recipitur per modum recipientis recipitur" applies. Whatever is received is received in a way determined by the recipient. Those hearing the Word of God will inevitably understand it in a way conditioned by what the hearers know (along with their feelings and attitudes) and these have been formed within a particular culture. Theologians are better equipped than most to determine whether those who have reacted to the Word of God have done so in a way consistent with the tradition to which the Church must be true if it is to retain its identity. The process of enculturation, however, has usually been going on well before it comes to the attention of theologians. What were Christians to make of the contrast between Jesus’s message in the gospels and the warlike culture of the Roman Empire or of the Germanic tribes that invaded the empire? Is there something from ancestor worship that can be adapted into Catholic piety? A wise answer to such questions will require solid theological discernment, but mentalities and attitudes and practices may become established before such discernment has taken place; and various biblical texts will have been understood in a variety of ways, or ignored, depending on the dispositions of the readers.

Writings that have survived from the first three centuries of the Church suggest that Christians’ attitudes toward the surrounding culture were mostly negative. That is hardly surprising given that the worldly powers were persecuting them, and there was much in the contemporary Greco-Roman culture that clearly contradicted the standards proclaimed in the New Testament. Polytheistic religion was not only unacceptable in itself to Christians but was so intricately bound up with social mores, government, recreational games and displays, etc., that many of the early Christians thought it best to refrain as much as possible from what was going on around them while they developed their own way of life.

Of course the Church was constantly interacting with the surrounding culture during this time. Often it was to remind people of the evils that surrounded them, evils that may have been part of their lives before their conversion. Christians naturally adopted many of the ways of the dominant culture, or in most cases, simply continued the ways that they had lived before their conversion. It was largely a matter of everything being allowed except what was condemned. Inevitably, not only individual Christians but also the institutional Church would be influenced by the culture. The Church, for example, found in Roman law and political structures some valuable lessons that were applied to the task of preserving a degree of unity of belief and practice within the expanding Christian population.

Church writers learned much from the prevailing intellectual culture of ancient Greece and Rome. Some early Christian thinkers, such as Justin Martyr, found much of value in contemporary philosophy. Even Tertullian, who was negative about the wisdom of this world, nevertheless used the analytic skills that this world had taught him to demonstrate the errors of those with whom he disagreed. Greek philosophy, especially the Stoics, Plato and the Neoplatonists, heavily influenced early Christian thinkers such as Origen and Clement of Alexandria, but probably the most important influence of Greek philosophers on Christian thinking came later through St. Augustine and much later when Aristotle would enter into the Christian culture through thinkers like St. Thomas Aquinas.

The era of Christian emperors, beginning with Constantine, brought about a shift in focus in the dialogue between faith and culture. Christians could now pursue the ideal of Christendom, a society in which, ideally, Christian rulers would enact laws inspired by the faith, where society from rulers down to simple peasants would embody the spirit of the Gospels. But the Kingdom of God is like yeast; it only gradually transforms the dough into which it is introduced. The faith after Constantine had to interact not only with pagans but with Christians, especially with those who were imperfectly catechised before baptism, but more generally with all of those, about one hundred percent of the membership, who do not live up to the gospel ideals.

Probably some Church authorities were too quick to condemn aspects of the Hellenistic and Roman world that were merely unfamiliar rather than evil, but there was another, and possibly greater, danger – that the Church would too quickly accept the status quo and neglect its duty to be a leaven in society. The question of war is an example. We deplore the fact that the Gospel teaching of meekness and turning the other cheek appears to have been lost in a Christendom that sanctioned holy wars that went well beyond the protection of the innocent. However, the Church has always to deal with the existing situation, and for many centuries the existing situation was a society in which the first duty of any ruler was to protect his citizens from marauding bands and neighbouring invaders. Reading the history of such figures as Pope Gregory the Great, one cannot help but admire their ability often to confront violence and at the same time work for peace. It is not surprising, however, if the spirit of the Prince of Peace became obscured in a society organized around the necessity of self-protection.

The consensus of historians is that during the Dark Ages that follow the fall of the Roman Empire in the west, Christianity was preserved in large part by the monasteries. Most monks and nuns were concerned more with escape from the world (a world that was at least nominally Christian) than learning from it. The genius of the founder of western monasticism, St. Benedict, was that he knew how to create a Christian culture that could endure. The monks in those monasteries devoted to learning learned from Greek and Roman authors who lived many centuries earlier, but the monks seemed to have owed relatively less to their immediate neighbours. No doubt the young people who entered the monasteries brought with them many of the habits and attitudes of the prevailing culture outside of the monasteries, so there was inevitably an interaction between prevailing culture and the monastic culture; but the influences that historians record go mostly in one direction – from the monasteries to the surrounding world. Monks provided education, hospitality, rudimentary health care, improved agricultural methods and examples of Christian virtue that they passed on to the population around them. The interaction of faith and culture in monasticism that reaches the pages of history was mainly a process by which a community of faith first developed a culture for itself and then contributed to the culture of a wider society.

Protestant Reformers criticised Catholics for allowing certain elements from the world to enter into and contaminate Christianity. This criticism was behind the insistence of Reformers on sola scriptura. Whether or not that criticism is valid, it raises an important point; what for some people is legitimate incorporation of aspects of the surrounding culture is anathema for others. This continues to be an issue.

A significant event in the alienation of the Catholic Church from the modern world was the French Revolution, which destroyed the old system of alliance between the Church and the monarchs. This alliance was often an uneasy one and one that hurt the Church in ways not realised at the time, but Church leaders saw it as in important way in which the Church could flourish and influence the world. In its early stages the French Revolution was supported by many Catholics, including bishops. Then those elements most hostile to the Church came to power and began to remove schools, hospitals and other institutions from the control of the Church. It was not a matter of the state reclaiming institutions that the Church had usurped. Catholics, first monks and then women religious, had created and staffed those institutions. If the world is busy taking over your schools and hospitals, both you and the world may lack the trust that is necessary for a productive dialogue between faith and the prevailing culture.

Had the Church been more engaged with the intellectuals of the Enlightenment, might it have been more open to the ideas that led to the Revolution and perhaps found a more peaceful way forward? Possibly. But prominent figures in the Enlightenment, people like Voltaire, had received a solid education from the Jesuits, so there had been contact between the Church intellectuals and Enlightenment thinkers, though the contact apparently did not always result in a creative synthesis. There were real issues involved. Consider the threefold rallying cry of the Revolution: Liberty! Fraternity! Equality! The Church would have no objections to fraternity. Jesus taught that we are all brothers and sisters. Equality need not have been a deal breaker. Most of the supporters of the Revolution did not believe in an absolute levelling in society.

The sticking point was the notion of liberty, of freedom. There are two (at least) different notions of freedom, and the main disputants at the time did not seem to notice it. One notion is that one is free if one is not subject to external restraints. This is a legitimate notion of freedom. To be free from external restraints is desirable. It is also not an inner quality of a person but an external condition, a condition that can be shared by sparrows and coyotes. It also places freedom in opposition to law and to authority, because law and authority are restrictions on the individual. That opposition has bedevilled political philosophy for centuries, pitting the need for freedom against the need for ordered living. John Paul Sartre was not manufacturing dilemmas when he famously said that hell is other people. Other people encroach on our freedom.

Through much of the 19th century the Catholic Church rejected liberalism because it implied rejecting the authority of the Church, and the liberals rejected the Catholic Church because its claim to authority took away freedom.

There is another notion of freedom - the freedom by which we are responsible. This freedom is scripturally based and has been analysed by Catholic thinkers in terms of conscience and free will. The Church could have contributed some clarity to the discussion had its representatives always been aware of the two types of freedom, but they seem not to have been. In fact, recent controversies about Liberation Theology have taken place with insufficient attention to that distinction. When we recognize that the freedom that truly ennobles us, that is at the centre of being a person, is the second kind of freedom, the perceived opposition of freedom to law and authority is cast in a different light.

The point of this digression is that success of the interaction of the faith with surrounding culture will depend not only on a willingness to dialogue but also on the qualifications of those carrying on the dialogue. Augustine was able to incorporate many insights of Plato into a synthesis that was true to Christian faith and helpful to Christian living and understanding. Thomas Aquinas did the same with Aristotle. However, figures comparable to Saints Augustine and Thomas Aquinas are rare, and not many non-Christian thinkers have had as much to contribute to Christian thinking as had Plato and Aristotle. It behoves us to temper our expectations for dialogue conducted among lesser lights.

The movement towards greater social justice in the century prior to the Second Vatican Council deserves special attention. The popes before Leo XIII were not leading figures in the effort to confront the miserable conditions of the working class in the earlier stages of the industrial revolution.⁸ Pope Leo XIII did provide leadership, especially with the publication of the encyclical letter Rerum novarum in 1891. Well before that date a number of Catholic leaders had tackled the problem. They, like Leo, were confronted by two opposing ideologies, Marxism and laisez faire capitalism, both of which had serious defects. Christians interested in social justice had to confront those alternatives, and thereby become involved in enculturation as they sought to find an alternative more consistent with the Gospel. Leo XIII is explicit in his critiques of those two ideologies even while he learns from them. For example, in his defense of the right to private property at the beginning of Rerum novarum the pope uses Marx’s insights against him. Marx had criticised capitalism because it alienated the workers from their work. After the labourer has put his effort into modifying and adding value to the raw material, the capitalist system takes the product and uses it to increase the power of the owners, who as such have interests contrary to the worker. Pope Leo argues that a system that claims a common ownership of all the means of production can do the same.

In the time since Rerum novarum the papacy has moved from being a late comer to the field of social justice to a position close to the vanguard. This is an instance of creative enculturation that began well before Vatican II. Enculturation here eventually sees the Catholic Church making common cause with secular thinkers in a new synthesis. Catholics took it upon themselves to learn from their secular colleagues; this helped them understand the current problems and how they might be overcome. Often a solution was first hammered out among Catholics and only later was there a common front with others.

In health care ethics the Catholic Church has been a leader from the first. In America the codes of ethics for the medical profession often read like manuals for good manners for physicians, along with excerpts from the Hippocratic oath. In North America before the 1960s there were few if any books on health care ethics except those published as texts for the courses on medical ethics offered by Catholic colleges, universities and schools of nursing. In the spate of recent secular publications on health care ethics the prevailing methodology seems to have been values clarification. This helps the practitioner to recognize the issues that are involved in a situation but provides little guidance as to which alternative is the morally correct one. There are, presumably, many people in our society who are not ethical relativists, but when there is no consensus within the population about which ethics to follow, values clarification becomes perhaps the only form of public ethical discourse that will not offend some significant part of the population.

What can we learn from the experience of the development of health care ethics? First, in this instance the Catholic Church got there first, before there was much secular thought with which to interact. Second, later study of secular health care ethics could help Catholics be aware of issues and remind them of any factual findings that they may have missed, but on the level of basic principles, the secular ethics provided little of substance with which Catholics could engage. A meaningful dialogue would have to go beyond health care ethics to those fundamental questions of the meaning of life that undergird objective ethics. To expect health care ethicists to carry the load in this kind of dialogue is expecting much of them.

In summary, enculturation occurs in a multitude of circumstances and often in ways that are not recognized as instances of enculturation.

During the 1950s a number of articles in American Catholic periodicals urged the faithful to get out of their ghettoes and engage with American society. Some of the euphoria preceding the Second Vatican Council arose from the hope that the time had come when Catholics would indeed engage with the world, the Church would flourish and American society would be more influenced by the Gospel. What followed instead was an emptying of Catholic Churches and drastically fewer vocations to the priesthood and to those religious communities that had established and operated the schools and hospitals through which the Catholic Church had been inserted effectively into American life.

Was the very idea of leaving the Christian communities (or ghettos) and engaging with the secular world a mistake? That may sound like a plausible conclusion, but there are more likely reasons why the emergence from the so-called ghetto mentality did not produce the hoped-for results. First, perhaps too many Catholics left behind the elements of a Catholic culture that helped them in the past, whether parish novenas or Wednesday evening devotions or Knights of Columbus or the Catholic Women’s League or CYO hockey teams. Maybe the North American Catholic Church (like the Catholic Church in some other parts of the world) may not have been adequately prepared for engaging with the world. It may have lacked the strong Christian communities, the intellectual depth, the deep faith and raw conviction necessary for a fruitful dialogue. There may also have been an overly simplistic understanding of the enculturation process itself. Perhaps Dorothy Day was right; first build a strong community based on the Gospel, get some experience producing a culture of your own, and then people will see what Christianity has to offer. To put it in crass terms, then the Church will have something to sell.

Another factor is the need for a proper forum where the Church can interact with the prevailing culture. Where such a forum is identified there can be positive results. In the area of social justice there have been several forums, in political life on municipal, state and federal levels, and in labour unions in which many voting members are Catholics. The Catholic Church has influenced American attitudes to social justice. In other important areas where culture is being formed, such as the mass media, the Catholic Church has not discovered or created situations where it could interact effectively with the secular world. A favoured place for interaction would be universities, and Pope Saint John Paul II in the document Ex corde ecclesiae saw higher education as especially the place for interaction between the Church and the world. However, perhaps because of their training or the dynamics of professional advancement, most university professors do not spend much time on productive dialogue with those who disagree with them or who think in entirely different modes.

IV. Current Interest in the Relation between Faith and Culture

One can discern three distinct sources for the interest in the relation between faith and culture in recent decades. One source was inspired by the openness to the modern world, or aggiornamento, that Pope John XIII hoped would be achieved through the Second Vatican Council. This meant principally finding a way of expressing the Christian message in terms that are understandable, attractive and convincing to the modern world.

There is a much older source of interest in the relation between Christian faith and culture, one that goes back at least as far as the great Matteo Ricci, S.J. (1552-1610) and the Jesuit Chinese missions. European missionaries preaching the Gospel in the unfamiliar culture of China needed to distinguish the essentials of the Christian message from those elements that were products of the enculturation of the Gospel in Europe, elements that the Chinese need not adopt. Modern missiologists have studied the problem with a wider focus than a particular culture such as China.⁹

A third source of interest in the relation of religion to culture is contextual theology,