Accommodation vs Evangelization and Their Origins

 I have a piece up in the The Pillar this week, advancing a framework for understanding why we see such different responses to the challenges of talking about the Church's teachings on marriage and sexual morality in the modern world.

How is it that among the world's Catholic bishops' conferences we have countries as seemingly different as Germany, Belgium and the countries of Latin America on the "accommodation" side of dealing with these problems, while on the other we have countries like the US and the African nations?

Pope Francis and Cardinal Fernandez hale from Argentina, where 92% of the population is Catholic, although few people attend mass or even marry in the Church, while Fiducia supplicans has come under strident criticism from the bishops of Africa, where in most countries Catholicism is a minority religion besides Protestantism and Islam

If it were simply a matter of affluence and modern economies, one might expect the US and Europe to seem more similar, while Africa and Latin America were on the same side.

I argue that there are different experiences and fears among church leaders in countries where the Catholic Church is the predominant religious force. Clerics who face a region in which the vast majority of residents are baptized Catholics are tempted by a sense of loss aversion: if only they can avoid giving people a reason to formally separate themselves from the Church, then when some point in their lives draws them towards God, it will be the Church and the Church's sacraments which people reach out to.

In regions with more religious competition, leaders in the Church have pushed to realize that waiting passively for the moment of grace may not be enough: if they do not seek to actively evangelize their flock, the sheep may be quickly drawn into another religious community.

You can real the full piece which lays out the argument and supporting details here.

With this post, I'd like to go a bit further and discuss some ideas which did not make it into the Pillar piece.

Obviously, it is the fact that at many times through Church history Church leaders have seen the necessity of evangelizing even though the vast majority of the people under their care are already baptized Catholics.  Accommodation and the minimization of the conflicts between Catholic teaching and the prevailing culture of the time is not the inevitable approach. The Church's history is full of great saints who recognized and sought to remedy the everyday practical unbelief which is a temptation for all of us.

So why, with the mainstream culture seemingly so opposed to Christianity at so many levels -- not just sexuality, but in regards to the meaning and purpose of human life, of possessions, of civil society -- has more of a movement not sprung up yet to bring the Church's message to a desperate world, even in the regions which are, on paper, already Catholic?

I think one could argue that among the "Vatican II generation" there is an idea that is a hangover from the post WW2 moment (when modernity seemed to have immolated itself in war and destruction, and Catholic theologian Jacques Maritain was a key inspiration for the UN Charter on Human Rights.) Catholic leaders thought that the Church was poised to provide answers to a ruined modernity's questions and lead the world into a new age of peace and thriving.

Whatever influence that Catholic vision may have had evaporated in the conflict with the sexual revolution. Even as the conciliar generation "threw open the windows the Church" thinking that the world would eagerly embrace the ideas of churchmen on ending war, pursuing European style Christian Democracy, and creating an economy focused on human ends, the world instead embraced a consumerism which extended to sex, relationship, and human life itself.

And yet many (especially in Europe and that conciliar generation) still see the post-Vatican II Church as clearly providing answers to the secular world's questions if only they could clear the air of questions about sexual issues.

We see this in a conviction that the Vatican can be a key player in negotiating an end to war in general (in individual conflicts such as Ukraine and the Holy Land in particular), and in providing the inspiration for a new culture which will tame carbon emissions.

But in the minds of the vast majority of people, that post-war moment is long past. When you talk with secular intellectuals about "human rights" they instantly think of gay marriage and trans rights, not the vision of Christian Democracy which the postwar generation of Catholic leaders sought to implement in Europe and abroad.  

And the sorts of questions that people are actually asking are in fact the ones which too many church leaders seem to see as a distraction: how am I to form relationships and raise a family?  What is a family? What is the relationship between me and my body?  If I could upload my mind into a computer, would that be "me"? Do we have the right to create life whenever and however we choose (from IVF to genetically modified "custom babies") and to end life when we see fit? What do my desires mean in a world where countless internet sights are flogging apparently instant satisfaction?  

And while the Church has answers to those questions, they're answers in clear and direct conflict with the post sexual revolution mores of secular society to which many are as deeply attached as pagan societies were to their idols. At some point, the leaders of the Church are going to have to choose between the credibility they imagine they could have with the leaders of the worldly elite and professing the Church's answers on the key questions of the day. They question is: will they choose to do so, in some parts of the world, while they still have a majority of people being baptized into the Church, or will the wakeup call wait until the collapse is complete.