Autor: McCarthy, Michael

Buch: Workshop Rome 2001

Titel: Theological Reflection and Christian Renewal

Stichwort: Mangel an einem kritischen Zentrum, Vetera novis augere et perficere

Kurzinhalt: Lonergan (aggiornamento), Gründe für den Widerstand der Kirche, emergence of a solid right and a scattered left

Textausschnitt: The aggiornamento initiated by Pope John XXIII has had uneven results. Catholic Christianity has gradually opened itself to the important modern developments in empirical science, historical scholarship, and collective practicality. But it has lacked a vital and unified center within its own ranks able to mediate effectively between inherited tradition and modern innovation.
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For Lonergan, aggiornamento meant elevating Catholic inquiry and practice to the level and demands of the modern world. He insisted that this effort at internal reform would require a tremendous stretch by Catholics, both as individual believers and as a global community of faith.
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Lonergan correctly anticipated the divisive emergence of a solid right and a scattered left within the Christian community.
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To what new theoretical and practical achievements did the twentieth century Church have to respond? Modern living has been permanently transformed by ...
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To a great extent, the Catholic Church, from the Council of Trent through the first half of the twentieth century, held itself aloof from these remarkable modern developments. Why did the Church adopt this posture of critical reserve and opposition? There were both internal and external reasons for its stance of withdrawal and resistance.
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The modern theoretical and practical legacy taken in its full concreteness is a tangled knot of greatness and wretchedness, to use Pascal's famous idiom. Because the Church felt threatened by many of these developments, its collective response to them was predominantly defensive and critical. The most influential modern thinkers were perceived as hostile to Catholicism and to the cosmological and anthropological beliefs it held and taught.
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The most powerful intellectual, political, and economic movements of modernity were also initially viewed as unwelcome. This was true of the Copernican revolution, ...
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Partly through deliberate exclusion but mostly through their own unpreparedness, Catholics found themselves segregated from creative intellectual leadership in the sciences, the arts, politics and economics.
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In Lonergan's unsparing judgment, Catholic defensiveness towards modern culture compared unfavorably with the Church's mediating role in the high Middle Ages. ... The inspiring model of Aquinas (Lonergan spent over a decade reaching up to the level of his thought) provided Lonergan with a striking analogy for his own life's work. 'To follow Aquinas today is to do for the twentieth century what he did for the thirteenth.'