Autor: McCarthy, Michael

Buch: Workshop Rome 2001

Titel: Theological Reflection and Christian Renewal

Stichwort: Notwendigkeit eines kritischen Zentrums zur Vermittlung von Kirche und Welt

Kurzinhalt: The Mediating Center, critical aggiornamento, creative minority within the Church, Liste: 7 Forderungen an ein kritisches Zentrum

Textausschnitt: 'Our disengagement from classicism and our involvement in modernity must be open-ended, critical, coherent, sure footed [...] we have to take the trouble, and it is enormous, to grasp the strength and the weakness, the power and the limitations, the good points and the shortcomings of both classicism and modernity.'
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Lonergan called for the emergence of a creative minority within the Church, a vital, critical center, 'big enough to be at home in both the old and the new, painstaking enough to work out one by one the transitions to be made, strong enough to refuse half measures and insist on complete solutions even though it has to wait.'
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He saw the need to reform what was no longer adequate in the vetera, while avoiding the exaggeration and one-sidedness of the champions of the new. He was impatient with mediocrity, half-truths, superficial opinions, the undiscerning embrace of or resistance to change.
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Aufgaben:
1) to understand and evaluate historical change, critically demarcating authentic development from unwelcome decline (30; Fs)
2) to assess impartially the merits and limitations of both classicism and modernity (30; Fs)
3) to mediate critically modern pluralism, practical, cultural, scholarly and theoretical; this would require thematizing the vast array of human differences, tracing them to their originating source in differentiated intentional consciousness, ...
4) to distinguish between authenticity and alienation in modern knowledge and praxis and to disentangle the enduring achievements of the new learning from the ideological counter positions to which they are often conjoined. ...
5) to check the recurrent human tendency to general bias, the source of short-sighted practicality and the underlying cause of the longer cycle of historical decline
6) to reaffirm the complementarity of faith and reason and in so doing, to reverse the succession of lower cognitive syntheses that began with the secular enlightenment and its rejection of revealed truth
7) to develop a methodical and critical philosophy that meets the continuing human need for intellectual integration while respecting the specialized character of modern science and scholarship. Grave problems, mountainous tasks and Herculean labors indeed!