Beyond the Culture Wars: CST Resources

A contribution from Gregory Kalscheuer, SJ at Boston College Law School:

After reading Amy's recent posting raising the crucial issue of how to move beyond culture war paralysis, I wanted to call people's attention to an interesting piece by Bryan Hehir in the most recent issue of the National Center for Pastoral Life's journal, Church (Spring 2004). Hehir raises the question: can the Church convincingly engage American culture? His answer focuses on the need for the Church's voice to be both dialogic and prophetic, with a clear emphasis on the primary role of dialogue if the Church's witness to its moral vision is to be effective.

Hehir sees Guadiem et Spes as the crucial text that ought to guide our reflection on this issue. This central Vatican II document recognizes both that the Church stands in a dialectical relationship with the world and that this dialectical relationship is most fruitfully sustained by an ongoing dialogue with the world. Operating in this dialogic mode, the Church has to demonstrate that it is open to learning from the world,as well as witnessing to it. There may be times when a more prophetic stance is called for, but the culture will more constructively be engaged through a pedagogical dialogue, where the Church both teaches and learns. Paragraphs 40 and 44 of Gaudiem et Spes are particularly important in this regard.

The Church's credibility as a moral voice in contemporary culture depends on its ability to find a voice that can humbly learn as well as confidently teach. Hehir points to John XXIII's encyclical Pacem in Terris and the US bishops' 1983 pastoral letter, the Challenge of Peace, as manifesting the sort of dialogical mode of speaking to the world that is required if the Church is to engage in effective conscience formation of well-educated, highly skilled adult people of faith. Cardinal Bernardin spoke eloquently of the dialogical, pedagogical, persuasive style of engagement with the world that Gaudiem et Spes models: "We should be convinced that we have much to learn from the world and much to teach it. We should be confident but collegial with others who seek similar goals but may differ on means and methods. A confident Church will speak its mind, seek as a community to live its convictions, but leave space for others to speak to us, help us to grow from their perspective, and to collaborate with them." See the very useful collection of Bernardin's speeches edited by John Langan, A Moral Vision for America. Also helpful in this regard is David Hollenbach's notion of "intellectual solidarity," which he spells out in chapter six, of The Common Good and Christian Ethics (e.g., at 137: the intellectual work of bringing religious values into public discourse in a religiously pluralistic community "is a form of solidarity, because it can only occur in an active dialogue of mutual listening and speaking across the boundaries of religion and culture. Indeed, dialogue that seeks to understand those with different visions of the good life is already a form of solidarity even when disagreement continues to exist.").

I'm confident that CST can provide us with an effective set of tools and principles to engage in the project of presenting what Amy called "the unique and profound beauty of the Catholic Church's vision of the human person and social life," while respecting dialogue partners with diverse approaches and differing prudential judgments about what the common good demands. I fear that the beauty of that vision can be obscured when the vision is presented more by means of public condemndations than through a humble, confident, and hope-filled dialogue of learning and teaching.