In Part III of our series on “The Invisible Schism,” I spoke of Liberation Theology as one of the items rolling around the ecclesial “junk drawer.” I explained that, in essence, the different currents of Liberation Theology are Marxist or Neo-Marxist, and as such, are fundamentally materialistic theories of reality. They aren’t really Christian at all, in anything even remotely resembling an “orthodox” sense, and the Church needs to be freed from those distortions, though
In the second installment in my series on “The Invisible Schism,” I said that the Church today is a bit like a “junk drawer” in which we find a few things we actually need, but also odds and ends of once-useful or even never-useful items that we’ve kept until now only because we haven’t sorted through them. In other words, an awful lot that really doesn’t belong in the Church coexists with those things that
In the first installment in this series, I presented the idea that self-identifying and even practicing Catholics may well espouse radically different understandings of what Catholicism is. I suggested that we can pray side-by-side with someone at Mass, externally saying all the same words and performing all the same outward gestures, professing the same written Creed, but that we could do all this without a shared understanding of what these words and gestures mean. Externally
In previous posts (part 1 and part 2) I have described the modern notion of the “self” and tried to explain its appeal. Modern belief in the self consists in the conviction that the human person is bare consciousness without additional definition — an irreducible consciousness that floats free of determination or definition by anything exterior to itself. In other words, the modern “self” is autonomous (self-defining) consciousness. In our current milieu, this sense of
What if you could get into the minds of a hundred different people to see what they think Catholicism is? I think, if you could, you’d find that few of them really understand the religion the same way. You probably expected me to say that “you’d get a hundred different answers,” because so many of today’s Catholic voices actually think “diversity” is a mark of the Church, and they want to imagine that Catholicism is
In a previous post I sketched the meaning and uses of the modern idea of the self. One important source of this idea is Rene Descartes. For Descartes, the ideas of the self emerges from his application of critical, methodical doubt to his own experience. The upshot of this method is the conviction, that the fundamental, indubitable reality of each human person is the self, expressed in Descartes’ famous assertion, “I think therefore I am.”
