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“How is an institution, a movement, a social teaching, or even an individual ‘Catholic’ today? It is surprising how frequently this question comes up and how difficult it can be to answer.” [1] With this question a recent issue of Concilium began an entire issue of that journal given to a discussion of Catholic identity. That same question is pertinent to the nature of schools which claim the appellation, “Catholic school.” At the same time the question is pertinent to hospitals, universities, charitable institutions and pastoral counselling services which function under the aegis of ‘Catholic.’ The same issue of Concilium explores the question from the point of view of canon law, history, sociology, psychology, futurology, ecumenism and even theology. This diversity of approaches may simply reflect the difficulty of pinning down both terms, ‘Catholic’ and ‘identity,’ in this postmodern era which tends to reject all “universalizing narratives.” In this essay I will first describe a canonical understanding of Catholic education. Secondly I will challenge some present understandings of Catholic education from the perspective of theology. Finally, I will make some brief personal observations about contemporary religion.
Catholic Education in Canon Law
Firstly, let me by look briefly at some aspects of the canonical approach to this question. The revised Code of Canon Law, published in 1983, devotes an entire section to Catholic Schools. [2] The revised Code acts out a presumption about the rights and duties of parents which it carefully nuances. It says:
Parents . . . are obliged and enjoy the right to educate their offspring; Catholic parents also have the duty and right to select those means and institutions through which they can provide more suitably for the Catholic education of the children according to local circumstances.
This legislation not only stands in contrast to the old Code of canon law, which forbade Catholics to attend other than Catholic schools without qualification. [3] Thus there is recognition of situations prevailing in many parts of Europe and North America where it has become customary to send many Catholic children to schools run by the state. Now parents are urged “to send their children to those schools in which Catholic education is provided; but if they are unable to do this, they are bound to provide for their suitable Catholic education outside the schools.” [4] Effectively parents are hereby in the position of having to make many choices about both the quality and appropriateness of their children’s education as well as providing for their Catholic education. Clearly specifically Catholic education may be sought in venues other than the Catholic school. It may even be possible that a Catholic school does not deliver Catholic education, in which case a parent would be obliged to see to that elsewhere. If Catholic education is no longer synonymous with the Catholic school, what is a Catholic school? Let us turn again to the Code of Canon Law where we find the following:
That school is considered to be Catholic which ecclesiastical authority or a public ecclesiastical juridical person supervises or which ecclesiastical authority recognizes as such by means of a written document. [5]
The canon attempts to answer the persistent question: What makes a school Catholic? This legal response is fairly top down, wherein it comes down to the fact that a school is Catholic either when it is run by the church (i.e. usually the diocese as represented by its Catholic education Office) or a body recognised by the church (i.e. a board or religious community) or because the local bishop says it is such. It is clear that operation or recognition by church authority is the final criterion in this extrinsic approach. However the canon continues to demand that education in a Catholic school be grounded in Catholic teaching by teachers who are outstanding for correct teaching and moral probity. [6] The difficulty is that this arrangement is not a legal requirement but in Coriden’s phrase “an expectation” and although it may offer the simplest and most verifiable criterion it gives little away about the desirable criteria of the school’s Catholicity. [7] A better answer to the question: What makes a school Catholic? is however available at Canon 795. It is worthy of repeating in full:
Since a true education
must strive for the integral formation of the human person, a
formation which looks toward the person’s final end, and
at the same time toward the common good of societies, children
and young people are to be so reared that they can develop harmoniously
their physical, moral and intellectual talents, that they acquire
a more perfect sense of responsibility and a correct use of freedom,
and that they be educated for active participation in social
life.
Coriden claims this is a “splendid statement” deriving as it does from the opening paragraph of the Vatican council’s Declaration on Christian Education. He summarizes this canon under four headings: holistic, developmental, social and personal. [8] I find this canonical approach to the nature of Catholic education comparable to my own research described in my 1999 article, Towards a Theology of Catholic Education. [9] In that article I argued that a theology of Catholic education has something to say to four important dimensions of educational thought: the person, knowledge, human destiny and the transformation of the world. My first and fourth dimensions correspond to Coriden’s fourth and third criteria respectively. I subsume his first category under my treatment of the person. What is so splendid about this canonical understanding of Catholic education is the strength of its humanism derived as it is from the teleological view of human persons. This approach emphasises the rational in human subjects striving for their ultimate end in accord with the divine plan of God’s practical reason. [10] Nonetheless the common good and social life are here integrated into the ideal notion of Catholic education in such a way that the implication is clearly that a Catholic education is an education in Social Justice as understood by the tradition of Catholic social thought.
I had also argued in Towards a Theology of Catholic Education that a great shift in thinking about Catholic education had occurred during a period of about sixty years from 1929 to 1988. That is from the publication of Pope Pius XI’s education encyclical Divini Illius Magistri to the publication of The Religious Dimension of Education in a Catholic School by the Vatican’s Congregation for Catholic Education. The conversation about the development of Catholic education continues but until certain theological-education issues are more fully explored the answer to the question: “What makes a school Catholic?” remains incomplete.
A Theological Challenge
Secondly contemporary theology addresses a number of challenges to Catholic education even as understood in the contemporary Church documents and legislation. I think these challenges are well expressed by Groppo. [11] First is the evaluation of the educational problems which culture presents to faith; second is the critical appropriation of modern theology’s understanding of salvation, holiness, autonomy, human action and education as liberating and humanizing processes; third is the understanding of the processes of religious conversion and development; fourth is the description of maturity and growth in both developmental and religious terms.
Given the time constraint I will proceed to comment on the challenge to faith from a culture that appears to be simply irreligious. This challenge is probably best encapsulated in the theory of secularization. According to Casanova the theory uniquely held paradigmatic status in the social sciences as the thesis was held in one form or another by most of the founding fathers, notably Ferdinand Toennies, Georg Simmel, Emile Durkheim, Max Weber Sigmund Freud and George H. Mead. [12] The central thesis of the theory of secularization is:
the conceptualization of the process of modernization as a process of functional differentiation and emancipation of the secular spheres—primarily the state, the economy, and science—from the religious sphere and concomitant differentiation and specialization of religion within its own newly found religious sphere. [13]
Two corollaries follow this theory: the first is the opinion that as a consequence of modernization religion is in the process of decline and eventual extinction according to some extremists. Second is the opinion that the consequence of a modern secular society religion is at best a private affair if not all together marginal to the rest of society. Although very little of this theory is verifiable in scientific terms as it is stated, the demographics of some parts of the world, including Australia, appear to support it. However, even in those isolated cases important distinctions about the nature of the sacred, the religious behaviour of people and the present institutional form of the church must be made. The research literature is prolific with significant contributions from Peter Berger, Roberto Cipriani, Grace Davie, Kieran Flanagan, Marcel Gauchet and David Martin. However, by far the most interesting discussion of secularization is found in Hervieu-Léger’s 1993 La Religion pour Mémoire? [14]
Firstly, I like
the way in which HL approaches the problem of modern religion
and places it in a broader context, namely that of modern consciousness.
This runs closely parallel to at least one possible approach
in modern theology, namely that of conducting its major discourse,
God-talk, in the context of modernity. The implication for Catholic
education is to conduct all or most religious discourse in a
manner that derives from contemporary philosophy and other forms
of thought rather than in ways deriving from the Thomistic synthesis
so successful in former times. This might even entail rapprochement
with the language of postmodernity. I commend a recent example
such as John Caputo’s small pocket book On Religion. [15] Secondly, this
is a book that also picks up the most topical themes in the sociology
of religion along the way. Alongside those already mentioned,
there is a discussion of functional and substantive approaches
to religion, the sacred, religious experience, the role of metaphor
or analogy in religion, tradition and of course memory or anamnesis
as a social construct. All of which suggests that a Catholic
education will feed the Catholic imagination. It is perhaps opportune
to remind ourselves of Paul Claudel’s diagnosis of the religious
crisis of the nineteenth century as “the tragedy of a starved
imagination.” [16] I
suspect the difficulty in contemporary education is not the education
of the imagination but the recognition of what constitutes the
Catholic imagination. Fortuitously priest, novelist, and
sociologist Andrew Greeley answers that question fairly well
in his book The Catholic Imagination. He begins:
Catholics live in an enchanted world, a world of statues and holy water, stained glass and votive candles, saints and religious medals, rosary beads and holy pictures. But these Catholic paraphanalia are mere hints of a deeper and more pervasive religious sensibility which inclines Catholics to see the Holy lurking in Creation. As Catholics, we find our houses and our world haunted by a sense that the objects, events, and persons of daily life are revelations of grace. [17]
Greeley goes on to identify this imagination as sacramental; an imagination that recognises the incarnation of God’s presence in Creation. A Catholic education feeds this imagination by its development of the imagination especially through exposure to literature, art, history and the classics. Thirdly, HL’s version of the secularization thesis proposes that as one form of religious tradition collapses, another form of religious identity emerges. This is a tantalizing prospect which invites the reader to speculate about the nature of that identity. It also relativizes those institutional forms in which the Church expresses itself. Catholic education should encourage a knowledge of diverse forms and the creation of new forms of living together in community. An education that offers a critical understanding of history and tradition is demanded.
Religion as a Chain of Memory was preceded by Vers un nouveau christianisme? (1986). The thesis of this book is that modern societies -by their nature - sap the strength of religious traditions. There is a structural incompatibility between the demands of modern society and traditional forms of religion. But modern societies cannot exist without some form of religiosity. This results in the emergence of innovative forms of religious life. There is abundant evidence that modern societies are destructive of conventional religion: rapidly declining religious practice, the decrease in numbers seeking Church involvement at the time of birth, death or marriage, and the collapse in vocations to the priesthood and religious life. Counterevidence is also pervasive. It includes the range of religious communities sects and cults which have emerged in face of recent trends. Other phenomena include the strength of popular religion, and the increasing attraction of sacred places both old and new. Then there is a certain ambivalence of evidence which suggests a general decline in orthodox belief and practice alongside the persistence of intense feelings and experience of the numinous. Perhaps the tremendous crisis of clergy sex scandals might be more easily understood and remedied in this context. For HL all aspects of this contradictory evidence are products of modernity itself. Modernity in this context refers both to the historical dimension which is inevitably corrosive of religion. Religion is simply redundant in a world that has all the answers. The utopian dimension of modernity is the gap that opens between our experience and the horizon of our expectations. According to Hervieu Léger:
the hypothesis that this ever increasing utopian space - ever increasing in view of the constant speeding up of knowledge and technology - becomes the space within which religious representations are constantly reorganised. Such representations are, however, subject to an equally permanent destruction by the forces of rationalism.
HL attempts to break out of the impasse between “functional” (broadly inclusive) and “substantive” (restrictive) definitions. She does so by reference to the legitimating authority of a tradition (or shared belief system). This tradition evokes a community as a concrete social group or by an imaginary genealogy. The essential point for Hervieu Léger is the chain which binds the believer to the community and the tradition legitimating this religious belief. The key question for HL is: are modern societies less capable of generating meaning systems characterized by this chain of memory? All this not due to rationalism but because of collective amnesia. The surrogate memories or small memories fill the symbolic space vacated by major religious traditions. Davie is optimistic about the possibilities of this approach whereas Gregory Baum is quite unconvinced by this eloquent, but “needlessly long book.” [18]
Concluding Remarks
Modernity has deconstructed
the traditional systems of believing, but has not forsaken belief.
Believing finds expression in an individualized, subjective and
diffuse form, and resolves into a multiplicity of combinations
and orderings of meanings which are elaborated independently
of control by institutions of believing, by religious institutions
in particular. This independence is, however, relative inasmuch
as it as it is restricted by economic, social and cultural determinations
which weigh heavily on the symbolic activity of individuals no
less than on their material and social lives. It is nonetheless
a real independence because the inalienable right of individuals
to conceive the world for themselves is asserted as a counterpart
to progress in the practical mastery exercised over the material
world.
Sacredness still constitutes in modern societies one of the possible methods of organizing collective meaning in terms of which human beings make sense of their existence. Essentially it finds expression in the absolute - sacred - character conferred on objects, symbols or values, which crystallize the feeling of radical dependence experienced, individually and/or collectively in emotional contact with an external force. Religion corresponds to another system of organizing meaning, based upon identification with a chain or line of belief.
Reference to the past no longer supplies a system of meanings which afford an explanation for the imperfections of the world and the incoherence of experience, nor does it provide a scenario for the future.
This uncertainty shows itself in a particularly acute form in the search for identity to which modern society is ill-suited to respond, lacking as it does the essential source for identity of a memory held in common. If human society cannot be imagined without a minimal collective sharing of the effort to produce meaning, the effort itself assumes that there exists between its members a minimal imaginative grasp of continuity without which the thought of a common future is impossible. The ever-increasing dislocation of this imaginative grasp at the same time forces society continually to reconstruct itself in new forms so as to ensure continuity for both the group and the individual. But without there being an organized and integrated social memory such reconstruction takes place in an entirely fragmented way.
REFERENCES
[1] James Provost and Knut Walf, “Catholic Identity,” Concilium 5 (1994): vii.
[2] “Catholic education receives an expanded (29 canons as compared with 12 in the 1917 Code) and updated (it strongly reflects the teachings of Vatican’s Declaration on Christian Education) treatment in the revised Code. Symbolic of its new direction is the fact that the very first word of the first canon is “parents.” It clearly asserts the rights of parents in the education process.” James A. Coriden, Thomas J. Green and Donald E. Heintschell, eds. The Code of Canon Law: A Text and Commentary (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1985), 564. In this section of the paper I have followed this commentary closely as a reliable guide to the interpretation of the Code.
[3] The relevant canon is 1374 in Benedict XV, Codex Iuris Canonicis (The Vatican: Polyglot Press, repr. 1951)
[4] CCL, Canon 798.
[5] CCL, Canon 803.
[6] Corriden, Code of Canon Law, 568.
[7] Ibid
[8] Ibid, 565.
[9] Brian J. Kelty, “Towards a Theology of Catholic Education,” Religious Education 94 (Winter 1999): 6-23.
[10] Charles E. Curran The Catholic Moral Tradition Today: A Synthesis (Wasington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press) 66-73. This is a critical evaluation of the teleolical approach to the natural law especially in Thomas Aquinas.
[11] Giuseppe Groppo, Teologia Dell’educazione: Origine, identità, compiti (Roma: Libreria Ataneo Salesiano, 1991) 440. I quote Groppo’s fundamental challenges in the conclusion of my article referred to above.
[12] José Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994) 17. The entire firs chapter offers a comprehensive overview. It is entitled “Secularization, Enlightenment, and Modern Religion” 11-39.
[13] Ibid 19.
[14] English translation: Hervieu-Léger, Danièle, Religion as a Chain of Memory. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000.
[15] John Caputo, On Religion (London: Routledge, 2001.
[16] Paul Claudel, Positions et Propositions (Gallimard, 1926) cited in Alexander Dru and Illtyd Trethowan, Maurice Blondel: Letter on apologetics and History and Dogma (London: Harvill Press, 1964) 21.
[17] Andrew Greeley, The Catholic Imagination (Berkeley: CA.: University of California Press, 2000) 1.
[18] GregoryBaum, “La Religion pour Memoire, by Danièle Hervieu-Léger.” review in Sociology of Religion.pp. vol 44 216-7. Grace Davie, “Religion and Modernity: The Work of Danièle Hervieu-Léger.” In Kieran Flanagan and Peter C. Jupp, eds. Postmodernity, Sociology and Religion (London: Macmillan, 1996), pp. 101-117.
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Brian Kelty lectures in the School of Theology, McAuley Campus.
