At the start of the 20th century, there were 266 million Catholics in the world, most in Europe and North America. Today there are 1.1 billion, with two-thirds living the global South. This means...."greater attentiveness to diversity of all sorts in the Church" - which in turns means...something or other.
These articles (this is one of thousands along the same lines that appear in "progressive" circles) confuse me in so many ways. Nationalism is indeed a terrible problem for Catholics. We are not and have never been about the nation-state. Our universalism has always defined us. It has been a source of our growth, a characteristic that sets us apart in an age of nationalism. We've never had anything to do with nationalism, and this has gotten us in deep trouble in every country, especially in the U.S. where we were subjected to appalling violence in the 19th century. Our loyalty was questioned throughout the 20th century. Especially in wartime (worlds wars one and two), Catholics were treated as traitors to the state and its mission.
But we must ask ourselves what forces have been at work that have given rise to nationalism within Catholic circles in our own times?. The two most obvious changes that have done so are: 1) the power of national conferences, which was dramatically enhanced by the Second Vatican Council, and 2) the change in the primary language of liturgy following the Council, from Latin to the vernacular.
The second force is decisive here: there are schools of thought that establish a near identity between nation and language. Taking away Latin was devastating for the cause of universalism. The first issue of national conferences gave rise to a Catholic political identity within the Church, one so intense that there are even Bishops who imagine themselves to be shepherds of something called the "American Catholic Church" rather than a universal one.
So I have no problem with seminars that seek to address the problem of nationalism. What I do not understand is why these seminars seem to avoid the obvious solution, which is not to go on endlessly about the merits of diversity but to restore Latin as the primary language of liturgy and to reduce the national power of the conferences to establish national identities that fracture the universal Catholic identity. These are changes that many Catholics in the "global South" would cheer! In fact, these very regions were among the most skeptical of vernacularization in the 1960s - and that is a well-documented fact. Print this post
