Challenges block spiritual growth

This week, the priests serving our Diocese gathered for our bi-annual convocation. This year, we discussed spirituality in a changing world.

Certainly, no topic is more timely than spirituality. On the one hand, there is a great hunger for spirituality as evidenced by the plethora of books, tapes, videos and internet resources on this matter. On the other hand, we in the Church are experiencing consternation and frustration about how to respond to this hunger, especially among our own people.

More and more Catholics, especially younger ones, are alienated from or indifferent to the Church, and find little meaning in its rituals, language and traditions, which they experience as unrelated to their lives.

We are perplexed when we see our young, and not so young, gravitate toward the evangelical churches and non-traditional spirituality centers, or choose secular settings over sacramental practices.

Losses

Many of our people feel free to dismiss Church teachings that are inconsistent with their own experiences with relationships and sexuality, or ignore Church proclamations about the beginning and the end of life.

Since 1965, vocations to religious life have declined by more than 50 percent; vocations to the priesthood, by more than 30 percent. Mass attendance in the United States has decreased by 30 to 40 percent since the Second Vatican Council of the 1960s.

Some attribute those trends to the implementation of the Council or to the Council itself. Others blame the scandal of clergy sexual abuse.

Scientism

I believe it is more than any one cause. Let me cite just three among several challenges in the contemporary milieu that must be understood and addressed if we are to be responsive to people's spiritual searching.

The first is scientism, which maintains that only that which is empirically verifiable or demonstrable can be considered as objectively true. Anything else is to be viewed as wishful thinking or mere ancient superstition that cannot be trusted or given credence.

A common view of scientism is that evolution occurs simply because matter obeys some unseen law whereby a simple organism will, if it evolves at all, become a more complex one. Evolution is thus a blind process without purpose, and science will one day uncover the mechanical rules underlying every seeming mystery.

Our own lives, therefore, are without purpose. There is no place for the supernatural in scientism.

Science/religion

David O'Brien, president emeritus of Rochester University, notes that the main strategy of scientism is to compare a set of religious claims to the claims of science and common-sense morality.

When that comparison is made, the religious claims appear implausible factually and reprehensible morally. Creation in seven days, the virgin birth, raising the dead -- scientism dismisses all those as absurd. And what of the morality of a God who asks Abraham to sacrifice his only son?

The flaw of that sort of critique is that it puts forth a straw man. According to scientism, the whole of human reality must be viewed through the lens of science. But a holistic view of the world and a scientific view are not the same thing. While the detached view of the scientific observer has immense value when we are trying to arrive at a description of the natural world, it is not the only perspective to be taken into account.

Human reality

Science is interested primarily, if not exclusively, in what is general and repeatable. But the experience of human beings is very different.

Understanding human reality is not a spectator sport. It must be lived from within rather than observed from without. A person, in other words, must be understood as more than a collection of physical laws and moral duties.

Unlike the adherents of scientism, I believe there need not be a conflict between science and religion. Actually, both are trying to do the same thing: to explain the world we see by referring to a world we do not see.

As Rabbi Neil Gilman notes, "both find the ultimate explanation for the immediately visible by postulating a world that is invisible and that accounts for why things are the way they are. That's what myths do; they deal with the invisible to explain the visible...in this sense 'the big bang' is much more theology than it is science. Both are poetry."

Ultimately, it seems to me that, if we do not find the compatibility between science and religion, life itself and all creation becomes meaningless and absurd -- totally pointless.

Atheism

Second, and closely aligned with scientism, is militant atheism, represented by contemporary best-selling authors, such as Richard Dawkins in his "The God Delusion" and Christopher Hitchens in "God is Not Great."

They not only ridicule and debunk belief in God or the supernatural, but also look upon faith as a disease, consider religious instruction as a form of child abuse and decry the harm religion has done and continues to inflict upon humanity. Asserting that religion is capable of doing enormous harm, these critics cite the Crusades, the Inquisition and contemporary Islamic Jihadism, and religious intolerance toward those outside the tradition -- gays, the separated and divorced, non-believers et al.

But how do these advocates for a world free of religious beliefs and traditions explain away the six million Jews incinerated in the ovens of Auschwitz and Birkenau, the 20 million Eastern Europeans killed under Stalin's brutal totalitarian regime, the untold millions slaughtered in the killing fields of Cambodia, the genocide of China's cultural revolution or the systemic effort within all of these godless ideologies to accept or even promote abortion, infanticide and eugenics?

Hope's place

What is missing both in scientism and atheism is hope. Neither provides much consolation at a funeral, and neither can respond to that insatiable quest for the Divine, the Transcendent, the Infinite that has been at the heart of the human experience throughout all of recorded history.

The Darwinian approach to life, upheld by scientism with its emphasis on natural selection, necessitates the ruthless and relentless destruction of individuals who have no meaning other than fostering the survival of the fittest. Following out the cosmic consequences of the big-bang theory and modern atheism has fueled eugenic perfection, ethnic purity and materialistic supremacy.

On the other hand, we believers are called to adhere to what the philosopher Gabriel Marcel has called a "metaphysic of hope," which finds God not absent amidst the vicissitudes of nature and man-made human savagery, but sees God in all the peculiar shapes that love takes amid the chaos and pain of the human condition, whose only ultimate goal is to gather us in the embrace of divine love.

Fundamentalism

Finally, a kind of a mirror image of the scientism and atheism is fundamentalism, both religious and political.

In its religious form, fundamentalism grants a privileged status to faith over reason, and to sacred texts and doctrinal tenets. It also refuses to grant validity to any evidence that might challenge or override that status.

Within our own Catholic tradition, we see this fundamentalism in a nostalgia for the past or in an unwillingness to allow for the development of theological doctrine or of moral understanding. There are also strains of fundamentalism to be found among Protestants, Jews and Muslims.

Going backwards

In a world which has become so insecure and in a post-modern age where all certainties, dogmas and doctrines are being questioned, it is understandable that some people inevitably try to go back to absolute certainties that might have been there -- or at least were perceived to have been there -- in the past.

There is a safety and security to this approach, providing pat answers or facile solutions to every problem, offering a kind of secure spiritual safety net or A-B-C approach to salvation -- as long as one does not stray beyond the boundaries of orthodoxy.

Fundamentalism, however, is a closed system, often accompanied by a smugness and intolerance, by a condescending judgmentalism and anti-intellectualism, all of which fail to appreciate complexity, seeing only black and white without any shades of gray.

Retreat from world

Fundamentalism is one of the attractions of some of the evangelical churches and sects, but it is a retreat from engaging the world. It is a retreat from seeking to harmonize faith and reason, which both John Paul II (in his encyclical "Fides et Ratio") and Benedict XVI (in his address last year at Regensburg, Germany) stated is so critically important if our Catholic Christian faith is to grow and flourish, and be attractive and credible in our contemporary world and society.

Scientism, atheism and fundamentalism are not the only factors in our contemporary society contributing to spiritual unbelief, but they are challenging realities that influence people's attitudes toward faith and religion.

They must be faced squarely if we are to pass the precious heritage of our Catholic Christian tradition to the next generation.

(11/08/07)