Shock! Pope is Catholic!

Change of plan. When this webblog resumes Monday, I intend to return to my review of John L Allen’s most important work.

Today though, I hope you may forgive a detour, which will prepare the stage for that continued review. That is, I want to say more about why I value so highly what Allen trying to do, in addressing the Anglophone world’s (Ireland excepted) incomprehension of the Vatican.

Among my reasons for applauding Allen is that I see a poverty of imagination in our culture. As though we simply cannot imagine any other alternative to our society, than it being built on the basis of the lowest-common-denominator of our experience: logic and empiricism. Which, as I have said, Rudolf Steiner so eloquently warned would lead to disaster.

Yes, friends, so that you are clear ‘where I am coming from’ I will say that I am haunted, haunted by Rudolf Steiner’s vivid portrayal of the ascent of ruthless capitalism on the back of Cartesian-Kantian epistemology and its heirs …

I am Catholic and I do not support many aspects of Steiner’s Anthroposophy. But I am haunted by what I take to be his undeniable foresight, as to a continued loss of soul in the world … with the gravest of consequences.

As to what I am calling a ‘poverty of imagination’, I think I can illustrate by turning attention to a common bewilderment about Catholicism, which can be regularly observed everywhere in the non-Catholic world – and as I have indicated before, particularly in the secular countries of Protestant heritage.

A bewilderment, which it seems to me, reflects an **unconscious assumption** that the Catholic does or at least should, think along the same lines as the non-Catholic, which conveniently ignores the fact that to be an accepting Catholic means to have one’s worldview shaped by very different factors than that of Secularism, or even Protestantism.

Now with the election of Benedict XVI earlier this year, this ‘unconscious assumption’ came into much sharper focus. At least for me. I can illustrate what I mean by referencing a piece by Gerard Baker in the London Times following the Papal election.

Commenting on ‘the simple incredulousness at the very idea that a man such as Joseph Ratzinger could possibly have become leader of the universal Church’ Baker went on to say:

“Pundits for whom the Catholic Church has long been an object of anthropological curiosity fringed with patronising ridicule have really let themselves go since the new pontiff emerged. Indeed most of the coverage I have seen or read could be neatly summarised as: ‘Cardinals elect Catholic Pope. World in Shock’.”

What Baker essentially suggests is that the non-Catholic world is simply unprepared to imagine the dynamics shaping contemporary Catholicism.

But I would say the problem goes far, far deeper than that. Our secular world is not simply unprepared to imagine Catholicism - it seems unprepared to imagine ANYTHING OTHER than its own perhaps-suicidal trajectory …

To be continued Monday.