- Feb 5, 2002
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It’s amazing how out of touch with current reality we can become as we age. I’ve mentioned before Hilaire Belloc’s interesting thesis that people in their sixties tend to still fight the battles in which they were engaged in their twenties and thirties, even though current problems might be quite different. The battles we keep fighting also depend on our personal inclinations, and if our inclinations haven’t changed (as, for example, through a deepening conversion) we are even more likely to bypass current reality in favor of attacking old straw men. But there is something far deeper at stake than our own theories of what is wrong with the Church and the world.
I am sure examples could be taken from my own life and the things I have always harped on. But a far more prominent example is Pope Francis, who has for the umpteenth time urged a new approach to theology. In particular, Francis has decried the theological manuals of the past as “all closed, all museum pieces, all bookish, without making you think.” This was a legitimate concern in the 1950s and early 60s (Pope Francis turned twenty-four in 1960), but by the late 60s and 70s we were awash in the opposite problem, that is, “theologies” which were deliberately designed to undermine both Divine Revelation and the Natural Law.
Continued below.
www.catholicculture.org
I am sure examples could be taken from my own life and the things I have always harped on. But a far more prominent example is Pope Francis, who has for the umpteenth time urged a new approach to theology. In particular, Francis has decried the theological manuals of the past as “all closed, all museum pieces, all bookish, without making you think.” This was a legitimate concern in the 1950s and early 60s (Pope Francis turned twenty-four in 1960), but by the late 60s and 70s we were awash in the opposite problem, that is, “theologies” which were deliberately designed to undermine both Divine Revelation and the Natural Law.
Continued below.
Is Pope Francis fighting youthful battles all over again?
For a Pope to see in the Church a lack of openness to the goods cherished by the dominant culture is for a Pope to put the identity of the Church at risk.
www.catholicculture.org
