AN OPENING CAVEAT
The relevance of this project is twofold. Initially, the acceleration in historical mutations regarding the new evangelism is vast in scope and Ricoeur‘s theory of narrative offers a structuring methodology for organizing and understanding this interpretive range. More importantly, the application of Ricoeur‘s narrative theory to the new evangelism provides one possible way forward in an otherwise heated stalemate between orthodox and progressive camps within the Church. The former, ever-afraid of relativism,
emphasizes the unique message of Christ; the latter, ever-afraid of blind obedience and the violences linked to hegemony, emphasizes openness to diversity. An application of Ricoeur‘s method to evangelism simultaneously appreciates both the importance of (1) a universal, prophetic voice based upon the Christian revelation, lest the uniqueness of the Christian message disappear by collapsing into cultural context alone, and the importance of (2) a contextualized theology that appreciates diversity and promotes intra and inter faith communication and dialogue, even across other religious faith claims.1
For any theology to speak in a therapeutic voice to today‘s world, it must attend to both its universalizing and its contextual dimensions. In order to engage in theology creatively and faithfully between the global and local situations in which it finds itself, both dimensions must be emphasized without neglecting the other, and without drawing
1Philip Gleason, ―The Crisis of Americanization,‖ in Catholicism in America, eds. Philip Gleason, John Highman, and Bradford Perkins (New York: Harper and Row, 1970), 153.
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straw-man caricatures of the other.2 As addressed in the first chapter, context is entirely relevant to this project because all narratives arise out of context. Accordingly, United States contexts—and the distinctively American story of Catholic evangelism that appears from these settings—furnish the subject matter of this second chapter. Whether by context one refers to social location, societal structure, or general culture, it always plays a critical role in framing theological articulation and appropriation. Consequently, theology must never dismiss its contextual component.
At the same time, theology dare not reduce to context only and miss its universalizing dimension. A crude form of contextualization that flattens theology to nothing more than culture loses its critical edge and reduces to a mere product of its surroundings. Martin Luther King, Jr. needed to universalize his theology and impose it upon the entire culture. Without the universalizing dimension, his prophetic word could not have applied to those who needed to hear it most. He could never have convicted, challenged, and shaken out of its complacent comfort zone a country that would otherwise have persisted in racism, had it not been for the universality of his message‘s reception and application.
As observed in the earlier discussion of the reciprocal dialectic between the space of experience and the horizon of expectation, openness to reconfiguration protects
history‘s quest for objectivity from the naïve notion that a singular contextualized, subjective interpretation could sufficiently constitute an absolute, concrete paradigm of reality. A total reductionism into context leads to the sedimentation of a lifeless, singular deposit; consequently, contextualization cannot become an intellectual idol that purports
2
Robert J. Schreiter, The New Catholicity: Theology between the Global and the Local (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1997), 8.
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to adequately account for the history of all theology. Innovations such as Martin Luther King, Jr.‘s prophetic and universal outcry against injustice safeguard history from
sedimentation and appreciate the Christian voice of Dr. King‘s theology as Christian, not merely as the outgrowth of his cultural context; after all, cultural context is precisely what narrative innovations are apt to challenge critically.
So not only is theology‘s context entirely relevant, but also its capacity for universality. On the one hand, context ensures that people hear how the word is
encountered, appropriated, interpreted, and further proclaimed by those who hear it; on the other hand, universality ensures that the Church maintain her prophetic voice in the world. The Church may, according to this current project, resist the positing of a false dichotomy and instead recognize that both context and universality are critical to theology‘s place. Ricoeur‘s theory of narrative, in its recognition that interpretations take multiple
configurations, allows for both the contextualizing and the universalizing dimensions of Christian proclamation to coexist.
Ultimately, this project argues for a renewal in the way the Church understands evangelism. By reconfiguring her understanding of the new evangelization to embrace the coexistence of competing narratives, the Catholic Church can move past the dichotomous and unproductive gridlock between theological conservatives and liberals. Such a project requires both a recognition of the importance of contextualization, which comprises the topic of this present chapter—for all narratives arise out of context, and a simultaneous recognition that Christian evangelization transcends context at the same time, for the Gospel has critiqued and transformed contexts for two thousand years. Accordingly, the third chapter will call for a renewed vision of evangelism that embraces a necessary
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openness to reconfiguration—a call that one can understand to be this project‘s universalizing, evangelistic outcry for justice. For now, the current chapter turns to context specifically, bearing in mind this caution against any reductionism into context alone.
COGNIZANT OF CIRCULARITY
Specifically, the context of this project‘s focus is United States Catholicism. The experience of the new Catholic evangelization in the United States derives from and continually develops within the United States context. The present chapter will describe this situation in detail as it showcases the historical and sociological elements that comprise this context because, as Ricoeur‘s theory makes explicit, narratives arise out of the contexts from which productive human imaginations construct emplotments.3 However, as this necessary description of context transitions the project from Ricoeur‘s theory of narrative to the application of that theory, its inherent circularity follows. As the previous chapter observed, an epistemological circularity between time and narrative undergirds Ricoeur‘s entire methodology. In the move from theory to practice, the healthy hermeneutical spiral of Ricoeur‘s method becomes apparent in this project‘s application of his method to the topic of contemporary evangelism.
On the theoretical side, an inherent epistemological circularity manifests itself in hermeneutical circles throughout Ricoeur‘s trilogy. The reciprocal dialectics between the space of experience and the horizon of expectation and between sedimentation and innovation both illustrate this essential circular dynamic. The three stages of mimesis themselves form a hermeneutical circle—an interpretive circularity that bears witness to
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the circular epistemology of Ricoeur‘s philosophical method, as he freely and frequently admits. From the initial engagement between Book 11 of Augustine‘s Confessions and Aristotle‘s Poetics, Ricoeur observed that people apply narrative concordance to the discordance of temporality; simultaneously, the imitation of temporality is precisely what makes sense of a story. Just as people make sense of time through emplotment, at the same time they understand stories in a temporal mode. The whole continuation of our analyses has been one vast extrapolation from this initial correlation.4 Therefore, the essential circularity continually resurfaces as Ricoeur expounds upon his initial
observation. It is not the circularity itself that Ricoeur denies. Rather, he denies that the circle is meaningless. The cycle of narrative interpretation through its three stages of mimetic activity is a healthy spiral, as witnessed in the productive formation of individual and social senses of identity that the hermeneutical circle of narrative interpretation cultivates.
Not surprisingly, this foundational circularity surfaces in this current project, which continues to extrapolate Ricoeur‘s initial, circular association between time and narrative in a theological application to the new Catholic evangelization in the United States. In particular, to understand the history of the new evangelization, the project must discuss the context. But to understand the Catholic Church in the United States, the current project must draw from histories which themselves are narratives, which themselves arose out of contexts. In other words, the present project cannot pretend to establish some uncontested, pure contextualized setting from out of which a host of different new evangelizations springs forth. The contextualization itself comes from
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historical descriptions which themselves are emplotted constructions situated within contexts. The analysis is a productive one, as the ongoing explosion of new
evangelizations is constitutive of identity for people and communities. But the circularity of contextualization is indeed undeniable.
A COEXISTENCE OF CONTEXTUALIZATIONS
Just as an abundance of theological narratives of the new evangelization arise from out of the United States context, numerous historical narratives coexist of the context itself. In other words, the descriptions of the context under review are not divorced from context—these descriptions of context are themselves competing narrative constructs that arise from context, in an inescapable circularity. In particular, the first comprehensive history of United States Catholicism to emerge after 1965 was A History of the Catholic Church in the United States by Thomas McAvoy. His work, published in 1969, centered chiefly upon the activities of Catholic clergy. McAvoy‘s narrative of the period was critical of infighting among American bishops, apathy among the laity, and relatively poor catechesis at the local parish level. But he applauded a united post-World War II sense of Catholic identity, noting the widespread Catholic stance against communism and the amalgamation of Catholic immigrants into the cultural mainstream. His final chapter specifically addresses currents of development during the twentieth century up to the time of the work‘s composition; he was clearly optimistic regarding the effects of Vatican II.5
In 1981, James Hennesey wrote the text American Catholics: A History of the Roman Catholic Community in the United States. Similar to McAvoy‘s text, Hennesey
5
Thomas T. McAvoy, A History of the Catholic Church in the United States (University of Notre Dame Press, 1969).
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also dedicated his concluding chapter to recent twentieth-century developments, recounting the dispersal of the immigrant Church into suburban regions of the United States and the assimilation into the mainstream of society that followed. In contrast to McAvoy, however, Hennesey does not subscribe to the notion of a united post-war sense of Catholic identity. Rather than a common post-World War II narrative of Catholic ascension out of poverty and marginalization, the amalgamation into the larger United States society was an experience of fragmentation, according to Hennesey.
Focusing more on the laity than the clergy, Hennesey observes the divergent experiences of blacks, Native Americans, and Hispanics within United States
Catholicism.6 He describes the reality of the postconciliar United States Church as one of difference, referring to the 1960–1981period as a time when fissures opened wide in the church which the immigrants had built.7 In their respective treatments of United States Catholicism, McAvoy characterizes the context as exhibiting a united sense of religious identity after the Second World War, whereas Hennesey describes the same situation as one of fragmentation; their respective historical narratives differ. A multiplicity of divergent voices, rather than agreement, designates not just the new evangelization narratives but also the narratives of the contexts that produced them.
Four years after Hennesey published American Catholics, Jay Dolan completed the writing of his work entitled The American Catholic Experience: A History from Colonial Times to the Present. Rather than compiling a conventional history of a religious
institution, Dolan‘s book constitutes the work of a social historian. From the perspective
6
James J. Hennesey, American Catholics: A History of the Roman Catholic Community in the United States (Oxford University Press, 1981).
7
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of Catholicism as not only an institution of religion but also as an institution of society, Dolan draws from a compilation of parish histories that the Cushwa Center for American Catholic Studies put together and archived at the University of Notre Dame. From this social-history perspective, Dolan observes a decrease in devotional practices that had previously marked the spiritual life of poverty-stricken Catholics prior to mainstream integration, and he notes an increase in the role of the laity in the life of the local parish.8 In Dolan‘s presentation of the context, these lay experiences anticipated some of the Council‘s reforms. Similar to Hennesey, Dolan highlights the prominent contributions of influential lay women as well as those of Catholics who were not of European descent.9
In 1999, Chester Gillis added his book entitled Roman Catholicism in America to the growing body of academic resources.10 His exploration of the encounter between Catholicism and the United States context relies heavily upon Dolan‘s history, with copious citations to Dolan‘s work.11
Dolan‘s initial volume had taken the discussion of United States Catholicism up to 1985. Then in 2002 he published an updated history with his text In Search of an American Catholicism: A History of Religion and Culture in Tension which echoes much of the material in his previous history, but advances the discussion into the start of the twenty-first century.
8
Jay P. Dolan, The American Catholic Experience: A History from Colonial Times to the Present (University of Notre Dame Press, 1992), 9. Originally published in 1985.
9
Ibid., 251–5. 10
Chester Gillis, Roman Catholicism in America (Columbia University Press, 1999).
11
There are several in just the first 61 pages for example; see ibid., 3, 52, 55–7, 59, & 61.
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Dolan‘s voice in both of his works calls for the United States Church to adapt to its emerging modern context. Critical of the conservative voices of traditionalists, Dolan laments the conservative swing in religion that corresponded with the pontificate of Pope John Paul II in 1978.12 In The American Catholic Experience Dolan says with regard to this resurgence of conservativism among United States Catholics:
Among Catholics, the most notable evidence for this was the official investigation of theologians suspected of unorthodox teaching, the attempted suppression of books, a renaissance of sexophobia with its accompanying denunciation of artificial birth control, the suspension of priests and nuns who held public office, and a reassertion of male supremacy and clerical control. Such actions have hardened the lines of division in the church. Traditional Catholics welcomed them while progressive Catholics denounced them. But the ways of the past will no longer work. A new spirit is alive in American Catholicism, and the twenty-first century belongs to it.13
His subsequent history, In Search of an American Catholicism, reiterates a desire for increased syncretism with the American cultural context. For instance, Dolan complains about how Catholicism‘s powerful ecclesiastical machinery was put into motion to silence the voices of theologians who called for adaptation.14 Elsewhere he asks the Church in the United States to blend its own tradition with the democratic context; he writes, ―To the degree that such blending takes place, Catholicism will become a much stronger community of faith.‖15
Dolan‘s orientation to the context is that of an accomodationist. He and those who share his position want to see United States Catholicism adapt more to
12
Dolan, The American Catholic Experience, 454. 13
Ibid. 14
Jay P. Dolan, In Search of an American Catholicism: A History of Religion and Culture in Tension (Oxford University Press, 2002), 161.
15
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the cultural context, in order to better accommodate the rapid changes that are happening in modern society.
In addition, in 2007 Leslie Tentler edited a collection of works entitled The Church Confronts Modernity: Catholicism since 1950 in the United States, Ireland, and Quebec. This collection includes essays by James Davidson, R. Scott Appleby, Michele Dillon, and Gregory Baum which demonstrate the plurality of voices that encounter United States Catholicism during this period.16 Also, Nancy Koester provides a History of Christianity in the United States that describes the context under review, especially as regards the multiplicity of voices within the United States, and the increased awareness of this multiplicity. This list of historical surveys adds Charles Morris‘ American Catholic: The Saints and Sinners Who Built America’s Most Powerful Church in 1997.17 As the title suggests with its reference to Catholicism as the most powerful church in America, Morris offers a triumphant vision of United States Catholic history. Furthermore, John
McGreevy‘s Catholicism and American Freedom appeared in 2003.18 His historical narrative of the context emphasizes the most elite Catholic scholarship, but talks relatively little about the majority of Catholic laity.
From Hennesey‘s link between Catholic history and secular history to McGreevy‘s focus on the top tier of Catholic scholars; from the accommodationist approach of Dolan
16
Leslie Woodcock Tentler, The Church Confronts Modernity: Catholicism since 1950 in the United States, Ireland, and Quebec (Catholic University of America Press, 2007).
17
Charles R. Morris, American Catholic: The Saints and Sinners Who Built America’s Most Powerful Church (New York: Times Books, 1997).
18
John T. McGreevy, Catholicism and American Freedom: A History (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 2003).
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to the triumphalism of Morris, the range of historical narratives is vast and varied. These multiple histories could be potentially perceived as problematic to the current project, due to both the scope and the diversity of different historical voices. The descriptions of the context under review not only span multiple versions, but these descriptions differ from and occasionally disagree with one another. Although the context is allegedly the same between these various historical surveys, variations to the point of disagreements result because causality imbued through emplotment differs from one historian‘s imagination to the next.
But rather than being perceived as an obstacle to the present study, these
competing narratives regarding the context are actually illustrative of the current work‘s application of Ricoeur‘s narrative theory to the variety of competing narratives of the new Catholic evangelization specifically. The numerous different new evangelizations, like the contexts that have given rise to them, are expressed as people‘s stories—competing stories, emplotted by a variety of productive human imaginations. As the context is established, the present work relies relatively heavily upon the more recent work by Dolan entitled In Search of an American Catholicism: A History of Religion and Culture in Tension and several others such as Patrick Carey, as footnoted throughout. As Dolan‘s accomodationist posture toward the context will find expression in certain narratives of the new evangelization, so too will the voices of his opponents. The conservative traditionalists whom Dolan rebukes will also express themselves in certain narratives of the new evangelization. The multiplicity of divergent narratives regarding the historical context includes both traditional and progressive voices; consequently, the competing narratives of evangelization that arise out of these contexts will exhibit the same plurality.
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The current work now proceeds to address the contextualization piece of the overall project, bearing in mind that Dolan‘s is not the only available description of the context.
THE CONTEXT OF FOCUS
Before proceeding into the contextualization component of this overall project, an important distinction must be drawn between the milieu within which the new
evangelizations develop and the context that produced the call for the new evangelization in the first place. Multiple competing narratives exist throughout the United States with regard to the appropriate rationale and implementation of contemporary Catholic
evangelization. Although this multiplicity of voices continues to take a variety of shapes amidst the postconciliar situation, these competing narratives of the new evangelization in the United States did not derive from the postconciliar context. Instead, the numerous