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July 14, 2010
I've always been puzzled by the way that the Catholic and Anglican Church sets its face against modernity even though, as an institution, it is a part of the process of modernity. One could even talk in terms of Catholicism's "cold war with modernity" --a Catholic anti-modernism.
By modernity I mean the objective transformation of the social fabric unleashed by the advent of the capitalist world market which tears down feudal and ancestral limitations on a global scale, and psychologically the enlargement of life chances through the gradual freeing from fixed status hierarchies. Chronologically, this covers the period from the mid nineteenth century accelerating to the present and it gives rise to T a social order in which religion is no longer fully integrated into and identified with a particular cultural life-form.
Martin Rowson
Most welcome this process as it means greater individual freedom. Not so the Christian Church. I should say that the Christian Church (Catholic and Anglican) tears itself into halves over the way that the movement of history in modernity challenges its fixed status hierarchies over secularism, freedom and the declining influence of Christianity in the West.
Nowhere is this resistance more evident in the way that it continues to cover up the sexual abuse of children by its priests. This is part of the wider sexual abuse scandal in the Catholic Church.
I realize that the power of the Church has been eroded by a growing sense of individual worth. Neither Protestantism nor Catholicism fare well when it comes to championing equality and human rights - especially for women and non-whites. The churches' record on supporting women's political enfranchisement is dismal. They sanctified a model that set men free to be active wage-earning heads of households while confining women to the unpaid labours of love, charity and domestic service.
It gives rise to the powerful and effective criticism of Christianity in the 20th century that it has been too closely identified with the rich and powerful, and too ready to legitimate the status quo. Christianity retains its commitment to a male God and priesthood, and the late 20th century has seen a renewed emphasis on male headship and female domestic submission, particularly in conservative Protestantism, along with a conservatism about sex and gender roles and campaigns against homosexuality.
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Not that I am a practising Catholic... but it seems to me that Jesus could be described as a radical, soicalist, rabble-rousing, do-gooder. Not to mention that he was (gasp) "middle-eastern" in appearance!
But that image isn't going to go over very well in today's world, is it?