God reveals himself to us (4)

by Fr Ian

(Part 1 here, Part 2 here, Part 3 here)

'In many ways the 'Spiritual But Not Religious' outlook appears as an outgrowth of affluent western consumer culture: it has a strong element of the modern therapeutic search for personal wellbeing and security and tends towards a rather individualistic, inward-looking and self-serving attitude.'

What I want to look at now is: 

C. Some mistaken ideas about God

Let’s go back to the three central questions I suggested we consider earlier: who is God, what is he like, what, if anything does he ask of us?

The Hazards of Modernisation

In our first post Fr Ian Dalgleish, parish priest of St Mary Magdalene Catholic Church in Blaenau Ffestiniog, reflects on some potentially negative aspects of adapting Christian faith to the values of modern society (approx. 2,500 words).

(click on the photograph for a modern celebration of Pentecost 

from the Archdiocese of Chicago)

In the Catholic Church, at the time of the Second Vatican Council, there was an Italian word which came to sum up the Council’s purpose and goal, and that was the word aggiornamento. It meant ‘up-dating’ or ‘modernisation’. It also had the connotation of renewal and re-energising: the renewal of Catholic spiritual life and the re-energising of the Church's mission.

It’s difficult to say very much briefly without oversimplifying things but I don’t think it’s misrepresenting the facts of Catholic Church history to say that by the 1950s there was a conviction among many Catholics - certainly among many of the Church’s bishops and theologians - that the Catholic faith had become in a sense fossilised, out-of-touch with modern society, perhaps even with most Catholics’ experience of everyday life.