Fr. Charles Irvin, Diocese of Lansing at 402-A E. Madison Street, DeWitt, MI 48820 US - Faith Come of Age

Can Faith and Reason Coexist?

The March 5, 2001 issue of AMERICA Magazine presents us with an excellent treatment of "Reason, Faith and Theology". The following essay by recently named Cardinal, Fr. Avery Dulles, S.J., is so insightful that I am compelled to present it to you here. FAITH COME OF AGE Typically, the faith of the individual passes through certain radical transformations corresponding to the stages of life. In a curious way, these stages seem to be reflected on a larger scale in the historical career of the Church as it grows toward maturity. The faith of the child is spontaneous and unreflective. Naturally religious, the child seeks a protective environment in which he is surrounded by benign powers. He responds readily to the idea of heavenly forces that take him in their care. In the absence of serious challenges from without, the child is not compelled to think critically. He confuses myth with reality, illusion with genuine insight, and easily falls prey to superstition. At the stage of adolescence, the critical faculties awaken. Prone to assert themselves as individuals the young are often antagonistic to authority. On the other hand, their exuberant vitality, harnessed to a vigorous faith and fired by zeal to transform the world according to a high idealism, can inspire great feats for God. But the adolescent's faith has its defects. It is too often egotistical, assertive, more critical of others than of self. It needs the humiliation of experience in order to discover the value of suffering, sacrifice, submission. It has to lose some of its self-confidence before it can be properly receptive to the values others have to communicate. A MATURE FAITH is one that has overcome the superficial enthusiasm of youth as well as the naive credulity of the child. Through harsh experience it has learned that evil persists and will persist, that humanity's ideals and labors, even when well intended, are shortsighted and ambiguous. Focused on the God of mystery rather than on tangible values, such a faith is equipped to face tragedy, diminishment, suffering and death. In the past generation, the Catholic Church in this country has passed rapidly from childhood to adolescence, and is now being called to full maturity. Thirty years ago, American Catholicism was passive and uncritical; it was the hereditary faith of isolated ethnic groups in ghetto situations. About the end of the 1930's, the Church began to emerge from its shell and enter into vital contact with its environment. The dislocations of World War II, with the draft and military service, thrust the mass of American Catholics into the mainstream of American life. The intelligentsia sponsored the Thomistic revival. Catholic higher education expanded enormously; there were many conversions and abundant vocations to the priestly and religious life. Catholics were convinced that their Church had an answer to every problem. With the 1960's we seem to have entered a new era. John F. Kennedy and John XXIII, each in his own way, summoned Catholics to abandon the alienation of a pretended superiority and take upon themselves the hopes and joys, fears and anxieties, of their contemporaries. Instead of standing in judgment on the world, Catholics now began to study their own deficiencies. They felt obliged to expose and overcome everything childish, obscurantist, anachronistic and corrupt in their own heritage. While seeking to change the world according to Christ, they saw the need to refashion their image of Christ according to the most exigent standards of modem critical thought. TO RECONCILE traditional Catholicism with modern secularity is proving difficult indeed. Traditional Catholicism demands that we should be submissive to authority, that we should find the fullness of truth in a limited number of sacred sources, that we should adhere to a deposit of faith completed centuries ago. Modernity demands that we think critically, that we should be ready to change and to correct our ideas, that we make ourselves receptive to the contributions of every group of people. Can these two mentalities be combined in the same individual? Can a person accept the authoritative claims of the Church and still enter sincerely into dialogue with other religious groups and secular quasi-religions? Psychologically, the two attitudes are hard to combine. Many people are tempted to choose between faith and reason, Church and world, tradition and modernity. But God is summoning us to bring these polar opposites into a new synthesis. As people of faith, we must allow no fragment of the gospel to perish. As modern persons, we must disengage the gospel from every antiquated world view and culturally conditioned ideology. The contemporary Christian need not look on this world with the eyes of an ancient Israelite or a medieval Aristotelian. A mature faith is humble enough to criticize its own presuppositions and learn from the science of its day. By continually dying to its own previous formulations, faith plunges ever deeper into the mystery of God. AVERY DULLES [AMERICA, Vol. 184, No. 7

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