Extract from an interview of Norwegian Bishop Erik Varden OCSO in the Italian periodical Il Foglio Quotidiano.
Do we Europeans of the Third Millennium have an identity issue? Do we still know where we come from, where we are going?
Not for a long time has consensus been so fraught on fundamental issues: on what it is to be a man or a woman, what it is to be a human being, what a society is supposed to be. Public discourse has long buzzed ominously like a wasp’s nest. Anyone engaging in it has run the risk of being stung. My sense is that the trend is now turning, with more people asking questions, seeking sound reasoning and reliable parameters. The Catholic intellectual tradition has an immense contribution to make here. While not wishing to downplay the pre-eminence of charitable work or the causes of justice and peace, I believe the intellectual apostolate is paramount for the decades ahead. The Word became flesh to imbue our very nature, created in the image of the Word, with logos. To embrace that aspect of our being and articulate it is to begin to remember our dignity.
In so-called ‘public opinion’ we often hear it said that what the Church offers is anachronistic, especially in the fields of moral life and even bioethics. After all, people say, why should we say no to euthanasia if a person suffers? The easier road is the one that is more pleasing. The problem is that many representatives of the Church likewise ask, in the media, whether we haven’t to ‘change’ or ‘reform’ because the message does not find its way to the People of God. What is your opinion? How useful, or how risky, it is to listen to the Zeitgeist?
The Zeitgeist is a fickle thing! Of course, we must listen out for it: it breathes a message we must take into account. But to seek to follow it is self-defying. By the time we have arrived where it was a moment ago, it has shifted. The Church is by its nature slow-moving. There is a risk that we engage with what we assume are contemporary trends when there is nothing left but dying embers. So we go haplessly, and absurdly, from one extinguished bonfire to the next. It is surely more promising, interesting and joyful to hold fast to what endures. That is what will speak to human hearts and minds in our age as in any age. The Second Vatican Council was marked by the incentive to drink deeply from the sources. The best vitality of Catholic life in the twentieth century sprang from the exhilaration of uncovering forgotten wells, to find the water therein limpid, fresh. What has happened to the exhilaration? Why do we now feel we must abandon the wells in order to set up collapsible stands by vending machines?
It is often claimed that our world, the Western world, is now post-Christian. I would like to ask if you agree with this definition or if the real risk is that of generalisation? Then, how can those who today declare themselves Cristian maker their presence felt in the midst of this reality?
As it happens, I am not in agreement. Theologically, the term ‘post-Christian’ makes no sense. Christ is the Alpha and the Omega, and all the letters in between. He carries constitutionally the freshness of morning dew: not for nothing do we throughout Advent storm heaven singing, ‘Rorate!’ Christianity is of the dawn. If at times, during given periods, we feel enshrouded by twilight, it is because another day is in the making. If we do want to deal in the currency of ‘pre’ and ‘post’, I think it more apposite to suggest that we stand on the threshold of an age I would call ‘post-secular’. Secularisation has run its course. It is exhausted, void of positive finality. The human being, meanwhile, remains alive with deep aspirations. Consider the fact that Marilynne Robinson and Jon Fosse are read worldwide; that people flock to the cinema to watch the films of Terence Malick; that thousands are seeking instruction in the faith. These are signs of the times. They should fill us with courage. They should make us determined not to put our light under a bushel. The Church possesses the words and signs by which to convey eternity as real. The English writer Helen Waddell once wrote: ‘to get any conception of infinity is like taking the stone off the mouth of a well’. Is that not a key Christian task for the present moment? Sursum corda!
Source: Coram Fratribus
