Toward A New Catholic Church: The Promise of Reform - Softcover

Carroll, James

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0618313370 ISBN 13: 9780618313372

Publisher: Harper Paperbacks, 2002

Synopsis

Elaborating on "A Call for Vatican III" in his best-selling book Constantine"s Sword: The Church and the Jews, James Carroll proposes a clear agenda for reform to help concerned Catholics understand the most essential issues facing their Church. He moves beyond current events to suggest new ways for Catholics to approach Scripture, Jesus, and power, and he looks at the daunting challenges facing the Church in a world of diverse beliefs and contentious religious fervor. His case for democracy within the Church illustrates why lay people have already initiated change. Carroll shows that all Catholics -- parishioners, priests, bishops, men and women -- have an equal stake in the Church's future.

About this title

About the Author:

James Carroll was raised in Washington, D.C., and ordained to the Catholic priesthood in 1969. He served as a chaplain at Boston University from 1969 to 1974, then left the priesthood to become a writer. A distinguished scholar-
in-residence at Suffolk University, he is a columnist for the Boston Globe and a
regular contributor to the Daily Beast.

His critically admired books include Practicing Catholic, the National Book Award–winning An American Requiem, House of War, which won the first PEN/Galbraith Award, and the New York Times bestseller Constantine’s Sword, now an acclaimed documentary.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

1 What Is to Be Done? It was January of 2001 when I published Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews, but the twenty- first century had not really begun. Politics and religion were central to that book's consideration of Christian antisemitism, but the meaning of politics and religion both were transformed by the event that marked the new era's true beginning, which was, of course, September 11. A savage act of violence was committed in the name of Allah. America's consequent War on Terrorism, inadvertently labeled a crusade by President George W. Bush, is being waged with a good-versus-evil religious fervor. As with Bush, absolutism has newly gripped world leaders, especially in the tinderboxes of the Middle East, on the Indian subcontinent, and in central Asia. Challenged by these unsettling developments, religious people everywhere have undertaken an urgent new examination of the relationship between variously held beliefs and their effects on those who do not share them.

We Americans have discovered with something approaching astonishment the wild diversity of religious and spiritual impulses that has come to mark not only the planet but our own nation. Today, as the great Catholic theologian Karl Rahner put it, everyone is the next-door neighbor and spiritual neighbor of everyone else in the world. And as Rahner argues, even from within Catholicism, this new circumstance means the assumptions of every religion must now be the subject of reexamination.

Ideological and religious elbow-rubbing is a global phenomenon, but it occurs in the United States as nowhere else. As a nation that welcomes an unending stream of immigrants, with their plethora of faiths and traditions, America implicitly sponsors this reexamination, as religiously diverse peoples encounter each other in the mundane neighborhoods of work, school, and living. The testing of assumptions that inevitably follows is one of the reasons America is suspect in the eyes of rigidly traditional societies.

After September 11, the Islamic presence in America drew particular attention, and the still dominant assumption of the mainly Christian, or Judeo-Christian, character of the nation was punctured. Americans discovered that there were more Muslims living among them than Presbyterians or Episcopalians, and as many Muslims as Jews. Suddenly, with Islam, on one side, being perceived as a religion that sponsors violence, and with God, on the other, being invoked as blessing America's War on Terrorism, religious differences as such loomed as flashpoints in the nation's life.

Meanwhile, across the globe, fundamentalist truth-claims, rooted in various religions, were seen to be fueling conflicts with ferocious new energy. In the Arab world, and in Europe, there was a virulent outbreak of the old scourge of antisemitism, with some Muslims believing that the September 11 atrocities were the work of Jews, and with some in the West inclined to accept Osama bin Laden's deadly equation between the existence of Israel and the misery of impoverished Arabs. Ariel Sharon, meanwhile, surfaced as an antisemite's dream, with few of his critics seeing his overwhelming force escalations against the Palestinians in the context of America's sanctioning. After all, overwhelming force was the mode of America's war in Afghanistan, the full costs of which have yet to be tallied. Likewise, Israel's critics have painted with the old broad brush, drawing few distinctions between the Israeli government's belligerence and the segments of Israeli society that continued to support the ideal of peace. Some drew moral equivalence between the Israel Defense Forces and Hamas, or condemned

About this edition

• Publisher: Harper Paperbacks
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0618313370
• ISBN 13: 9780618313372
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 144