The "way" forward... (Main Forum)

by Brian Coyne , LINDEN, NSW, Wednesday, May 16, 2012, 16:18 (368 days ago) @ Brian Coyne

Tom's commentary serendipitously intersects with another conversation that is buried down the board about the way forward. Here's the text of a post I've just added to that string that intersects, I think, with some of the things Tom McMahon touches on today...

The original string can be found at:
www.catholica.com.au/forum/index.php?mode=thread&id=102699#p102807

Thanks, Joe, yes that's very much along the lines of my thinking. The question that exercises my mind — not necessarily from any practical point of view of helping facilitate it but simply from the curiosity pov of how a large society handles such a transition — is: how do we get from the present state we are in to the sort of one you outline, or which was outlined by the Second Vatican Council?

I do have a confidence that human society will eventually embrace what we might call "the Vatican II vision" but by the time it occurs it may well be that the people who give it life have no memory of Vatican II and an expression like "Vatican II vision" would have no meaning to them — the on-the-ground reality though is that that is what they would be implementing or have implemented. I also envisage that it will be a "mass phenomenon" rather that some "cult or sect phenomenon". In other words it will be generally embraced by the masses of humanity rather than just some small sector. (I do have questions as to whether it might be "mass" though in the sense of being "institutional". It may well be something embraced by the masses but in a non-institutionalised way. For example most people embrace concepts like "love" or "peace" but they don't necessarily embrace those ideas within an institutional paradigm of thinking. They are concepts "universally embraced" but people do not necessarily need some institution to belong to that furthers the concepts of "love" and "peace" in their world.)

My own increasing view — formed, I must say, by many of the conversations on Catholica over the past 5 or 6 years — is that it is not going to grow out of the existing Catholic institutional structure. That I now view as an effective impossibility. The existing structure has to collapse or become a truly "irrelevant remnant" before we can begin to visibly see the "new shoots" of the sort of picture you paint. To use another metaphor, I liken much of what is occurring at the moment in religious society, as something similar to what must happen below the ground before we see the first "green shoots" of some seed poke through the surface layer of soil to embrace the sunlight.

After reading Tom McMahon's commentary today [LINK], and many of the things we discuss here on Catholica, I often wonder why we spend so much time worrying about the neanderthal element or what Benedict or any of the bishops think when, at the same time, we believe they are essentially irrelevant to the future of where humanity is heading? Yet, the reality is that we do. Is it that necessarily as part of the baggage we want to carry forward with us we have to separate it out from the redundant baggage we also carry with us? Might it be likened to a train or plane journey where at the end of the journey, before we embark on the next stage of wherever we are going we have to sort out which are our bags from the big pile of bags the porters and baggage handlers have thrown higgeldy-piggeldy onto some trolley or baggage carousel? The process we're engaged in at the moment is one of sorting what truly belong to us – what we truly believe – from what is the property, or beliefs, of others? What are the "essentials" that we take forward with us for the next part of our journey and what is the waste paper and other rubbish we have accumulated in the previous part of our journey and we need to discard in some trash can before we move to the next phase?

Brian Coyne
[Editor & Publisher]