Unsecular age

There are several things that deserve attention, unfortunately of a not very pleasant character.

It is taking place an attack on the Church that endangers us all. I mean, it endangers our civilization, one could say, I prefer to say our whole legal civility.

Think of what happened in Belgium, a country whose raison d'etre was to be Catholic, and now sees his bishops practically detained for hours to be interrogated, while the tombs of dead bishops were ransacked.

It is all happening because of the sins of the Church's sons, it is the easy reply.

No playing victims from our great Pope Benedict. Just a right call to penance. The worst enemies of the Church are inside, he tells us.

It is so, but who are the enemies he is talking about? just the pedophiles?

How about the unacceptable understanding of things shown by our high prelates? Sinning, as it looks, of an ignorance that is a betrayal of Christ.

I was appalled by reading a debate between a highly considered cardinal, the archbishop of Vienna, and the Canadian Catholic philosopher Charles Taylor. Unfortunately I haven't been able to find an English text to comment upon it. So I will have to stay with the title of Taylor's last book: The secular age.

Let me be a bit paradoxical, or at least go against the grain of current conceptualizations of present day society.

I don't believe that any such a thing as "secularization" exists. Usually it is meant by it the progressive loss of a religious understanding of the world, by turning to the saeculum so called: a desacralization of it. I see happening quite the opposite: a sacralization of it.

Christianity taught us not to identify God with any finite things. Now, what appears to be happening is the reverse (as I argued in my previous posts on "typhus").

So, I confess I don't understand what the archbishop is debating about with the philosopher.

HP