There have been plenty of books arguing the need for change in the Church. In the aftermath of Vatican II, surprisingly soon after, as a matter of fact, there were Léon-Joseph Suenens’s Coresponsibility in the Church and Hans Küng’s Truthfulness: The Future of the Church. Twenty years ago, there was my own The Liberation of the Laity: In Search of an Accountable Church. These and many more had ideas aplenty and a sense of urgency, but none envisaged the dramatic decline in Church practice or the uprooting of the parochial structure of the local church. Tomáš Halík’s latest book puts these issues front and center, suggesting the need for a much more searching investigation into where the Church should go from here.
The Afternoon of Christianity is the seventh of Halík’s books to be published in the United States, all translated by Gerald Turner and all under the imprint of the University of Notre Dame Press. Despite the number and excellence of the books and the substantial record of awards, including the prestigious Templeton Prize, Halík is hardly a household name in the American Catholic Church. A secular priest in what is often called the most secular of all European countries, the Czech Republic, Halík is a professor of sociology and pastor of the university church in Prague. Why he is not well known outside academic circles is not easy to understand, but this fact may change with the very practical focus on ecclesial life in his latest book. That Halík is strongly influenced by Pope Francis, to whom The Afternoon of Christianity is dedicated, might also offer a hint about which American Catholics may be readier to hear what he has to say.
Like any self-respecting sociologist, Halík begins with data, but also like the theologian he is, he draws inferences from the data that will support a thoroughly inductive ecclesiology. It is pretty obvious in most Western countries that religious practice and traditional belief are on the decline. Churches are empty and often closed, and parishes are combined to cater to ever-smaller congregations with declining numbers of ordained ministers. The Catholic Church is no exception to this, not even in the United States, for so long considered a more religious outlier. But Halík takes this inarguable pool of data in stride, making two points: First, the Church has always been changing and will continue to do so. Second, and more controversially, the Church has passed through its “morning,” when it created itself and grew into a vast cultural institution, and its “noonday,” when it underwent the crisis of declining membership, the painful process of addressing its involvement in the abuse of minors, and perhaps most important of all, though less obviously serious, a change in “the link between the language used in expressing the faith and the way it is lived.” The Church proclaims things in its own way, but the ideas and opinions of the faithful are increasingly out of sync with that kind of language. This, thinks Halík, is a moment of opportunity, ushering in the “afternoon of Christianity,” in which radical changes must occur if the Gospel is to continue to be heard in a dramatically different world.
“Faith” is the key word here. Halík’s principal argument is that if we understand correctly what “faith” means then we will be able to have “the courage to change,” the subtitle of his book. By exploring what it means for us to define faith as a fundamental trust in God, rather than a whole list of beliefs that together comprise “the faith,” Halík’s text directly challenges the conservative wing of the Church and radicalizes Pope Francis’s thought. The vision of the future here is very much what Francis would say if he weren’t responsible for holding the global Church together. Take synodality, for example. Francis is clear that this is nothing less than a new way of “being Church,” but for obvious reasons he is hoping to institutionalize it in parochial and diocesan ecclesial structures. Could it be that the relative lack of success with synodality in Europe and its almost total failure thus far in North America might correlate quite closely with the moribundity of the idea of the parish? And could it be that the urgency of attending to synodality might be the one way to breathe new life into local faith communities? Halík certainly seems to think so, and I strongly suspect that Francis is quietly cheering him on from the wings.
The deepest and most challenging implications of Halík’s ideas become apparent in his reflections on the scriptural axiom that “God is love.” “The objection that we must first believe in God’s existence before we can believe in God’s love contradicts the logic of the Gospel: only those who love can understand what is meant by the word God” (author’s italics). So much follows from this. Only love “validated by one’s own life” gets God right. If we do not have that kind of love, then we are “sinfully” taking God’s name in vain. And if we are people whose love is “validated” in our lives, people who give priority to what liberation theology calls “orthopraxis,” then whether or not we use the language of religious belief is immaterial to our salvation. Such people have what Simone Weil memorably called “implicit faith.” Thus, the evangelization that is so central a motif in Francis’s papacy is about carrying the active love of God to what he has called “the existential periphery.” All baptized Christians are meant to be missionary disciples, turned outward to the world.
The step that Halík takes beyond Francis is to envisage how Church structures must change to make this kind of evangelization possible. In Halík’s imagination, the future of a vibrant Church does not lie with a revivified parish or diocese but in learning to respond to “the hunger for spirituality” that has largely replaced any interest in traditional religious practice. Then, such a “newly conceived Christian spirituality can make a significant contribution to the spiritual culture of humanity today, even far outside the bounds of the churches.” Because the realm of the spirit is an “anthropological constant,” it is the ministry of spiritual accompaniment that Halík identifies as the place where the Church can regenerate itself. Approaching the end of the book, Halík’s vision becomes more and more Ignatian. The work of spiritual “accompaniment”—and Ignatius would welcome the shift of nomenclature away from “direction”—is to engage people in the secular world and to foster trust and hope in the search for meaning. Jesuits know this. You only have to look at a work like Roger Haight’s Christian Spirituality for Seekers or his Spirituality Seeking Theology to appreciate it.
Unfortunately, it is one thing to appreciate the growing understanding of spiritual accompaniment among its practitioners; it’s another to see if it will or even can change the Church. Halík is quite correct that without this shift the Church will continue on a downward path, and equally astute in affirming the need for a wholly new kind of pastoral flexibility. But before any such dramatic change could occur, the need for internal evangelization is acute. Though The Afternoon of Christianity is a kind of primer for the people in the pews, Halík doesn’t make it quite as clear that fostering spirituality is indeed the evangelization that the Christian community itself needs in order to turn outwards to the world. I don’t know if Halík is a Commonweal reader, but he would find a sobering article by Bernard Cooke in the magazine of November 15, 1974—sobering because Halík is calling for exactly what Cooke thought we needed exactly fifty years ago. “For centuries,” wrote Cooke,
the need of spiritual direction has been recognized, if persons were to acquire accurate and profound religious insights through contemplation, and if balanced and innovative decisions about life were to be made…. Today, if we are to face realistically the potential and demands of the future, there is a basic need to provide the kind of sensitive and theologically formed spiritual direction that can guide men and women, through their years of growth and into adult life, towards the capacity to grasp personally the meaning of their faith and to inject that understanding into the pragmatic decisions of their lives.
While Cooke was right half a century ago, Halík’s essentially similar diagnosis is much more urgent and bears comparison with the fortunes of climate activists. We all “know” that climate change is upon us, and far too many of us want to bury our heads in the sand and live day to day. Saving the earth requires metanoia, and so does saving the Church, though saving it for the sake of the world that it serves, not for its own sweet self. Those of us who go to church mostly do so for the solace of the sacraments—but without the knowledge of what the sacraments are for, that they are strength for the journey, their meaning is simply lost. These days we need to encourage people of faith to look beyond the Church, and not to be tied to its present institutional form, stagnant, nostalgic, and idealized as it can be. As Halík puts it so well, the Christ who is present to us in our world today may be as hidden and humble as he was in the stable at Bethlehem, and his followers must be ready to surrender the present form of the Church to the needs of the world. The self-surrender of the Church is the way forward to its self-transcendence.
All of this substantiates Halík’s insistence that more attention to spirituality is the key to revivifying the community of faith for its proper evangelical function, but at present in the United States, it is hard to be hopeful about such a change of heart. There is still too much lay passivity—Francis would call it clericalism—and faint-hearted ecclesial leadership at best. Bernard Cooke suggested that an important step would be to improve preaching, and not to leave it entirely in clerical hands. Amen to that but, as they say, don’t hold your breath. How many of our clergy are even aware of FutureChurch’s “Catholic Women Preach,” let alone consult it from time to time for its abundant good ideas? And as for the U.S. bishops’ allergic reaction to synodality, it only demonstrates their fear of Francis’s insistence that leadership sometimes means following the herd and always remaining close enough that the smell of the sheep infuses their episcopal finery.
If we cannot rely on traditional leadership, perhaps we could turn instead to Halík’s discussion of three well-known models of the Church, and a less familiar fourth. The Church is first the People of God journeying through history, the clear message of Vatican II. Second, it is “a school of life and a school of wisdom.” And third, it is a field hospital, whose task “is to discover and exercise the therapeutic potential of faith.” The fourth, in line with Francis’s views but more structurally radical, is that it is a source of “spiritual centers, places not only of adoration and contemplation but also of encounter and conversation, where experiences of faith can be shared.” If these places exist currently in any numbers, they are at a few monastic communities and centers for spiritual direction, and perhaps in and among American colleges and universities. Maybe here is where we need to begin, and since so much of Halík’s work is with students, perhaps he would agree. I think he is certainly of the opinion that without such a radical shift, our future as a Church is perilous indeed.
Paul Lakeland is emeritus professor of religious studies at Fairfield University.
Republished with permission by Commonweal Magazine.
