Roger Haight, S.J., died on June 19, 2025. A prominent Catholic theologian and a frequent contributor to America, he offered this substantial essay in April of this year, with typical humility, in an email titled “Sneaking in a submission.” We offer it as a final word from this Jesuit theologian and longtime friend. May he rest in peace.
An undated image of American theologian Roger Haight SJ. Image: Wikimedia Commons
As the church has been the subject of careful self-examination in recent years, an important observer has been the Rev. Tomas Halik. In his The Afternoon of Christianity, Halik criticized the church on the parish level for failing to stimulate a spirituality for our time. At the same time, a group of Catholic sociologists, in their recent review of the last 50 years of church development, Catholicism at a Crossroads: The Present and Future of America’s Largest Church, described why people are streaming out of the church rather than into it.
It seems like an old order is passing away. The social base of large families, ethnic enclaves in cities, worldwide denominational solidarity, expanding membership and building exist today only outside developed Western societies or in some pockets within them.
We cannot adequately understand the church without addressing why so many of its members are walking away from it. But sociological description and explanation do not supply a theological ideal at which to aim. We need a framework for representing the church that addresses this issue with a deep theological grounding and in a public way. This revisioning of the church should explain the foundations of the church beyond a merely ad hoc response to the situation.
In what follows, I will discuss further the reasons why a new theological perspective on the church is needed. I then describe a strategy of going back to Jesus’ teachings during his earthly ministry. I use the theology of Abraham Joshua Heschel to illumine Jesus’ Jewish perspective. Then, in a final section, I want to offer an outline of how placing Jesus’ own teaching at the center of an understanding of the church elicits a new vital way of thinking about the church and its mission.
To continue reading this article, click here.
Roger Haight, S.J., a prominent theologian, was until recently an emeritus scholar in residence at Union Theological Seminary in New York. He died on June 19, 2025.
With thanks to America and Roger Haight SJ, where this article originally appeared.
