E s s a y s
ROLE OF CATHOLIC UNIVERSITIES IN THE NEW EUROPE
Lecture for Lublin
Excelence, Magnificence, spectabiles, honorabiles cives academici,
distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen
It is a great honour to give this lecture and thus inaugurate the first meeting of representatives of Catholic universities from the United States and from western and eastern Europe.
I was asked to speak about the role of Catholic universities in the new Europe.Three questions immediately struck me about very title of the lecture. Firstly, do not the terms “Catholic”, “university” and even “Europe” point in the same direction?
Secondly, the adjectives used in the title beg the question – in what sense are the universities that we have in mind “Catholic” and in what sense is the part of Europe we wish to speak about “new”. And thirdly, do Christians in this part of Europe truly have something “new” to offer, and might this “new” element perhaps contribute towards renewing our understanding of “catholicity”, “university” and “Europe”?
I think these are more than enough questions for one inaugural lecture.
First of all, regarding the expression “new Europe”. I must admit I find the term somewhat irritating. On the one hand it is burdened with political ballast: the most frequent references to a “new Europe” in the twentieth century came from the mouth of Hitler and Nazi propaganda; on the threshold of the 21st century it was used by the administration of President Bush when it wanted to praise the post-Communist countries for their loyalty and to distinguish between the attitudes of “old” and “new” Europe to America’s adventure in Iraq.
On the other hand, does the term says any more about the post-Communist countries than that they simply were able to become members of the European Union only recently, after the collapse of the totalitarian Soviet empire?
The nations of eastern central Europe always had a deep sense of belonging to Europe and its culture and were never reconciled with the Iron-Curtain division of the continent. There exists an old map of Europe on which Europe is depicted allegorically as a queen with the individual countries forming her limbs. My homeland and its capital Prague are shown as the centre of the continent, as the heart of Queen Europe – even though Shakespeare thought that Bohemia was by the sea, and I’d better not cite the notions about the countries of central Europe that I have sometimes heard in recent years from many English people and Americans. One joke from the Communist era maintained that Stalin and Brezhnev deserved the Nobel Prize for surgery for have managed to transplant the heart of Europe into the digestive tract of the Soviet Union.
The apostles to the Slavs, Cyril and Methodius, were active at Velehrad in the 9th century, Nitra has been a bishopric since the year 880, an archdiocese was founded in Gniezno in the 11th century, a university was founded in Prague in 1348, and I could draw out the list further in order to demonstrate that these countries are no beginners in the school named Europe.
The term “new Europe” is scarcely more appropriate a designation for the countries of eastern central Europe than “post-communist countries”, which defines them in terms of a single stage in their recent history. What is it, in fact, that links those countries apart from their geographical location and the similar experience of oppression in their recent history? The religious situation in those countries is radically different. Recent research has shown how deceptive it is to speak in sweeping terms about “the church in the post-Communist world”. The religious situation and the position of the church in Poland more closely resembles the situation in Ireland than that in the neighbouring Czech Republic; the religious situation in the Czech Republic is much more like the situation in France than in Slovakia; and in this respect Slovakia is more similar to Austria, from which it was separated by the Iron Curtain, than to the Czech lands with which it formed a single state for over 70 years, etc.[1]
The church’s standing in society and its ability to withstand persecution were, moreover, influenced by the history of “inculturation”, i.e. the degree to which it managed to incorporate Christianity into the actual culture and mentality of society, and how much the church identified with the interests of a particular nation and society. However, the church’s standing, once acquired, is not definitive – the fact is that in the transition from a traditional society to a pluralistic modern society, as in the transition from an authoritarian state to a civil society, the most radical secularisation occurs precisely where a single church held a dominant position and was therefore unaccustomed to pluralism; the Catholic Church has markedly lost influence, and continues to, even where it made a major contribution to the transition from dictatorship to democracy.[2]
One of the few things that the churches in post-Communist society have in common, or which are analogous, is the need to cope with similar temptations and shadows of the past. It is remarkable that where one group in society is in intense conflict with another for a long period of time, in eventually acquires some of the characteristics of its opponent – not only marriage partners but also old enemies come to resemble one another after a time. I often notice, for instance, that the calls for unity, which are often heard within churches in the post-Communist world – a nostalgia for the closed ranks that were necessary during the period of persecution – is based unwittingly more on the ideals of discipline and conformity required by the Communists than on the unity in diversity that St Paul spoke about, when he described the church as the body of Christ, in which every member has a specific mission. [3] Many Christians in the post-Communist countries are no longer capable of living without an enemy. Since the fall of the Communist regimes, they have been strenuously searching for new enemies, either within their own ranks, or, most frequently, within “Western liberalism”, and the rhetoric of fear and disgust vis-à-vis the “corrupt West” is unpleasantly reminiscent of what we used to hear from Communist ideologists in respect of the free world.
After the fall of Communism, the question was sometimes raised whether Christianity – and Catholicism in particular – might not fill the vacuum left in eastern central Europe by the bankrupt Communist ideology. To some, the prospect was appealing, while others, on the contrary, were appalled by it. The fact that many liberals, for whom the church was until recently a welcome ally in the struggle against Communism, now adopt a hostile attitude to it in post-Communist countries, can partly be explained by such fears. Those who perhaps expected the church and Catholic institutions to adopt a dominant role in eastern central Europe based this assumption not only on an unrealistic assessment of the social, cultural and political developments but above all on a deformed notion of Christianity.
Those who believed that the buildings left vacant by the “institutes of Marxism-Leninism” –once the obligatory ideological core of every university – would simply be taken over by “Catholic universities” or theological institutes, in order to play – albeit with a contrary philosophical and ethical content – an analogous social role, regarded Christianity as a “Weltanschauung” or ideology. If the Church ever signalled approval of this demand anywhere, it was making a great mistake. For Christianity to achieve credibility in the “new Europe”, it must first prove that it is not simply “Marxism in reverse”.
What was to be fatal for many liberal currents in the political and economic life of the post-Communist countries was the very fact that some representatives of those currents regarded liberalism as “Marxism in reverse”. They inherited from Marxism a primitive economic determinism – what we used to call ironically “the fairy tale about the base and the superstructure”. The Communists anticipated that changes in the economic base – the elimination of private ownership and the social ownership of the means of production – would automatically bring about changes within the cultural and spiritual “superstructure” and engender a “new Socialist man”. What was engendered, however, was a type of human being which the Russian writer Alexander Zinovjev and Polish philosopher, Fr Tischner, dubbed “homo sovieticus”[4] – people devoid of initiative, creativity and responsibility. Some representatives of economic liberalism in the post-Communist world – many of them convertees from Communism – anticipated, for their part, that the opposite changes in the economy, particularly the privatisation of industrial firms, would automatically alter people’s attitudes and society’s mentality, and that the “homini sovietici” would turn into people with all the “Protestant virtues” that Max Weber claimed were at the root of capitalism. However it is easier to make soup out of fish than to turn fish soup back into fish again – the creation of a moral biosphere for a culture of democracy in the economy and politics of the post-Communist countries would seem to demand somewhat profounder changes and more complex nurturing than mere changes of ownership or economic relations.
Many of those who imagined that Christianity might assume the throne vacated by Communist ideology failed to grasp the peculiar role actually played by that ideology and just how feeble was the support it enjoyed. From the mid-sixties, there were definitely more convinced Marxists in the West than in the East. In eastern central Europe, Marxism first won the hearts of people after World War I, next at the time of the great financial crisis of the 1930s, and then after World War II. For many already doubt-ridden Marxists in the Soviet bloc, 1968 was the last hope for Marxism to achieve a more credible political incarnation. The crushing of the “Prague Spring” by Warsaw Pact troops in August 1968 meant a final sobering up for the overall majority of “believing Communists”, and not only in Czechoslovakia. I would go so far as to say that in the last twenty years of the Communist empire’s existence, Marxism was no longer any more than a ritual ornament of cynical and pragmatic politics; even the overwhelming majority of the high priests of Communist propaganda no longer believed in its ideals. The mystery of the longevity of the Communist regime was more the unwritten “secret pact” between the rulers and the ruled, namely, that if the people conformed and would not demand their rights and freedoms, they would be ensured “social security” and the regime would tolerate a lot of things, including poor working morale and petty thefts of “common property”. We can now plainly see the sort of corruption to which that gave rise..
So to return to our topic. The first task of the Catholic universities in the “new Europe” is to provide convincing proof that the word “Catholic” in the title of the university means something quite different from the word “Marxist” in the title of Communist educational institutions. It is necessary to prove that Catholic Christianity is not an ideology.
I have already vaunted the fact that a university was founded in my homeland as early as 1348. It is the oldest university in eastern central Europe. At the time of its creation there was no need for it to be designated as “Catholic”. The thought occurs to me whether the designation “Catholic university” – and the entire cultural and political concept implicit within that designation – did not in fact come into existence at a time when the catholicity of the church was being called into question, shaken and undermined – at a time when “catholicity” was giving way to “Catholicism”?
Do we not live today at a time of the “collapse of Catholicism”, and might this not be an enormous opportunity to enhance the catholicity of the church? What role can universities play in the journey from Catholicism to catholicity?
Catholicity is more than the customary designation of one of the Christian denominations. Catholicity – like unity, sanctity and apostolicity – is a fundamental characteristic and mark of the church’s canonicity. The entire community of Christians acknowledge this catholicity, when it prays the Apostolic or Constantinople/Nicaean Creeds. Catholicity is a gift and also a task – a mission, which, in common with unity and sanctity, has an eschatological character. It cannot be achieved fully and utterly in any of the empirical forms of the Church in its pilgrimage through history, but only when “God will be All in all”.
Catholicity – universality, plenitude – means “openness”. If the Church is to live its catholicity it must strive constantly for openness, to be here for everyone, to speak – as at Pentecost – “in every tongue”, to relativise, in common with St Paul, all barriers – between social groups, sexes, races, nations, cultures and religions – There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female” – and to become “all things to all people”.
Cultivating catholicity means constantly resisting the temptation to become a closed sect, an elite club of “the initiated”, or an esoteric group. An instance of that struggle for the catholic character of the Church is the early clash between the Church and Gnosticism, and Christianity’s ongoing confrontation with newer and newer variations of Gnosticism down the ages, right to our own day.
Catholicity is the Church’s broad embrace. The opposite of catholicity is “narrowness” – in many languages there is one word for both “a confined space” and for “anxiety”. For that reason Chesterton could characterise catholicity as joyfulness, ease, generosity: the free and cheerful nod of creation – as the opposite of puritanical gloom and depressiveness.
My teacher of theology, the great Czech theologian and human-rights champion Josef Zvěřina, characterised the “Catholic principle” as the maxim “not only but also”: not only immanence but also transcendence, not only God but also man, not only freedom but also mercy, not only faith but also reason.
On the threshold of the new millennium, Pope John Paul II publicly acknowledged the sins and failings of the Church in history. Of course that historical “mea culpa” was not intended to be a one-off, a closed act, but instead a challenge to constantly examine the church’s historical conscience, to learn from the past and heal the scars of the past by a penitential mind set (cor semper penitens). Is not one of the great failings of the church the fact that “catholicity” became enfeebled in the course of modernity and that “Catholicism” was gradually substituted for catholicity?
At the beginning of modernity the Church was dealt many severe blows. The first was the split in the unity of the western church as a result of the conflicts arising out of the Reformation. We now realise that it would be unjust to blame that split entirely on one or other of the conflicting parties (notwithstanding the fact that there were many more currents and factors at play than the two main protagonists of “Reformation” and “Counter-Reformation”). Parallel with that there was the schism between theology and modern science – the trial of Galileo and the burning of Servetus at the stake remain in the European memory. Mediaeval “christianitas” started to disintegrate. It was a model of civilisation in which the Church had become ensconced and in which nationalism started to assert itself; later, in a new guise, nationalism was to become one of the competing “religions” of Europe. Mediaeval theology lost the capacity to be an understandable “language” in which educated people throughout the continent could communicate and which they could use to express their life experience and feelings. The life experience and feeling of the people of Modernity, their new relationship to the world, to the body, to the past – as well as to the newly discovered parts of planet Earth – looked for a new language. For a long time – approximately up to the mid-20th century – this new language (lingua franca) was to be “science” (experimental and empirical science). The Christian religion and classical theology became – like Latin – a “dead language”, more a subject of study, a festive ornament of various celebrations, a matter for a narrow circle of specialists, but no longer an intelligible means of communication for everyday use.
The church reacted to the loss of its previous positions by beginning to build a “counter-culture” in opposition to the massive advance of modernisation – a parallel world, a fortified camp: “Catholicism”. I do not intend to encroach on the historians’ bailiwick and describe in any detail the individual stages of this process – the period of the “first confessionalisation”, around the time of the Thirty Years War in the 17th century, and the period of the “second confessionalisation” in the 19th century. I am sure we would find plenty of positive elements in those repeated “religious mobilisations”, which had valuable results in terms of popular piety, missionary activity and culture, and they had their great saints and martyrs. However, we cannot ignore the fact that “catholicity” – i.e. openness – was undermined in the course of the process, and, in particular, the capacity to read positively the “signs of the times” and react to them boldly by entering into tolerant dialogue with contemporary culture and thought. “Catholicism” tended to acquire the character of a ghetto, creating its own social and cultural environment and coming to be perceived as an “ism” among other “isms”.
Catholic Christianity was perceived – and in a certain sense perceived itself – as an ideology, upheld by a certain institutional leadership, which generated a series of other institutions to promote its interests and influence. Pope Pius XI’s appeal to Catholics, at a time of strengthening liberalism and socialism, to build “party against party, association against association and press against press” expresses well that mentality of building a “parallel world” – “Bundeskatolizismus” – and the mushrooming of “Catholic” institutions and organisations, from trade unions to sports clubs. The Catholic’s ideal was to be born in a Catholic maternity hospital, attend various levels of Catholic education, be employed by a Catholic employer, be organised into a Catholic trade union, to vote for a Catholic political party, to spend his leisure time in a Catholic sports or social club, to read the Catholic press and “good Catholic books”, to die in the presence of a Catholic priest and to be buried in a Catholic cemetery. But could such a Catholicism be the “salt of the earth” and “the leaven to leaven the entire dough”?
If the “Catholic university” is to be regarded in that light, then God protect not simply the “new Europe” from such a spectre of the past!
The Second Vatican Council distinctly recognised that the strategy of “Catholicism” as a “parallel world” had been exhausted and that to pursue it further would mean, sooner or later, that the Church would be reduced to a marginal sect on the fringe of society. The emphasis that the Council laid on dialogue with other Christian churches, with non-Christian religions and with the modern secular world, including atheism, marked a turning point “away from Catholicism towards Catholicity”. Let us leave aside for now the debate about the extent to which that turning point remained an “unfinished revolution” and about the positive and negative aspects of the “post-Council developments”.
During the period 1968-1978, the “Catholic cultural and social milieu” came to a final end in western Europe. In the countries with Communist regimes, that milieu was dealt a massive blow in the shape of Communist persecution, but here and there, precisely in the confrontation with Communism, a certain “religious mobilisation” occurred and Catholicism received a boost in terms of a “counter-culture”. That counter-culture needed allies, however. In some places it was to be nationalism, in others liberal movements fighting for human rights and civic freedoms. After the fall of Communism, nationalism proved to be a very dubious ally of the Church, as it jeopardised its “Catholic openness”, and many liberal allies distanced themselves from the Church because it was out of tune with their concept of “openness”.
Might not the role of the Catholic university in the post-Communist world consist precisely in demonstrating what catholicity does and does not mean in terms of “openness”? Is it not possible for that dialogue between faith and culture, which is part and parcel of the church’s “catholicity”, to take place within the bounds of the university? And is that dialogue between faith and culture something that Christianity established in the very earliest period of European identity? Nowadays we are confronted with many phenomena that confirm John Paul II’s warning – stated in the encyclical Fides et ratio – that faith without thinking and reason without faith can prove dangerous. To foster dialogue between faith and thinking is to fulfil the meaning of catholicity and the original purpose of the university, as well as the meaning of that great spiritual adventure in the history of humanity known as Europe.
Ought not the Christians of those countries that are the new member states of the European Union be the ones to comprehend their political return to the family of free western nations as an opportunity – for themselves and maybe for the rest – to rediscover and help revive that dimension of European identity?
It is an exciting thought, but let us not get carried away. To a great degree, Communism decimated the Church in eastern Europe. The long years of isolation from the means of free exchange of ideas is evident in different places. Much prejudice and misunderstanding has accumulated in East-West contact. On both sides “cultural shocks” sometimes occur, as well as the frustration of overexpectations of the other or the mournful necessity to revise one’s self-image.
Insufficient creative theological thinking and the inability of theology to enter into dialogue with political and sociological thinking have meant that, by and large, Christians in the post-Communist countries have proved incapable of reflecting sufficiently on the changes that have occurred in the church’s status and social role. Instead of the necessary “recontextualisation” and “redefinition”, or of pastoral visions, a process of restoration has often been initiated, an attempt to return to a world that no longer exists. Here “Catholicism” continues to eclipse “catholicity”.
The situation of the church in many post-Communist countries resembles the distressing situation of the church in a large part of the rest of Europe – the difference being that Christians of the “new Europe” have less experience of a democratic and pluralistically secular society.
In conclusion, let us look for inspiration at the very beginnings of the church history. I regard one of the most interesting attempts at “open dialogue” between early Christianity and pagan culture to have been St Paul’s address at the Areopagus. In it Paul refers to “the altar to the Unknown God” and seeks to interpret that unknown god. That attempt at dialogue ended the moment when Paul declared that the story of Jesus of Nazareth, His death and resurrection, had been a manifestation of that god. The message of resurrection seemed to the Athenians just one of many familiar mythological stories. They did not give Paul the chance to demonstrate to them that for him the resurrection was something else entirely: that it was the expression of the paradox of “kenosis”, which Paul refers to the letter to the Philippians. The gospel of resurrection is not one of the stories about “resuscitating corpses” as the Athenians supposed (and as, I fear, many Christians also suppose). For Paul, it is a gospel that what some people regarded as a disgrace, defeat and extinction, can be seen with the eyes of faith as a radically new God-given opportunity.
The world around us has always been full of “familiar gods”. The Gospel, however, cannot be proclaimed at the altars of familiar gods. The familiar gods are no gods at all but simply idols. Only the “unknown”, unfathomable, ever amazing God, the God of paradox, the God who turns defeat into victory and death into life – the one who makes “all things new” can be the starting point of Christian evangelisation.
It could be that a “familiar god” – one that must die and depart into the unknown – has taken root in our theology and religiosity. Perhaps we have to undergo a fresh religious experience in order to come face to face with the absolute mystery, the living God, full of paradoxes. Or has that experience already been the “kenosis” of Christianity in our civilisation?
Our era has seen in many areas the defeat and death of Christianity – or at the very least of its familiar historical forms. The decimation of the Christian churches during the Communist period was only one striking form of Christianity’s “kenosis” in our time.
A remarkable Christian thinker and bishop of a persecuted protestant church was active in my homeland in the 17th century, Jan Amos Komenský (Comenius), who wrote the “The Bequest of a Dying Mother, the Unitas Fratrum” – a message and testament of a dying church. In the 20th century, at the time of Communist persecution, it inspired one of my teachers, the theologian and long-serving prisoner of Communist jails, Oto Mádr, in his article “Modus moriendi ecclesiae”[5]. It would seem that it is not the “death of God” but the “death of the church” which is a recurrent theme of theological thinking in my country, which is now designated as one of the most atheistic on the planet. However, does not Paul, the great theologian of paradox, declare that where sin has proliferated there too mercy has proliferated?
We must learn to open the meaning of the present situation with the key of the Easter story: Death is not the final end, but the resurrection is also not a return to the past; it is not the reanimation or restitution of erstwhile conditions. It is the opening of “a new dimension”.
It strikes me that the role of the Catholic universities in the “new Europe” can also be above all to reflect on and endure the crisis of Christianity, which, Europe is enduring in various forms, “in both its lungs” – west and east. We must resist the temptation of triumphalism but also the temptation of resignation. Our God, the God of paradox, is the God of hope.
Delivered as an the first meeting of representatives of Catholic universities from the United States and from western and eastern Europe at Catholic University in Lublin (Poland) in September 2004
To be published in “Vzýván i nevzýván”[Bidden and unbidden] in November 2004 by Lidové noviny publishers, Prague.
[1]see Tomka M., Zulehner P.M., Religion in der Ländern Ost(Mittel)Europas, Ostfidern 1999[2]Religions in the Modern World, Chicago – London 1994
[3]srov. 1 Corinth. 12, 12-30
[4] Zinovjev A., Homo sovieticus, Moscow 1991 (in underground-press 1982) and Tischner J., Etyka solidarnosci oraz Homo sovieticus, Kraków 1992
[5] Mádr O., Modus moriendi ecclesiae, in: Mádr O., Slovo o této době, Praha 1992