As churches institutionalized, they professionalized
and a professional elite took over, the clergy
who focused on how to live the Christian life but lost the why –
the motivations of regular lay believers
Catholic clergy have been wrestling with laity forever:
when Catholicism fought the heretical monster
it labeled “modernism”
it condemned modernism’s chief architects:
Galileo/Darwin/Marx/Freud
all Christian and Jewish-atheist laymen
who threatened the church’s
classicism/Hellenism/Thomism
however, Bernard Lonergan’s “transcendental precepts”
that underlie his General Epistemological Method (G.E.M.)
that underlies all the hard and soft sciences:
attentiveness (paying attention)/intelligence (what seems to be happening?)/
reasonableness (is that accurate?)/responsibility (what should be done?)
gave Catholicism a new way of doing theology
that matched our fast-emerging world civilization
hopefully Lonergan’s work will not be subverted
because assertion and then subversion
of the good/true/beautiful
is the basic pattern of the Bible –
the nonviolent resistance of Jesus to the “normal” state
of his society – the violent Roman Empire –
is met with his murder
when individualism reigns in our society
Christian charity alleviates the suffering of individuals
but ignores the unjust structures/laws
made by the privileged to protect the privileged
that cause the suffering in the first place
“A Merchant Mentality destroys compassion and the soul –
and the sin behind all sin is dualism – splitting things apart”
– Matthew Fox
rather than meditating on God from our armchair
it would be more fruitful to actually unite
with “others” who are least like us
and find Jesus the Christ in them too.
Intelligent Christian Spirituality 