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Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture 7.1 (2004) 45-62



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Heroism, Hospitality, and Holiness
Generational Perspectives on the Church-World Relationship 1

Christopher Ruddy


IT IS PERILOUS—and presumptuous—to speak as a representative of a generation. Although born in 1970 and having watched an inordinate amount of MTV growing up, I am not a typical Generation X-er in terms of faith as described by Tom Beaudoin in his book Virtual Faith, 2 particularly in the Gen-X preference for personal "spirituality" over institutional "religion." And, although everyone under thirty or forty may seem alike to those older, I am increasingly struck by the ever-greater differences between my students and me: born in the early to mid-1980s, they have no memory, for example, of Ronald Reagan or even the Gulf War, much as I am completely incompetent when it comes to Web page design and instant messaging. Moreover, although I am young, my Catholicism is largely old and thick. I grew up in the novelist Alice McDermott's country—Queens and Nassau Counties, New York—a dense, urban Catholicism, where my all-boys high school classmates identified themselves by parish, and immigrant culture and employment still endured; my high school lost nearly twenty graduates on September 11, 2001, at the World Trade Center, many of whom [End Page 45] were city firefighters. The geographic rootlessness, parish-shopping, suspicion of institutions, and fragmented families so characteristic today are not my experiences.

Nonetheless, even if I cannot pretend to speak for an entire generation or generations, I do think that I am representative of many younger believers and theologians, particularly in a certain distance and freedom from the polarizations of the Vatican II generation: the mention of John Paul II does not reflexively raise for me the specter of Pius XII or the promise of John XXIII, nor is Humanae vitae shorthand for repressive sexual teaching or the corrosive dissent of theologians. If younger generations are often frighteningly ignorant of their church's history, that same "clean slate" also offers much space with which to work and to open new ways of life and thought.

Accordingly, the "signs of the times" reveal, along with grief and anguish, many joys and hopes for the church and the world that I hope to explore. I will proceed in three steps: first, a brief definition of the terms "church" and "world"; second, an exploration of two signs of the times—heroism and hospitality—that I have encountered in my students and my peers and that I find personally helpful in envisioning the church's engagement with the world; and third, a concluding look at holiness as perhaps the best lens with which to view the church-world relationship today. My focus is not primarily sociological or statistical, but theological and ecclesiological (mindful, of course, that these categories can never be separated cleanly). Moreover, even though the immediate context for my remarks is North American, I also will look at a more global perspective.

For the sake of simplicity, I define "church" and "world" as Gaudium et spes does. The "church" is that pilgrim community sharing in the Triune life and announcing the good news of salvation to the world. Its nature is to be a sacrament of communion; its mission is evangelization (GS 1). The "world," in turn, is the "entire human family," the "theater of human history, bearing the marks of its travail, its triumphs and failures" (GS 2). The council further defines the [End Page 46] world theologically and Christologically: it is created in love, fallen through sin into slavery, liberated by the cross and resurrection—all moving toward the fulfillment of the Father's plan.

The social ethicist Bryan Hehir has said that the most important word in the extended title of Gaudium et spes—"Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World"—is "in." Unlike "against" or even "and," "in" rules out any simple juxtaposition, opposition, or detachability of church and world. While...

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