2012-08-19          Sydney:  Theology Study Days for 2012

Venue:   Australian Catholic University,  25A Barker Road, STRATHFIELD, Location room TS19 Hanrahan Lecture Theatre in the Old building

Saturday August 25 2012  Five sessions, between 9:00am and 5:00 pm.  If there is a change in venue to a larger theatre I will let you know in advance.  

Cost:  $30 for each study day;  pay at the event.  Bring your own lunch, or get lunch from the shopping centre nearby;  Tea/coffee and biscuits will be provided.  Should you wish to attend, email your intention to graham.rossiter@acu.edu.au    OR   send a brief note to Graham Rossiter at Australian Catholic University, Locked Bag 2002, STRATHFIELD NSW 2135   Getting some idea of numbers helps with the printing of a suitable number of sets of notes  

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Outline of the day  

Prologue   This reflection began as a retrospect on Vatican 2, fifty years since its inception.  As it developed, it became an attempt to look at what has happened over the past 50 years, rather than simply what happened at, and as a result of, Vatican 2.  It will look at Vatican 2 in a larger frame.  

This is not a presentation of what might be thought of as the politics of ‘linea partita’.  It is not meant to argue with such a position, either.  It is rather an attempt to look critically at the data and see an underlying meaning in the flow of events.  I am looking at the ‘thinking position’ typical of scholars with a Catholic mindset in that time, and I am taking a critical look at the way that thinking position dealt with church matters.  I am also looking at the impact of this position on the larger Catholic community.  That focus overlaps with church practice at times, and with developments of thinking outside church circles then and at other times.  I am more concerned with the dynamics underneath what happened.  My study has shown me that interesting dynamics are beneath each step of this history, and that they add up to a single overall model.  The main aim of this study day is to realise what that model is, and how it throws light on where we all go from here.  

Talk One: Vatican II – The issue of Paternal authority – or better the character of authority itself.

Vatican 2 needs to be looked at in terms of Vatican 1 and its definition of papal infallibility, and in terms of the series of events in which the Roman Magisterium reacted negatively to ‘modernism’ and related movements.  The issue was always that of (papal) authority.  

Talk Two: The immediate aftermath – a divide theology – or better the issue of an enlargement of affect beyond the control of authority.

Around the Council, there was a development of an affective kind of theology.  The emerging issue was that of affect.  There is need of consideration of the strong refusal of this affective theology by church authority.  

Talk Three:  Secularisation in ’68. – the questioning of religion itself or better the issue of disillusionment.

Authority could not restrain affect.  But secularisation has done so, and almost in one stroke.  The result is a refusal of optimistic vision and a preference for banality and blandness.  

Talk Four: Two long pontificates – the issue of education – or better the beginnings of mutual separation between those who know and those who do not.

In such a time a reversion to security is to be expected, and so a reform of the reform.  It is also to be expected that not everyone will buy this.  Those who do buy it are likely to be people less educated and formed into affect after Vatican 2 and less educated and adjusted to the realism of actual secular life.  The reform of the reform is likely to give rise to a smaller church with stronger convictions that fewer people with education can buy.  

Talk Five: Financial collapse – the issue of the non-restoration of the ancient world or better the possibility of and the need for a new symbolisation of life.

The reform of the reform doesn’t work, because it separates the church from the world it is self-commissioned to help.  That world is not the old world fashioned in the past by an old church.  It is a new world.  The old one is dead and buried.   A new symbol set is needed to communicate with this new world.

 Epilogue:  The process – authority, affect, disillusionment, separation, re -symbolisation – itself needs articulation in a new set of symbols that spells out the relationship of God and the universe in a different way.   The process that leads to it is unfinished….

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