ABSTRACT
In his assessment of Gaudium et spes after 30 years, Walter Kasper concluded that this document remains part of the Church’s ‘Magna Charta’ for the Third Millennium, and, further, that we have reason to hope that the ‘modern age’ will be ‘a new kind of praeparatio evangelii such as at one stage was provided by the Hellenistic civilisation of the Roman Empire’.1 Kasper made the second of these observations after an acknowledgement that the postConciliar era has been characterised by a ‘mis-understanding of the idea of autonomy’ and ‘an overadaptation to secularised bourgeois civilization or to revolutionary liberation movements’.2 Nonetheless, he suggests that ‘the secularisation of many originally Christian values created the necessary conditions for releasing the European Christian idea of humanity from the historical matrix in which it arose making it universally communicable’.3 It is on the basis of this judgement that he draws his optimistic conclusion about the ‘modern age’ being a ‘new kind of praeparatio evangelii’. The conclusion of this work, however, is that the ‘secularisation of many originally Christian values’ and the detachment of the Catholic faith from the historical matrix in which it took root has not made it any more ‘universally communicable’. If anything, it has led to a widespread loss of faith within Europe itself and within countries like Canada, the United States and Australia, which, though not geographically lying in Europe, have fundamentally European cultures.4 This is not to argue that, for example, African Catholics or Pacifi c Islander Catholics could not develop their own authentically Catholic cultures with their own local customs, but that what has actually occurred is that the culture of modernity has been treated as a new ‘universal culture’ replacing Greco-Latin culture, and that this culture, far from being a neutral medium for the spread of Christianity, and far from being a praeparatio evangelii in the manner of Classical culture, is actually a hostile medium for the fl ourishing of Christian practices and beliefs; and indeed, according to some scholars, it represents an ‘heretical reconstruction’ or ‘secular parody’ of the principles of an authentically Christian culture.
