Robert Gascoigne - The Church and Secularity - Two Stories of Liberal Society (Moral Traditions) (2009)

The Church and Secularity
SELECTED TITLES FROM THE MORAL TRADITIONS SERIES

James F. Keenan, SJ, series editor
American Protestant Ethics and the The Context of Casuistry

Legacy of H. Richard Niebuhr James F. Keenan, SJ, and
William Werpehowski Thomas A. Shannon, Editors
Aquinas, Feminism, and the The Christian Case for Virtue Ethics
Common Good Joseph J. Kotva Jr.
Susanne M. DeCrane
The Critical Calling: Reflections on
The Banality of Good and Evil: Moral Dilemmas since Vatican II
Moral Lessons from the Shoah Richard A. McCormick, SJ
and Jewish Tradition
David R. Blumenthal Defending Probabilism: The Moral
Theology of Juan Caramuel
A Call to Fidelity: On the Moral Julia Fleming
Theology of Charles E. Curran
James J. Walter, Democracy on Purpose: Justice and
Thomas A. Shannon, and the Reality of God
Timothy E. O’Connell, Editors Franklin I. Gamwell
Catholic Moral Theology in the The Ethics of Aquinas

United States: A History Stephen J. Pope, Editor
Charles E. Curran
Ethics and Economics of Assisted
The Catholic Moral Tradition Reproduction: The Cost of
Today: A Synthesis Longing
Charles E. Curran Maura A. Ryan
Catholic Social Teaching,

1891–Present: A Historical,
Theological, and Ethical Analysis
Charles E. Curran
The Church
and Secularity
Two Stories of Liberal Society
8
Robert Gascoigne
georgetown university press

Washington, D.C.
Georgetown University Press, Washington, D.C. www.press.georgetown.edu
© 2009 by Georgetown University Press. All rights reserved. No part of this

book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic
or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information
storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
This volume draws on material Robert Gascoigne previously published in the

following publications:
“The Eucharist and Ethics,” in Eucharist: Experience and Testimony, ed.

T. Knowles, pp. 104–14. Melbourne: David Lovell, 2001. “The Two Stories
of Liberalism: Reconciling Autonomy and Community,” Colloquium:
Australian and New Zealand Theological Review, 33/2 (2001): 109–20;
“Christian Identity and Social Commitment,” in Ecumenics from the Rim:
Explorations in Honour of John D’Arcy May, ed. J. O’Grady and Peter
Scherle, pp. 71–78. Berlin: LIT Verlag, 2007; “Church, Kingdom and the
Moral Concerns of Modernity,” in Christianity in the Post-Secular West, eds.
J. Stenhouse and B. Knowles, pp. 257–74. ATF Press, Adelaide, 2007;
“Human Dignity within Secularity, in the Light of a Theology of Church and
Kingdom” in Responsibility and Commitment: Eighteen Essays in Honor of
Gerhold K. Becker, ed. Tze-Wan Kwan, pp. 59–74. Waldkirch: Edition Gorz
2008; “Christian Hope and Public Reason,” in Religious Voices in Public
Places, ed. N. Biggar, Oxford University Press, in press, 2009.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Gascoigne, Robert.
â•… The church and secularity : two stories of liberal society / Robert
Gascoigne.
p. cm. — (Moral traditions series)
â•… Includes bibliographical references and index.
â•… isbn 978-1-58901-490-9 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Liberty—Religious aspects—Christianity. 2. Liberalism—Religious
aspects—Christianity. 3. Church and the world. 4. Vatican Council (2nd :
1962–1965). Constitutio pastoralis de ecclesia in mundo huius temporis.
5. Augustine, Saint, Bishop of Hippo. De civitate Dei. I. Title.
â•… bt810.3.g37 2009
â•… 261.7—dc22â•…â•…â•…â•…â•…â•… 2008054428
This book is printed on acid-free paper meeting the requirements of

the American National Standard for Permanence in Paper for Printed
Library Materials.
15â•… 14â•… 13â•… 12â•… 11â•… 10â•… 09â•…â•…â•… 9â•… 8â•… 7â•… 6â•… 5â•… 4â•… 3â•… 2
First printing
Printed in the United States of America

To my friends and colleagues in the
Australian Catholic Theological Association
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Contents
Acknowledgmentsâ•‡â•‡ ix
Introductionâ•‡ â•‡ 1
o n e Two Stories of Liberal Societyâ•‡ â•‡ 7
t w o Church, Kingdom, and Secularityâ•‡ â•‡ 37
three The Virtues of Noninstrumental
Relationshipsâ•‡â•‡ 76
f o u r Christian Hope and the Eucharist:
Witness and Serviceâ•‡ â•‡ 112
f i v e Two Stories of Liberal Society and
Contemporary Catholic Identityâ•‡ â•‡ 143
Indexâ•‡ â•‡ 169

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Acknowledgments
It is a great pleasure to record my thanks to those who have assisted

me in the development of this book. The book includes some previously
published material, and I would like to thank the respective editors and
publishers for their permission to republish this material. The articles
and chapters gave me a valuable opportunity to develop the ideas
presented in this book, and I am grateful for the various invitations
and occasions that gave rise to them.
My particular thanks and appreciation go to Jim Keenan, editor of
the Moral Traditions series, and Richard Brown, director of Georgetown
University Press, for their encouragement of this project and their
acceptance of this book in the series. I would like to thank all the staff
of Georgetown University Press for their courteous and timely help.
I am very grateful to James McEvoy for his advice and encouragement
during the writing of this book, as well as to Raymond Canning for his
assistance with some aspects of Augustine scholarship. Any errors that
remain are naturally my own.
Two conferences convened by Nigel Biggar, on “Religious Voices in
Public Places” and “The Christian Foundations of Liberal Society,”
were very stimulating and instructive in the field of ideas that this book
is concerned with.
I would like to record my thanks to the Australian Catholic
University for the periods of study leave and teaching release that have
made this book possible. Patrick McArdle and Gail Crossley, my head
of department and dean at the time, gave me invaluable support in
obtaining this leave.
The attempt to live as a Christian in a liberal society brings many
challenges, joys, and surprises. I would like to thank my wife, Yvonne,
for her companionship on this journey and all that it has meant in our
ixâ•‡
xâ•‡â•‡ Acknowledgments
family and parish life. The parish of St. Brigid, Marrickville (Sydney),
together with the Passionist community that ministers to it, has been
for us a true community of word and sacrament. Our particular thanks
go to Tom McDonough CP, who now shares his special gifts with the
parish of St. Joseph, Boroko, Port Moresby.
8
Introduction
This book is concerned with the relationship of the Catholic Church

to contemporary liberal societies. It seeks to explore the meaning of
secularity as a shared space for all citizens and to ask how the Church
can contribute to sensitivity to and respect for human dignity within
liberal societies. In particular, it considers the ambivalence of human
freedom in those societies and explores how the Church can assist
in the expression of freedom as the wellspring of the common good
rather than as a self-assertion that degrades communal and social
relationships.
In a liberal society, all individuals are accorded certain rights, but
the laws and institutions of society are agnostic about the transcenden-
tal foundations of those rights. They are simply an ethical given—the
ethical premise of laws and political procedures, without any shared
transcendental foundation of their own. There are good reasons for
this, since liberal societies are secular and pluralist societies. To give
such shared transcendental foundations a politically established sta-
tus might privilege a particular religious tradition and threaten the
religious freedom that is essential to a liberal society. It would also be
harmful to the Church itself, since such privileges undermine the free
appeal that evangelization makes to conscience.
Yet it is also true that this “givenness” is limited and fragile. The
claim that every human being has worth and dignity is controversial in
a host of ways: in its scope, in its limits, and in its application. In par-
ticular, the freedom that is at the core of human dignity is interpreted
in crucially different ways, especially in terms of the tension between
conceptions of individual autonomy and a willingness to support
the common good. Its sheer “givenness”—its lack of transcendental
1â•‡
2â•‡â•‡ Introduction
content—can also affect the motivation of members of society to de-

fend human dignity and their hope that this defense, this commitment,
will not be in vain. The lack of a transcendental context can isolate
the appeal to human dignity: it makes a transcendental claim without
being able to link this claim to a comprehensive vision of reality. This
can render it vulnerable to the force of more palpable and pragmati-
cally demonstrable claims, which sacrifice human dignity in favor of
economic, ethnic, class, power, and other imperatives.
The aim of this book is to consider how the Christian church can
serve the cause of human dignity in this social and political context.
While retaining its own prophetic freedom from state authority, how
can it help to support the claims of human dignity: to respond to its
force, to strengthen and broaden its content, to reinforce commitment,
and to inspire hope that this commitment is not in vain?
The freedom that is fundamental to liberal societies can be the
source and guarantee of the love, solidarity, and respect that make
authentic community possible. Liberal society, refraining from im-
posed traditions of meaning and social hierarchies, has the potential
to encourage the free development of communities based on mutual
respect and affinity, without the intrusion of rank and the temptations
of hypocrisy. Yet it is also true that the disengagement of individual
freedom from socially reinforced traditions of meaning and the expec-
tations of social custom can become the rejection of any meaning and
value outside the ego, the mere assertion of the desire to dominate,
control, and consume, the destruction of the ethical substance that en-
ables individuals to develop and express themselves in a social milieu.
In this sense, liberal society can and does tell two stories: a positive
story of freedom of conscience and the development of unconstrained
community, as well as a negative story of self-centeredness, vacuity,
and the commodification of human values.
A key part of the Church’s service to liberal societies is in the as-
sistance it can give in strengthening the first, positive story of liberal
society, in developing understandings of human freedom as the fun-
damental potential for community and creativity, rather than as de-
structive self-assertion. The Christian faith’s own understanding of
freedom, as the response to God’s gift of life and love, can serve and
Introductionâ•‡â•‡ 3
nourish all expressions of freedom in liberal society that are oriented

to mutual respect and just relationships. Within the culture of liberal
societies, the Christian faith’s vision of the meaning and purpose of
human existence can help limit the destructive potential of freedom, its
rejection of anything but the self-aggrandizement and self-abasement
of the ego.
Two texts are of particular importance for the argument of this
book: Vatican II’s Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern
World, Gaudium et spes; and Augustine’s City of God. It is guided by
the vision of the Church and its role in the world that is articulated in
Gaudium et spes, finding in this document an inspiring and illuminat-
ing perspective on the Church as a witness to Christ and servant of hu-
manity. It interprets Augustine’s City of God as a classic resource for
the illumination of the ambivalent character of freedom and for living
in the shared space of secularity, taking issue with those readings that
interpret this text as essentially a rejection of the legitimacy of secular-
ity in favor of ecclesial existence. It argues that the central concern of
the City of God is not a contrast between Church and state, but rather
a fundamental contrast between two meanings of freedom, based in
two different loves: the love of God and neighbor, and the love of
self. Because the City of God reflects on the meaning of freedom as
expressed in these two radically different loves, it has much to say to
our contemporary experience of the ambivalence of freedom in liberal
societies. It will be evident that this book is not a work of Augus-
tine scholarship: rather, it seeks to learn from a number of Augustine
scholars in order to benefit from the insights of the City of God, most
explicitly in the first and third chapters of the book.
It is important to note that this book does not set out to be a discus-
sion of different philosophies of liberalism, but rather seeks to reflect
on the essential features of liberal societies themselves, namely, the
foundational importance of individual freedom and of human rights,
whether articulated in normative statements of rights or protected by
convention and common law. Clearly, these essential features of liberal
societies have a number of historical sources, including philosophi-
cal sources, which, in turn, have complex and controversial relation-
ships to Christian tradition and the churches. This book does not seek
substantially to engage in the important debates about this complex

history. It focuses rather on the character of liberal societies, as a form
of political life, with the perspective that societies based in personal
freedom and human rights are a precious historical heritage. Encour-
aged by the endorsement of liberal societies in the documents of Vati-
can II, especially because of their transcendental roots in freedom of
conscience, it seeks to explore the fundamental challenges they face
and the ways in which the Church can serve humanity and bear wit-
ness to Jesus of Nazareth by helping to maintain and strengthen the
ethical project of a society that respects human rights.
This book is written in the context of Catholic theology, and, espe-
cially in the final chapter, is particularly concerned with the relation-
ship of the Catholic Church to liberal societies. The argument does,
however, engage with, and has—I hope—greatly benefited from, many
writers of other Christian traditions, and it is concerned with ques-
tions that affect the role and significance in the contemporary world
of Christian faith as a whole.
The first chapter begins by considering the ambivalence of freedom
in liberal society. It argues that a key characteristic of liberal society is
the disestablishment of tradition as a constraint on individual action.
This freedom from tradition-as-constraint can enable the deployment
of tradition-as-resource: the free development of patterns of life and
community through a social dialogue that benefits from the insights
and practices embodied in traditions. Tradition-as-resource can be the
source of an “ontology of the human” that is crucial to the ethical life
of liberal societies. Yet the disestablishment of tradition-as-constraint
can also lead to the rejection of all tradition as an imposition on in-
dividual freedom, so that freedom is understood as the denial of any
ontology of the human and is exercised purely as unconstrained and
self-assertive choice. The argument of this chapter then considers two
key works that reflect on the origins of this situation in the demise
of Christendom: Oliver O’Donovan’s The Desire of the Nations and
Charles Taylor’s A Catholic Modernity?1 While both of these authors
emphasize the ambivalence of freedom in modern societies, they have
very different appraisals of Christendom and the reasons for its de-
mise. The chapter concludes by considering the light that the City of
Introductionâ•‡â•‡ 5
God can shed on this ambivalence of freedom and on secularity as a

shared social and political space. In particular, it seeks to interpret the
“two cities,” inspired by two loves—the love of God and neighbor,
and the love of self—as a means of understanding the “two stories”
of liberal societies.
Chapter two argues that it is an essential aspect of the Church’s
identity to commit itself to supporting human dignity and human
rights in liberal, secular society. The tension between Christian iden-
tity and a commitment to universal ethical ideals is explored through
a theological reflection on the relationship between Church and King-
dom and Christ and the Spirit in human history, against the backdrop
of Joachim da Fiore’s theology of history, and in critical debate with
the work of Andrew Shanks and William Cavanaugh. The chapter
argues for a conception of the Church that retains both its identity as
discipleship of Jesus Christ and its mission of solidarity with all hu-
man beings, based in a theology of the anonymous presence of Christ
in every human person, as articulated in Gaudium et spes.
Chapter three argues that the two stories of freedom in liberal soci-
eties can be summed up in terms of the contrast between instrumental
and noninstrumental relationships. It seeks to learn from the insights
of the City of God to develop a theology of the virtues of noninstru-
mental relationships in a Christological perspective. It explores the
ways in which the virtues of humility, reverence, and self-giving at
the risk of self-loss are crucial to the expression of freedom in com-
munity, and argues that the Church’s proclamation of Christ as the
definitive embodiment of these virtues is a fundamental service to lib-
eral societies.
A liberal society is essentially an ethical project that must be
strengthened and inspired by hope in order to flourish and survive.
Chapter four reflects on the ways in which Christian hope can serve
this project for the sake of human community. In dialogue with John
Rawls’s essay “The Idea of Public Reason Revisited,” it considers the
possibilities for the communication of Christian hope in the “pub-
lic political forum” and the “background culture” of liberal societies.
Christian hope has its most powerful source and focus in the Eucha-
rist; yet for many in liberal societies, religious ritual is irrelevant to the
ethical project of respect for human dignity. The chapter concludes

by arguing that the Christian Eucharist, the memory and celebration
of Christ’s paschal mystery, can communicate hope in the face of the
temptation to despair at the gulf between universal ethical ideals and
the frightening evidence of their failure.
The earlier chapters of this book are concerned with the ways in
which the Christian Church can both bear witness to Christ and serve
liberal societies. The fifth and final chapter is concerned with how, in
the post-1960s age, this relationship to liberal societies is also critical to
the Catholic Church’s own processes of identity-formation. From the
French Revolution to the mid-twentieth century, the Catholic Church
was characterized by processes of demarcation and mobilization in
response to the dominance of liberal anticlerical elites in many Eu-
ropean countries and Protestant hegemony in the British Empire and
the United States. Vatican II gave the sanction of the Church’s highest
authority to a new stance in relation to liberal societies, one expressed
in particular in the documents Dignitatis humanae and Gaudium et
spes. This stance—of witness to Christ in solidarity with universal
humanity—has extraordinary evangelical and ethical promise. Yet
it also makes great challenges, both in maintaining a communal and
universalist perspective despite the individualist economic dynamics
of liberal societies, and in avoiding forms of identity that give highest
priority to demarcation from some secular interpretations of personal
autonomy in sexual and life ethics. The book concludes with the argu-
ment that the Church’s own social identity, rooted in Eucharist com-
munities, should be bound up with the struggle for human rights and
the resistance to commodification of the human in all its forms.
Note
1. Oliver O’Donovan, The Desire of the Nations (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1996); James L. Heft, ed., A Catholic Modernity? Charles
Taylor’s Marianist Award Lecture, with Responses by William M. Shea,
Rosemary Luling Haughton, George Marsden, and Jean Bethke Elshtain
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).
8
chapter one
Two Stories of Liberal Society
The Ambivalence of Freedom in Liberal Society
A key characteristic of a liberal society is its ambivalence, its pro-

pensity to tell two stories. The first of these stories is of individual
freedom as the source of creativity and diversity, as the warrant of
critical reason to constantly reform social institutions for the sake of
the common good; this story proclaims the right of even the most ap-
parently insignificant to make their voices heard in the debates that
concern their destiny. The other story is of freedom as a voluntarism
that destroys the ethical and cultural substance of tradition, leaving
only the emptiness of self-indulgent whim; it is a story of a society
with astonishingly sophisticated means of communication but with
little more than trivia and sensationalism to communicate. This am-
bivalence about freedom suggests a particular role for the Christian
church in the context of liberal societies: to assist those societies in
telling their positive story of freedom by illuminating the sources of
freedom in human dignity and by acting in solidarity with all those
who commit themselves to enhancing our consciousness of this dignity
and to giving it practical effect.
By a liberal society, I mean a society in which the invocation of
tradition is not sufficient to constrain or limit individual freedom. I
understand the contrast between liberal and traditional societies to be
the contrast between a society that gives priority to individual freedom
and one that gives priority to certain forms of behavior that express
a society’s past and give it social unity. In a traditional society, these
forms of behavior are not merely options or recommendations, but
practices that are associated with strong expectations, constraints,
and sanctions, such that if an individual were to ignore them they
would experience, to varying degrees, social exclusion or anomie. A
7â•‡
8â•‡â•‡ Chapter One
liberal society is one in which, in principle, all limitations on indi-

vidual behavior need to be justified by social argument, rather than by
the invocation of tradition. A fundamental aspect of social tradition is
religion, so a liberal society is a secular society insofar as it does not es-
tablish any religion or impose any religious test on public office. In this
sense, the secular character of society consists above all in freedom of
conscience in religious matters, in the elimination of any link between
state power and religious affiliation.
A liberal society is one kind of modern society. A hallmark of mo-
dernity is the weakening or abolition of tradition as a constraint: A
liberal society is that kind of modern society in which tradition can be
freely adopted by individuals, in contrast to those societies in which
the abolition of tradition has left a vacuum to be filled by various
kinds of authoritarianism or totalitarianism, some of which may in-
clude elements of tradition—such as religion or the nation—taken out
of their traditional context and transformed into instruments of total
control. A liberal society is also by its nature a democratic society,
although not all democratic societies have been liberal societies to the
same degree, since in many of them social traditions have continued
to exercise very strong constraints or modernizing political forms have
abrogated traditional freedoms.1 A liberal society is one in which in-
dividual freedom has priority over social unity, whether that unity be
imposed by tradition or by modernizing institutions and ideologies.
In a liberal society, the dwindling force of tradition leaves the in-
dividual free to act in ways that were impossible in traditional socie-
ties. In the first place, individuals can form freely chosen communities,
without the constraints of ethnic or class identity. They can choose
life-goals that go beyond the boundaries of traditional expectations
and norms. They can fashion diverse forms of life that express indi-
vidual creativity and aspiration. They can choose from a range of pos-
sibilities that may have been denied them by a traditionally prescribed
social order.
Yet, in order to fashion forms of life, to attempt human fulfillment,
they will also be informed by the content of tradition—no longer as
constraint and taboo, but as a historically formed portrait of human
possibilities, a lived and tested set of practices that enable personal
Two Stories of Liberal Societyâ•‡â•‡ 9
development. In a liberal society, tradition becomes available as re-

source rather than as constraint, as a guide to the task of becoming
an individual. Tradition as resource is a social argument, which, in
a liberal society, is conducted in a pluralist context, making various
traditions of human fulfillment available for admiration, scrutiny, and
mutual critique marked by civil discourse.
The abolition of tradition as an assertive and stifling constraint, and
the availability of tradition as a dialogic social resource, characterizes
the best features of liberal society. In this sense a liberal society is char-
acterized by both negative and positive freedom. Negative freedom,
or freedom from constraint, allows individuals to make a range of
choices concerning their self-fulfillment and life-goals. Positive free-
dom, or the freedom to fulfill certain purposes of human existence,
is grounded in the willingness to accept certain constraints—such as
various forms of moral discipline or commitments to communal and
personal fidelity—in order to achieve these purposes. The awareness
of these purposes of human existence, and their potential for human
fulfillment, are embodied in tradition as a social resource. Tradition as
social resource mediates a range of conceptions of human fulfillment,
or the human good, that can be freely chosen by individuals.
These various traditions of the human good offer resources for an
“ontology of the human,” a conception of human nature and poten-
tial that understands freedom as fulfilled in a variety of complemen-
tary relationships based in the virtues. Through the virtues of respect
for others, fidelity in relationships, solidarity with those in need, and
care for nonhuman nature, human beings are able to fulfill their per-
sonal moral potential. This ontology of the human is grounded in the
human person him- or herself, in the human dignity of each human
being, which makes a moral claim on all others.2
Because positive freedom always depends on tradition-as-resource,
on a social argument, it is constantly contested. In particular, the
meaningfulness of any ontology of the human, beyond the assertion
of individual freedom itself, is the subject of constant debate, argu-
ment, and negotiation. Should equality in the exercise of freedom,
essential to a liberal society, also extend to substantial forms of socio-
economic equality? What kinds of legal respect should various kinds
of interpersonal commitment, such as marriage, enjoy? How much

of their economic resources should individuals relinquish in order to
support the disabled and marginalized? Should members of society
have the right to end the lives of other human beings under certain
conditions?
The answers to these questions can only be given through civil
discourse among the members of liberal societies. This discourse will
draw constantly on the resources of traditions, and religious tradi-
tions have played and will continue to play a very significant part in
this. Yet for many members of liberal societies, tradition-as-resource
can look suspiciously like tradition-as-constraint. Beyond the claim
to individual freedom, any notion of an ontology of the human is ex-
perienced—in different ways by different people—as groundless and
intolerable. Claims to socioeconomic equality are rejected as unwar-
ranted restrictions on individual economic power, and the commit-
ments of interpersonal and communal bonds are deemed secondary to
individual self-expression and self-disposition.
The freedom of a liberal society can be interpreted not as the over-
coming of tradition-as-constraint by tradition as a freely adopted
resource, but rather as the overcoming of tradition as such, when tra-
ditions are experienced as sources of a spurious and restrictive ontol-
ogy of the human. Even tradition as a socially continuous debate is
rejected, since such a notion of tradition is linked to a sense of positive
freedom, to a sense that we can identify certain purposes of human
fulfillment. From this perspective, freedom is interpreted purely and
exclusively as absence of constraint, as freedom of choice, since any-
thing else is an imposition on the possibilities of individual freedom.
Freedom is no longer the possibility of personally appropriating tradi-
tion in order to fulfill human potential, but rather it is the rejection of
all tradition in order to exercise choice itself.
In this case, freedom becomes its own object and justification: Its
meaning lies purely in the experience of unrestricted choice, which
is, as much as possible, the experience of unrestricted power. Choice
becomes its own justification, without any need to appeal to a tradi-
tional wisdom of human fulfillment. Communal or faithful choices
are no better than selfish or solipsistic preferences. Choices that lead
individuals to a higher or deeper form of life are no better than those

that are about instinctual gratification. At its worst, this becomes sim-
ply an experience of the ego itself—the dominant, restless, consuming
ego—since everything in the world is experienced as restraint on the
ego. This can oscillate between self-assertion of the ego—and the ex-
perience of power that accompanies it—and the ego’s terror at itself,
in the realization that it has no content and no meaning other than
the experience of arbitrary choice. When freedom takes this guise,
we witness the denial and evacuation of any ontology of the human,
resulting in individualism instead of solidarity in community, and in
depersonalization rather than fidelity and commitment in sexual and
other interpersonal relationships.
Thus we experience a conflict between two notions of freedom in
liberal societies: freedom as the creative, personal appropriation of
tradition, expressing an ontology of the human as the outcome of a
process of social debate; and freedom purely as freedom of choice,
where all choices are equal because there is no ontology of the hu-
man, no realm of meaning to inform them, and where the ego relates
to the world around it only through domination or consumption, or
else cripples itself through various forms of addiction. Because both of
these options are possibilities of freedom, we constantly witness both
of them in liberal societies, where the scope of freedom has been made
all the greater by modernity’s disestablishment of tradition and by its
technological power.
In this sense, liberal societies do tell two stories. Because both of
these stories are so evident in our experience, and because the dif-
ference between them is so great, both anecdotal and more reflective
responses to liberal society vary markedly. Evidence justifying both the
essentially humane and positive as well as the essentially narcissistic
and shallow character of liberal society can easily be presented. The
reality of both of these possibilities, and the stark differences between
them, make clear how demanding the project of a liberal society is.
Such a society faces the constant challenge of re-appropriating tradi-
tion, in the face of changing circumstances and experiences, in or-
der to shape a moral consensus concerning the meaning and purpose
of human freedom. Parts of this task must be faced by government,
insofar as some dimensions of an ontology of the human, especially

those concerned with the balance of freedom and equality, must have
a legal expression. Much of the task must be taken up by society as a
cultural forum in continuous conversation about what expressions of
human freedom will enable civilization to continue as a truly humane
project. In whatever context it is pursued, the project of a liberal soci-
ety requires constant dedication and discernment.3
The Demise of Christendom and the

Ambivalence of Freedom
We can understand the nature of this task better by considering the

roots of contemporary liberal societies in that earlier relationship be-
tween Christianity and European society usually called Christendom.
This can help us understand what liberal societies owe to Christendom,
why Christendom ended, and why the development of liberal societies
from Christendom has been marked by this profound ambivalence of
freedom. Two important works can assist us in this reflection: Oliver
O’Donovan’s The Desire of the Nations: Rediscovering the Roots of
Political Theology and Charles Taylor’s A Catholic Modernity?4 These
books consider the disparities between Christendom and liberal soci-
eties in significantly different ways, and both address the ambivalence
of liberal modernity.
For O’Donovan, the legitimacy of all political authority after the
resurrection and exaltation of Christ derives from Christ himself:
“Christ’s victory . . . is the same victory that was promised to Israel
over the nations, the victory of a God-filled and humanised social order
over bestial and God-denying empires, a victory won for Israel on be-
half of all mankind.”5 The reign of Christ means that the only political
authority left to secular power is the power of making just judgments,
since other governmental rights are “overwhelmed by the immediate
claim of the Kingdom.”6 O’Donovan makes the striking claim that the
concept of the “state” itself derives from Christ’s victory. He argues
that it was a concept “unknown to the ancient world because it de-
scribes something new, a form of political authority which has come
to understand itself differently as a result of Christ’s triumph.”7 Only
after Christ was a distinction necessary between the limited authority

of the organs of government, subject to Christ, and another source of
authority, the Church.
According to O’Donovan, this conception of the limited role of the
state—as the steward of justice subjected to the rule of Christ—was
the most valuable feature of Christendom. Although Christendom was
prone to the dangers of “negative collusion, the pretence that there
was now no further challenge to be issued to the rulers in the name
of the ruling Christ,” it was able to foster the ancient prophetic ideal
of nations subject to God’s Law.8 In the early modern world—in what
O’Donovan describes as “the last and greatest of the legal accom-
plishments of Christendom”—this was expressed as an “international
law, dependent on no regime and no statute, but on the Natural Law
implanted in human minds by God, and given effect by international
custom and convention.”9
For O’Donovan, the First Amendment to the American Constitu-
tion can be taken as an indication of the end of Christendom, since it
explicitly ruled out the establishment of any religion. Although it was
enacted by Christians, in order to prevent government interference in
the life of the church, it “ended up promoting a concept of the state’s
role from which Christology was excluded, that of a state of freedom
from all responsibility to recognise God’s self-disclosure in history.”10
It was in fact heretical, since it denied the Creed’s affirmation that
Christ’s reign will have no end.11 The effect of this was to “exclude
government from evangelical obedience,” with “repercussions for the
way society itself is conceived.”12 The resulting idea of society “dis-
solves the unity and coherence” of the idea of justice “by replacing it
with a plurality of rights.”13 According to O’Donovan, the key prob-
lem with this notion of rights is that they are conceived of subjectively
and taken to be original rather than derived: “The right is a primitive
endowment of power with which the subject first engages in society,
not an enhancement which accrues to the subject from an ordered and
politically formed society.”14
Despite liberal society’s rejection of the reign of Christ, it can embody
some of the best features of Christendom, and O’Donovan believes
that a Christian theologian can “venture to characterise a normative
political culture broadly in continuity with the Western liberal tradi-

tion.”15 Liberal society bears the marks of Christ’s rule in so far as it is
marked by freedom of individual decision, by mercy in judgment, by
equality, and by the “openness to speech” that has its key embodiment
in representative parliaments. However, according to O’Donovan, this
positive narrative of liberal society as expressive of the reign of Christ
must be accompanied by a negative description of it as Antichrist, as
“a parodic and corrupt development of Christian social order.”16 Once
society has been formed by the reign of Christ, it cannot simply regress
to “naive malevolence”: rather, its possibilities of evil now have a de-
monic, Antichristic character.17 With its point of departure as “free
choice,” liberal society as Antichrist destroys the objectivity of natural
right, substituting the assertion of individual rights and wants, which
in turn corrode and undermine community and render justice and
punishment an arbitrary imposition on an individual’s “will for life
and freedom.”18 These two “counter-interpretations of modernity,”
expressing the reign of Christ and Antichrist, describe a crossroads,
a moment of decision that is “what all civilizational description must
aspire to in the era between Ascension and Parousia, the era mapped
out from its beginnings by the seer of Patmos.”19
The point of departure for O’Donovan’s powerful account of the
relationship between Christendom and modernity is the question of
the legitimacy of political authority. Charles Taylor’s A Catholic Mo-
dernity? is marked by many similar concerns, but it is principally mo-
tivated by the question of the sources of moral commitment in liberal
societies. Taking up the concluding theme of his Sources of the Self,
Taylor’s concern is to reflect on the problem of motivation for the de-
manding moral commitments that have become characteristic of the
“rights culture” of liberal societies.20
Whereas O’Donovan regards the birth of liberal societies out of
Christendom as originating in a heretical act of denial of Christ’s
Lordship, Taylor argues that Christendom had to die in order to make
the full universalization of the Gospel’s ethical meaning possible. Since
Christendom was the attempt to incarnate the Gospel in particular so-
cieties, it inevitably cast the Gospel in ways that disadvantaged those
of other faiths or of unacceptable morals. Because society involves
coercion, the attempt to embody any creed—including Christianity—

in social forms will involve coercion.21 The end of Christendom made
possible the full development of an ethical creed that had its principal
source in the Gospel itself, the development of a “rights culture” that,
“for all its drawbacks, had produced something quite remarkable, the
attempt to call political power to book against a yardstick of funda-
mental human requirements, universally applied.”22
According to Taylor, while the rights culture of modern liberalism
owes so much to the Christian Gospel, it was also accompanied by
the rise of “exclusive humanisms” that regard religion as harmful to
those rights. For these “exclusive humanisms,” what is important is
the flourishing of human life: Any claim that there is something be-
yond life, in this human, terrestrial sense, is perceived as a threat to
this flourishing. Taylor sees this emphasis on the value of “ordinary
life” as originating in the Reformation’s critique of Catholicism’s dis-
tinction between a higher, spiritual life, marked by celibacy and reli-
gious vows, and ordinary, secular married life, with its involvement in
economic activity. Later, various forms of secular humanism applied
this critique against Christianity itself, rejecting any appeal to higher,
religious value in favor of an exclusive focus on human flourishing in
a secular context. Taylor expresses this worldview in propositional
terms: “1. that for us life, flourishing and driving back the frontiers of
death and suffering are of supreme value; 2. that this wasn’t always
so; it wasn’t so for our ancestors, or for people in other earlier civiliza-
tions; 3. that one of the things that stopped it from being so in the past
was precisely a sense, inculcated by religion, that there were higher
goals; and 4. that we have arrived at 1. by a critique and overcom-
ing of (this kind of) religion”.23 Liberal societies, deeply influenced
by “exclusive humanisms,” still have some of the characteristics of a
postÂ�revolutionary order, a suspicion of anything that “smacks of the
ancien régime,” that is, of any subordination of secular human flour-
ishing to any purportedly higher or transcendental claims.24
Therefore, the society that has resulted from this development has
mingled within it “both authentic developments of the gospel, of an
incarnational mode of life, and also a closing off to God that negates
the gospel.”25 Its greatest moral strength is the development of a
universalist ethic that expresses an extension of moral concern without

parallel in earlier times—an ethic expressed in such extraordinary ex-
amples of moral commitment as Amnesty International and Médecins
sans Frontières. Yet this universal commitment, which seeks to include
strangers across the globe in a community of moral concern, faces the
question of its own moral sources: How can such a commitment be
sustained? For Taylor, the most powerful secular source of such com-
mitment is the sense of self-worth we derive from helping others out of
a recognition of their human dignity.26 Secular humanism emphasises
the worth and potential of humanity and the value of philanthropy in
making human flourishing possible.
Yet such philanthropy has a “Janus face”: if those who are being
helped do not live up to our image of the human, we can come to
despise them and, ultimately, to coerce them as passive material that
must be forced into the form of our own ideals.27 Likewise, in our pas-
sion for justice we can come to hate those we identify as the enemies
of moral progress.28 In this way, the horrors that the Enlightenment
critique saw in the perversion of religious ideals through religious war
became evident in secular humanism, in some cases with far worse
effects. If “action for high ideals is not tempered, controlled and ulti-
mately engulfed in an unconditional love of the beneficiaries, this ugly
dialectic risks repetition.”29
Just as O’Donovan recognizes both the Christic and Antichristic
potential of modernity, Taylor sees a certain logic in the fact that the
century of Amnesty International and Médecins sans Frontières is
also the century of Auschwitz and Hiroshima, that the “history of the
twentieth century can be read either in a perspective of progress or in
one of mounting horror.”30 Although Christendom also gave ample
demonstration of this “ugly dialectic” of human ennoblement and an-
nihilation, Christian faith can offer a vision of the love of God that can
heal it. This can be described in two ways, which have in fact the same
meaning: “either as a love or compassion that is unconditional—that
is, not based on what you the recipient have made of yourself—or as
one based on what you are most profoundly, a being in the image of
God.”31 This vision of human worth based on the love of God, and
thus independent of the demand to live up to a high ideal, is linked to
the profound commonality of the sense that “our being in the image of
God is also our standing among others in the stream of love, which is
that facet of God’s life we try to grasp, very inadequately, in speaking
of the Trinity.”32
For Taylor, then, the challenge facing liberal society is to be open to
the Gospel of the love of God as a sustaining source of moral concern.
This can provide an inspiration for a culture of universal human rights.
Although he shares with O’Donovan an interpretation of modernity
as the conjunction of high ideals and totalitarian atrocity, corruptio
optimi pessima, Taylor does not direct his criticism at the notion of
human rights itself, but rather at the attempt to sunder them from a
vision of humanity created in the image of God. For O’Donovan, who
focuses on the question of authority as the political act “which can
give moral form to a community by defining its commitment to the
good,” the notion of subjective rights threatens to fragment the ethi-
cal substance of natural law, the greatest heritage of Christendom.33
Subjective rights as “a primitive endowment of power” jeopardize the
objective justice made possible for all nations by Christ’s reign.
How, then, can a Christian be faithful to Christ’s reign in this time
that is irrevocably post-Christendom? In my judgment, the greatest
strength of The Desire of the Nations is its insistence on the ways in
which Christ’s triumph, as the anticipation of the Kingdom, must be
understood not only as the legitimation of Christendom but also as the
ultimate legitimation of political authority in liberal society. Daniel’s
prophecy of the one “like a Son of Man” (Daniel 7:13) who would
triumph over bestial empires has an uncanny contemporary relevance,
calling to mind the United Nations’s recognition of human dignity as
the wellspring for international peace and justice after the catastrophe
of World War II and the yearning of oppressed peoples for rule “with
a human face.”34 Yet I do not share O’Donovan’s view of the opposi-
tion between subjective rights and natural law. If it is one “like a Son
of Man” who is the source of divine justice, cannot the true meaning
of “natural law” be found in the dignity of the human person, under-
stood as a unique subject? If Christ’s rule is the rule of what is humane
and the abolition of what is bestial, should we not find its touchstone
in the dignity of the human person? If it is the human face of the one
“like a Son of Man” who brings justice, cannot a philosophy of the

dignity of the human subject be seen, not as the rejection of Christol-
ogy that O’Donovan finds in the American Constitution, but rather as
a sign of the elevation of the human person that God made possible
in Christ? In this sense, it is possible to see a polity based on human
rights as an implicit recognition of the reign of Christ. Such a polity
has, indeed, a stronger link to Christology than one based on less per-
sonalist conceptions of natural law, since it is based on the transcen-
dence of the human person, rather than on the structures of law. It is
open to an understanding of individual human dignity as grounded
in a union with Christ, the Word-become-human. It recognizes that it
is the human person, transformed in Christ, who is the touchstone of
all law.
A key difficulty in O’Donovan’s account lies in the link between
the end of Christendom and the development of liberal society. For
O’Donovan, Christendom ended in a heretical act, when churchmen
denied their own allegiance to Christ in a misconceived attempt to
free the church from civil control. Yet the First Amendment was not
a denial of the reign of Christ, but simply a denial of the political pre-
rogatives of the established Church and of the British monarch within
that Church. Because of the contradictions of an established church,
Christ’s reign must now be understood and expressed in a different,
implicit way, and that way was through the affirmation of the dignity
of the human person. Catholic tradition has had to struggle with a
similar process, moving from the nineteenth-century Papal insistence
on state support for the Catholic Church, and the condemnation of
religious freedom, to the recognition, in Vatican II’s Declaration on
Religious Freedom (Dignitatis humanae), that the dignity of the per-
son demands respect for the subjective rights of conscience and that
political privileges for the Church undermine this respect.
O’Donovan does, of course, value individual freedom in his positive
narrative of liberal society, but he sees the dangers of arbitrary volun-
tarism in its negative twin. Yet a statement of natural law in terms of
universal human rights need not lead to arbitrary voluntarism: the
subjectivity of human rights can be interpreted as the fundamental
right to freedom and self-expression of the individual person. In a
crucial sense, the subjective dignity of the human person is prior to the
objective right of the state. This subjective dignity is indeed a “primi-
tive endowment of power” in the sense that it is a dignity that the in-
dividual has prior to and independent of any political authority. Yet its
“primitive” character can be understood in the ultimate sense of being
in the “image of God,” prior to any and all human civilization.
The dignity of the human subject gives the objective order of po-
litical institutions the character of intersubjectivity: Their laws and
procedures are justified in terms of their ability to respect the freedom
and equality of all. Human dignity gives such societies their moral
foundation. At the same time, I share O’Donovan’s insistence that a
social order faithful to Christ’s reign is not based on “subjective will”
in the sense that the arbitrary will of the majority could abolish the
human dignity of others. Rather, the inalienable dignity of the person
must be enshrined—at least implicitly—as the basis of constitutional
order, so that its abolition would mean the self-destruction of a free
society. This is explicitly the case in the Universal Declaration of Hu-
man Rights, and in the American and German constitutions.35
If this is the case, a Christian can see a liberal society as faithful to
Christ’s reign in so far as it respects the dignity of the human person
as expressed in human rights. The extent to which such a society is
compatible with an attenuated form of Christendom is interesting and
complex, and the world provides many examples of varying constitu-
tional roles for religion and churches in liberal societies, notably the
contemporary British monarchy and its prerogatives and responsibili-
ties in relation to the Church of England.
The profound moral ambivalence of liberal modernity that
O’Donovan and Taylor eloquently describe is, in one sense, no more
and no less than the ambivalence of human freedom itself, whose po-
tential for good and ill has become dramatically clear in societies that
give maximum scope to that freedom against a backdrop of accelerat-
ing technological power. Yet, as O’Donovan points out, it is not sim-
ply a matter of the moral ambiguity of human freedom at any stage of
human history, but rather the ambiguity of a freedom elevated by the
passion, resurrection, and exaltation of Christ. If, as Taylor empha-
sizes, the universal meaning of this freedom of the Gospel has become
clear and effective with the end of Christendom, then the moral ambi-
guity of modernity has a particularly intense and challenging charac-
ter—something exemplified in the “culture wars” and moral anxiety
that are familiar aspects of our cultural condition.
The Augustinian Heritage: The “Two Cities” as Two Loves
To come to terms with this moral ambiguity in the post-Christendom

era, we now turn to the greatest classic of Christian reflection on civi-
lization, Augustine’s City of God. Augustine wrote at the beginning of
the epoch we call Christendom, but his conception of the relationship
between Church and society was not marked by an expectation that
any such fusion of Church, culture, and society would occur: part
of his relevance for our situation is that he does not speak from the
perspective of Christendom. In considering how the Church can help
liberal society tell its better story in this post-Christendom age, it is
illuminating to consider Augustine’s seminal analysis of the two sto-
ries of freedom: his conception of human, and indeed cosmic, history
as a dramatic narrative of the conflict between two cities—the heav-
enly and the earthly. I want to argue that a key aspect of the continu-
ing relevance of Augustine’s City of God lies in its portrayal of this
ambivalence of freedom—freedom as the potential to choose a social
ontology of love, or freedom as the libido dominandi, the “lust for
domination.”
Some contemporary writers find support in the City of God for
their rejection of the secular liberal state as a site for positive Christian
action. According to this perspective, the state is equated with Augus-
tine’s reprobate “earthly City”: It is only in the Church that a peace-
ful, Christian politics can be found.36 Yet an equivalence of the visible
Church with Augustine’s “heavenly city,” and of the state with his
“earthly city,” is fundamentally flawed. Augustine noted that his use of
the term “city” had an allegorical character, referring to moral rather
than political entities: “I classify the human race into two branches:
the one consists of those who live by human standards, the other of
those who live according to God’s will. I also call these two classes
the two cities, speaking allegorically.”37 As R. W. Dyson has argued,
the “two cities” are not cities at all in the ordinary sense, but moral
categories: cosmic communities united by what their members love.
The two cities “are the two all-embracing categories into which God’s
rational creation is divided throughout history. . . . The City of God is
the society of grace: the entire community, past and present, of those
who unfeignedly love God. It is the Church, but it is the Church in the
broadest sense of the term.”38 Nor can the state be identified with the
reprobate “earthly City.” It is true that, for Augustine, the state exists
because of sin; yet it also has the positive task of rectifying the damage
caused by sin, and it is understood as a means of discipline.39
In Christianity and the Secular, Robert Markus argues that the City
of God is not a rejection of the legitimacy of the secular, but on the
contrary a powerful argument for the acknowledgment of the secular
as the earthly context for the Church’s existence as it awaits the es-
chaton.40 The secular, for Augustine, is the “present age” (saeculum),
in which the members of the heavenly and earthly cities live in an
“inextricably intertwined state” in this temporal life.41
Markus notes that there have been two types of modern political
thought that claim support in Augustine. One is secular liberalism,
severing the direct relation between religion and the public realm; the
other is “the tradition which would see the public sphere as founded
or tied in one way or another to Christianity.”42 At the heart of this
second perspective is the “radical equation of the secular with sin.”43
Markus rightly takes John Milbank as a leading exponent of this view.
For Milbank, the civitas terrena is not regarded by Augustine “as a
‘state’ in the modern sense of a sphere of sovereignty, preoccupied with
the business of government. Instead, this civitas, as Augustine finds it
in the present, is the vestigial remains of an entire pagan mode of
practice, stretching back to Babylon.” The ends sought by this earthly
city “are not merely limited, finite goods, they are those finite goods
regarded without ‘referral’ to the infinite good, and, in consequence,
they are unconditionally bad ends. The realm of the merely practical
cut off from the ecclesial, is quite simply a realm of sin.”44
Markus sums up Milbank’s interpretation of Augustine as the claim
that there is “no neutral public sphere in which people can act po-
litically without reference to ultimate ends.”45 Markus acknowledges
that Augustine would have rejected any notion that individuals can
perform morally indifferent actions, since all actions must be carried
out with some reference to our ultimate ends, whether for salvation
or damnation. But he denies that this rejection of “morally indiffer-
ent” or “neutral” action implies that Augustine rejected the possibility
and legitimacy of a neutral public sphere, that is, practices, customs,
and institutions that could constitute a shared context for action for
members of both cities.46 Within these shared institutions, members of
the heavenly city could act in ways that referred “limited finite goods”
to the infinite good: “it is absolutely clear that Augustine envisaged a
possibility of acting morally, with God’s grace, within the framework
of earthly political order.”47 A striking example of this is Augustine’s
praise for the Christian Roman emperor Theodosius I.48
What is crucial, Markus argues, is to distinguish the two different
senses of the “earthly City,” the civitas terrena, as this term is used
in the City of God: first, the broader sense of the term, denoting the
society on earth that comprises both virtuous and wicked members;
and second, the narrower sense—which it usually has when Augus-
tine defines it explicitly—of the mass of the reprobates. According to
Markus, “a great deal of the confusion and the controversy over the
‘secular’ realm in Augustine’s thought arises from failure to distin-
guish the two senses that the ‘earthly City’ can bear in Augustine’s
language.”49 Those, like Milbank, who argue that Augustine rejected
the legitimacy of the secular fail to make this distinction. For Markus,
Augustine recognized that the Church lived within a “secular frame-
work” that “demanded acknowledgement of its function and value,
while at the same time it needed to be critically distanced and assessed
within a Christian perspective.”50
Dyson’s and Markus’s studies provide good grounds for rejecting
any interpretation of the City of God as a denial of the legitimacy of
the secular, as a shared space in which Christians can cooperate with
others for the common good. Augustine’s polarity of the “heavenly”
and “earthly” cities cannot be used to set up a dichotomy between a
peaceful Church and an intrinsically sinful secular realm. How, then,
can the City of God shed light on the contemporary situation of Chris-
tians in liberal societies? I want to argue that the great value of the
City of God for understanding our contemporary situation is not in

an alleged tale of the contrasts between a peaceful Church and a irre-
deemably violent liberal state, but in its reflections on human freedom
in relation to two loves: the love of God and neighbor, in contrast to
the love of self.51 These two differing loves characterize human be-
ings, and they differentiate the two cities.52 I want to illuminate the
“two stories” of liberal societies with Augustine’s account of the “two
cities”—and the two loves that energize them—as fundamental pos-
sibilities of human freedom.
This understanding of the heritage of the City of God must, of
course, reinterpret Augustine’s understanding of grace and salvation in
light of contemporary Christian understandings.53 According to Vati-
can II, the grace of salvation is not limited to the baptized, but rather
it is offered to all humanity. All human beings, whether they know
and acknowledge Christ explicitly or respond to the grace of God in
conscience through the awareness of ultimate values given in their
own cultures, can belong to the civitas Dei.54 All human beings, gifted
with the grace of salvation, can exercise their freedom to the extent
of refusing or responding to the love of God. In this sense, the “two
cities” can be interpreted as fundamental options of human freedom:
the “heavenly city” is the community of those, Christian or otherwise,
who respond to the gift of grace with love of God and neighbor; the
“earthly city” is comprised of those who are enslaved by self-love.
I began this chapter by reflecting on liberal society as a space in
which the potential of human freedom for community and dignity
or for selfishness and degradation is constantly in play. In this light,
Augustine’s reflections on human freedom in the City of God are of
extraordinary value, as a key aspect of a seminal Christian text ex-
pounding the meaning and consequences of fundamental human
choices with dramatic intensity and analytical power. Augustine sets
out the meaning of the two loves in a key passage:
We see then that the two cities were created by two kinds of love:
the earthly city was created by self-love reaching the point of con-
tempt for God, the Heavenly City by the love of God carried as far
as contempt of self. In fact, the earthly city glories in itself, the
Heavenly City glories in the Lord. The former looks for glory from
men, the latter finds its highest glory in God, the witness of a good
conscience. The earthly lifts up its head in its own glory, the Heav-
enly City says to its God: “My glory, you lift up my head.” (Ps 3, 3)
In the former, the lust for domination lords it over its princes as over
the nations it subjugates; in the other both those put in authority
and those subject to them serve one another in love, the rulers by
their counsel, the subjects by obedience. The one city loves its own
strength shown in its powerful leaders; the other says to its God, “I
will love you, my Lord, my strength” (Psalm 18,1).55
The two loves have their outcomes in different expressions of free-

dom. The love of God and neighbor seeks its glory not in itself but in
God and expresses itself in “the witness of a good conscience,” in a
humility and trust that recognizes God’s Lordship, and in community
between those who are entrusted with government and those who are
governed. The love of self is expressed in contempt for God, by an
obsession with its own glory and power, and by the libido dominandi,
a lust that binds not only the ruled but also the rulers themselves who
are captive to it. Citing Romans 1:21, Augustine argues in the same
passage that this false love also leads to the self-degradation of idola-
try. The degradation of human sexuality through idolatry and its as-
sociated obscene practices is pursued in detail by Augustine in relation
to pagan Rome in the early books of the City of God.56 Since all evil
is the perversion of something good, this difference between the two
cities is not from nature, but rather a perversion of nature.57
In the city of God, freedom is characterized by humility, most of all
in the example of Christ himself: “Thus, in a surprising way, there is
something in humility to exalt the mind, and something in exaltation
to abase it. . . . That is why humility is highly prized in the City of God
. . . and it receives particular emphasis in the character of Christ, the
king of that City.”58 Humility “exalts the mind by making it subject
to God.”59 A freedom that deems itself to be self-sufficient diminishes
a human being: “This then is the original evil: man regards himself as
his own light, and turns away from that light which would make man
himself a light if he would set his heart on it.”60 Freedom should not
trust its own will, but should “hope to call upon the name of the Lord
God.”61
Although we are created free, subjection to sin enslaves our free-
dom, and only openness to the grace of God can restore it.62 The exer-
cise of human freedom is not once for all, but rather it is characterized
by constant struggle.63 Augustine emphasizes that we cannot achieve
the elimination of the desires of the flesh in this life, cannot think we
have achieved victory. The virtues, “which are certainly the best and
most useful of man’s endowments here below,” are of inestimable as-
sistance in this struggle.64 The “membership” of either city is not ir-
revocable but depends on freedom’s response to the gift of grace.
For Augustine, a society or “people” is a group that is bound to-
gether by shared values—by its “common objects of love”—and the
character of any society can be discovered from these shared values.65
The citizens of the heavenly city are oriented towards community: they
resist the spell of the libido dominandi and “form a community where
there is no love of a will that is personal and, as we may say, private,
but a love that rejoices in a good that is at once shared by all and
unchanging—a love that makes ‘one heart’ out of many, a love that is
the whole-hearted and harmonious obedience of mutual affection.”66
The highest value for the life of a community is peace, “than which
nothing better can be found.” This is the supreme desire and includes
a “mutual fellowship in God.”67 Peace is well-ordered concord, char-
acterized by mutual service. In the peaceful household, “even those
who give orders are the servants of those whom they appear to com-
mand. For they do not give orders because of a lust for domination
but from a dutiful concern for the interests of others, not with pride
in taking precedence over others, but with compassion in taking care
of others.”68
In the heavenly city, all good acts are directed towards peace, both “in
relation to God, and in relation to a neighbor, since the life of a city is
inevitably a social life.”69 In the earthly city, by contrast, peace is only the
temporary absence of war, the result of conquest that reverts once again
to war once the resentment of the vanquished bursts out in revenge:
If any section of that city has risen up in war against another part,
it seeks to be victorious over other nations, though it itself is the
slave of base passions; and if, when victorious, it is exalted in its
arrogance, that victory brings death in its train. Whereas if it con-
sider the human condition and the changes and chances common to
mankind, and is more tormented by possible misfortunes than
puffed up by its present success, then its victory is only doomed to
death. For it will not be able to lord it permanently over those whom
it has been able to subdue victoriously.70
Augustine’s reflections on the different effects of the two loves focus

on the contrast between humility and self-aggrandizement. Humble
people know that our powers and capacities come from God, and
that they will only find fulfillment in worship of God and in love of
neighbor. Love of neighbor is expressed in peaceful service, the effort
to form a community where some may have higher office, but where
no one lives by domination or in servitude. Self-aggrandizement, in
contrast, leads to a cycle of violence, domination, and the countervio-
lence of the defeated, where peace is merely another way of saying that
there is no one left to fight. The choices of these two loves, in their dif-
ferent expressions, determine the character of a community, whether
large or small. Peaceful communities are bonded by the ties of mutual
respect and service; warring communities by the power of the libido
dominandi, which enslaves both the victors and the vanquished.71
The continuing power of Augustine’s reflections, and their profound
relevance to liberal societies, lies in their insight into the radical social
and political implications of our loves. These loves are the expression
of our freedom; but for Augustine there are loves that intensify and
multiply freedom, and others that in fact bind and choke it, spiral-
ing downwards into various forms of destruction, addiction, and self-
degradation. As shared values, the character of our loves shapes the
kind of society we live in. Augustine is passionate about the potential
of communities, especially families and groups of friends, to live a
common life of peace and mutual service. Clearly, he did not share
the conviction of pre-Christian Graeco-Roman philosophers that the
polis, the state itself, could be a school of virtue in the higher sense.
Thomas Aquinas was to have a more positive view of the political

realm and its capacity for moral education.72 However, Augustine did
recognize the worth of political and social institutions for the common
life of Christian and pagan alike, and he acknowledged the Christian
value of virtuous commitment within these institutions.
Augustine’s contrast of the two loves intensifies our awareness of
the fateful consequences of the abuse of freedom, especially in the con-
text of modernity, in which individual will is so often unconstrained
by tradition and has so much technological power at its disposal. At
the same time, he constantly reminds us of the power of grace to lead
freedom towards peaceful community—that it is possible for human
beings to live in mutual respect, consideration, and service.
Augustine’s account of freedom, written before the development of
Christendom, continues to illuminate the circumstances of liberal so-
cieties that have emerged from the demise of Christendom; most of all,
it highlights the challenges they face. These challenges are shared by
the Christian church, which is committed to helping liberal society tell
the better story of freedom, so that the church can live freely within
it, but also—and most of all—for the sake of all the human beings
that are members of liberal societies, and for the whole world that is
so deeply affected by the multifaceted powers of liberal modernity.73
Augustine reminds us that the task of virtue is never completed, that
none can ever say that they have mastered their vices. In the same way,
liberal societies are constantly faced with the choice between the two
loves—the two meanings of freedom—sometimes in more everyday
ways, sometimes in ways that may determine the future of civilization.
The Christian tradition is profoundly aware of the radical character of
human freedom—of its power for good and ill—and Augustine’s City
of God is a classic expression of that awareness. It is this understand-
ing that the Church brings to secularity, the shared space of social
debate, in order to serve the common good.
Notes
1. For example, De Valera’s Irish Republic and the early twentieth-century
French Third Republic at the time of the expulsion of Catholic religious
orders were both democratic but hardly liberal.
2. As Charles Taylor argues in Modern Social Imaginaries (Durham, NC,

and London: Duke University Press, 2004), “a moral order is more than
just a set of norms; it also contains what we might call an ‘ontic’ compo-
nent, identifying features of the world that make the norms realizable.”
In the “modern social imaginary,” this “ontic” order has not disappeared,
but is now “a feature about us humans” (10–11). This imaginary is a
secular imaginary in the sense that it involves the “freeing of politics from
its ontic dependence on religion” (187).
3. This becomes particularly clear when societies are freed from oppression
and can embrace freedom once again, as was the case in Eastern Europe
after the fall of Communism in 1989. During the initial years of democ-
ratization in Eastern Europe, freedom as sheer voluntarism was very evi-
dent, with the widespread prominence of “carpetbagger” capitalism, por-
nography, and organized crime; this was followed more slowly and
gradually by freedom as a complex articulation of tradition and the de-
velopment of more stable democratic institutions and community
groups.
4. Oliver O’Donovan, The Desire of the Nations (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1996); James L. Heft, ed., A Catholic Modernity? Charles
Taylor’s Marianist Award Lecture, with Responses by William M. Shea,
Rosemary Luling Haughton, George Marsden, and Jean Bethke Elshtain
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).
5. O’Donovan, The Desire of the Nations, 147.
6. Ibid., 151.
7. Ibid., 231.
8. Ibid., 213.
9. Ibid., 236.
10. Ibid., 245.
11. Ibid., 246.
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid., 247.
14. Ibid., 248. O’Donovan draws a strong distinction between the natural law
doctrines of early modernity and the doctrines of subjective human rights
that were influential in the eighteenth century and afterwards. However,
in Nature as Reason: A Thomistic Theory of the Natural Law (Grand
Rapids, MI: William Eerdmans, 2005), Jean Porter argues, drawing on the
work of Brian Tierney (The Idea of Natural Rights: Studies on Natural
Rights, Natural Law and Church Law [Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1997]),
that we in fact owe “the first explicit claims for the existence of subjective
natural rights to medieval canon lawyers” (344), who, in their develop-

ment of the idea of natural law from Scripture and other sources, formu-
lated “a concept of the natural law which regards an interior power or
capacity for moral discernment as natural law in the primary and para-
digmatic sense, in terms of which other kinds of appeals to the natural law
are to be understood.” This gave “them a way to justify and safeguard
claims to autonomy and self-direction” (348), which led in turn to the
“idea of a right as a subjective power of the individual” (350), giving rise
to a distinctive claim and existing prior to particular social arrangements.
The key scriptural influence on this was the doctrine of the imago Dei,
which was linked to the capacity for moral discernment that belongs to
every human being.
5.
1 O’Donovan, The Desire of the Nations, 230.
16. Ibid., 274.
17. Ibid., 251.
18. Ibid., 277Â�–78.
19. Ibid., 284.
20. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1989).
21. For James McEvoy, O’Donovan’s judgment is that “citizens of liberal
societies today have an implicit distrust of the idea of Christendom and
therefore raise the question about coercion because they see society in
terms of minimum formal conditions. And they think about society in this
way, he continues, because they have lost confidence in the search for
shared convictions.” James McEvoy, “A Dialogue with Oliver O’Donovan
about Church and Government,” The Heythrop Journal 48 (November
2007): 957. Yet as McEvoy rightly notes, “O’Donovan’s argument does
not directly respond to the question of whether Christendom is implicitly
coercive. That question remains unanswered. Neither does O’Donovan’s
response here acknowledge that the question about Christendom and co-
ercion could be raised by someone not at all committed to or influenced
by the contemporary subjectivist climate” (960). McEvoy argues that Tay-
lor’s work recognizes the inevitably coercive effects of Christendom and
at the same time offers a thorough critical analysis of contemporary sub-
jectivism.
2.
2 Taylor, A Catholic Modernity? 18.
23. Ibid., 23–24.
24. Ibid., 24.
25. Ibid., 16.
6.
2 Ibid., 32.
27. Ibid.
28. Ibid., 33.
29. Ibid.
Ibid., 37.
30.
Ibid., 35.
31.
Ibid.
32.
O’Donovan, The Desire of the Nations, 249.
33.
Recall, for example, the plea of the Prague Spring of 1968 for “socialism
34.
with a human face.”
35. The United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) be-
gins with the words, “Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of
the equal and inalienable rights of all the members of the human family is
the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world.” Diane Ravitch
and Abigail Thernstrom, eds., The Democracy Reader (San Francisco:
HarperCollins, 1992), 202. Article I of the Basic Law of the Federal Re-
public of Germany affirms that “The dignity of the human person is in-
violable. To respect and protect it is the duty of all state authority. 2.
Therefore the German people affirms the inviolable and inalienable rights
of the human person as the foundation of all human community, peace
and justice in the world” (author’s translation). See www.datenschutz-
berlin.de/recht/de/gg/gg1_de.htm#art1. Cf. the discussion of this article in
Wolfhart Pannenberg, Systematische Theologie, Vol. 2 (Göttingen: Van-
denhoeck and Ruprecht, 1991), where the sources of contemporary con-
ceptions of human rights in a theological vision of the human person are
emphasized (205). For the Declaration of Independence of the United
States of America, human beings are “endowed by their Creator with
certain unalienable rights.” See Vincent Wilson Jr., ed., The Book of Great
American Documents (Brookeville, MD: American History Research As-
sociates, 1987), 15.
6. See, for example, William Cavanaugh, “Discerning: Politics and Recon-
3
ciliation,” in The Blackwell Companion to Christian Ethics, ed. Stanley
Hauerwas and Samuel Wells, 196–208 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004). For
Cavanaugh, “Rather than forcing a choice between acceptance of or with-
drawal from the one public reality, Augustine’s metaphor of the two cities
is a far more fruitful model, for it helps us to see that there are two rival
performances, the City of God and the earthly city, contending for the
status of ‘public.’” In Cavanaugh’s discussion these two “rival perfor-
mances” are identified with the difference between the church and the
modern “nation-state,” and Augustine’s analysis of the libido dominandi

in the Roman empire “carries over—mutatis mutandis—to the tragic
politics of the liberal state” (206).
37. Augustine, City of God, trans. H. Bettenson (Harmondsworth: Penguin
Classics, 1984) XV:1, 595. All subsequent references are to this edition.
38. R. W. Dyson, The Pilgrim City: Social and Political Ideas in the Writings
of St. Augustine of Hippo (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 2001),
10–11. See also Dyson’s St. Augustine of Hippo: The Christian Transfor-
mation of Political Philosophy (London: Continuum, 2005) 32–33.
39. According to Dyson’s reading of Augustine, “the state has arisen . . . first
as a consequence and expression of sin; second, as a mechanism for ame-
liorating the material damage arising from sin; and third, as an instrument
of discipline, whereby sinful men are punished and virtuous men tested
and proved” (The Pilgrim City, 47).
40. Robert Markus, Christianity and the Secular (Notre Dame, IN: University
of Notre Dame Press, 2006).
1.
4 Ibid., 39. Cf. City of God I:35.
42. Ibid., 41.
43. Ibid., 43.
44. John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (Ox-
ford: Blackwell, 1993), 406.
45. Markus, Christianity and the Secular, 44. Markus’s formulation of Mil-
bank’s reading of Augustine is cited from M. J. Hollerich, “John Milbank,
Augustine and the ‘Secular,’” in History, Apocalypse and the Secular
Imagination, ed. Mark Vessey, Karla Pollmann, and Allan D. Fitzgerald,
315 (Bowling Green, OH: Philosophy Documentation Center, 1999).
46. Markus, Christianity and the Secular, 44. Markus notes that in his earlier
work, De doctrina Christiana, Augustine had acknowledged the value of
classical culture for Christians; in a similar way, the City of God acknowl-
edges the value of “acting within the framework of existing social and
political institutions”: “As with the curriculum of the established educa-
tion system, and, generally, with established practices, customs, and insti-
tutions, members of the two Cities make use of the same finite goods, al-
though for different ends, with a ‘different faith, a different hope, a
different love’” (XVIII:54, 45). In Living in Two Cities: Augustinian Tra-
jectories in Political Thought (Scranton, PA: University of Scranton Press,
1998), Eugene Te Selle argues that “it is true that Augustine detached
himself from ‘sacral politics’. But this does not mean that he posited any-
thing as neat as a ‘neutral’ sphere; his thought is more dialectical than
that. He saw the two cities intertwined throughout human history. We are
all born children of Cain and the earthly city; but the very fact that we can
be reborn into the city of God highlights the potentialities for good that
remain in all human reality.” Although rejecting the notion of a “neutral”
earthly city, Te Selle does, however, affirm its “ambivalence” in a way that
also allows for its legitimacy as a site of moral action for Christians: “it is
precisely the earthly city then, not some tertium quid, that is affirmed
because of its positive achievements and its potentialities for future good.
It remains ambivalent, usable by both cities, both sets of motivations”
(42–43).
47. Ibid., 46.
8. Augustine, City of God V:26. Rowan Williams, in “Politics and the Soul:
4
A Reading of the City of God,” Milltown Studies 19/20 (1987): 55–72,
notes that Augustine praised Theodosius because he was not subject to the
libido dominandi; he was capable of sharing power and accepting hu-
miliation (65). For Williams, Augustine emphasizes “consulere,” spiritual
nurturing, within the context of both small and large communities, which
are “essentially purposive, existing so as to nurture a particular kind of
human life” (63). So “the member of the City of God is committed ex
professo to exercising power when called upon to do so, and, in respond-
ing to such a call, does not move from a ‘church’ to a ‘state’ sphere of
activity, but continues in a practice of nurturing souls already learned in
more limited settings” (68). For Gerard O’Daly, in Augustine’s City of
God: A Reader’s Guide (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), the City of God
is “not a discussion of the relations between church and state: rather, it
gives an account of how Christians may, and why they must, be good
citizens of the empire, by defining the limited but significant area where
the aims and interests of the two cities, in their historical form, coincide”
(209).
49. Markus, Christianity and the Secular, 47. It is noteworthy that Gaudium
et spes uses the term “earthly city” in its “secular” rather than “repro-
bate” sense; e.g., “the Church has a saving and an eschatological purpose
which can be fully attained only in the future world. But she is already
present in this world, and is composed of men, that is, of members of the
earthly city [civitas terrestris] who have a call to form the family of God’s
children during the present history of the human race, and to keep in-
creasing it until the Lord returns” (40); “Laymen should also know that
it is generally the function of their well-formed Christian conscience to see
that the divine law is inscribed in the life of the earthly city [civitas ter-
rena]; from priests they may look for spiritual light and nourishment”
(43). As these extracts demonstrate, in Gaudium et spes, members of the
Church are also members of the “earthly city,” which itself can bear the
impress of divine law. English translation from Vatican Website edition:
www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/
vat-ii_cons_19651207_gaudium-et-spes_en.html.
50. Markus, Christianity and the Secular, 45. As Christopher Insole argues in
The Politics of Human Frailty: A Theological Defence of Political Liberal-
ism (London: SCM Press, 2004), the weakness of the “radical orthodox”
approach is in its “genealogical reduction” of secular society to an “ontol-
ogy of violence”: it opens up an “assertive transcendental space” by an
erroneous and unnecessarily alarmist description of the secular world,
whereas we are in fact left with a “broken middle,” neither nihilism nor
the City of God, in which “the wheat and the chaff are thoroughly mixed
until the coming of the Son of Man” (141).
1. Robert Kraynak, in Christian Faith and Modern Democracy: God and
5
Politics in the Fallen World (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame
Press, 2001), understands Augustine’s “earthly city” essentially as the
state, rather than as a moral allegory of self-love. However, in contrast to
Milbank and Cavanaugh, Kraynak does not interpret Augustine as con-
demning the “earthly City” in this sense (as secular order) and rightly
notes that Augustine’s “political teaching is thus a kind of moderate au-
thoritarianism that respects the limited boundaries of the earthly city”
(94). However, Kraynak builds on this to develop an Augustinian theory
of contemporary politics and a critique of the “Kantian Christianity” of
democracy based on human rights (152–54), arguing that the contempo-
rary import of Augustine’s work is that it “gives sanction to all constitu-
tionally limited governments under God, even those that are not based on
human rights or social contract theory” (191). Yet the City of God is not
principally interesting because it can be interpreted to justify constitution-
ally limited government in ways that are critical of democratic human
rights theory—such an approach is both utopian (because it does not
recognize why such undemocratic constitutional governments are intrinsi-
cally unstable) and runs counter to Catholic social teaching, as expressed,
for example, in Joseph Ratzinger’s somewhat Kantian formulation: “Since
all collaborate in the genesis of law, it is common to all. As such, all can
and must respect it. And as a matter of fact, democracy’s guarantee that
all can work together to shape the law and the just distribution of power
is the fundamental reason why democracy is the most appropriate of all
political models.” Values in a Time of Upheaval (New York: Ignatius

Press, 2006), 33. For my own argument, the contemporary importance
and relevance of the City of God is less in transposing Augustine’s sense
of the limitations of government (which, as TeSelle notes, was “over-
whelmed with the fleeting character of life and the lack of opportunities
to make much of a difference”; Living in Two Cities, 156) to our own very
different age than in its analysis of the two loves and their fateful impor-
tance for moral and political choices.
52. It is significant that one of Catholic tradition’s most influential spiritual
texts, the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius Loyola, was probably influenced
by Augustine’s reflections on the two loves as fundamental options of
human freedom, which were expressed by Ignatius in “A Meditation on
Two Standards”: the “standard of Christ” and the “standard of Satan”
(Fourth Day, Second Week. The Spiritual Exercises, ed. L. Puhl SJ, 60
[Chicago: Loyola Press, 1951]). In The Spirituality of St. Ignatius Loyola
(Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1953), Hugo Rahner argues that this
fundamental theme of the City of God influenced Ignatius through his
reading of the story of Augustine in the Golden Legend during his conva-
lescence after the siege of Pamplona (27–28). The Golden Legend relates
of Augustine’s great work, “that his book is concerned with the story of
two cities, with the Kings of these two cities, Jerusalem and Babylon. For
Christ is king over Jerusalem, Satan over Babylon. Two contrary loves
gave birth to these cities.” Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend,
trans. W. G. Ryan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993),
II:126.
3. In the history of salvation before Christ, the “City of God” could also
5
include non-Jews who were pleasing to God, such as Job, of whom Au-
gustine writes: “I have no doubt that it was the design of God’s provi-
dence that from this one instance we should know that there could also
be those among other nations who lived by God’s standards and were
pleasing to God, as belonging to the spiritual Jerusalem” (XVIII:47; 829)
or even the Erythraean Sybil, because of her prophecies of Christ
(XVIII:23). After the coming of Christ, of course, Augustine believed that
membership of the eternal City could only be possible through baptism
and incorporation into the visible Church. However, even this may need
to be nuanced; as T. Johannes van Bavel OSA argues in “What Kind of
Church Do You Want? The Breadth of Augustine’s Ecclesiology” (Lou-
vain Studies 7/3 (Spring 1979): 147–71), although Augustine adopted
Cyprian’s view that “outside the Church there is no salvation,” “we must,
however, be on our guard against a too simplistic interpretation of this

principle,” since, in Augustine’s conception, “church” “generally means
more than the empirical church” (153), and this has implications for his
conception of the breadth of the church both before and even after the
coming of Christ (154–55).
54. “Those who, through no fault of their own, do not know the Gospel of
Christ or his Church, but who nevertheless seek God with a sincere heart,
and, moved by grace, try in their actions to do his will as they know it
through the dictates of their conscience—these too may achieve eternal
salvation.” Lumen gentium, 16. Vatican Council II: The Conciliar and
Post Conciliar Documents, ed. A. Flannery O.P. (New York: Costello
Publishing, 1987), 367.
5.
5 XIV:28, 593.
56. E.g., VII:26, 27.
57. XII:1, 3.
58. XIV:13, 572–73.
59. XIV:13, 572.
60. XIV:13, 573.
61. XV:21, 635.
62. “The choice of the will, then, is genuinely free only when it is not subser-
vient to faults and sins. God gave it that true freedom, and now that it has
been lost, through its own fault, it can be restored only by him who had
the power to give it at the beginning. Hence the Truth says ‘if the Son sets
you free, then you will be truly free’” (John 8.36) XIV:11, 569.
3.
6 XIX:4, 853–54.
64. XIX:4, 857.
65. XIX:24.
66. XV:3, 599.
67. XIX:13, 870.
68. XIX:14, 874.
69. XIX:17, 879.
70. XV:4, 599.
71. As Raymond Canning notes in his article “Common Good,” in Augustine
through the Ages: An Encylopedia, ed. Allan D. Fitzgerald (Grand Rapids,
MI: Eerdmans, 1999), for Augustine, pride is “the enemy of the common
good,” and is “paralleled by a ruinous self-love which, in turning from the
pursuit of the common good to its own exclusive good—whether that be
money or power—finds itself not in a state of possessing more but in
confinement and destitution (in angustias egestatemque)” (220).
72. For Paul E. Sigmund, in “Law and Politics,” in The Cambridge Compan-
ion to Aquinas, ed. N. Kretzmann and E. Stump (Cambridge University
Press, 1993), in the De regimine principum, Aquinas conceives of the
political community as “a union of free men under the direction of a ruler
who aims at the promotion of the common good. Government then has
positive role and justification” (218). In contrast to Augustine, Aquinas
believed that the state is part of God’s original intention for creation,
rather than the result of the fall: for Aquinas, whereas “servitude” is the
result of sin, “subjection” “could have existed before sin” in a hierarchy
oriented to the common good. See Antony Black, Political Thought in
Europe 1250–1450 (Cambridge University Press, 1992), 23. For Robert
Markus, the trajectory of Augustine’s thought is not simply towards a
“night watchman” state: he would have wanted to maximize social and
cultural consensus, and thus to extend the public realm accordingly; yet
he would not have welcomed the idea of a shared religion being a purpose
of the state, in the sense of a “Christendom,” since this would threaten
the eschatological character of the City of God (Christianity and the Sec-
ular, 64–65).
73. “In pursuing its own salvific purpose not only does the Church commu-
nicate divine life to men but in a certain sense it casts the reflected light of
that divine life over all the earth, notably in the way it heals and elevates
the dignity of the human person, in the way it consolidates society, and
endows the daily activity of men with a deeper sense and meaning. The
Church, then, believes it can contribute much to humanizing the family of
man and its history through each of its members and its community as a
whole.” Vatican II, Gaudium et spes, 40. Flannery, 940.
8
chapter two
Church, Kingdom, and Secularity
Christian Identity and Secular Moral Ideals
I ended the last chapter by arguing that it is part of the Church’s mis-
sion in the contemporary world to assist liberal secular societies to tell
their “better story.” In this chapter, I would like to consider the im-
plications of this task for the Church itself and its own identity. How
can this task of encouraging liberal society’s better story be at the same
time an expression of the Church’s own identity? To what extent will
the Church find its own concerns within the concerns of the liberal
secular world, so that support for the best ideals of liberal modernity
will also be an expression of its own mission? In this relationship, the
Church runs the risk of identifying its own mission and goals with the
aspirations and best principles of liberal secular civilization; there is
also the equally grave temptation for the Church to conceive its own
distinctiveness in a way that renders it less able to live in solidarity
with all human beings.
The relationship of the Church to secular moral ideals is pro-
foundly contested in contemporary theology and in the contemporary
experience of Christians. Two fundamental concerns loom large: If
the Church is committed to supporting and encouraging the dissemi-
nation of universal ideals of freedom, justice, and dignity, why does
it insist on its own uniqueness and the uniqueness of the Gospel it
proclaims? Does not this very insistence inhibit the development of a
universal moral consciousness based on mutual respect? From a very
different perspective, many point to the malign story of liberal socie-
ties and contend that secular modernity is so fundamentally degraded
by the libido dominandi and its offspring that it is essentially alien
37â•‡
38â•‡â•‡ Chapter Two
to the Church’s mission, which is to live as an alternative society to

secularity.
One understanding of the Church’s contemporary task might be
to identify certain moral concerns as the meaning of Christianity, and
to give these concerns its full commitment. Yet if these moral concerns
are themselves not seen as founded in Christian identity, then an over-
riding commitment to them can gradually render the distinctive stance
of Christian faith secondary and inessential, so that Christian religious
consciousness is no longer integrated with moral consciousness, but
rather is replaced by it. If the content of Christianity is primarily un-
derstood as a moral imperative, as distinct from a faith in Jesus Christ
as the risen promise of God’s gift of salvation, then the Christian tradi-
tion can seem to be one, ultimately inessential, way to express a com-
mon, universally human commitment to this moral imperative.
A very different reaction—which has both traditional forms as well
as strong recent expressions in postliberal theology—is to argue that
the Church’s identity and future are not bound up with the moral
problems of “the world.” According to this point of view, the future
of the Church lies in a strong communal identity and an acute sense
of differentiation from the secular world. From this perspective, the
moral ideals of secular modernity are unconvincing and illusory, since
they are about changing a world that cannot be changed: The world of
the secular state is of its nature a place of violence and discord, a place
where relationships of solidarity are impossible. The Church’s role is
not to support universalist movements of human dignity and human
rights, since these notions are vain and ineffectual abstractions, but to
be itself a body that displays a particular kind of politics and morality,
an alternative society to the state.
Neither of these perspectives recognizes an intrinsic relationship
between Christianity and the better story of liberal society: the first
because these moral ideals are conceived to be independent of Christi-
anity, so that Christian faith can be of great assistance to their realiza-
tion but is not constitutively linked to them; the second because the
realization of such ideals is conceived to be illusory and not the task
of the Church as a distinct community. In both cases we see a bifurca-
tion between the highest moral ideals of liberal society and the Church
Church, Kingdom, and Secularityâ•‡â•‡ 39
as a community of faith. It may lose its identity by giving more and

more attention to these ideals, coming to see its own religious beliefs
and identity as subordinate; or it may pay less attention to these ideals
and focus on its own internal life. In essence, these alternatives are a
dissolution of identity or a withdrawal from the moral challenges and
potential of the secular world.
The purpose of this chapter is to advocate a way of relating to lib-
eral societies that respects and encourages universal moral values, but
that at the same time grounds the Church’s support for these values
in Christian identity itself. Our understanding of the relationship be-
tween the Church and liberal secularity is deeply affected by our con-
ception of the relationship between Church and Kingdom. If the best
values of liberal societies—respect for human dignity and the quest for
human rights—are an intimation of the values of the Kingdom, how
should the Church relate to them? Can it support these values in a way
that does not compromise its own sense of identity? Can it insist on
its own unique role while affirming its solidarity with all those groups
and movements that strive to defend and enact human dignity? This
chapter develops a theological perspective to respond to this challenge
in terms of the relationship between Church and Kingdom, between
the community of Christian faith and the Kingdom that offers hope
for a world of peace and justice. The key criterion for this relationship
is Christological, since the Church is witness to Christ as the pro-
claimer of the Kingdom and the one in whom and through whom it
has come and will be fulfilled.
As part of this discussion, I would like to consider two distinctive
and high-quality contributions to the debate that are, to my mind,
informed by the two very different perspectives I have sketched above.
The first is expressed in Andrew Shanks’s God and Modernity: A New
and Better Way to Do Theology.1 The second is found in the work of
William Cavanaugh.
Before discussing Shanks’s contribution, it is important to recall the
significance of the “Joachite” thread in Christian theology and his-
tory, stemming from the twelfth-century Calabrian abbott, Joachim
da Fiore. Joachim’s ideas, which are vitally concerned with the re-
lationship between Church and Kingdom, have been extraordinarily
influential in Western religious and political history, and Shanks’s book

can be read as a creative contemporary interpretation of the Joachite
tradition.2
Joachim da Fiore attempted to interpret the doctrine of the trin-
ity in explicitly social and historical terms. His ideas raise a number
of issues in the understanding of the relationship between trinitarian
faith and our expectations of social community within human history
that remain important to this day. Joachim’s deepest concern was to
link the trinity to history in a fundamentally apocalyptic perspective.
In his various meditations and symbolic interpretations of scripture,
Joachim sought to do this by interpreting the two testaments through
the notion of three ages of history, each age associated with a person
of the trinity.3 The first age, the age of the Father, was the age of the
Law, the Old Testament; the second age, of the Son, is the age of the
Church; the third age will be the age of the Spirit, characterized by an
immediate knowledge of God, by worship “in spirit and truth.”
On the basis of this historical doctrine of the trinity, Joachim ac-
cused Peter Lombard of speaking of a “quaternity” in the definition
of the trinity in his famous Sentences, since he spoke of a common
nature notionally distinct from the three persons: “the blasphemy of
Peter, who by dividing the unity from the trinity introduced quater-
nity.”4 In 1215, the Fourth Lateran Council defended Peter against
Joachim’s criticism and condemned Joachim’s own conception of the
trinity as deficient in the divine unity, which he “conceives not as true
and proper, but, so to say, as collective and by similitude, just as many
people are called one nation, and many faithful one Church.”5
The Lateran Council’s concern focused on Joachim’s “collective”
doctrine of the trinity. Later in the thirteenth century, Thomas Aqui-
nas’s critique of Joachim’s teachings focused rather on his association
of the three persons with three “ages” of salvation history. Article 4
of Question 106 of the Prima secundae of the Summa is devoted to
the question, “Whether the New Law will last until the end of the
world?” Thomas emphasized the centrality of Christ for salvation un-
til the end of time, rejecting the notion of a third age of the Spirit. The
point particularly criticized by Aquinas was that Joachim’s notion of
the third age of the Spirit posited a differentiation in the history of the
world, and of the Church, between Pentecost and Parousia, a differ-

entiation that appeared to relativize the definitive character of Christ
for all time. For Aquinas, “the New Law too does not belong only to
Christ but also to the Holy Spirit: ‘the law of the Spirit of life in Christ
Jesus’ etc. (Romans 8:2) So we are not to look forward to some fur-
ther law proper to the Holy Spirit. Since Christ began his preaching of
the Gospel by saying ‘The Kingdom of heaven is at hand’ (Matthew
4:17), it is absurd to say that the gospel of Christ is not the gospel of
the Kingdom.”6
Therefore, the principal theological questions that arise from
Joachim’s work today are as follows: Can we speak meaningfully of
an “age of the Spirit” that is in some sense distinguishable from the
“age of Christ”? Does this mean, in turn, that we can speak of an “age
of the Kingdom” that is distinguishable from the “age of the Church”?
If not, what stimulus can Joachim’s ideas give to our sense of the re-
lationship between Christ and the Spirit in the understanding of this
saeculum, of history between Pentecost and Parousia—in particular
our understanding of the possibilities of social community within that
history?
A reading of Shanks’s God and Modernity provokes a similar field
of questions. God and Modernity begins with an evocation of the no-
tion of the “solidarity of the shaken,” coined by the late Czech philos-
opher Jan Patočka. The “solidarity of the shaken” is a sense of fragile
human value and moral transcendence shared by all those who dare
to confront the horror of destructive violence in modern totalitarian-
ism and technological annihilation. For Shanks, the “solidarity of the
shaken” has its most effective expression in the “new social move-
ments,” such as Amnesty International, which do not seek political
power but are oriented to a whole range of social, political, and envi-
ronmental concerns. These movements have an “underlying common
identity: an ethically principled commitment to trans-confessional sol-
idarity-building within a civil-society context—plus a radically shaken
sense of danger to inspire it.”7
In Shanks’s God and Modernity, the “solidarity of the shaken” has a
methodological priority, since for him the key question is “what might
it mean to do theology, quite directly, on the basis of the solidarity of
the shaken?”8 His aim is to help develop a “trans-confessional ethos

of civil-society movements,” and he sees religion as “the ideal solidar-
ity-reinforcing ritual expression—and transmission process—of shak-
enness.”9 This new theology will contribute to a “third modernity”:
while the first modernity was the universalism of the biblical vision,
and the second modernity that of the Enlightenment, the third mo-
dernity is not about any universal political narrative but rather about
the “solidarity of the shaken,” especially in response to the trauma
of “second modernity” in twentieth-century totalitarianism and vio-
lence. Part of the “trans-confessional ethos” of third modernity will
be civil-religious experimentation, “sacramental celebrations of the
very purest solidarity of the shaken,” involving a religious “calendar
reform” that might, for example, give Hiroshima Day a particular
status.10
This new Christian theology will be postmetaphysical and unequiv-
ocally pluralist. Shanks’s interpretation of pluralism is as “a radical
openness to the thought of other cultures plus a passionate affirmation
of difference, both within and between cultures, as a positive good in
itself,” building up the solidarity of the shaken through the eyes of dif-
ferent religious cultures.11 Thus, “for the Christian theologian of third
modernity, the loyalty of church-members to their church is primarily
to be affirmed as a unique potential contribution to the larger solidar-
ity of the shaken.”12 In contrast to Christian fundamentalism, as well
as to more mainstream Church life that, for Shanks, tends to a “pas-
toral monoculture,” the dynamic role of Christians in third modernity
will be as subgroups in new transconfessional social movements.13
Shanks recognizes that his theological vision is in the Joachite tradi-
tion, and that the notion of a “third modernity” is a reinterpretation
of Joachim’s third age of the Spirit. He does not, however, subscribe
to Joachim’s identification of three successive ages with the persons of
the trinity—his interpretation is synchronic rather than diachronic. A
postmetaphysical interpretation of the trinity “would need to get back
behind the pattern of three ages, to encounter the three Persons rather
as three perennially re-emergent agencies of cultural shake-up.”14 In
this light, “Third Person theology” is “all about reading the signs of
the times,” entailing “all manner of revisionary reinterpretation of the
past.”15 On this basis, Christianity can offer third modernity “a. a

vigorous spiritual community of intellectuals with non-intellectuals;
and b. a thought-provoking spiritual communion of the progressively-
minded with the past.”16 It will also help the new social movements
to overcome sectarian impulses, for the sake of “ideal communitarian
structuring of public ethical debate in the just society.”17 The sacred,
as Spirit, will be present in third modernity as “ideal communicative-
ness as such,” constantly providing a voice for those who are silenced
and marginalized.18
Unlike Joachim, Shanks does not envision the “third age” in a uto-
pian manner: he gives eloquent testimony to the horrors of the con-
temporary age. The best hope of third modernity, through the new
social movements, is in a solidarity constantly reengendered by the
experience of human tragedy, by a sense of the precious fragility of the
humanum. In his view, Christian claims to absolute meaning diminish
this potential solidarity, encouraging fundamentalism and authoritari-
anism. For Shanks, Christianity’s propensity to make absolute claims
is the long-term result of its own original trauma of martyrdom and
persecution: like an abused child, it becomes itself an abuser, constantly
asserting its absolute and definitive character in ways that spill over
into intolerance and the persecution of others. For this reason, Chris-
tianity’s recollection of its own past needs a “complete reframing” to
free it from the limitations of the first modernity. This should include
a liturgical reframing, since the Church’s liturgical year is too bound
up with its own memories.19 A Christian identity formed in the age
of martyrs must be overcome in favor of one that is merged with the
martyrs to suffering humanity as such, the “solidarity of the shaken.”
For Shanks, then, the identity of Christianity is to become one
strand in a future transconfessional movement affirming the “solidar-
ity of the shaken.” The specific character of Christianity will remain,
in the sense that particularity is to be valued in this multifarious move-
ment, but it should not be associated with any universal or absolute
claims. Awareness of the “solidarity of the shaken” is part of a con-
tinuing revelation, open to new defining moments of human meaning
in the tragedies of the modern world. The Christian tradition is part
of this universal process of the “three modernities,” conceived in the
Joachite tradition. The uniqueness of the incarnation, as the hinge of

salvation history, has no place in this pluralist interpretation of world
religious history. Because of this, the Church—the community that
bears witness to the incarnation—has no unique role either, but in-
stead it becomes part of a universal, transconfessional movement.
My difficulty with Shanks’s account is not his starting point in the
solidarity of the shaken, since contemporary moral experience, espe-
cially of such urgency, is certainly a powerful and legitimate start-
ing point for Christian theology. Nor is it with his argument that the
Church should be part of, and give its energies to, a transconfessional
moral movement to affirm such solidarity. Rather, it is the relativizing
of Christian revelation and of the meaning of the Church, so that they
become only one of the sources and alliance partners in realizing this
solidarity—and this not only in a practical sense, which is evidently
the case, but also from the point of view of theological truth.
For the Christian tradition, the love of Christ portrayed in the Gos-
pel narrative is the ultimate criterion for spiritual experience, so there
can be no “age of the Spirit” that is not also an “age of Christ” and
of the Church that bears witness to him. Spiritual experience finds
its form and touchstone in the person of Christ. In Shanks’s Joachite
reading of religious history, the “third modernity,” or age of the Spirit
as “ideal communication,” supersedes both the first modernity of ex-
clusivist religious universalism and the second modernity of the secu-
lar Enlightenment. Its spiritual content and character is free of the
claims to ultimacy of any one religious tradition and is to be found
in transconfessional experiences of solidarity. Yet this vision is open
to the same objections as Joachim’s notion of the age of the Spirit,
even though it is understood synchronically rather than diachronic-
ally. Within the history of the Church, between Pentecost and Parou-
sia, how can there be an “age of the Spirit” that is no longer grounded
in the ultimate character of the age of Christ? What is the meaning of
Christian spiritual experience unless its criterion is Christ? If an age of
the Spirit, or a third modernity, transcends the age of Christ and of the
Church, what is its spiritual content?
Like any pluralist theology of religions, Shanks’s approach has to
confront the question of content and criterion for authentic spiritual
experience. On pluralist grounds, the tradition of any one religion

cannot be the criterion. Nor, if religions are to retain their particular-
ity and avoid any kind of religious Esperanto, can these criteria be
framed by a fictive meta-insight, a higher interpreter who would claim
to be independent of all faith traditions and thus able to distil their
common essence. Does the content of this experience then remain only
the immediate experience of solidarity in the face of horror? But if this
is true, what will speak a word of hope to this experience, what reli-
gious vision will dare to speak of salvation in the midst of this horror?
Can any religious tradition, denied its claims to ultimacy, preserve the
confidence to speak of salvation in the midst of violence and cruelty, or
does it become just one more human gesture in the face of tragedy?
Shanks’s account of the third modernity avoids any Joachite uto-
pianism, yet it threatens to leave the experience of human solidarity
without an ultimate word of hope. His plea for an inclusion of com-
memoration of the Holocaust and Hiroshima in the liturgical calendar
is a serious challenge to the churches to confront the nightmares of the
twentieth century in their life of worship. However, if such commemo-
rations are not embraced by the ultimacy of eucharistic hope, how
can they overcome sheer grief at the enormity of human cruelty and
human suffering? An age of the Spirit can respond to the “solidarity
of the shaken” with the image of the Suffering Servant, but this image
can retain its saving power only if we live, at the same time, in the age
of Christ, whose paschal mystery is the ultimate and universal mean-
ing of human history, and whose Church has the mission of proclaim-
ing Christ crucified and risen.
While Shanks argues for the distorting effects of the commemora-
tion of martyrdom in Christian liturgy, William Cavanaugh’s Torture
and Eucharist: Theology, Politics and the Body of Christ focuses on
martyrdom as central to a eucharistic Christian identity.20 Cavanaugh’s
work, like Shanks’s God and Modernity, is a coming-to-terms with
the horrors of twentieth-century history, specifically, the practice of
torture in Chile under the Pinochet regime. Yet while Shanks’s focus
is on a transconfessional “solidarity of the shaken,” Cavanaugh’s em-
phasis is on the solidarity of Christians as the Body of Christ. On the
basis of detailed research into the Chilean tragedy, Cavanaugh argues
that the effect of torture was to destroy human bonds of solidarity, to

make citizens “into isolated monads easily made to serve the regime’s
purposes.”21 Torture becomes, in fact, a perverse antiliturgy, with the
bodies of the victims as the site: an antiliturgy oriented to the glorifica-
tion of the state and the degradation of human beings.22 Cavanaugh
notes how important it was to the regime to avoid creating martyrs:
By using torture and disappearance it produced victims, not martyrs,
even by using doctors as assistants to torture to ensure the victims
would not die.23 For Cavanaugh, this should not be conceived of in
terms of the denial of human rights of the victims, but rather as the de-
struction of the Church as the visible Body of Christ, “fragmenting the
church body while depriving the church of martyrs, visible witnesses
to the conflict between the church and the powers of the world.”24
Much of Cavanaugh’s work is concerned with the ecclesiology and
sociopolitical ethics of the Chilean church. He notes that the Chil-
ean bishops tended to speak of their constituencies in terms of the
borders of the nation-state.25 They also employed a “distinction of
planes” ecclesiology, derived from the “New Christendom” approach
of Jacques Maritain, which made crucial distinctions between clerical
and lay roles. This approach saw the authority of the Gospel—and of
the hierarchy—in terms of fundamental evangelical values, rather than
specific political programs. On this basis, the hierarchy encouraged
the laity to be involved as Christians in democratic society on their
own initiative, inspired by evangelical values; they did not see their
role as encouraging clerical control of political parties, or a partisan
involvement of the Church in the political process. For this reason, for
example, the hierarchy forbad priests to be involved in the “Christians
for Socialism” movement.26
Although the intention of the “New Christendom” approach was
to avoid the abuses of the “Old Christendom’s” throne-and-altar al-
liances, Cavanaugh is critical of it since “the church’s ecclesiology in-
herited from Maritain involved the constant denial that the church
itself constitutes a type of ‘politics’, that is, a way of inscribing bodies
into certain visible communal practices.”27 Likewise, the notion that
the task of the laity was to “incarnate” the values of the Gospel in
democratic politics on their own initiative contains, for Cavanaugh,
“the implication that the church itself is somehow not incarnate in the
temporal realm, not a body but rather the soul of society.”28
Maritain had argued for a conception of natural law that was the
basis of human rights. This natural law had its ultimate source and
highest affirmation in the Christian Gospel, but could also be univer-
sally known through human reason. For Maritain the Church seeks
to impregnate society with a Christian spirit, but it respects the in-
dependence of the state, which is concerned with the common good
and rights of the person. A central concern of his philosophy was to
emphasize the influence of the Gospel on democratic values, while
avoiding any form of theocracy or clerical politics, for the sake of the
mutual independence of Church and state at the institutional level,
and of the independence of lay Catholics from clerical control in their
democratic political activities.29
Cavanaugh gives a clear and fair exposition of Maritain’s approach,
but he is strongly critical of it since he contends that it fails to recognize
that the Church is a “contrast society” to the state, a social body in its
own right. Because of this, Maritain’s philosophy does not allow the
Gospel to have its own “politics” and set of social practices “which
are neither purely otherworldly nor reducible to some ‘purely tempo-
ral’ discourse.”30 For Cavanaugh, Maritain’s notion of the influence
of Christianity on an ethos of human rights is “maddeningly vague”
about the specifics of what the impact of the Gospel on culture is sup-
posed to be.31 He argues that to conceive the meaning of the Gospel
for society in terms of human rights would mean that Christianity
would wither, since it would be banished from public discourse.32 The
concept of human rights is, for Cavanaugh, an empty one since it is
predicated on a “thin” conception of the human being, without impli-
cations for specific practices.
For Cavanaugh the Eucharist is the true opposite of torture, since
it is the Body of Christ, both as community and as sacrament. While
the secular state imagines itself to be eternal, the Eucharist is truly
eschatological: “The Christian wanders among the earthly nations on
the way to her eternal patria, the Kingdom of God.”33 The Eucharist
conforms Christians to the Body of Christ, so that they can resist the
state: it is a performance with disciplined practices, “an assimilation to
Christ’s self-sacrifice.”34 Thus it is critical that the Church have a “vis-

ibility in history,” something achieved in the Chilean Church’s street
liturgies with litanies against torture, which made torture visible in or-
der to condemn it, creating spaces of resistance.35 Cavanaugh focuses
in particular on excommunication as a Church practice: In the Chilean
context, this made the church visible against the invisibility of torture,
a discipline marking out the boundaries of the church as the Body of
Christ, to be conceived of as “an invitation to rejoin the flock.”36
Cavanaugh’s conception of church and state is not directed only
against dictatorial and terrorist states, such as Pinochet’s Chile, but
rather it is a general thesis. In “The City: Beyond Secular Parodies,”
he argues that the modern “impersonal and centralized state accompa-
nied the invention of the autonomous individual,” seeing individuals
purely as bearers of individual rights, without participation in God or
each other, who, in the absence of shared ends “relate to each other
by means of contract, which assumes a guarantee by force.”37 It is a
simulacrum, a false copy of the Body of Christ, subjecting individu-
als to its power, while the Eucharist transgresses national boundaries
and “re-defines who our fellow citizens are.”38 The state is in fact an
“alternative soteriology,” using war as its only true means of union.39
There is, for Cavanaugh, an “inherent conflict between state practices
and those practices, such as the Eucharist, that Christians take for
granted. True peace depends not on the subsumption of this conflict,
but on a recovered sense of its urgency.”40
In Cavanaugh’s perspective, since the state is an illegitimate “alter-
native soteriology” based on the threat or reality of violence, church
and state cannot be seen as coexisting in the same space with different
legitimation, goals, and methods. Of their nature, they are in mortal com-
bat. This perspective shapes Cavanaugh’s interpretation of the Chilean
situation and, especially, of Maritain’s political philosophy. Cavanaugh’s
critique contends that Maritain’s philosophy emasculated the Church’s
response by encouraging lay independence and the language of human
rights, and by discouraging action by the Church as a political body in its
own right. While I am not competent to judge the Chilean situation in
any detail, my own interpretation of the data that Cavanaugh presents
is that the real culprit in the early stages of the Church’s response to
Pinochet was the “Old Christendom” rather than the “New Christen-
dom”: a sense of close identity between church and nation that weak-
ened the hierarchy’s response to a dictatorial military regime. When
a more vigorous response did come—for example, in Cardinal Sil-
va’s establishment of the Vicariate of Solidarity—this was on explicit
grounds of support for human rights, as Cardinal Silva emphasized
in his encounter with Pinochet.41 It was Vatican II’s and Paul VI’s de-
velopment of the Church’s role as a defender of human rights, deeply
influenced by Maritain, that provided support for such a stance.42
In subsequent writings, Cavanaugh has made clear that his view
of secularity is influenced by a particular reading of the City of God,
that is, the identification of the liberal secular state with Augustine’s
reprobate “earthly city.”43 This identification means that, since it is
essentially about the libido dominandi, the secular state cannot be a
positive site for Christian action. Further, his conception of the Church
and its evangelizing mission is an exclusively communal and practical
one: There can be no communication of the Gospel as a vision of hu-
man existence, or as implying a group of moral principles, that can
inspire Christians to act in certain virtuous ways within the secular
public forum, or that can be communicated to other fellow citizens of
whatever religious creed or none. For these reasons, there can be no
Christian conception of cooperation in secular space based on values
that are both formed by the Gospel and communicable to fellow citi-
zens of other faiths or worldviews.
This rejection of the secular as a common space in which certain
practices and values of freedom, justice, and tolerance can be lived out
goes together with a portrait of the Church that emphasizes “bodily
practices” that involve as much as possible of our daily lives. In “The
Church as Public Space,” Cavanaugh argues that “the assembly on
Mount Sinai” is a model for the Church, in the sense that the life of
the Church should include a range of bodily performances that is as
inclusive as possible: “What makes these practices ‘public’ is that no
aspect of life is excluded from them.”44 Yet there are many aspects of
life in which the particular form of bodily practice is not prescribed
by Christian tradition but is left open to different cultures and to per-
sonal self-expression. All Christian practices must be informed by love
and justice, but these virtues do not necessarily differentiate Christians

from others and can find many different forms of expression among
Christians themselves. The number of specifically Christian “bodily
performances” is relatively small compared to those of Judaism and
other world faiths, since, apart from the sacraments, Christian tra-
dition prescribes relatively few ritual practices. Moreover, its ethical
traditions are not conceived of as uniquely Christian in their practical
implications, but rather as in principle communicable to all human
beings and expressing the fullness of human existence. This particular
relationship between Christian faith and ethics provides a broad basis
for developing some shared values in the common space of secularity.
Since, for Cavanaugh, the secular space is intrinsically corrupted by
power, it is only within the space of the ecclesia that human life can be
truly lived. This begs the question of how well the Church is equipped
to fulfill a range of roles to do with the enhancement of human well-
being in contemporary circumstances. Clearly, in earlier historical
periods, when state and society were unable or unwilling to support
social welfare or even education, these tasks largely fell to the Church.
In more recent times, many of these tasks have devolved to the state.
It is a matter for detailed public debate (both within the Church and
in the secular forum) as to which of those tasks should remain the
responsibility of the Church, and which should be undertaken by the
state. There is no general theory of “the secular” that can answer that
question, and an identification of the secular state with the reprobate
“earthly city” fails to recognize the positive achievements of the secu-
lar liberal and social democratic state in many dimensions of human
welfare.45
Because Cavanaugh portrays the state in this manner, he rejects the
value of Catholic social philosophies that advocate the development
of communicable moral arguments and solutions that can influence
public policy.46 He rightly raises many critical questions about the
emasculation or eradication of intermediate and communal groupings
by state action, or by the actions of globalizing capitalism. Yet even
on the plane of civil society, he is critical of Church cooperation with
citizenship programs that use secular language, since he perceives such
cooperation as the Church’s acquiescence in its own marginalization,
in the inculcation of national citizenship rather than a Christian’s true

citizenship in heaven.47 Since moral practices and ideals cannot be
communicated in secular space, the only influence of the Church on
other citizens can be through immediate example on a local, com-
munal basis.48 This is clearly a very important part of the life of the
Church, but it by no means exhausts the Church’s capacity to com-
municate its beliefs and practices to fellow citizens for the sake of the
common good. Cavanaugh rightly emphasizes the need for the Church
to be present in the world as a “body” in its own right, and to live by
its own distinctive practices, but this need not rule out other forms of
communication within a shared secular space—the space Christians
share with others in statu viatoris.
Furthermore, because of its fundamental premises, Cavanaugh’s
perspective has no room for the possibility of the Church learning
from liberal secularity, whether this learning be a matter of enhancing
the possibilities for open debate in the Church in light of the practices
of liberal polities, or by being open to secular leadership in moral
questions, for example, in ecological awareness, which was pioneered
in secular circles and has only subsequently been espoused by the
Church. Cavanaugh’s work lays bare the malign story of the liberal
state, but it is strangely unwilling to recognize the liberal state’s posi-
tive achievements and what the state offers to all those who have suf-
fered from the stifling constraints of local, communal, and, sometimes,
religious traditions.49
Church, Kingdom, and Secularity
I now return to the question that began this chapter, that is, the re-
lationship between Christian identity and the better story of liberal
society—what Shanks commends as the “solidarity of the shaken,”
and Cavanaugh criticizes as human rights thinking. We have seen
that neither of these writers sees any constitutive relationship be-
tween Christian identity and this better story. While Shanks argues
for an understanding of Christian identity as one strand in a coali-
tion of groups dedicated to maintaining the solidarity of the shaken,
Cavanaugh’s conception of the Church is as the only genuine form
of human community beyond small-scale, face-to-face groupings. Ex-

tra ecclesiam nulla communitas, since the state reduces human beings
to individuals who can relate to each other only through enforceable
contracts. The contributions of these two theologians alert us to the
challenges—and the strong disagreements—inherent in this field of
questions.
In its most fundamental form, the question we face concerns the char-
acter of the relationship between Church and Kingdom. For Christian
tradition, the Kingdom, proclaimed by Jesus Christ, extends beyond
the Church: It is universal and expresses God’s presence to humanity
in terms of a realm of peace, freedom, justice, and reconciliation. The
Kingdom can never be realized in this world by human effort: It is the
gift of God, which is fulfilled only in the life of the resurrection; but,
through the power of the Spirit, we can find signs and foretastes of the
Kingdom in this world. At their best, the universalist moral ideals of
liberal society are a secular attempt to express some of the values of
the Kingdom: the dignity and rights of the person, of personal freedom
in just societies, of liberation from social and economic disability and
discrimination. These ideals are by no means simply an expression of
individualist freedom of contract in an impersonal and atomized so-
ciety, even though that is a depressingly large part of modern Western
experience. They also include elements that are in harmony with a
witness to the Kingdom. Nor are they simply abstractions: They can
provide a concrete reference point for those who protest against their
governments’ flouting of the very rights that these governments have
usually committed themselves to respect. In this way, they can become
part of a specific program of liberating political action.
How can the Church-Kingdom relationship illuminate the way the
Church should relate to these ideals and attempt to realize them as
signs and foretastes of the Kingdom? In the first place, the Kingdom
cannot be divorced from the Church that bears witness to it. While
the Church is not itself the Kingdom, it does have a unique role as
witness to it. The Kingdom was proclaimed by Jesus Christ and antici-
pated in his resurrection. It is the Church, as the Body of Christ, that
bears witness to that proclamation and that resurrection. It is a part
of the Church’s witness that Christ and the Kingdom have an essential
relationship: The eschatological character of Christ’s proclamation,

and of his resurrection as an anticipation of the Kingdom, means that
the Kingdom cannot be understood apart from Christ. Since it is in
Christ that God’s Kingdom is already present in sign and in Christ’s
Parousia that the Kingdom will be present in its fullness, the Kingdom
cannot be abstracted from witness to Christ. Christian commitment
to the realization of universalist moral ideals, as an attempt to bear
witness to the Kingdom, has its identity and root in Christ, since it is
through God’s work in Christ that we can have faith that the Kingdom
is not mere illusion and projection, but rather a promised and antici-
pated reality. For this reason, Christian moral commitment can never
be divorced from Christian religious identity. It is religious identity in
Christ that gives the Christian both the hope that can strengthen com-
mitment to moral ideals, and the faith that their defeat is never final
and irrevocable.
Yet the relationship between Church and Kingdom also reminds us
that the Kingdom is always wider than the Church that bears witness
to it. An awareness that it was the Kingdom that Jesus proclaimed al-
ways calls the Church away from introspection to action in the world,
since it is in the world as a whole that the Kingdom will be fulfilled
and is already present in hints and fragments. This means that much
of the Church’s moral commitment to the Kingdom must be enacted
outside its own visible confines. It must seek to do the work of the
Kingdom in the world. It also recognizes that, although it is in Christ
that hope for the Kingdom has its final assurance, the values of the
Kingdom can be present through traditions and institutions that have
no explicit relationship to the Church (although they may have been
influenced by ideals that stem from Christian influence on Western
civilization). The values of the Kingdom can also, of course, be pres-
ent in religious traditions whose origins were quite independent of
Christianity.
The medieval—and modern—controversy over Joachim da Fiore’s
notion of the “age of the Spirit” can help to focus our reflection on
the relationship between Church and Kingdom. Thomas’s insistence
that the “New Law will last to the end of the world,” and Augus-
tine’s emphasis that there will be no differentiation within the “final
age”—the saeculum, the age of the Church, which extends from Pen-
tecost to Parousia—express the fundamental Christian conviction that
there can be no “age” in human history that in any sense transcends
the time when the Church witnesses to Christ in patient hope for the
coming of the Kingdom. There can be no “age of the Spirit” that can
be distinguished from the “age of Christ”: within this saeculum, this
present age of pilgrimage, the power of the Spirit is to make Christ
present to all people in all times and places. An “age of the Spirit”
cannot, therefore, be one that relativizes the role of Christ in the salva-
tion of the world or the role of the Church in witnessing to him. From
the perspective of Christian orthodoxy, this is the essential flaw in any
religious or philosophical project that envisions a spiritual content in
which Jesus Christ no longer plays a definitive role. This is true of a
pluralist theology of religions. It is also true, in a different way, of
all those philosophical humanist projects since the Enlightenment—
perhaps influenced by Joachim’s vision—that have acknowledged the
contribution of Christian faith to the “education of humanity,” to
use Lessing’s phrase, but consider it now to be transcended by self-
conscious humanity. Any understanding of the secular that sees itself
as “transcending” Christianity in this sense becomes part of a philoso-
phy of secularism, rather than simply the acknowledgment that we
live in a common space characterized by freedom of conscience.
Sharing this common space, the Christian Church respects what-
ever is genuinely humane in these philosophical commitments; most of
all, it respects the varying paths to wisdom and holiness of the other
great faiths. Yet, at the same time, part of its insistence that the “age of
Christ” will never be superseded or relativized is a critical challenge to
any humanist or spiritual vision that ceases to put concrete human suf-
fering at its center. The urgent need constantly to recollect this impera-
tive has always been a challenge for the Church itself. Christian faith
has at its center the suffering of the Word-made-flesh in a concrete in-
dividual, Jesus of Nazareth. It makes the claim that all spiritual visions
are judged and tested by this event, the reconciling presence of God-
with-us and one of us amidst the absurdity of human suffering. The
“age of Christ,” which will encompass all of human history until the
end of time, is the age in which no spiritual vision can claim validity
unless it keeps before its gaze the suffering of the human person in his
or her concrete individuality. Part of the power and attractiveness of
Shanks’s proposal is to do precisely this, as expressed in the phrase the
“solidarity of the shaken.” Yet, I would contend, an “age of the Spirit”
conceived of as a “third modernity” cannot speak an ultimate word of
hope unless it is grounded in the crucified and risen Christ.
The positive meaning of the “age of the Spirit,” which is also and
at the same time the “age of Christ,” is in its affirmation of the bound-
lessness of the Kingdom, its discernible presence in all human contexts
and cultures.50 In this “age of the Spirit,” understood synchronically,
the Church recognizes that the Kingdom exceeds its own boundar-
ies, and that it waits together with all humanity for the “liberty and
splendor of the children of God” (Romans 8:21).51 It can recognize the
work of the Spirit in all human actions and institutions that seek to
respect and embody values that are in harmony with the Gospel. The
presence of the Spirit in all times and cultures means that the Church
can be challenged to deepen and enrich its own response to Christ
through the stimulus, and even provocation, that it receives from the
most unexpected quarters.
For an understanding of secularity, what is vitally relevant in a the-
ology of the relationship between Christ and the Spirit in history is the
relationship between the experience of moral and spiritual value and
its ultimate ground and meaning. The presence of the Spirit within
all history means that values in harmony with the Gospel can be ex-
perienced in many different contexts, inside or outside the Church.
Because of this, the common space of secularity can share these val-
ues, regardless of their origins. In many cases, they will spring from
the historical influence of the Christian heritage, the positive fruits of
Christendom. In others, they may have a more explicitly philosophical
origin, or be part of the wisdom of other religious traditions. These
values, the fruits of the Spirit, can be experienced through their own
self-evidence, their sheer power to enrich and enlighten, to liberate and
encourage. In this “age of the Spirit,” the values of human dignity and
human solidarity can be a part of the common space of followers of
different creeds, without a shared background of belief. Yet, because
this is at the same time the “age of Christ,” the question of the source
and ground of these values cannot be avoided. Within our human his-
tory, so marred by sin and suffering, who can give us hope that these
values are not illusory, that they will not succumb to our brokenness,
but rather that they are formed and tempered by the reconciling em-
brace of that brokenness?52
During this saeculum, when the Kingdom is present in sign but not
yet in its fullness, the goods of creation must be protected and culti-
vated despite the constant urge of human sinfulness to distort and de-
grade. Consequently, a theology of Church and Kingdom must have a
constructive role for the state as the guardian of the goods of creation.
It is a hard-won historical experience of the Christian churches that
attempts to assert political power are intrinsically corrupting in the
life of the Church, since they militate against the voluntary character
of membership in the Body of Christ. The state must have ultimate
recourse to the means of force, in order to protect the goods of cre-
ation, but it can also, to a limited but real extent, exemplify and en-
courage varying levels of moral community. In this sense, a just state,
which seeks to enact commonly held principles of justice, can give the
Church the freedom to be the Church, a voluntary community, be-
cause the state accepts the role of enacting and enforcing laws for the
common good. Conversely, the Church, with its explicit witness to the
Kingdom, always reminds the state that it has no ultimate spiritual or
moral sovereignty over its citizens.53
The justice of the modern state, since it is institutionally indepen-
dent of the Church and of clerical power, cannot be enacted through
language and symbols that are specifically Christian, since this would
deprive the state’s laws of their secular legitimacy. As Maritain rightly
argued, Christian faith can be the source and inspiration of universal-
ist moral ideals, but they need to have secular legitimacy in their ap-
peal to general human experience and their expression in philosophical
terms.54 In their solidarity with contemporary universalist moral ide-
als, Christians can both express one aspect of their own identity and
respect the secular character of such moral contexts; this is expressed,
for example, through contemporary expressions of the ancient ideal of
natural law in terms of human rights.55
Reflection on the relationship between Church and Kingdom can

assist us in interpreting the challenges of the Church’s relationship to
contemporary secular moral aspirations and movements. It can remind
us that Christian identity is always bound up with the person of Christ
as the proclaimer and risen sign of the Kingdom, and that the Church’s
role is to bear witness to a Kingdom that is wider than itself and can
only be brought about by the God who is the creator of all humanity
and whose Spirit is in every human heart. Christian identity conceived
of in this way can affirm moral ideals shared in secular space without
in any sense acquiescing in a divorce between morality and religion,
individual spiritual witness and communal religious tradition. It can
bear witness to Jesus Christ as the source of our hope for the Kingdom,
which finds partial expression in the attempt to realize universal moral
ideals, and at the same time affirm the moral community of Christians
with “all people of good will,” who express these ideals in secular
forms and seek to embody them in secular institutions of justice and
freedom. Because of this, the Church can play a role in liberal societies
that always retains—in fidelity to God’s Kingdom—a critical distance
from any particular political form, and yet never remains aloof from
the “solidarity of the shaken,” from all those whose experience of evil
inspires them to struggle for justice.
Service and Witness: A Christological Perspective
This understanding of the relationship between Christ and the King-

dom can give us a foundation for understanding the relationship be-
tween service to others and Christian witness in secular society. When
Jesus is asked by the disciples of John, “Are you the one who is to
come, or are we to expect some other?” he responds: “Go and tell
John what you have seen and heard: the blind receive their sight, the
lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised,
the poor have good news brought to them. And blessed is anyone who
takes no offence at me” (Luke 7:22–23). Jesus’s response, harking back
to Luke 4:18–19, and in turn to Isaiah 61, presents the “program” of
the Kingdom, the ways in which the in-breaking of the Kingdom can
be palpably experienced in the healing of human beings, in liberation,

and the restoration of dignity. But at the same time it is a statement
about Jesus himself, it is the answer to the disciples of John: “blessed
is anyone who takes no offence at me.” The good news of the King-
dom can be stated in terms of the fullness of human life, but it cannot
be divorced from the one who proclaims the Kingdom, who makes a
particular challenge to personal discipleship.56
This passage highlights for us some key themes in the relationship
between Church and Kingdom. The Kingdom, the eschatological full-
ness of creation, transcends the Church and is the destiny of all hu-
manity. The Kingdom can be experienced here and now in all those
graced acts and events in our lives that communicate something of the
fullness of human destiny. In this sense, it can be described in ethi-
cal, human terms—even, in a sense, “secular” terms, as Jesus does so
describe it: The signs of the Kingdom are that “the blind receive their
sight, the lame walk and the lepers are cleansed.” In contemporary
terms, this understanding of the Kingdom as sensed and anticipated
in works of healing and the restoration of dignity is quite compat-
ible with a secular commitment to human welfare, in the sense of a
commitment that is focused simply on the needs of human beings in
ethical terms. Service to human beings is, in and of itself, a work for
the Kingdom.
In whatever contemporary context, secular or religious, we can
presume that service to human beings—especially the radical care
summed up by the phrase “the lepers are cleansed”—is motivated by
love. We have no need to question that. Yet we can and should ask
a question concerning hope: the meaning of the Kingdom is that the
signs and anticipations that we witness in these works of healing will
find their fullness in a life beyond death, a life “in which every tear is
wiped away” (Revelation 21:4). In this hope, we transcend a secular
ethical perspective, daring to affirm that the sorrows of this life can be
transformed into joy in the next. Are our works of service and heal-
ing a commitment to other human beings in the face of death, beyond
which no human mutual service can pass, or a response to intimations
of a future fullness that only God can bring about? In this sense, the
Kingdom is present in ethical service, but the meaning of that service

is obscure without faith in the Kingdom as radically future.
This means that, for Christians, witness must go hand in hand with
service. Service has its own integrity in ethical, human terms. In itself,
service is quite compatible with secularity, in the sense of a commit-
ment to other human beings that is agnostic about the religious or
transcendent meaning of human existence. Yet service must be accom-
panied by witness if the ultimate meaning and direction of that service
is to be understood. While service has its own self-evident goodness,
it can be radically nourished and strengthened by the hope that wit-
ness can inspire. This witness is given primordially by the Church,
which bears witness that the signs of the Kingdom we experience in
acts of loving service will be fulfilled in the eschatological Kingdom.
Furthermore, since the Church remembers and makes present the self-
offering of the risen Christ, it already experiences that fullness in a
sacramental way, celebrating in the midst of humanity for the sake of
all humanity.
Through faith, the Church confidently proclaims the eternal des-
tiny of the human person, despite the obscurity of that destiny in this
world. Yet this faith does not insulate members of the Church from all
that threatens human dignity in this life. Faith can give consolation in
suffering but does not lessen its force, which is shared with all as part of
the human condition. In suffering, all human beings, whether agnostic
or believing, experience absurdity, the absence of meaning, especially as
suffering so often destroys works of loving service or goes beyond the
limits of our capacity to respond. The experience of suffering brings
home to us the radical difference between religious faith and other kinds
of knowledge. Faith is a seeing in darkness, a hope in a love and good-
ness that is so often belied in experience (Hebrews 11:1). In the midst
of suffering, Christian witness focuses more and more on Christ, the
suffering servant, on the paradox of the crucified Son of God. The
challenge of this witness was summed up by Jesus himself: “blessed is
anyone who takes no offence at me” (Luke 7:23).
The meaning of accepting Jesus—and of not finding him an
“offence”—is expressed in the character of our response to all those
whose needs call for the ministry of the Kingdom. It is this response
that is, in fact, our decision about Jesus himself. This is nowhere em-
phasized in scripture more than in Matthew 25:31–46. This passage,
unique to Matthew, is often called “The Parable of the Last Judge-
ment.” However, it is not presented in the form of a parable but rather
as the conclusion of an eschatological discourse, “the unveiling of
the truth that lay behind all the parables in chapters 24–25.”57 It has
the character of a solemn assertion about our ultimate destiny. As it
makes clear, the criterion of our salvation lies in our acts of mercy
towards those we encounter in need within the circumstances of or-
dinary, historical existence. It is those specific acts that will testify to
the genuineness of our response to the love of God. Each of them, in
the descriptive detail of the narrative, concerns service to the need of
our neighbor in conditions of poverty, hunger, and distress. In that
encounter with our neighbor in distress, we encounter Christ: our sal-
vation is realized in these acts because they are a response to Christ in
the person of our neighbor. The incarnation of the Word has its anony-
mous manifestation in the real presence of Christ in those in need of
our service. The text of Matthew 25 affirms the eternal significance of
historical acts of solidarity, through which we acknowledge the love
of the Word-made-flesh.
The key Christological passages of Gaudium et spes argue that this
identification of Christ with every human being is a truth implied by
the incarnation itself. In paragraph 22, which affirms that Christ re-
veals to us the mystery of our own humanity, the union of Christ with
humanity is interpreted in both universal and highly individual terms:
“Human nature, by the very fact that it was assumed, not absorbed,
in him, has been raised in us also to a dignity beyond compare. For, by
his incarnation, he, the son of God, has in a certain way united himself
with each man.” The implications of the paschal mystery are under-
stood in a similar way in the same paragraph: “For, since Christ died
for all, and since all men are in fact called to one and the same destiny,
which is divine, we must hold that the Holy Spirit offers to all the
possibility of being made partners, in a way known to God, in the pas-
chal mystery.”58 In its final paragraph (93), the Pastoral Constitution
reaffirms that “the Father wills that in all men we recognize Christ our
brother and love him effectively, in word and in deed.”59
This mystical union of Christ with, and presence in, every human
being is clearly given considerable theological weight in Gaudium et
spes. This presence is both universal and particular, and at the same
time anonymous. As Matthew 25:37 makes clear, those who served
Christ through service to the hungry, thirsty, and imprisoned did not
know that they had done so. The needy and bereft are described in
Matthew 25:35–36 in the same straightforward human terms as the
program of the Kingdom in Luke 4 and 7. Service to them is service
to a fellow human being and can be authentically understood in those
terms. Yet, without doing violence to the humanity and individuality
of each person, service to that person is also service to Christ—and not
merely figuratively, but as a matter of theological truth.
The anonymity of Christ in the person in need gives us a guide for
a Christian attitude to secularity. Service to that person is in itself a
service to Christ, without any need for interpretations that in any way
distance this service from the concrete humanity of the one before us.
Their humanity requires no interpretation in other terms or contexts
of meaning: Matthew emphasizes that those who served Christ had
no idea that they were doing so. Service to that person, in his or her
concrete need, would be rendered less attentive and less respectful if it
was coupled with an insistence on Christian witness.60 It demands re-
spect for the conscience and beliefs of that person: Any imposition of
religious or other meaning that has nothing to do with service threat-
ens to replace service with manipulation or indoctrination. The ethical
task of service must retain its own integrity. Yet, in its own proper
context, Christian witness to Christ’s identification with that person
can be a unique form of service.
What do these Christological themes, linking Church and King-
dom, witness and service, indicate for the contemporary relationship
between the Church and secular society?61 Since the Church affirms
the values of human dignity, freedom, and justice as values that an-
ticipate the Kingdom, then it can affirm much of the project of secular
liberal society, understood as the attempt to form a common life based
in freedom of conscience. It can respect the liberal state’s agnosticism

about the transcendent sources of meaning, since that affirms freedom
of individual conscience in religious matters. The secular character of
the state, in this sense, also frees the Church from the temptations of
wielding civil power.
The secular character of modern liberalism, at its best, implies a
belief in human dignity and human rights that is an ethical “given”:
of its nature, the modern liberal state can make no publicly shared
appeal to transcendent foundations or destiny. The force of an appeal
to human dignity comes from its self-evidence: This self-evidence can
be and is reinforced by many human stories of suffering, compassion,
and sacrifice that are publicly shared through the national media or
local experience. Yet the way we interpret and respond to these sto-
ries and events is also formed by wider and deeper narratives, which,
thankfully, tend to give such acts of compassion and self-giving a spe-
cial, respected place in liberal culture. We are also painfully aware of
how that compassion can be conspicuously absent for certain minority
groups, and how often it is superficial, short-lived, and unsupported
by practical assistance.
In his “In Search of Humanity: Human Dignity as a Basic Moral
Attitude,” Gerhold Becker draws attention to the divergence between
the low opinion of the concept of human dignity held by many profes-
sional ethicists and its prevalence and importance in the constitutions
and foundational legal documents of many nations, as well as of the
United Nations Organization.62 As Becker argues, this “astonishing
asymmetry” needs explaining.63 Many moral philosophers see the
concept of human dignity as an empty formula and a “useless relic
of the moral past” that vainly attempts to preserve an echo of Chris-
tian theology.64 Yet many nations—most of all, the Federal Republic
of Germany—see it as the foundation of their common ethical life.65
Becker notes that a number of moral philosophers contend that mem-
bers of their profession should be given preeminence in ethics commit-
tees because of their expertise, yet he rejects this argument in favor of
an emphasis on the practical and intuitive nature of morality.66 This
applies particularly to the concept of human dignity. What for some
professional ethicists is merely an “empty formula” remains, to judge
by its prevalence in key documents, a crucially important affirmation

for those who seek to defend and preserve human rights and ethical
decency: “Human dignity draws its moral force not from a particular
and well-defined philosophical conception but from the intuitive ap-
peal of the ordinary language of respect for the human person and
her inherent worth. . . . Though the idea was originally derived from
a particular religious world view and humanistic tradition, it may still
be worth defending even and particularly within the conditions of
secular society.”67
The reality of our shared ethical recognition of human dignity and
human poignancy, as well as of its often restricted scope and its fickle-
ness and fragility, give us some indications of the task of the Church
in bearing witness to the Kingdom in a way that serves all members
of society. Yet part of that task is careful reflection on the mode of
communication itself. How can the Church communicate its support
for human dignity in ways that respect the secular character of soci-
ety? For John Rawls, in “The Idea of Public Reason Revisited,” the
essence of a concern for “public reason” is a matter of respect for
others, for civility or “civic friendship”: Public reason demands that
the reasons we give in public political life, that is, reasons that can
justify coercive laws and public political institutions, are reasons that
are, at least in principle, both intelligible and acceptable to others, so
that the normative status of these laws and institutions can be justi-
fied to all citizens in relation to the common good, and in terms that
they might reasonably accept.68 Laws and institutions should not be
based directly on the beliefs and imperatives of “comprehensive doc-
trines,” including religious doctrines, but rather on some shared basis
of public reason. From a Catholic perspective, this requirement is an
important expression of freedom of conscience: Citizens should not
be forced to obey laws or conform to institutions that are directly
mandated by a particular religion. Civil institutions must be based on
a shareable conception of the common good, rather than on the beliefs
of any particular religion.69
On this basis, if Christians seek to contribute to public political
life, they must do so in ways that show a willingness to express the
implications of their faith in publicly shareable terms. They have the
task of discerning the ethical and political meaning of their religious

faith, and of articulating that meaning in particular contexts, with-
out seeking to impose the content of their religious faith on others.
Such are the constraints of civility in liberal and pluralist societies, the
constraints of public reason. Acceptance of this constraint can be the
expression of a positive desire to serve others, to respect their free-
dom of conscience by confining advocacy to forms of expression that
appeal to whatever can be evoked as common human experience. A
sensitivity to the religious freedom of others includes an awareness
that an insistence on particular religious doctrine may be heard simply
as an appeal to a particular group identity, or a recounting of opaque
claims to authority, rather than as an invitation to reflect on our com-
mon human situation. At the same time, Christians, by nature of their
discipleship of Jesus Christ, are called to be faithful to the identity of
the Christian Gospel: In seeking to serve their fellow citizens, they
must also bear witness to the Gospel and its proclamation of eternal
life, which infinitely transcends the priorities of any human society.
A Christian contribution to public life must therefore be character-
ized by both a sense of service and a sense of identity, both a desire
to evoke and share the common ethical truths that ground a society
of mutually recognized rights and a fidelity to the particular truths of
the Gospel of Jesus Christ. The debate concerning the relationship be-
tween Christian faith and public reason includes the questions: How
can Christian belief be compatible with and contribute to public po-
litical reason? And how can it remain faithful to its own identity in
doing so?
In the same essay, Rawls argues that religious “comprehensive doc-
trines” appropriately play a role in the “background culture” of a
society, and that they can act as sources of motivation for individual
citizens’ allegiance to democratic values and practices, as part of the
“overlapping consensus” that undergirds those values and practices.
They do not normally have a place in the language of the judiciary
or of public political institutions—in particular of elected officials or
those seeking public office. Yet, taking a “wide view of public political
culture,” Rawls does accept the validity of their contribution in the
public political forum subject to an important “proviso”: “reasonable
comprehensive doctrines, religious or non-religious, may be intro-

duced in public political discussion at any time, provided that in
due course proper political reasons—and not reasons given solely by
comprehensive doctrines—are presented that are sufficient to support
whatever the comprehensive doctrines introduced are said to support.
This injunction to present proper political reasons I refer to as the pro-
viso, and it specifies public political culture as distinct from the back-
ground culture.”70 How to satisfy this proviso, Rawls argues, “must
be worked out in practice and cannot feasibly be governed by a clear
family of rules given in advance. How they work out is determined by
the nature of the public political culture and calls for good sense and
understanding.”71
In my view, “The Idea of Public Reason Revisited,” particularly
through its deployment of its proviso, does present a fair and bal-
anced view of the appropriate use of religious language in the different
contexts of contemporary liberal society.72 The interpretation of the
meaning and relevance of this proviso will be the subject of more de-
tailed consideration in chapter four.
If the secular character of society means that reference to the Chris-
tian sources of human dignity in the “public political forum” needs
to be subject to this proviso, there is every reason why the Church, in
the background culture, has the task of situating the sheer givenness
of human dignity in a grounding and sustaining narrative, in theo-
logical reflection and communication, in communal ethical life, and
in sacramental practice. By an active presence in the culture of liberal
societies, the Church can bear witness to the source and destiny of hu-
man dignity in creation and Kingdom, can prophetically challenge any
denial of compassion and dignity to out-groups (including the unborn
and the terminally ill), and can encourage fellow citizens in their un-
derstanding of our common lives as held together by acts of sympathy
and self-giving.
In these ways, the Church can make a fundamental service to secu-
lar society by helping to preserve individual freedom as essentially a
freedom of conscience in a context of human dignity, rather than as a
voluntarist evacuation of meaning filled only by the lust for domina-
tion or consumption. There are, nevertheless, those who contend that
the self-evidence of ethics and human dignity can only be harmed by

any kind of religious reference: the Church’s witness to the transcen-
dent destiny of human beings is still seen by many as a superfluous, and
even offensive, intervention in public debate. This serves to remind us
that, even when affirming the best of liberal society’s own values, the
Church will be resented as well as appreciated, that the witness to the
Kingdom will never be free of the cost of scandal.
Notes
1. Andrew Shanks, God and Modernity: A New and Better Way to Do The-
ology (London: Routledge, 2000). God and Modernity develops the per-
spective on these questions that Shanks presented in his Civil Society, Civil
Religion (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995). I have attempted a response to some
of the key arguments in this latter book in my The Public Forum and
Christian Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001),
153–60.
2. For an important assessment of the influence of Joachim’s ideas, see Nor-
man Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millenium (London: Paladin, 1970), espe-
cially 108–13.
3. Marjorie Reeves, The Influence of Prophecy in the Later Middle Ages: A
Study in Joachimism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), 16–20.
4. Bernard McGinn, The Calabrian Abbott: Joachim of Fiore in the History
of Western Thought (New York: Macmillan, 1985), 164.
5. “Chapter II: The Error of Abbott Joachim” (Fourth Lateran Council),
The Christian Faith in the Doctrinal Documents of the Catholic Church,
ed. Joseph Neuner and Jacques Dupuis (London: Collins, 1983), paras.
317, 107. However, “the condemnation was carefully phrased so as to
avoid branding Joachim himself as a heretic and to safeguard his reputa-
tion.” In 1220 Pope Honorius III ordered a public declaration throughout
Calabria that Joachim was not a heretic and that “eum virum Catholicum
reputamus.” See Reeves, The Influence of Prophecy, 32. Joachim was to
be praised in Dante’s Paradiso as “Calabria’s abbott . . . Joachim, spirit-
fired and prophet true” (XII, 141). The Comedy of Dante Alighieri, Can-
tica III: Paradise, trans. Dorothy Sayers and Barbara Reynolds (Har-
mondsworth: Penguin, 1962), 161.
6. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Vol. 30: 1a2ae 106–14, ed. Corne-
lius Ernst (Blackfriars, London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, and New York:
McGraw Hill, 1972), 19. Joachim’s notion of the “age of the Spirit” has
continued to provoke debate in contemporary theology. Jürgen Molt-
mann, in “Christian Hope—Messianic or Transcendent? A Theological
Conversation with Joachim of Fiore and Thomas Aquinas,” in his History
and the Triune God: Contributions to Trinitarian Theology (New York:
Crossroad, 1992), argues that Joachim’s notion of the “age of the Spirit”
does justice both to the Christological and the eschatological dimension
of the Spirit. “Thomas Aquinas failed to recognize that when he ecclesi-
asticized the Spirit in his argument and declared that the Church itself was
part of the time and state of the Holy Spirit” (101–2). I am more inclined
to accept the judgment of Yves Congar and Walter Kasper that talk of the
“age of the Spirit” runs the risk of weakening the bond between Christ
and the Spirit in the time between Pentecost and Parousia. As Kasper ar-
gues in The God of Jesus Christ (London: SCM, 1984), “The new thing
which the Spirit brings is that he constantly makes Jesus Christ present
anew in his eschatological newness. . . . This means that we are continu-
ally linked to the humanity of Jesus and that the tension between letter
and spirit cannot be overcome through historical progress” (209). See also
Yves Congar, I Believe in the Holy Spirit (New York: Seabury Press, and
London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1983), 1:128. A rejection of any distinction
of “ages” in the time between Pentecost and Parousia is implicit in the
affirmation of Vatican II’s Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation,
Dei Verbum, para. 4: “The Christian dispensation, therefore, as the new
and definitive covenant, will never pass away and we now await no fur-
ther new public revelation before the glorious manifestation of our Lord
Jesus Christ (cf. 1 Tim. 6:14 and Tit. 2:13).”
7. Shanks, God and Modernity, 13.
8. Ibid., 15.
9. Ibid., 26.
10. Ibid., 31.
11. Ibid., 47.
12. Ibid., 91.
13. Ibid., 107.
14. While retaining an emphasis on the three persons, Leonardo Boff, in Trin-
ity and Society (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1988), and Jürgen Moltmann, in
The Trinity and the Kingdom of God (London: SCM, 1981), share
Shanks’s general approach of a synchronic interpretation of Joachim’s
three ages, representing “trinitarian possibilities” rather than successive
ages. For Boff, each age contains the other in a perichoretic inclusiveness
(228–29), while for Moltmann the three ages are “continually present
strata and transitions in the kingdom’s history” (209).
5.
1 Shanks, God and Modernity, 128.
16. Ibid., 140.
17. Ibid., 145.
18. Ibid., 153.
19. Ibid., 108–9.
20. William Cavanaugh, Torture and Eucharist: Theology, Politics and the
Body of Christ (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998).
1.
2 Ibid., 45.
22. Ibid., 30–31.
23. Ibid., 66.
24. Ibid., 70–71.
25. Ibid., 77.
26. Ibid., 80.
27. Ibid., 93.
28. Ibid., 79.
29. See, for example, Jacques Maritain’s discussion of these principles in The
Rights of Man (London: Geoffrey Bles: Centenary Press, 1944), chapter
1, “A Society of Human Persons,” especially the section “A Vitally Chris-
tian Society” ( 16–19). For a positive assessment of Maritain’s thought as
a “communal liberalism” that can overcome the conflict between liberals
and communitarians in contemporary political theory, see Brian Stiltner,
Religion and the Common Good: Catholic Contributions to Building
Community in a Liberal Society (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield,
1999), in particular 135–36. Stiltner argues that Maritain’s conception of
the contribution of the Catholic Church to the common good can be
summed up under three headings: “1. Catholicism’s intellectual resources
for a public philosophy include its moral anthropology, its communal
orientation of human rights, and its account of mediating institutions; 2.
The Christian church and its members foster conditions for social har-
mony through their expressions of neighbor-love and actions for justice;
3. Christians give voice to neglected human goods through a prophetic
critique of society in fidelity to Jesus’ option for the poor” (114).
0.
3 Cavanaugh, Torture and Eucharist, 181.
31. Ibid., 186.
32. Ibid., 187.
33. Ibid., 224.
34. Ibid., 234.
5. Ibid., 244, 274–75.

3
36. Ibid., 259.
37. Cavanaugh, “The City: Beyond Secular Parodies,” in Radical Orthodoxy,
ed. John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock and Graham Ward, 194 (London:
Routledge, 1999).
38. Ibid., 196.
39. Ibid., 193.
40. Ibid., 198.
41. Cavanaugh, Torture and Eucharist, 103.
42. For Paul VI and Maritain, see Thomas Bokenkotter, Church and Revolu-
tion: Catholics in the Struggle for Democracy and Social Justice (New
York: Image, 1998), 372, and Peter Hebblethwaite, Paul VI: The First
Modern Pope (London: HarperCollins, 1993), esp. 122.
43. See chapter 1, note 36, of this book. See also William Cavanaugh, “From
One City to Two: Christian Reimagining of Political Space” Political The-
ology 7.3 (2006): 299–321, where, in criticizing John Courtney Murray’s
political philosophy, Cavanaugh argues that “the earthly city is not a
neutral, common space, bounded by ‘articles of peace’, where the various
‘conspiracies’ meet, as in Murray’s scheme. For Augustine, the earthly city
is not religiously neutral, but its members share a common end, ‘the love
of self, even to the contempt of God’” (310).
44. William Cavanaugh, Theopolitical Imagination (Edinburgh: T. and T.
Clark, 2002), 87.
45. It also fails to recognize the moral value of citizenship in the liberal secu-
lar state, and, in some circumstances, the willingness to defend it—values
denied in Cavanaugh’s use of Alasdair Macintyre’s reduction of such de-
fense to “being asked to die for the telephone company.” William
Cavanaugh, “Killing for the Telephone Company: Why the Nation-State
Is not the Keeper of the Common Good,” Modern Theology 20:2 (April
2004): 243–74 . Macintyre’s own formulation, cited in Cavanaugh, “Kill-
ing for the Telephone Company,” 263 (from Alasdair Macintyre, “A Par-
tial Response to My Critics,” in After Macintyre: Critical Perspectives on
the Work of Alasdair Macintyre, ed. John Horton and Susan Mendus
[Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994], 303) has been
significantly altered in Cavanaugh’s title. In “The Politics of Radical Or-
thodoxy: A Catholic Critique,” Theological Studies 68 (June 2007), Mary
Doak argues that Cavanaugh’s radical criticism of the state’s authority,
which she identifies as an “anarchic oppositionalism,” “evinces an ex-
traordinary optimism about the ease of achieving a peaceful justice among
human groups of various sizes and strengths, and so it would leave the less
powerful within and among communities especially vulnerable and without
legal rights or defense” (392). As Doak rightly argues, the need of contem-
porary Christian political thought is not for a condemnation of the liberal
secular state, but rather a “religious critique of society such as that envi-
sioned by Gaudium et spes, a social criticism informed by faith as well as
by a thorough and adequate grasp of the relation-in-difference between
reason and revelation, between church and state.” (393).
6.
4 Cavanaugh, Theopolitical Imagination, 63.
47. His commendation of school-based citizenship programs in Minnesota is
tempered by his sense that they are vulnerable to being coopted by the
“democratic capitalist order,” and that their use in Catholic schools im-
plies a “self-discipline of Christian speech at the bar of public reason.”
Cavanaugh, Theopolitical Imagination, 79–80.
48. See Cavanaugh, “Killing for the Telephone Company,” 268, and
Cavanaugh, Theopolitical Imagination, 94. In the latter work, he argues
that the best way to dialogue with those outside the Church is “through
concrete practices that do not need translation . . . creating spaces in
which alternative stories about material goods are told.”
49. As James Mackey argues in Power and Christian Ethics (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1994), it is important not to exaggerate the
difference between the exercise of power by the secular state and by the
Church. He emphasizes the great power for good that churches can have
in secular societies, but also that their attempts to enforce morals can have
very negative effects and show them to be very similar to secular groups:
“Certainly, nothing shows better than their occasional moral ineptitude
when they seek to act as powers in society, the extent to which churches
are also on all fours with the more admittedly secular powers which en-
gage in the perennial task of seeking to create, according to their lights,
the moral values by which human life can be enhanced, and occasionally
also of seeking to define or influence the formal legislation by which a
necessary minimum of value must be imposed” (141). For a recent study
of a number of official church interventions in political campaigns and
legal debates in the United States and Australia, and of the issues they
raise for the meaning of acting according to an informed conscience in
Catholic life, see Frank Brennan, Acting on Conscience: How Can We
Responsibly Mix Law, Religion and Politics? (Brisbane: University of
Queensland Press, 2007).
50. This universal presence of the Kingdom and the need to relate it to the
kingdom of Christ are both emphasized in John Paul II’s Redemptoris
missio: “It is true that the inchoate reality of the kingdom can also be
found beyond the confines of the Church among peoples everywhere, to
the extent that they live ‘gospel values’ and are open to the working of the
Spirit who breathes when and where he wills (cf. Jn 3:8). But it must im-
mediately be added that this temporal dimension of the kingdom remains
incomplete unless it is related to the kingdom of Christ present in the
Church and straining towards eschatological fullness” (20). www.vatican
.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_enc
_07121990_redemptoris-missio_en.html.
51. In Church: Community for the Kingdom (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis 2002),
John Fuellenbach notes that Vatican II’s Lumen gentium clearly empha-
sized the distinction between the Kingdom of God in human history and
the coming Kingdom in its eschatological fullness (e.g. Lumen gentium 5:
The Church “receives the mission of proclaiming and establishing among
all peoples the kingdom of Christ and of God, and she is, on earth, the
seed and the beginning of that kingdom. While she slowly grows to ma-
turity, the Church longs for the completed kingdom and, with all her
strength, hopes and desires to be united in glory with her king”). Yet, in
Fuellenbach’s judgment, it is arguable whether Vatican II really made the
distinction between the Kingdom in history and the pilgrim Church itself,
and that this distinction was only clearly made in later documents, in
particular Redemptoris missio, as noted above. Those who argue that
Vatican II did distinguish between the pilgrim Church and the Kingdom
in history emphasize Lumen gentium’s characterization of the Church as
a sign or sacrament of the Kingdom: “Hence that messianic people, al-
though it does not actually include all men [sic], and at times may appear
as a small flock, is, however, a most sure seed of unity, hope and salvation
for the whole human race. . . . All those, who in faith look towards Jesus,
the author of salvation and the principle of unity and peace, God has
gathered together and established as the Church, that it may be for each
and everyone the visible sacrament of this saving unity” (Lumen gentium,
9). For Fuellenbach, a “theological fruit of non-identity” of Church and
Kingdom in history is that “it shows how the work for justice and libera-
tion inside and outside the church is intrinsically linked with the kingdom
present now, since the ultimate goal of the kingdom of God is the trans-
formation of all reality” (82).
52. For David Hollenbach, in “Social Ethics under the Sign of the Cross,” in
The Global Face of Public Faith: Politics, Human Rights, and Christian
Ethics (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2003), an ethics
that goes beyond mere self-defensive survival must seek the ultimate real-
ity; thus, the ultimate question, vital for all who seek a social ethic, is as
follows: is ultimate reality God as Enemy or as Friend? Drawing on Aqui-
nas’s theology of the cross as a sign of God’s compassionate friendship
with humanity, Hollenbach interprets the sign of the cross as “an invita-
tion to interpret the ultimate mystery surrounding the fragments and
pieces of human history as the reality of compassionate friendship” (64).
53. In “Church and Political Order in the Horizon of the Kingdom of God,”
in Systematische Theologie, Vol. 3 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ru-
precht, 1993), Wolfhart Pannenberg argues that all forms of the state
stand in some relationship to the Kingdom of God, since they have the
task of bringing about justice and peace in the human community (62),
while the Church in its celebration of the Eucharist anticipates the perfect
shape of human community, denying the claims to ultimacy of any politi-
cal order (65).
54. See, for example, Jacques Maritain’s Man and the State (Chicago: Univer-
sity of Chicago Press, 1951), chapter V, “The Democratic Charter,” espe-
cially section I: “The Democratic Secular Faith” (108–14).
55. As Jean Porter argues, in Nature as Reason: A Thomistic Theory of the
Natural Law (Grand Rapids, MI: William Eerdmans, 2005), the concept
of human rights did emerge from Christian theology but “the general idea
of human rights has indeed proven to be persuasive to men and women
within a wide range of social contexts” (370) and has “become part of the
shared patrimony of the race” (371). For Porter, to the extent that con-
cepts of human rights have become part of the life of secular societies,
Christianity has a stake in supporting them, since they owe so much to
Christian theological commitments.
56. For Francois Bovon, in Luke 1: A Commentary on the Gospel of Luke
1:1– 9:50 (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2002), Jesus’s words in these
Lucan passages emphasize the present palpability of the Kingdom: they
“should not be understood purely metaphorically for spiritual benefits,
after death or the parousia. Jesus’ speeches and miracles will show that
salvation reaches the entire person even now” (154). At the same time, his
healing of others is also a sign of his own Messianic role: in both of these
passages Jesus’s interpretation of his works of healing is as an “actualiza-
tion of prophecy through the schema of prophecy and fulfillment” (282),
a prophecy of the Messiah as bearer of the Spirit (154). L. T. Johnson also

emphasizes that Luke 7:23 “asks that the works of healing and preaching
be accepted as signs of the prophetic Messiah through whom God is visit-
ing the people.” L. T. Johnson, The Gospel of Luke (Collegeville, MN:
Liturgical Press, 1991), 122. The Theological Dictionary of the New Tes-
tament, vol. VII, ed. Gerhard Friedrich (Grand Rapids, MI: William Eerd-
mans, 1971), in its article σκa′νδÎ±λον (“offence”), emphasizes the escha-
tological character of Jesus’s response to John’s disciples in this verse: it is
a challenge to make a decision about Jesus, since “every beatitude and
every woe (cf. Matthew 18:7) on the lips of Jesus is an eschatological
judgment. . . . The macarism here is closely connected with the depiction
(on the basis of Isaiah 35:5 and 61:1) of salvation that has already come.
The present age of salvation is also an age of decision” (350).
57. John P. Meier, Matthew, New Testament Message 3 (Dublin: Veritas Pub-
lications, 1980), 302. I find Meier’s argument persuasive here, since the
narrative focuses directly on our encounter with the Son of Man; for an
argument that this text is, nevertheless, a parable, see Warren Carter and
John Paul Heil, Matthew’s Parables: Audience-Oriented Perspectives,
Catholic Biblical Quarterly Monograph Series (Washington, DC: Catholic
Biblical Association of America, 1998), 208. Donald Senior, in Matthew
(Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1998), argues that the works of love referred
to may describe the love with which the Gentiles are to receive Christian
missionaries, rather than love of neighbor in a universal context; but in
both the more universal interpretation and his own, “fidelity to the love
command . . . becomes the decisive criterion of divine judgement” (285).
58. Flannery, Vatican II, 923, 924. In his commentary on chapter one of the
document, “The Dignity of the Human Person,” the then Joseph Ratz-
inger notes that “we are probably justified in saying that here for the first
time in an official document of the magisterium, a new type of completely
Christocentric theology appears,” which “dares to present theology as
anthropology” (159); Christ taking to himself human nature means that
the human nature of all human beings is Christologically characterized
(160). Commentary on the Documents of Vatican II. Herbert Vorgrimler,
ed., Volume 5: Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World
(New York: Herder and Herder, 1969).
9.
5 Flannery, Vatican II, 1001.
60. In the words of Benedict XVI’s Deus caritas est, 31: “Those who practice
charity in the Church’s name will never seek to impose the Church’s faith
upon others. They realize that a pure and generous love is the best witness
to the God in whom we believe and by whom we are driven to love. A

Christian knows when it is time to speak of God and when it is better to
say nothing and to let love alone speak. He knows that God is love (cf. 1
Jn 4:8) and that God’s presence is felt at the very time when the only thing
we do is to love.” www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/encyclicals/
documents/hf_ben-xvi_enc_20051225_deus-caritas-est_en.html.
61. In Christ and Human Rights: The Transformative Engagement (Alder-
shot: Ashgate, 2006), George Newlands notes that very little has been
written on the relationship between Christology and human rights: “there
are, however, important areas of reflection and practice which overlap
with both Christology and human rights. These include humanity before
God, righteousness and justice, mercy, reconciliation, and hospitality.
Christ is often seen in the Christian tradition as the centre of forgiveness
and generosity, of commitment to marginality, to specific sorts of strang-
ers” (8). He argues, however, that the relevance of Christology to human
rights is strongly contested in contemporary society because of the “ex-
tremely ambiguous record of Christianity in relation to human rights
through the centuries” (11). In particular, he points out that the relation-
ship of Christology to human rights has varied in the tradition according
to the influence of different images of Christ, for example, the contrast
between Christ as implacable judge and as fellow sufferer (63).
62. Gerhold Becker, “In Search of Humanity: Human Dignity as a Basic
Moral Attitude,” in The Future of Value Inquiry, ed. M. Häyry and
T. Takala, 7:53–65 (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2001).
3.
6 Ibid., 56.
64. For example, see Peter Singer, who argues that “‘ideas of dignity, respect
and worth’ are simply an indication that philosophers ‘have run out of
arguments.’” Quoted in Becker, “In Search of Humanity,” 53. Singer’s
statement appears in “All Animals Are Equal,” in Applied Ethics, ed.
Peter Singer, 215–28 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986).
65. As Becker notes, citing Haim H. Cohn, of the Supreme Court of Israel
(“On the Meaning of Human Dignity,” Israel Yearbook on Human
Rights, 234) the Constitutional Court of the German Federal Republic
does not give the concept of human dignity a merely declamatory value,
but affirms it as an “actually binding constitutional norm of the highest
rank.” Becker, “In Search of Humanity,” 54.
66. Ibid., 57. Becker affirms the expertise of ethicists in clarifying complex
technical and scientific issues, but not in terms of a “higher wisdom” than
the general public in their sensitivity to ethical values.
7. Ibid., 60.
6
68. John Rawls, The Law of Peoples with “The Idea of Public Reason Revis-
ited” (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 137–38. By the
term “public political life,” Rawls refers specifically to the realm of law
and political institutions.
69. I share the view of Patrick Riordan in “Permission to Speak: Religious
Arguments in Public Reason,” Heythrop Journal XLV (2004):178–96,
when he argues that Rawls’s conception of public reason is in harmony
with Vatican II’s Dignitatis Humanae (Declaration on Religious Freedom),
insofar as basing public political life on the religious beliefs of a particular
group would amount to a violation of the freedom of conscience of citi-
zens who do not share those beliefs.
70. Rawls, “The Idea of Public Reason Revisited,” 152.
71. Ibid., 153.
72. As Christopher Insole argues in The Politics of Human Frailty: A Theo-
logical Defence of Political Liberalism (London: SCM Press, 2004),
Rawls’s proviso expresses a pragmatic approach that does not stipulate
rules in advance (46). For Insole, the only claim that cannot be accom-
modated by the later Rawls is “the claim that a religious believer should
not, in any circumstances—even in a pluralistic culture when discussing
the use of public power in the case of a stand-off—be required to intro-
duce nonreligious reasons when communicating with citizens who do not
share those reasons” (62). While I accept Rawls’s general argument in
“The Idea of Public Reason,” it is crucial that references to the back-
ground culture are not construed as limiting the public relevance of reli-
gion in a broader sense than the formal exercise of political power and
legal judgment. As David Hollenbach notes, “to be sure, reciprocal rea-
sonableness constrains what can be done in the name of religion. But it is
also the case that serious religious discourse in civil society and the back-
ground culture can have significant impact on what citizens at large judge
that they can reasonably affirm.” David Hollenbach, The Common Good
and Christian Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002),
167.
8
chapter three
The Virtues of Noninstrumental

Relationships
In the previous chapter, I considered the mode of relationship of the

Church to liberal society. I now want to return to the question of the
character of liberal society, especially its propensity to tell two stories.
As I argued at the beginning of chapter one, the difference between
these two stories reflects two fundamentally different approaches to the
nature of freedom. For one understanding, freedom is the rejection of
tradition as inevitably a constraint on self-expression and self-assertion.
For the other, tradition can be a resource that informs freedom and
gives it content, allowing the development and expression of an ontol-
ogy of the human embodied in various kinds of relationships.
The purpose of this chapter is to explore the difference between
these two stories by considering the kinds of relationships between
human beings that are possible in contemporary liberal societies. It
will focus in particular on the character of noninstrumental relation-
ships, considering what virtues are important to giving life to these
relationships, and the contrast between them and instrumental re-
lationships, which have a dominative, exploitative, or gratificatory
character. As foreshadowed in chapter one, a reading of the City of
God as an interpretation of human freedom will play an important
role in this reflection. A fundamental service that the Church can give
to liberal societies is to exemplify and communicate those virtues in
ways that enhance noninstrumental relationships. I will argue that the
key virtues exemplified in noninstrumental relationships are humility,
reverence for others, and self-giving with the risk of self-loss. For the
Church, these virtues are definitively embodied in the life and passion
of Jesus Christ. By proclaiming Christ and meditating on the virtues
76â•‡â•‡
The Virtues of Noninstrumental Relationshipsâ•‡â•‡ 77
that his life expressed, the Church hopes to be able to serve all mem-
bers of society in their attempts to live their lives in ways that recog-
nize the intrinsic worth of their community with others, rather than to
see others purely as means to achieve their own goals.
Instrumental and Noninstrumental Relationships
For Augustine, the fundamental difference between the two cities re-
sides in the sources of motivation and action: the earthly city is built on
self-love, the heavenly city on love of God and neighbor. In this light,
we can understand instrumental relationships as those that literally
use other persons in order to achieve the self’s goals, refusing any shar-
ing or mediating of those goals with the goals of others. The “self,”
in this case, could also be a particular group of people who act like a
selfish individual in relation to other groups—their “common objects
of love” consist of the gains that can be made by the exploitation of
other groups. The self conceives itself as self-sufficient: it neither seeks
the meaning and source of its own life beyond itself, having no love
of God, nor seeks its own fulfillment in constitutive relationships with
others, spurning the love of neighbor. As self-sufficient, it can only
enlarge itself by reducing other persons to objects of use, seeking to
satisfy desires that cannot, in fact, be satisfied and that become addic-
tive and self-destructive.
Noninstrumental relationships, in contrast, are grounded in the
love of God, whether explicitly or implicitly, since they express the
self’s humility, the recognition that our lives are not of our own do-
ing and making, that the meaning of our lives lies beyond ourselves.
Further, they seek the love of neighbor, since it is only this love that
can fulfill the self and rescue it from the downward spiral of addictive
and self-destructive forms of desire. Noninstrumental relationships
are relationships that are entered into not exclusively for the sake of
the self’s individual goals, extrinsic to the relationship itself, but rather
for the sake of the shared life that commitment to the relationship
makes possible, forming, in Augustine’s words, “a community where
there is no love of a will that is personal and, as we may say, private,
but a love that rejoices in a good that is at once shared by all and
78â•‡â•‡ Chapter Three
unchanging—a love that makes ‘one heart’ out of many, a love that is
the whole-hearted and harmonious obedience of mutual affection.”1
Noninstrumental relationships are therefore the essential basis for any
community, although because of the great range of noninstrumental
relationships (from international political relations to the most inti-
mate personal relationships) the degree and kind of community in-
volved can vary enormously.
I give priority to the term noninstrumental rather than communal
relationships because it has a more inclusive scope: not all noninstru-
mental relationships are necessarily close or mutual enough to have a
communal character. Noninstrumental relationships are those that, at
the least, manifest respect for others and consideration of their needs.
This respect can be displayed in many contexts that are “social” rather
than “communal,” that is, contexts that have a primarily economic
or exchange character or that involve administrative systems rather
than relationships of friendship. It is clear that a very large proportion
of our everyday relationships are to some degree instrumental in the
sense that we engage in many transactions of an economic, technical,
or administrative character in which we relate to another member of
society without seeking with them any personal relationship, in the
fuller sense of that word. Yet these everyday transactions do depend
on a subtext of courtesy, trust, and recognition in order to give them
a character that is not simply the reduction of one party in the ex-
change to the instrument of the other; rather, they depend on a mutu-
ally respectful exchange marked by some mode of acknowledgment
of the service provided. The fact that the development of a communal
relationship is not the purpose of these transactions does not mean
that they lack an essential noninstrumental dimension: this dimension
must be manifest in the appropriate markers of respect for another
human being who performs a task for monetary exchange or as part
of a social system of roles and duties.2 Dominative or reductive rela-
tionships dispense with this subtext of recognition (or use it purely in
manipulatively strategic ways) in order to assert the goals of the self.
The difference between society and community is not, therefore,
in the contrast between instrumental and noninstrumental relation-
ships, since all human relationships should manifest respect for others
and refrain from using others purely as instruments. This difference is

rather in the degree to which these noninstrumental relationships take
on the character of mutuality, of shared affection.3 A persevering com-
mitment to noninstrumental respect, whether or not it is reciprocated
by others, is a sign of a person’s commitment to a good society. Com-
mitment to community, since it is predicated on a degree of mutuality,
can only thrive when it receives signs of reciprocal commitment from
others. Both a commitment to a good society and a commitment to
community are forms of love of neighbor: the former has more of
the character of charity, the latter more of friendship. Yet the differ-
ence between society and community is ultimately one of degree rather
than of kind: some mutuality, some shared commitment to “common
objects of love,” is, as Augustine argued, essential to any society or
“people.” A mutual commitment to democracy and some sense of hu-
man rights is essential to a liberal society. This may manifest itself as
an experience of community at particular times of threat, hope, soli-
darity, or celebration.
Noninstrumental relationships—whether in more social or more
communal contexts—can be distinguished from ways of relating to
others that are truly instrumental in the sense of using others for the
purposes of the self without any degree of personal respect. For Augus-
tine, writing in a context so marked by obsession with military glory
and imperial domination, the most pernicious expression of self-love
was the libido dominandi. In liberal societies, the desire to assert the
self by reducing others to objects of use cannot often be as unasham-
edly dominative as in the ancient world: the essence of domination is
more often expressed by economic exploitation and commodification,
by psychological and emotional manipulation, or by the use and dis-
carding of others as objects of sexual gratification.
In varied spheres of life, these dominative and exploitative rela-
tionships tell the negative story of liberal society, in which individual
freedom becomes a license to use others. In this story, politics is purely
about interests and the negotiation of interests. There is no sense of
the common good or reflection on common ends, because political life
is no more than the competitive interactions of selfish interests. Poli-
tics has a purely instrumental purpose in this story: the mechanisms
of democracy are used to advance the interests of those who can use
them to best advantage. Democratic safeguards are erected essentially
because of fear of others—specifically, in order to prevent the accu-
mulation of power. The work of the political representative is not a
vocation to seek the common good through a deliberative process, but
rather the advancement of particular interests to the maximum degree
compatible with the law.
In economic life the self pursues its goals with the single-minded
exclusion of “externalities” such as the common good or the envi-
ronment. Since liberal society, even in its negative story, demands a
much higher burden of justification for going to war than did the po-
tentates Augustine wrote of, the libido dominandi has acquired more
of an economic than a military form in our time. The economic self
brushes aside all other values in order to expand its control of mar-
kets and resources to the greatest extent possible, in terms memorably
described by Marx: “all fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train
of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all
new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is
solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.”4
Further, the libido dominandi becomes—to adapt Augustine’s
phrase—a libido consumendi, the self as consumer, provoked by
ceaseless and compulsive desire that seeks to fill the vacuum of inter-
personal meaning by the accumulation of objects.5 This libido consu-
mendi is impatient with any limits to what can be bought and sold, so
more and more elements of communal, personal, erotic, and aesthetic
life are commodified in order to satisfy what is pathologically insa-
tiable.6 As many commentators have remarked, the economic system
favors the bifurcation of the individual into expressivist and utilitarian
personae.7 The utilitarian engages in means-ends rationality in the in-
creasingly long working day, while the expressivist satisfies individual
life-goals in private time. What the system actively discourages is any
attempt to unify the two in a communal project of meaning, a project
that might threaten to affirm a rationality of the common good during
working hours and seek to transcend a private expressivism of indi-
vidual materialist gratification through the attraction of a path of spir-
itual wisdom nourished by the well-springs of communal tradition.
In personal relationships this negative story is one of gratifica-

tion and provisionality. Interpersonal commitments are limited to the
extent that they satisfy the self’s needs and desires. These needs and
desires are not transformed through the experience of an intimate re-
lationship into a shared search that could itself become an interper-
sonal bond, but remain unrepentantly individual, constantly testing
and assessing the partner to judge whether or not he or she is capable
of giving satisfaction according to the criteria dictated by individual
desire.8
The common denominator of this story is the refusal to recognize
any possibility of self-interest being subordinated to, or transformed
into, a relationship of mutual recognition and respect. Because self-
interest will always have priority over mutual relationships, there is no
basis for common reflection on what can fulfill our personal and inter-
personal lives, or on some set of shared goods. This story of liberal so-
ciety resists any limitations on individual freedom based in a claimed
insight into the purposes of life other than satisfying individual desire.
The response to any attempt to agree on a common good, on limits
to the marketplace, or on personal relationships that go beyond pro-
visionality and gratification is that these are unwarranted limitations
on individual freedom, an appeal to goods that are not shared, or an
imposition of tradition-as-constraint.
Yet the positive story of liberal societies can tell of a wide variety
of noninstrumental relationships, ranging from the broadest political
communities to the most intimate relationships of interpersonal love.
Their common thread is that they are not relations of domination and
consumption, and that the relationship itself, rather than goals extrin-
sic to the relationship, is the most important motivation for personal
commitment.
Politically, both at an international and a national level, liberal so-
cieties are capable of embodying relationships that express respect for
other human beings, rather than any goals extrinsic to that respect.
Statements of human rights express relationships of mutual recogni-
tion: the recognition of all human beings as making a moral claim on
us, limiting the assertiveness of the self and calling us to wider fields
of concern. The goal of these statements is founded in this relationship
of recognition: to enable all human beings to live in a global human

community of freedom, justice, and peace.
At the level of national politics, political procedures and mecha-
nisms can be employed not only with the negative goal of limiting the
power of selves who would otherwise exploit that power, but also to
further the common good. The deployment of democratic procedures
can be the enactment of political rights, guarantees that the concerns
of the electorate are effectively voiced. Those who are involved in par-
liamentary politics can experience those procedures as the means of
forming a relationship with each other as representatives of the nation
who have a common responsibility to seek the common good. While
democratic politics is necessarily adversarial to a considerable degree,
it can also be motivated, at a deeper level, by a sense of shared respon-
sibility and mutual respect.
Although a market economy has, notoriously, a strongly instrumen-
tal dimension, economic activity generates a host of relationships that
have a noninstrumental character. Business relationships can some-
times become relationships of mutual respect and trust. Workplaces
are focused on the delivery of goods and services, but can also become
sites for relationships of cooperation, solidarity, and friendship, es-
pecially when the goals of production and delivery are restrained by
codes and practices that allow space for the noninstrumental aspects
of economic activity to emerge and flourish. Processes of technological
innovation and development can also be the catalyst for relationships
that are initiated by common commitment to a project: They can de-
velop their own noninstrumental character through the experience of
collaboration and shared intellectual engagement.
At a social level, liberal societies are characterized by a huge range
of voluntary communities. Many of these communities are focused
on the shared relationship itself—based in various forms of common
identity, whether ethnic, cultural, or simply in friendship. To this ex-
tent, their goals transcend the self but not necessarily the bounds of
a specific community. Others are founded in various kinds of com-
mitment to society, or even humanity, at large. In such cases, these
relationships are oriented to enhancing the welfare and human dignity
of others, rather than to the immediate benefit of the self or of any spe-
cific community. In addition to this, their orientation to the welfare of
others can enable a very high degree of cooperation and shared com-
mitment among their members. In contrast to most economic activity,
such organizations are noninstrumental both in their goal—which is
the welfare of others rather than the self—and in the character of the
relationships that commitment to these goals can engender. Among
these voluntary social organizations, religious organizations deserve
special mention because of their size, scope, and contribution to soci-
ety. As Alexis de Tocqueville was one of the first to observe, voluntary
religious organizations can thrive in liberal societies, free of the con-
straints and counterforces engendered by religious establishment.9
While marriage and family are threatened by the negative story of
gratification and provisionality, it is also true that they have become
steadily more independent of social and economic imperatives during
the course of modern history, and in this sense more and more non-
instrumental. While earlier forms of marriage and family were heav-
ily dependent on questions of property and social alliance, and were
often oriented to small-scale economic production, both marital and
family relationships are increasingly valued for the sake of the quality
of the relationship itself. Relations between parents and children are
understood much more in terms of mentoring and friendship than in
economic or sociostructural terms. Similarly, the ideal of marriage is
much more than formerly an intense and lifelong form of erotic friend-
ship and companionship than a commitment to fulfill certain socially
prescribed expectations.10
In all these ways, liberal societies are capable of enabling and foster-
ing noninstrumental relationships. In contrast to dominative or grat-
ificatory relationships, these noninstrumental relationships enable the
development of an ontology of the human, that is, an understanding
of the human person as fulfilled in relationships based on free commit-
ment. This has an ontological character in the sense that the true mean-
ing and purpose of personal being is fulfilled in these relationships. In
contrast to dominative or gratificatory relationships, which isolate in-
dividual selves from each other, noninstrumental relationships enable
human community, to varying degrees of intimacy and intensity, and

thereby the emergence and development of the personal character of
human existence in the fullest sense of the word.
These brief reflections on the negative and positive potential of in-
dividual freedom in liberal societies—on the contrasting trajectories
of dominative and gratificatory, as opposed to noninstrumental, rela-
tionships—illustrate the constant need to develop understandings of
noninstrumental relationships that can motivate and form individual
freedom. They seek to emphasize that the difference between the two
“stories” is in the understanding of the self: one as an individual self
seeking its own goals, so that relationships have a purely instrumental
character; the other as a self willing to allow its own goals to be trans-
formed through a commitment to a relationship that is distinct from
those individual goals. Yet for individuals to sacrifice the immediate
pursuit of their own goals for the sake of commitment to personal
relationships, they need to be convinced that this relationship will be
fulfilling, that it will not become simply a loss of self, a sacrifice of
individuality that runs the risk of being exploited by others. This con-
cern is especially relevant in contemporary experience, since, in his-
torical terms, many are still influenced by memories—some inherited
rather than directly experienced—of exhortations to sacrifice and to
commitments to relationships that were experienced as a radical and
unjustified loss of self: whether of patriotic sacrifice in time of war,
submission to Church authority, or suffering caused by an unhappy
marriage or oppressive family relationships.
The concern that various kinds of communal relationships threaten
individual freedom reminds us that the affirmation of the priority of
individual goals, and the accompanying critique of communal rela-
tionships, has to be carefully interpreted. In some contexts, the invo-
cation of philosophies of individual freedom is purely an ideological
fig-leaf for the maximization of self-interest, for self-love in its domi-
native and exploitative sense. In others, it may reflect interpretations
of individual freedom that resist different forms of community that
they fear will be stifling and repressive of personal initiative and self-
expression—that talk of community often masks the oppressive hand
of tradition-as-constraint. Any attempt to strengthen and support the
positive, noninstrumental potential of liberal society must be attentive

to these fears and concerns.
In attempting to encourage and enhance noninstrumental relation-
ships in liberal societies, the work of the Church is at least twofold.
One aspect of this task is to contribute to the development of strong
and convincing philosophies of the common good, so that members of
liberal societies can be shown that there are real alternatives to philos-
ophies of individualism. This is a specifically intellectual task, which
draws from the philosophical and theological traditions that support
and affirm an ontology of the human, the fulfillment of human beings
in different forms of cooperation and community.
The principal focus of the present work, however, is on the meaning
of the virtues, specifically on the social meanings of love of neighbor
and the malign effects of self-love. Because of this, the remainder of
this chapter will focus on another fundamental aspect of the Church’s
task in liberal society: to communicate the virtues that can make pos-
sible a commitment to noninstrumental relationships, that can enable
freedom to be expressed in ways oriented to community rather than
domination or gratification. The Church’s task of communication is
particularly oriented to showing that commitment to community is
not about the stifling of individual freedom but about the fulfillment
of the self in interpersonal relationships. In the most profound sense,
this task of communication has a Christological character, since the
Christian church proclaims the life and passion of Christ not as a story
of destructive self-immolation but one of love, of joy and peace in
community.
The Virtues of Noninstrumental Relationships
Augustine argues that the virtues “are certainly the best and most use-
ful of man’s endowments here below,” and that they are of inestimable
assistance in the struggle to live by the love of God and neighbor,
rather than for self-love.11 In liberal societies, this struggle takes the
form of constantly resisting the reduction of personal liberty to an in-
dividualism of self-gratification. Of their nature, the market and com-
mercial media agencies of liberal society are oriented to stimulating
and satisfying material need. To varying degrees, liberal societies are

pluralist, without very strong shared communal, religious, and ethnic
symbols, festivities, and other activities that claim public space and
attention.12 Communal activities, or activities associated with higher
culture, do not have high levels of profitability and so attract relatively
little market and media attention. Furthermore, media technology has
given marketing activities far more attractive and penetrative power
than they had even in recent decades. For all these reasons and oth-
ers, the individualist, gratificatory face of liberal society is constantly
prominent. To some degree this can be resisted by reasoned argument,
based in the common good, that media penetration must be limited in
certain specific cases, for example, in the advertising of unhealthy food
to children, the restriction of pornographic and violent content, or the
protection of the human and natural environment from disfigurement
by commercial media. Yet whatever consensus can be developed in
support of these restrictions, the nature of the market economy and
the sophistication of media technology mean that liberal societies will
be characterized by a (probably increasingly) strong and intrusive pub-
lic presence of individualist and gratificatory messages and imagery.
Because of this—and despite the fact that liberal societies have many
powerful resources for noninstrumental relationships in many areas of
life—education in the virtues at the heart of those relationships is con-
stantly challenged by the public prominence of instrumental attitudes
and stimuli. The commitment to the positive, noninstrumental possi-
bilities of liberal society is at constant risk of distortion and destabili-
zation by the reduction of freedom to self-assertion and gratification.
This means that this education in the virtues requires sustained com-
mitment and support, a commitment that is able to assist in discerning
the positive potential of liberal society and empowering forms of life
that resist the reductive effects of the market-media symbiosis.
If our freedom can only be guided towards noninstrumental rela-
tionships, rather than coerced into them, then the role of the state
in this education is clearly a limited one. The maintenance of stable
political institutions that articulate the free self-expression of citizens,
the promulgation of just and justly enforced laws, and the provision
of decent standards of social welfare are all essential prerequisites for
community and can play an educative role in the development of com-

munity sentiments. The formulation and establishment of these fea-
tures of a liberal society can also express a profound commitment to
the common good on the part of those involved in public life, just as
the experience of giving and receiving just judgment or welfare assis-
tance can be the occasion for a strong and authentic sense of shared
citizenship, of membership of a commonwealth. There is a healthy
and important sense in which the institutions of state and society can
evoke the emotions of loyalty and community, the sense of living in
a society that gives effective public recognition to the dignity of the
human person.
Yet the state is also, and of its nature, the wielder of instruments
of coercion. Its laws are experienced not only as justice but also as
mere frustrations to individual will, which can often, with ingenuity
and financial resources, be circumvented or rendered impotent. Many
experience them simply as the expressions of economic power and
interest, the will of those who have much enforcing the poverty of
those who have little. Because of their inherently coercive dimension,
and because of the inevitable gap between the objectivity of even the
best laws and interior assent to community, state institutions cannot
of themselves be the means of resolving liberal society’s fundamental
ambiguities through an education in the virtues. Many individuals and
families are committed to giving this education to the young people
in their care, but without the sustaining life of a community it is even
more difficult than otherwise to do so. It is communities, forms of
ethical life sustained by tradition, whether secular or religious, that are
best placed to engage in the sustained and disciplined communication
of the good of personal freedom as oriented to mutual respect and the
common good. These communities draw on tradition as a resource for
the development of personal freedom. It is part of the mission of the
Church in liberal, secular societies to share in this task for the sake of
its own life and for that of all members of society.13
What are the virtues that can form freedom for communal, nonin-
strumental relationships rather than relationships of gratification and
domination? I want to argue that there are three virtues at the heart of
these relationships: humility, reverence, and self-giving at the risk of
self-loss. These virtues are themselves inspired by love: humility by the

love of God, the recognition that our lives are in God’s hands; rever-
ence and self-giving by the love of neighbor.
For Augustine, the virtue of humility is at the heart of the contrast
between the heavenly and earthly cities: “The one city loves its own
strength shown in its powerful leaders; the other says to its God, ‘I will
love you, my Lord, my strength.’” (Psalm 18:1).14 The virtue of humil-
ity is the recognition that my life is based in God’s strength rather than
my own. To live humbly is to recognize that my worth and the mean-
ing of my life do not depend on my own achievements: the effort, love,
and commitment given to worthwhile goals is itself an expression of
virtue, but the value of this commitment does not finally depend on
perceived success. It is also to recognize that I cannot draw the mean-
ing of my life from myself alone, that my life would be frustrated if I
were to use others as the means to my own goals, without seeking to
enter into community with them. The humble person recognizes that
a world shaped in the image of his or her individual goals, with others
subordinated to merely instrumental value, would be a sinister and
joyless world: that the self becomes empty if it relates to others purely
through the modes of domination and gratification. Humility recog-
nizes that we draw strength from beyond ourselves when we engage in
life-giving relationships with others.
Humility is not self-abasement, but rather a peaceful and joyful
awareness of my own need for life-giving relationships with God and
others. It involves a recognition of sinfulness—that assertions of my
own self in dominative and exploitative ways are both self-destructive
and destructive of relationships. Indeed, humility can begin in the
chastened acknowledgment of the harm done by self-assertion or self-
indulgence at the expense of others. It may also begin in an honesty
born of suffering, the recognition of my inadequacy without strength
from beyond myself.15
Through humility, the self is turned outwards, recognizing that its
own meaning depends on relationships with others. In this sense, hu-
mility prepares us for reverence for others—a reverence that is incom-
patible with treating others in an instrumental way. Reverence for the
worth and dignity of others is made possible by ridding ourselves of
anxiety about our own worth, and of the behavior that stems from
that anxiety. We are free to be open to the value of others, since we
know that our own value is given to us, rather than something we
must achieve. Reverence for others is at the root of statements of hu-
man dignity and human rights, which draw on the experience that
all human beings have an ontological uniqueness and value that calls
forth from us a response of reverence. We cannot dominate or con-
sume what we revere: the virtue of reverence responds to human dig-
nity in ways that mark its preciousness, fragility, and uniqueness.
Reverence is powerfully evoked by the poignancy of loss and de-
struction of the human: the experience of desecration brings home to
us most powerfully the irreplaceable worth of human beings.16 It is
expressed in care for others, which has a normative form in statements
of human rights that articulate and safeguard the worth of the human
person. Reverence is also expressed in protest against the commodifi-
cation and degradation of human values in liberal societies, including
the constant pressure from the market/media economy to reduce the
human body to a marketing tool and to reinforce self-congratulatory
and stereotypical self-images of society.
Humility leads the self to look beyond itself, enabling it to give due
reverence to the human dignity of others. The experience of the value
of others illuminates the potential of community, the fulfillment of the
self through living in relationships of mutual recognition, friendship,
or intimacy. Yet commitment to noninstrumental relationships inevi-
tably involves some risk of self-diminution or even of self-loss. This is,
of course, a matter of degree, depending on the particular character
of the relationships I am entering into. Participation in some forms of
relationship, workplaces for example, usually involves a combination
of instrumental and noninstrumental goals to varying degrees depend-
ing on the nature of the workplace. In these kinds of context, my
willingness to suffer self-diminution (such as lack of promotion or a
low salary) will depend on the degree to which the overall goals of
the workplace coincide with my own most cherished values. In other
forms of relationship, such as friendship, the relationship has no goal
extrinsic to itself: it is essentially inimical to friendship to imply that
I enter into it in order to achieve personal goals that are distinct from
the friendship itself. A strong friendship may be grounds for generous

self-giving, in the sense of a sustained commitment to aid and sustain,
but not grounds for self-loss by compromising or denying personal
beliefs that are at the core of one’s own identity.
Although noninstrumental relationships vary greatly in the extent
to which they may also include an instrumental dimension, all non-
instrumental relationships intrinsically involve a risk of at least self-
diminution in the act of self-giving. A common life entails the risk
of loss, since the development of a shared relationship requires that
participants commit themselves, trusting that others will do so equally.
Notoriously, those who make this act of trust leave themselves vulner-
able to exploitation and even betrayal by others. Yet if no one is pre-
pared to take this risk, noninstrumental relationships cannot flourish.
The risk of self-diminution is not a good or desirable thing in itself,
but communities are impossible without it.17
How vulnerable should someone become for the sake of a commu-
nal relationship? Much will depend on how important that relation-
ship is to one’s own life and identity. If a person is genuinely committed
to a relationship, the decision to end this relationship is not simply a
matter of removing something extrinsic to one’s own identity. If the
self is deeply committed to life in community, to noninstrumental re-
lationships, then these will in turn form the self, so that the question,
“Should I pursue this relationship?” is not one that can be simply
separated from the self’s life-goals and identity. Noninstrumental rela-
tionships can have the power to transform a person’s individual goals,
so that there is less and less distinction between those goals and the
relationship itself. Some forms of community may not be at the core
of personal identity, and therefore they are not worth the renunciation
of important individual goals. Other kinds of relationship, such as
marriage or a parental relationship, because they are so fundamen-
tal to the constitution of our own sense of self and our ethical iden-
tity, may involve very considerable sacrifices of individual goals and
projects.
Our willingness to be committed to communal relationships de-
pends on our own self-identity, the correspondence between those
relationships and our sense of self-fulfillment. Yet that sense of self-
fulfillment itself depends on the things we value, the things that we

think are worth dedicating our lives to. In Augustine’s terms, the sorts
of communities that we are willing to commit ourselves to, and to risk
self-loss for, will depend on their “common objects of love.” These
common objects of love may be intimate relationships themselves, for
which we will make ourselves vulnerable, or they may be transcendent
ethical and religious ideals, which give the communities dedicated to
their realization a particularly high value in our eyes. For common
objects of love of moderate value, such as the enhancement of a local
neighborhood’s quality of life, we may be prepared to make a commit-
ment that leaves us vulnerable to our energies being exploited by the
complacency of others. For those of transcendent value, such as the
dignity of the human person in situations that truly threaten that dig-
nity, or the continued credibility and public resonance of fundamental
ethical and religious values, we may risk serious self-loss.
Once a person’s identity is so closely bound up with such relation-
ships, its vulnerability radically deepens. To dedicate oneself to such
relationships may mean not only self-diminution, but even self-loss,
if identity is so deeply enfolded in them. Yet when is self-loss for the
sake of the highest objects of love in fact self-immolation? When does
mutual commitment to the highest ideals become a betrayal of one’s
own personal worth? Contemporary liberal societies are marked by a
strong antipathy to anything that smacks of self-loss for the sake of
communal relationships. In Western memory, the First World War may
be the most powerful single cause of this in a political context. There
is also a revulsion against the exploitation of communal—particularly
youthful—idealism that was a marked feature of Communism and
Nazism, and which can still be witnessed in many authoritarian socie-
ties around the world. At a social level, the reaction of women against
notions of self-loss and self-abnegation for the sake of family relation-
ships was articulated in many outstanding works of literature since
the early nineteenth century and became part of a major sociopoliti-
cal movement during the 1960s. In Catholic spirituality, notions of
self-offering characteristic of the Tridentine era have been challenged,
especially since Vatican II, as prone to psychological distortion and
manipulation by authority.
Since the 1960s, the notion of investing personal identity in a com-

munal or institutional project with the risk of self-loss has become
deeply suspect.18 This suspicion rightly fears the ways in which such
commitments can be subject to exploitation and manipulation: what
relationships can be so life-giving and so free of self-seeking by at
least some participants that they could warrant taking such a risk with
an individual’s own destiny and happiness? Clearly, all people must
protect their own integrity against manipulation, exploitation, and
betrayal by those to whom and with whom they commit themselves
in various kinds of social or communal relationships. Yet it is also
true that the willingness to make a commitment to these relationships
is crucial to the health not only of liberal societies, but also of all
those persons who wish to live a life that transcends a strategy of
individual cost-benefit. It is evident that achieving a balance between
commitment to noninstrumental relationships and self-preservation is
far more than a simple matter of risk-assessment, especially because
some of the most constitutive communal relationships, such as mar-
riage, depend on a commitment to face together whatever the future
might hold. While all people should have a healthy sense of their own
integrity, which is not to be sacrificed to the whims of others, a cal-
culative strategy, which seeks to protect the self from as much risk as
possible, undermines the commitments characteristic of marriage and
friendship, as well as of involvement in many voluntary communities
and in social institutions oriented to the common good.
This tension between individual self-possession and risking non-
instrumental relationships is one of the most fundamental challenges
to the vitality of liberal societies. Much of the impetus behind the
development of such societies was in the liberation of the individual
from enforced structures of social order; the development of commu-
nal relationships on the basis of free commitment is one of liberal
society’s highest ethical characteristics. At the same time, the scope
and degree of this commitment is constantly subject to doubt because
of the power of individualist ideologies and because of the fear of
self-loss. This poses both a particular challenge and a crucial oppor-
tunity in the Church’s relationship to liberal societies. It is a challenge
because much of the resistance to ideals of commitment with the risk
of self-loss is a reaction to the real or perceived role of the Church in

inculcating these ideals in ways that were detrimental to healthy per-
sonal development. Yet it is also an opportunity, because this funda-
mental tension in liberal societies is one that has profound resonances
with the Church’s own Christological proclamation. The challenge to
fulfill the self through commitment to others with the risk of self-loss
is deeply Christological in character.
A Christological Understanding of Noninstrumental

Relationships
In response to this challenge, the Church is called to communicate a

Christology that can both redress the harm caused by distorted the-
ologies of self-abnegation and make a radical challenge to members
of liberal societies to allow noninstrumental relationships to flourish
through personal commitment. In the first place, this Christology is
Kingdom-oriented. It emphasizes that the meaning of Christ’s mission
is the proclamation of the Kingdom, which is made up of relationships
sustained by mutual respect and love and marked by joy and peace. It
is most of all in these communal, noninstrumental relationships with
others that we have foretastes of the Kingdom in this life. In the King-
dom, these relationships are an occasion of thanksgiving and are cel-
ebrated as the gift of God.
Christ’s dedication to the proclamation of the Kingdom is based on
his humility (Philippians 2:5–11). The humility of Christ is expressed
particularly as the emphasis that he has received everything from the
Father: that his whole life and purpose is that of the Father (Luke
10:22, John 17). He is completely identified with the proclamation of
the Kingdom, which itself embodies the Father’s loving purpose. Re-
sisting the temptation to self-preoccupation and self-projection (Luke
4:1–13), Jesus opens himself to the will of the Father. This openness
means that he is completely identified with the proclamation of the
Kingdom to everyone he encounters. Self-preoccupation does not dis-
tort his relationship to others: he is freed to give them the good news
of the Kingdom. Yet this self-emptying in openness to the Kingdom
makes Jesus all the more himself, a person-in-relationship, peacefully
assured of the Father’s love and therefore able to reach out to and heal
the anxieties and vulnerabilities of others.
Since Jesus lacks all self-preoccupation, he can give his full atten-
tion to others in their concrete individuality and need. This attention is
reverence, the gaze that loves and heals, the speech that calls forth the
image of God in those he encounters, whether this be a wretched man
in anguish or a woman terrified of going out in public (Mark 5:9, 34).
This reverence knows no bounds—it is extended beyond the people
of Israel to a Canaanite woman and a Roman centurion (Matthew
15:21–28; Luke 7:1–10), and to the limits of Jesus’s strength as the
crowds press in upon him (Mark 3:7–9). Like the prophets before him,
Jesus’s reverence is also expressed as a protest against those who lack
concern for the needy and afflicted, a “daughter of Abraham” kept
prisoner “by the bonds of Satan” (Luke 13:15–17), and as a castiga-
tion of those who make the house of God a “den of thieves” (Matthew
21:13). His reverence for the sacred traditions of the Law and the
Temple motivates stern rebuke for those who exploit them to oppress
the weak or preserve their own power.
In his humility—his self-emptiness before the love of the Father—
Jesus is completely identified with the proclamation of the Kingdom;
therefore, he cannot abandon this proclamation, whatever the cost.
He has no self other than a self-in-relationship to the Father whose
Kingdom he proclaims. Because this proclamation threatened some
elements in his people’s religious leadership as well as Roman power
itself, his identification with the Kingdom led to Jesus’s death. He did
not seek this death as a means of ushering in the Kingdom: it was im-
posed on him by the cruelty of the libido dominandi. Nor did he avoid
it by abandoning or modifying his proclamation of the Kingdom, or
by avoiding confrontation with the powerful. Jesus made it clear to his
disciples that fidelity to the Kingdom, in the conditions of this world,
would mean taking up the cross in discipleship (Mark 8:34), but this
was not because suffering is an essential part of the Kingdom itself.
It was simply and solely because fidelity to the Kingdom would bring
violence and rejection down upon those who proclaimed it.19
What of sacrifice? Did Jesus understand his own death as a sacri-
fice, and if so, how was that sacrifice different from those ritual acts
that, as he and the teachers of Israel had agreed, were inferior to the
love of God and neighbor (Mark 12:32–33)? Ethically speaking, how
should a Christian understand self-sacrifice in imitation of Christ in a
way that rejects the group’s unholy demand for the self-immolation
of the individual? Let us turn to Louis-Marie Chauvet’s reflection on
Jesus’s sacrifice in his Symbol and Sacrament: A Sacramental Reinter-
pretation of Christian Existence.20 For Chauvet, “the sacrifice of his
life consisted in his refusal to use God to his own advantage.”21 In
doing so, he reversed the fundamental sin of Israel, which is also the
paradigmatic sin of humankind: “to live its relation to God accord-
ing to a pattern of force and competition.” Jesus’s life is essentially
about “de-mastery.” “We do not come to ourselves if we do not re-
nounce ourselves and thus abandon the attempt to found ourselves
on ourselves. This ‘sacrificial’ letting-be seems to us to open a way to
express theologically the significance of the life and death of Jesus ‘for
all humankind’, a way at least as fruitful as that of ritual sacrifice or of
feudal justice exacting compensation.”22
For Chauvet this allows us to read the sacrificial interpretation of
Jesus’s death in a nonritualist manner. Responding to René Girard’s
critique of any use of the term “sacrifice” as implying scapegoating
and the abandonment of responsibility, Chauvet argues that we can-
not have the perfect reciprocity of “non-sacrifice” in this in-between-
time of mortal existence.23 Instead, he favors the term “anti-sacrifice”:
“The anti-sacrificial regimen to which the gospel calls us rests upon
the sacrificial, but it does so to turn it around and thereby to redirect
ritual practice, the symbolic point of passage that structures Chris-
tian identity, back toward ethical practice, the place where the ritual
practice is verified.”24 The Eucharist is an “anti-sacrifice” because it
is contrary to all scapegoating: it calls for ethical commitment and
responsibility, and it finds its premier place in the “ethical practice of
reconciliation between human beings.”25
These Christological reflections can help shed light on the meaning
of self-giving. For Christian faith, the uniqueness of Jesus of Naza-
reth, his union with the Father, which has been classically interpreted
through the dogmas of Nicea and Chalcedon, can be expressed in terms
of his complete self-emptying and identification with the proclamation
of the Kingdom. This identification with the Kingdom implied the risk
of self-loss in confrontation with the powerful. Yet this form of self-
loss, in the sense of religious disgrace as a blasphemer and a cruel
death at the hands of an oppressor, was, for Jesus, a cost of fidelity to
the Kingdom, which he could not abandon without self-loss in the tru-
est sense of loss of identity, the loss of his openness to the Father.
What relevance does this have for the challenge of self-giving at the
risk of self-loss in liberal societies? In the first place, it emphasizes that
all self-giving that might resonate with the image of Christ must be
oriented to the joy and peace of community, motivated by reverence
for the uniqueness of others. The risk that this self-giving does incur
is not taken because suffering is itself a good thing, but because the
formation and preservation of community depend on a willingness to
risk hurt and betrayal from those we seek to support, and the violence
of those whose own grip on power over others is thereby threatened.
Should we use the term “sacrifice” to describe this self-giving?
Chauvet and Girard agree that sacrifice understood as the scapegoat-
ing of victims to propitiate divine forces, or any bearers of power, is
utterly foreign to the true meaning of the Gospels, and that Jesus’s
death abolished the stranglehold of this form of sacrifice once and for
all. Where they disagree is on the legitimacy of using the term “sacri-
fice” to describe the ethical gift of freely risking self-loss for the sake of
relationships of love and fidelity. For Girard this is a confusion of two
quite different things, while for Chauvet this term must be used with
care in pastoral contexts but is ineradicable: from an ethical point of
view, it allows believers to make a liturgical reading of their practice
of justice and mercy.26
One danger of using this term is that, given the continuing seduc-
tive power of the notion of propitiatory sacrifice, the gift of self-loss
in fidelity made by a community’s moral heroes will be exploited by
others to absolve themselves of active responsibility—rather than re-
sponded to as a source of moral inspiration. Another danger inherent
in the term is the tendency, particularly in connection with a nation’s
military history, to use the deaths of its citizens as a means of giv-
ing ethically dubious or reprehensible events a sacral character and
thereby rendering them immune from criticism. Nevertheless, I agree
with Chauvet that the word sacrifice can be a fruitful means of de-
scribing the gift of self for the sake of relationships of love and fidelity.
Although it bears such a heavy burden of negative meaning in terms
of victimhood and propitiation, it can also convey a positive sense of
self-offering. Since such self-offering for the sake of others is so crucial
to the life of communities, we cannot dispense with this ancient term,
so fraught with meaning though it is.
In addition, a Christological perspective invites us to consider the
kind and degree of identification with the cause of community that a
particular individual can make. Jesus’s union with the Father, a union
that the Church professes through the proclamation of his Lordship,
meant that his own self was completely given to the cause of the King-
dom. Yet an aspect of his own reverence for each person that he en-
countered was to offer them a calling suited to their own gifts and
capacities—sometimes challenging to a discipleship that would accom-
pany him in poverty and loneliness (Matthew 19:16–22), sometimes
gently resisting those who wanted to become his faithful attendants
by restoring them to their own place and people (Mark 5:18–19). The
uniquely personal character of vocation—and of the ways in which
the cross is taken up—is illustrated through the range of these encoun-
ters. The call to commit oneself to the cause of community is not an
abstract and general imperative, but an invitation for each person to
reflect on what they are able to give. The capacity to give, in turn, is
affected by the deepest sense of one’s own identity, and of what would
lead to loss of that identity. For Christian faith, self-fulfillment is only
possible at the risk of self-loss, but the character and context of that
risk is different for every individual.
Our sense of identity depends on our personal formation, including
the influences to which we willingly expose ourselves. The Gospels
make clear how much Jesus’s own freedom from self-preoccupation
stems from an openness to the Father in the Spirit through prayer and
immersion in sacred scripture. This freedom from self-preoccupation
is also a self-confidence that enabled him to resist those who sought to
stifle his message by threats and accusations of blasphemy. This brings
home to us how much the ability to give oneself to community—and
to resist the claims of exploitative communities—depends on each
person’s sense of their own worth, founded in their relationship to

God. The virtue of humility, in its openness to God, can be in fact the
foundation of a sense of self-worth that realizes that the threats and
blandishments of communities based in superficial and tawdry “com-
mon objects of love” can be resisted. It can also be a foundation for
critically recognizing those communities that are truly worthy of the
gift of self. As Augustine argues, “Thus, in a surprising way, there is
something in humility to exalt the mind, and something in exaltation
to abase it. . . . That is why humility is highly prized in the City of God
. . . and it receives particular emphasis in the character of Christ, the
king of that City.”27
We have considered how some of the key virtues for a positive
story of liberal society have a profoundly Christological reference.
We should also ask whether the negative story can be interpreted in
Antichristic terms. Is this scriptural motif a useful tool for interpret-
ing the negative phenomena of liberal society? For O’Donovan, since
Christendom expressed the rule of Christ over the nations, it had An-
tichristic potential as well, expressed particularly in the conflation of
the two kingdoms (secular and eternal) and the convergence of claims
for universal political sovereignty and heavenly mediation, expressing
the tension between true and false messianism.28 In modernity, how-
ever, the Antichristic character of civilization is expressed most of all
as arbitrary will: “Faith in creation means accepting the world down-
stream of the Arbitrary Original, justified to us in being, goodness and
order. Voluntarism, on the other hand, situates the agent at the source;
it offers a mystical access to the moment of origination, and leads the
spirit to the rapture of pure terror before the arbitrariness of its own
choice.”29 Although liberal society can express the reign of Christ,
this voluntarism can also give it an Antichristic character. This face of
liberal society has “free choice” as its point of departure, emphasizing
voluntary communities rather than those founded in “blood-ties or
local contiguities,” preferring “compassion” to sympathy and seeing
suffering always as a “waste,” which deprives punishment of any ra-
tionale, using the principles of individual rights and equality to elimi-
nate any “differentiation within communities of affinity” and abusing
parliamentary expression by adversarial and sectional politics rather

than the pursuit of the common good.30
O’Donovan sums up the essence of the negative aspects of liberal
society very effectively and expressively as a voluntarism that rejects
the fulfillment that can be found in “being, goodness and order.”
Whether the emphasis on voluntary communities, compassion, and
equality in fact reflects the sheer arbitrariness of choice, an essen-
tially nihilistic voluntarism, or, much more positively, an emphasis on
personal freedom in relation to historically given social structures is
quite a different question. To see these phenomena as symptoms of
an Antichristic tendency of liberalism is misplaced. There will always
be debate within liberal societies about the respective emphasis that
should be placed on cultural traditions and historically given social
differentiation as against a general principle of equality and individual
rights. But this debate is not one about Christic and Antichristic in-
terpretations of freedom. As I argued in chapter one, the emphasis on
the human person as the bearer of subjective rights is not a denial of
the reign of Christ, even though it was usually associated in earlier
historical contexts with the disestablishment and even persecution of
the Church. On the contrary, it can be seen as an implicit recognition
of Christ’s Lordship, anonymously present in every human person.
Liberal society, in its negative expressions, all too clearly manifests
what is non-Christian. Yet to call it Antichristic does not do justice to
the fact that it is based in freedom, a freedom that—for all its abuse—
does allow space for human flourishing and Christian worship. Even
in the fragile liberal society of the Weimar Republic—home to both
democratic heroism and artistic creativity, as well as to political vio-
lence and cultural nihilism—the dignity of the human person could
still be defended, its violation still protested against.31 It was what de-
stroyed this society that was Antichristic. The scriptural theme of the
“Antichrist” is indeed an apposite one for some aspects of modernity,
but for totalitarianism rather than for liberal society.32 Contemplat-
ing the staggering excesses of Stalin’s and Mao Tse Tung’s personal-
ity cults, the monstrosities of the Holocaust and the Thousand Year
Reich, and the nihilistic primitivism of the Khmer Rouge’s “Year
Zero,” we cannot but draw on the New Testament’s image of the An-
tichrist. What sums this up is a perverted messianism that destroys
freedom and justice in the name of freedom and justice, that focuses
all its adulation on one who claims to bring salvation but who in fact
deals in mass death, and that even seeks to redefine and capture time
by projecting itself into a limitless future or by bringing the era back to
zero, thereby usurping the place of the one born in Bethlehem.33
I have argued in this chapter that the key difference between the
two stories of liberal society lies in the virtues that inspire and inform
noninstrumental relationships, enabling persons to live in different
forms of community rather than in the emptiness of self-assertion. Of
their nature, virtues require embodiment in a way of life, and they are
most effectively communicated and handed on by sustaining commu-
nities of virtue. This is particularly true in liberal societies, which are
so deeply marked by sophisticated and virtually ubiquitous marketing
that appeals to and encourages acquisitive and gratificatory desire.
There are many such communities of virtue, with both secular and
religious origins and character. However, in Western societies the most
important and influential is the Christian church in its various denom-
inations and expressions. I have argued that the virtues of humility,
reverence, and self-giving are vital to forming freedom in liberal socie-
ties, and that these virtues are definitively embodied in Jesus Christ.
In this sense, it is the mission of the church, the Christian com-
munity, to communicate these virtues for the sake of all members of
liberal, secular societies. Yet this thesis raises some important criti-
cal questions to do with the character of communities as bearers and
communicators of virtue. If Christians are formed in these virtues
through the Christian way of life and Christian narrative, how can
they be communicated to other members of secular society who are
not formed by this way of life or narrative?34
In the first place, it is very important to note that the Christian pres-
ence in secular society is far from being only a matter of Christians
communicating something to other “secular” fellow citizens. Chris-
tians themselves have a secular identity as well as their identity as
members of the church: that is, they are citizens of secular societies
and seek to contribute to those societies on the basis of their formation
as Christians. Formed by the Christian community, they seek to ac-

knowledge the anonymous Christ in every human being and to uphold
and apply the human rights that are the basis of liberal secular society.
In Rawls’s terms, the Christian community and its beliefs are part of
the “background culture” of a liberal society, the basis on which those
citizens who are Christians commit themselves to uphold fundamental
democratic values.
Yet how can Christian virtue influence those who are not formed by
Christian communities? An adequate answer to this question should
both recognize the profound links between communities and forma-
tion in the virtues as well as the real influence the church can have
beyond those who are active participants in its life. Since regular Chris-
tian church attendance is declining in virtually all liberal societies, it is
clear that a significant proportion of them is made up of people who
have been exposed in some way to Christian teaching or Christian
formation, at least through the influence of parents or grandparents,
but who are no longer practicing members of Christian communities.
There is good evidence that those who have been exposed to Chris-
tian formation in early life remain receptive to fundamental Christian
teachings and values, even though they cease to be practicing members
of Christian communities. In his Churchgoing and Christian Ethics,
Robin Gill argues for a “cultural theory of churchgoing” that recog-
nizes the influence of churchgoing on the inculcation of values: for
this approach, it is “churchgoing more than religious belief which is
the independent variable, that is to say, it is churchgoing which fos-
ters and sustains a distinctive culture of beliefs and values.”35 In this
light, beliefs and values can be maintained by those who had an early
experience of churchgoing although they later cease attending church.
However, the theory also emphasizes that “the culture of churchgoing
fosters and sustains beliefs/values, so a decline in churchgoing will
over time result in their demise unless they are sustained by an alterna-
tive moral community.”36
Gill also notes that research findings indicate that there are real links
between church attendance and such practices as voluntary service,
although the “distinctiveness of churchgoers is relative rather than ab-
solute.”37 His research encourages us to believe that there are many
members of liberal societies who are not churchgoers, but who are
nevertheless influenced by Christian beliefs and Christian formation in
virtue. The influence of the Christian community is a good deal wider
than the group of active churchgoers. However, Gill also emphasizes
that these beliefs and virtues cannot be indefinitely sustained without
renewal through new groups or generations actively participating in
church communities.
Gill’s research gives some empirical credibility to a conception of
the Christian church as a community of virtue that is essential to sus-
taining the positive ethical life of a liberal society, but that can also
have an influence beyond its own membership. At the end of the previ-
ous chapter, I spoke of the experience of human dignity in secular so-
ciety as an ethical “givenness” that seeks a transcendental foundation
that the public institutions of liberal society cannot provide. This indi-
cates a particular role and service for the Church: to be a community
of interpretation that is able to draw attention to and sustain these
experiences of human dignity, to give them reverence, and to show
how they inform what is truly valuable in liberal societies, especially
those virtues and relationships through which the human ontology of
interpersonal life is manifest. Whether, and to what degree, this task
of interpretation will have a religious dimension, or invoke Christian
narrative, will depend on particular contexts and circumstances. What
is certain is that the Church will only be capable of this service if, in
its own life, it is gathered around the table of the Lord and hears the
word that tells of the divine person who became human to share in
our condition.
Notes
1. Augustine, City of God, XV:3, 599.

2. This emphasis clearly owes a great deal to Kant’s principle, “Act in such
a way that you always treat humanity, whether in your own person or in
the person of any other, never simply as a means, but always at the same
time as an end.” The Moral Law, Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysic
of Morals, trans. and ed. H. J. Paton (London: Hutchinson, 1948), 91.
Social transactions can have a legitimately instrumental character, but
only if they are predicated on noninstrumental respect. As Oliver

O’Donovan notes in Ways of Judgment (Grand Rapids, MI: William
Eerdmans, 2005), there is no such thing as a purely commercial transac-
tion: “Every engagement in which exchange takes place implies a social
context of things held in common; our exchange-transaction either up-
holds the justice of that community, or flouts it” (249). For John Milbank,
in Being Reconciled: Ontology and Pardon (London: Routledge, 2003),
“if community is not enshrined in exchange itself—and capitalism is pre-
cisely the exclusion of community from exchange—there is no other social
site, no family site, no local site, no national site, in which community can
take refuge” (166). He sees the most effective alternative to capitalism in
terms of syndicalist socialism, with an emphasis on the professional ethos
of producers with “some sense that that which is produced is primarily a
gift to the community, which will relate to community values in crucially
important ways” (185). I share Milbank’s desire to understand economic
activity—like other social activities—as a contribution to society that can
be enhanced by a professional ethos. However, I do not think that social-
ism, or social democracy, is usefully understood as conceiving of exchange
relationships themselves as community relationships. A just society, in
which the market economy is oriented towards social inclusion and pre-
vented from commodification of the human, is still one in which, for most
transactions, there is a distinction between gift relationships and relation-
ships of exchange, just as not all social relationships can become com-
munity relationships.
3. As Frank Kirkpatrick argues in The Ethics of Community (Oxford: Black-
well, 2001), “societies cannot provide in and of themselves the substance
of mutuality that constitutes the heart of authentic communities. Built as
they are on indirect relations between persons, societies are only ‘poten-
tially’ communities” (76). However, Kirkpatrick emphasizes that if we are
aware of the moral conditions for community, then this can become a
critical spur for the development of societies in the direction of commu-
nity: “an absolute dividing line between society and community is impos-
sible. They mutually condition and inform each other, especially around
the issue of justice” (77). In my own understanding of the difference be-
tween society and community, the communal “potential” of society can
be realized when noninstrumental relationships develop from relation-
ships of respect and recognition to relationships characterized by some
degree of mutual esteem or affection.
4. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, in

Karl Marx: The Revolutions of 1848, ed. by David Fernbach (Harmonds-
worth: Penguin Books, 1973) 70–71.
5. In his essay “Living in a Post-Traditional Society,” in In Defence of Soci-
ology: Essays, Interpretations and Rejoinders (Cambridge: Polity Press,
1996), Anthony Giddens argues that the Protestant ethic of capitalism,
deprived of its original theological motivations, becomes simply obsessive:
“The past lives on, but rather than being actively reconstructed in the
mode of tradition it tends to dominate action almost in a quasi-casual
fashion. Compulsiveness, when socially generalized, is in effect tradition
without traditionalism: repetition which stands in the way of autonomy
rather than fostering it” (23). Giddens also sees addiction as a negative
sign of the detraditionalization of society, a “repetition which has lost its
connection to the ‘truth’ of tradition” (24).
6. A degradation of human values trenchantly criticized in John Paul II’s
Centesimus annus, 40: “There are goods which by their very nature can-
not and must not be bought or sold. Certainly the mechanisms of the
market offer secure advantages: they help to utilize resources better; they
promote the exchange of products; above all they give central place to the
person’s desires and preferences, which, in a contract, meet the desires and
preferences of another person. Nevertheless, these mechanisms carry the
risk of an ‘idolatry’ of the market, an idolatry which ignores the existence
of goods which by their nature are not and cannot be mere commodities.”
www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii
_enc_01051991_centesimus-annus_en.html. As Raymond Plant notes in
Politics, Theology and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2001), “some claim that markets should be extended to more and more
areas of life because we lack the moral resources to legitimize collective
judgments about the nature of common values, common obligations and
common views about the nature of fundamental relationships.” For Plant,
“only a sense of the transcendent,” expressed perhaps through some con-
ception of natural law, “can, in fact, provide a secure basis for the argu-
ment that there are definite limits to the sphere of commodities and to the
sphere of rational self-interest” (194).
7. See, for example, the discussion in Robert Bellah et al., Habits of the
Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (Berkeley: Uni-
versity of California Press, 1985).
8. In his Lost Icons: Reflections on Cultural Bereavement (Edinburgh: T. and
T. Clark, 2000), Rowan Williams illustrates the radical contrast between
these attitudes and interpersonal love. For Williams, love is the recogni-
tion that “I can be the cause of joy to another in virtue of something more
or other than the capacity to meet their needs . . . to be other, to be distinc-
tive, is more than being someone else’s other, being what fits into another’s
stipulated lack” (159). This capacity to love another, rather than to see
them essentially as answering my needs, depends on a particular sense of
self: “For any self to be free to enable another’s freedom means that it
must be in some way aware of the actuality, not only the possibility, of a
regard beyond desire—and so of its own being as a proper cause of joy,
as a gift” (161). For Jews, Christians, and Muslims, this sense of self is
grounded in the worship of God, whose “creative activity is pure gratu-
ity” (162).
9. “On my arrival in the United States the religious aspect of the country was
the first thing that struck my attention; and the longer I stayed there, the
more I perceived the great political consequences resulting from this new
state of things. In France I had almost always seen the spirit of religion
and the spirit of freedom marching in opposite directions. But in America
I found they were intimately united and that they reigned in common over
the same country. My desire to discover the causes of this phenomenon
increased from day to day. In order to satisfy it I questioned the members
of all the different sects; I sought especially the society of the clergy, who
are the depositaries of the different creeds and are especially interested in
their duration. . . . I found that they differed upon matters of detail alone,
and that they all attributed the peaceful dominion of religion in their
country mainly to the separation of church and state.” Alexis de
Tocqueville, Democracy in America (New York: Vintage, 1981), 1:319.
10. In her Sex, Gender and Christian Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 1996), Lisa Cahill emphasizes how contemporary marriage can
“nourish the human capacity for compassion and solidarity . . . which was
once much more easily embodied in a renunciation of kin ties” by a vow
of celibacy. She cautions, however, that the distancing of marriage and
family from economic and political factors does not mean that they
“should or even can be ‘freed’ from their complex lines of connection to
all levels of communal life. Individualism in the family is as unbalanced
and pernicious as tyrannical social control” (182).
1.
1 Augustine, City of God, XIX:4, 857.
12. In some cases, these festivals or public displays of religious or communal
identity are socially divisive or even prone to provoke violence. Their
decline is therefore not always a social loss. The challenge for pluralist
societies is to develop festivities that can give public space something more
than a commercial or exchange character while enhancing rather than
weakening the bonds of social respect and solidarity.
13. Timothy O’Connell’s Making Disciples: A Handbook of Christian Moral
Formation (New York: Crossroad, 1998) draws on the insights of the
social sciences to link Christian moral formation with the general dynam-
ics of group experience (see especially 76–85). On this basis, O’Connell
concludes that, since groups are so important to the formation of personal
values, then making disciples is fundamentally about making communities
of discipleship (85). In his Go and Do Likewise: Jesus and Ethics (New
York: Continuum, 1999), William Spohn emphasizes a threefold approach
in moral formation in the Christian community, drawing together the
New Testament story of Jesus, the ethics of virtue and character, and
practices of Christian spirituality (12). For Spohn, “spiritual practices are
the core of authentic spirituality and provide the link between the New
Testament and virtue ethics” (37): “Baptism and Eucharist, intercessory
prayer, Biblical meditation and discernment, forgiveness and solidarity are
the ordinary paths by which Christians connect with the person of Jesus
Christ” (186). Spohn emphasizes that the Christian identity formed
through these spiritual practices is oriented to solidarity, since “over
against all parochial enclaves stands the reconciled totality that Jesus
called ‘the reign of God’, that is, the world according to God” (180).
4.
1 Augustine, City of God, XIV:28, 593.
15. A very important example of this form of humility is the Twelve Steps of
Alcoholics Anonymous and related organizations, a practical form of con-
temporary spirituality that is communicable in secular contexts. See, for
example, the discussion of the Twelve Steps in Michael H. Crosby’s article
“Addiction,” in The New Dictionary of Catholic Spirituality, ed. Michael
Downey (Collegeville, MN: Michael Glazier/Liturgical Press, 1993), 5–10.
Crosby’s article argues that “the founders of Alcoholics Anonymous
found in the Twelve Steps a pattern of spirituality for recovering addicts,”
and that “the Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions offer a contemporary
spirituality for North Americans” that “contain[s] the best of principles
in ascetical spirituality” (5).
16. A truth manifest in the preamble to the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights: “Whereas disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted
in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind, and
the advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of
speech and belief and freedom from fear and want has been proclaimed
as the highest aspiration of the common people.” For Jack Mahoney, in

his The Challenge of Human Rights: Origin, Development and Signifi-
cance (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), the UN Charter “reaffirms faith in
human rights, that is, a faith in human rights which was previously held
but which now needs reaffirming because of, or better, in spite of, the
dispiriting events of recent history. It expresses a human act of joint faith,
a shared conviction of their indispensable importance for the future of
humanity if history is not tragically to repeat itself” (124). This act of
faith and commitment to reverence goes together with the gift of forgive-
ness for those who have desecrated human dignity. In his chapter “The
Logic of Superabundance: An Ethic of Forgiving Love,” in Concepts of
Person and Christian Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1997), Stanley Rudman emphasizes the role of forgiveness in preparing
the ground for such statements as the UN Declaration: “Perhaps the most
telling initiatives to re-establish peace come from those who have experi-
enced conflict and have realized that without forgiveness there can be no
renewal of community” (285).
17. In his How Are We to Live? Ethics in an Age of Self-Interest (Melbourne:
Text Publishing Company, 1993), Peter Singer, citing research by Robert
Axelrod on the Prisoner’s Dilemma game, argues that “Tit for Tat” is the
best strategy for social relationships and claims that this “amounts to
nothing less than an experimental refutation of Jesus’ celebrated teaching
about turning the other cheek,” since such a teaching would help to create
a society in which cheats thrive: “There is not much attraction in an ethic
of turning the other cheek if the resulting hardship falls not only on those
who allow themselves to be struck, but on everyone else as a whole”
(139–40). Yet Singer also notes that “it is true that between lovers, in a
family, or with close personal friends, where each genuinely cares for the
well-being of the other, the question of reciprocity scarcely arises. To put it
more technically, in Prisoner’s Dilemma games, caring about the welfare of
the other player changes the way in which we assess the outcomes. . . .
Genuine concern for others is, then, the complete solution to the Prisoner’s
Dilemma; it dissolves the dilemma altogether” (147). Since Singer’s under-
standing of the teaching of Jesus is limited to portraying him as advocating
a morality of self-interest in connection with heavenly reward (180–81),
he shows no awareness that Jesus’s teaching about not returning harm for
harm was an expression of love of neighbor rooted in the love of God, a
love that dissolves the dilemmas that characterize an understanding of
social relations based purely on calculative self-interest.
18. For Charles Taylor, in his A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, Har-
vard University Press, 2007), the 1960s were a “hinge moment, at least
symbolically,” of a “cultural revolution” in North Atlantic civilization.
Taylor argues that democratic societies were characterized by an “Age of
Mobilization” from 1800 to 1950, in which new political and religious
forms were developed after the overthrow of the ancien régime. In the Age
of Mobilization, political and religious identities were formed by recruit-
ing the allegiance of broad sections of the population to the nation and
the institutional churches. The Catholic Church, in various national con-
texts, felt itself to be beleaguered, and felt that it “offered the only pos-
sible bulwark of civilizational order” (470). This in turn meant that the
church “became the focus of often intense loyalty, a sentiment akin to
nationalism” (471–72). This Age of Mobilization wove four strands to-
gether—“spirituality, discipline, political identity, and an image of civili-
zational order”—in a mass phenomenon that became a mutually strength-
ening whole (472). Taylor argues, however, that from the 1960s there has
been the steady spread of a culture of “authenticity,” an understanding of
life “that each one of us has his/her own way of realizing our humanity,
and that it is important to find and live out one’s own, as against surren-
dering to conformity with a model imposed on us from outside, by society,
or the previous generation, or religious or political authority.” Taylor
notes that this culture had its origin in the “Romantic expressivism of the
late-eighteenth century . . . but it is only in the era after the Second World
War that this ethic of authenticity begins to shape the outlook of society
in general” (475).
19. As James Alison argues in Raising Abel: The Recovery of the Eschato-
logical Imagination (New York: Crossroad, 1996), a truly Christian un-
derstanding of sacrifice is not of God demanding a sacrifice from human
beings, but rather of a God who so loved the world that he offered a
sacrifice to us: “it is God’s handing over of Jesus to us which defines what
‘the wrath’ is: the wrath is the type of world in which Jesus was borne to
death by sinful humans who could not receive the truth” (47). Jesus gave
up his life for his friends not to perpetuate the belief that it is only one’s
death that can show one’s love, but rather to “make possible a model of
creative practice which is not governed by death,” opening up new pos-
sibilities that should not be “subverted by myths of sacred renunciation”
(71).
20. Louis-Marie Chauvet, Symbol and Sacrament: A Sacramental Reinterpre-
tation of Christian Existence (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1995).
1. Ibid., 299.
2
22. Ibid., 301.
23. For Girard, the death of Christ is nonsacrificial and abolishes this mytho-
logical form of group violence directed against a victim. In his judgment,
a mistaken sacrificial reading of the Gospels has made it possible “for
what we call Christendom to exist for fifteen or twenty centuries; that is
to say, a culture has existed that is based, like all cultures (at least up to a
certain point) on the mythological forms engendered by the founding
mechanism. Paradoxically, in the sacrificial reading the Christian text it-
self provides the basis.” The Girard Reader, ed. James G. Williams (New
York: Crossroad, 1996), 179. For Girard, Christ’s abolition of sacrifice is
a sign of his divinity: “To say that Jesus dies, not as a sacrifice, but in
order that there may be no more sacrifices, is to recognize in him the Word
of God” (184). (This discussion is in chapter 11 of The Girard Reader,
“The Nonsacrificial Death of Christ,” which is itself drawn from the
chapter “A Non-Sacrificial Reading of the Gospel Text” in René Girard,
Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World [Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 1987].)
24. Chauvet, Symbol and Sacrament, 307.
25. Ibid., 311. As William Crockett writes in Eucharist: Symbol of Transforma-
tion (New York: Pueblo, 1989): “When a relationship is broken, it requires
an act of costly love in order to reestablish communication and commu-
nion. There is no language more adequate than sacrifice to express this. The
gift that creates the profoundest communion also involves the profoundest
cost” (259).
26. Chauvet, Symbol and Sacrament, 316.
27. Augustine, City of God, XIV:13, 572–73.
28. O’Donovan, The Desire of the Nations (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 1996), 214.
29. Ibid., 274.
30. Ibid., 276–82.
31. This is perhaps most notably present in the last free parliamentary act of
the Weimar Republic, the speech in rejection of Hitler’s Enabling Act by
Otto Wels, the leader of the German Social Democratic Party, on March
23, 1933: “The Weimar constitution is not a socialist constitution. But we
stand firm with the principles of a state based on laws, of equality, of so-
cial justice that are established in it. We German Social Democrats for-
mally commit ourselves, in this historical moment, to the foundations of
humanity and justice, of freedom and socialism. No Enabling Act gives
you the power to annihilate ideas that are eternal and indestructible.”
www.dhm.de/lemo/html/doku mente/wels/index.html, accessed July 3,
2008 (author’s translation).
32. For his part, O’Donovan sees a drift towards totalitarianism in any nar-
rative that aims at “the progressive realization of ‘truths of evangelical
origin’ about the dignity of the human person”; he finds this, for example,
in the writings of Jacques Maritain in and after the Second World War.
For O’Donovan, the special task of government is “defending against
wrong.” The Ways of Judgment, 171–72: “political judgments do not
limit freedom in order to realize it, but in order to defend it. Public free-
dom is not a project, like private action, that requires realizing; it is an
ensemble which gives coherence to private undertakings. And so political
authority has no special mandate to pursue a public goal, ‘the common
good’ conceived of as a giant millennium dome.” (57) This view of the
role of government flows from O’Donovan’s premise that the rule of
Christ means that the powers of government have been limited to just
judgment, whereas the Christological perspective I have been advocat-
ing—in a way akin to Maritain—is that the pursuit of the common good
through democratic government can be an institutional expression of re-
spect for the dignity of the human person, which has its theological foun-
dations in Christ.
3. This note of false messianism in modern totalitarianism was noted by Pius
3
XI in his encyclical Divini redemptoris, written in condemnation of Com-
munism in 1937: “The Communism of today, more emphatically than
similar movements in the past, conceals in itself a false messianic idea. A
pseudo-ideal of justice, of equality and fraternity in labor impregnates all
its doctrine and activity with a deceptive mysticism, which communicates
a zealous and contagious enthusiasm to the multitudes entrapped by de-
lusive promises. This is especially true in an age like ours, when unusual
misery has resulted from the unequal distribution of the goods of this
world. This pseudo-ideal is even boastfully advanced as if it were respon-
sible for a certain economic progress. As a matter of fact, when such
progress is at all real, its true causes are quite different, as for instance the
intensification of industrialism in countries which were formerly almost
without it, the exploitation of immense natural resources, and the use of
the most brutal methods to ensure the achievement of gigantic projects
with a minimum of expense” (8). English translation, Vatican website, at
www.vatican.va/holy_father/pius_xi/encycli cals/documents/hf_p-xi
_enc_19031937_divini-redemptoris_en.html. According to Glenn Tinder,

in The Political Meaning of Christianity: An Interpretation (Baton Rouge:
Louisiana State University Press, 1989), “although mass society is a less
terrible spectacle than Marxist totalitarianism, it is in one way more dis-
turbing. The latter demonstrates the dangers of proud and sweeping ac-
tion. The former shows that even cautious and piecemeal action, action
as guarded and gradual as the long series of measures that led to the emer-
gence of the egalitarian republic that Tocqueville observed in the Jackso-
nian era, can have results that are both unanticipated and highly undesir-
able” (191). Tinder rightly notes some of the degraded results of the abuse
of freedom in liberal democracies—results that were indeed unexpected
by many proponents of democracy—but these are precisely abuses of a
freedom that has been preserved by the “guarded and gradual” history of
a republic: they are a good deal less disturbing than the terrifying results
of abolishing that freedom and replacing it with a state based on fear and
lies, or the paralyzing cynicism and apathy of the last decaying years of
Communism in Eastern Europe.
34. I have attempted a more extensive discussion of this field of questions in
chapter four of The Public Forum and Christian Ethics (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 2001).
35. Robin Gill, Churchgoing and Christian Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1999), 64.
6.
3 Ibid., 66.
37. Gill notes that “there are broad patterns of Christian beliefs, teleology and
altruism which distinguish churchgoers as a whole from nonchurchgoers.
It has been seen that churchgoers have, in addition to their distinctive
theistic and christocentric beliefs, a strong sense of moral order and con-
cern for other people. They are, for example, more likely than others to
be involved in voluntary service and to see overseas charitable giving as
important. They are more hesitant about euthanasia and capital punish-
ment and more concerned about the family and civic order than other
people. None of these differences is absolute. The values, virtues, moral
attitudes and behaviour of churchgoers are shared by many other people
as well. The distinctiveness of churchgoers is real but relative” (Churchgo-
ing and Christian Ethics, 197).
8
chapter four
Christian Hope and the Eucharist:

Witness and Service
In the previous chapter, I reflected on the virtues that enable a realiza-

tion of the ethically positive potential of liberal societies, and on the
ways in which these virtues are definitively embodied in Jesus Christ.
The crucial role of these virtues emphasizes the fact that liberal society
is an ethical project. Modernity in general is not necessarily an ethical
project and may simply be the outcome of a number of “disembed-
ding” social processes, accelerated by the development of technology.1
Nonetheless, liberal society is a distinctive form of modernity that is
based on the dignity of the human person, expressed in normative
statements of human rights or in laws and practices that embody those
rights.
Since liberal society is an ethical project, it depends essentially on
hope: only hope can sustain the ethical commitment required to give
life to this project, constantly renewing it despite the strength of the
negative dynamics of domination that threaten to reduce it to some
other, illiberal, form of modernity. Because human desire can take the
path of self-love or love of neighbor, the future of liberal societies can
never be taken for granted. Their character as an ethical project means
that they must be constantly open to conversion, to the renewal of
their commitment to love of neighbor over dominative self-love. Hope
is a fundamental aspect of this conversion: To live by hope is to live
in willing readiness for commitment to noninstrumental relationships,
overcoming the fear and cynicism that tempts societies to revert to
selfishness and guarded exclusion.
For Christian hope, “where sin abounded, grace did much more
abound” (Romans 5.20). Christian hope affirms that the story of
112â•‡â•‡
Christian Hope and the Eucharistâ•‡â•‡ 113
humanity will, through the gratuitous love of God, reach its destiny
in the Kingdom of God. For Christian hope, the story of humanity is
ultimately one story that has Jesus Christ at its center. The story of
liberal societies is a different matter: It is not part of Christian faith to
affirm that societies that respect human rights will ultimately embrace
all humanity and have a sustained and stable future in the continu-
ing history of the human race. The development of modernity may
be quite different—after all, the twentieth century was dominated by
appalling conflict and geopolitical tensions in which the global influ-
ence, if not the survival, of liberal society was in grave doubt. Yet this
does not mean that the Church is indifferent to the future of liberal
societies, to the circumstances of human life within this saeculum. As
John Paul II emphasized in his Redemptor hominis (1979), even as
the Church lives by faith in the life of the resurrection, “by the truth
about the human person, which enables us to go beyond the bounds
of temporariness,” it thinks at the same time “with particular love
and solicitude of everything within the bounds of this temporariness
that affects man’s life and the life of the human spirit.”2 Expressing
the spirit of Gaudium et spes, John Paul constantly emphasized that
what most fittingly respects the image of God in the human person
in this earthly pilgrimage is a society based on human rights. Inso-
far as liberal society is an ethical project that embodies respect for
human rights, the Church seeks to support it, since it does thereby
bear witness to the Kingdom, in however partial and imperfect
a way.
The most powerful expression of Christian hope is the celebration
of the Eucharist. The Eucharist recalls Jesus’s commitment to pro-
claiming and enacting the Kingdom of God within human history, and
the rejection of that proclamation, the apparent failure of his ministry,
in his execution. It celebrates his resurrection as the “first fruits of
the dead” (1 Corinthians 15:20), which promises hope beyond the
failure of the fruits of our striving. It affirms that Jesus’s commitment
to humanity in its history was not in vain: that all acts of love will
be enshrined in the Kingdom that God will bring to fulfillment. It
empowers Christians to live in the hope of the Spirit of Jesus—a hope
that gives itself for human need in history, in the confidence that even
114â•‡â•‡ Chapter Four
the most shattering defeats can be borne through the power of Christ’s
cross and resurrection.
This chapter will focus on the relevance of Christian hope and the
celebration of the Eucharist to the ethical project of a liberal society. It
will consider them especially from the perspective of service and wit-
ness. The principal concern of chapter two was how Christian service
to liberal society could be inspired by Christian identity and manifest
itself through Christian witness. It concluded with a consideration of
the significance of Rawls’s “The Idea of Public Reason Revisited,” es-
pecially its “proviso.” This chapter will explore how Christian hope
can be communicated as a service to liberal societies and as a witness
to the Kingdom of God. It will engage with Rawls’s argument in order
to examine in some detail how hope can be communicated in the pub-
lic political forum and in the “background culture” of liberal societies
in ways that respect public reason.
The previous chapter spoke of Jesus Christ as the definitive em-
bodiment of the self-giving that is at the heart of noninstrumental
relationships. For Christians, it is primordially the Eucharist that com-
memorates and makes present Christ’s self-giving. Yet, for many mem-
bers of liberal societies, all religious rituals, including the Christian
Eucharist, are irrelevant to the ethical task and challenges of a liberal
society that is conceived of as a purely secular and self-sufficient com-
mitment to human dignity. This tension between the ethical and the
ritual is in fact deep within biblical tradition itself. The second part
of this chapter will focus on the tension between the ethical and the
ritual, and it will argue that Christian celebration of the Eucharist can
bear witness to hope in the midst of ethical failure.
Christian Hope and Public Reason
In what ways can Christian hope serve the citizens, laws, and public
political institutions of a liberal society? How can it be communicated
in ways that express the civility of public reason and at the same time
faithfully maintain its own transcendent witness? This chapter will
firstly argue that Christian hope is characterized by a tension between
an inspiration to solidarity within history and an independence from
the course and outcomes of history, and that living in and with this
tension can be a great gift to liberal societies. Secondly, it will reflect
on the meaning of hope for the public life of those societies, arguing
that a public, political hope expresses itself in three key ways: a dis-
cernment of human capacities that evokes moral virtue, a conviction
of the openness of the future to human striving, and a certain detach-
ment from the fruits of that striving. Finally, it will consider the ways
in which Christians can communicate their own hope to others in lib-
eral societies, in ways that both respect the canons of public reason
and are faithful to Christian religious identity.
The source and ground of Christian hope is the gift of God, and its
symbolic summation is the Kingdom of God, a realm in which human
beings live in the inheritance of eternal life. The hopes of Christians
go beyond history and cannot be satisfied by anything in human his-
tory. Whatever the outcome of human history or the fate of particular
historical communities, Christian hope in the Kingdom cannot be de-
stroyed. Human history cannot fulfill that hope, nor can it abolish it.
Yet at the same time, Christians are called to solidarity in history, to a
bond with their fellow human beings that is forged and strengthened
within history. It is within history, through their ethical commitment,
their love of neighbor, that Christians respond to the gift of the King-
dom and help to make it present. If they ignore the historical plight of
their fellow human beings, then they ignore the image of God in their
midst. It is in the historical circumstances of their lives that they come
to know God through his image in their neighbor and use their free-
dom to help make God’s Kingdom visible in sign and anticipation.
The tension between a hope that goes beyond history and a love
that is realized within it is a crucial characteristic of Christian life.
The products, or “outcomes,” of history are not the focus of Christian
hope—they can neither fulfill nor destroy it. History may end in nu-
clear or ecological disaster, or in some other conclusion that destroys
all the works of human civilization. Much of the labor of past genera-
tions was denied fruition by conflict and unforeseen contingency, and
history gave no solace to those whose lives were cut short by war and
famine. Yet it is within history, through our attempt to respond in
freedom and love to God and neighbor, that we are saved. Through
our efforts to respond to the goodness of creation, to perform works

of love, we help to prepare for the Kingdom, since those works of love
develop moral character: persons—and communities of persons—
formed by love. It is those persons who will become members of the
Kingdom of God. We cannot respond to the Kingdom in our own
lives unless our dedication to others and to the historical world that
is the arena of our shared lives is real and genuine and demonstrated
in solidarity.
Our salvation is not determined by the course and consequences of
human history, yet our hopes are for human history, the history that
the Word of God shares by becoming human. It is the object of our
care and concern, and within it we witness and strive to have empathy
for our fellow human beings. This empathy may be expressed in what
William Wordsworth called “little, nameless, unremembered acts of
kindness and of love” or in larger, politically organized schemes for
human welfare: Whatever their scale, such acts of service can respond
to the teaching of Matthew 25 when performed with love and with
acknowledgment that their fruits are beyond our control.
One of the crucial ways in which Christians can serve others is to
respond to Christian faith’s gift of hope by bringing hope to other hu-
man beings. Historical societies, in a very real and palpable sense, live
in hope and through hope. My concern is for the ways in which Chris-
tian communities can communicate hope to the broader societies of
which they are a part and in ways that express the “civic friendship”
of public reason. Its particular focus will be on the ways in which the
specific character of Christian hope, which is not founded in history
but is a hope for history, will shape the ways in which Christians seek
to offer hope to the societies in which they share their lives with people
of many and varied religious and nonreligious perspectives.
Christian hope is characterized by a tension between its inspira-
tion to solidarity within history and its independence from the course
and outcomes of history. What I want to argue is that this tension, if
lived out and communicated with faith and love, can be a great gift
to liberal societies: that awareness of this tension, and of the light it
throws on the meaning of human action, can be a crucial form of ser-
vice to society in its attempt to face the future in hope. Of course, the
historical record shows that this tension has often been interpreted as
a severe dichotomy, leading to a Christian withdrawal from engage-
ment with history and to the charge that Christians were unconcerned
about the historical plight of their fellow human beings. Christian
withdrawal of this sort has sometimes taken the form of simply ignor-
ing the importance of human society as a field within which freedom
and love could find an expression that might shape our response to
salvation. Sometimes, perhaps even more destructively, it has been ex-
pressed in the conviction that the injustices of history are permanent
and unchangeable, that they can not be abolished or even ameliorated
by human action, and therefore that they are merely to be suffered
by those who are their victims for the sake of eternal salvation. Thus,
Christian eschatology has illegitimately become a source of ideological
indifference to human suffering, and the devastation of the Church—
either through mass atheism or acts of violent revenge—has been the
harrowing result.
This dichotomy can only be abolished by an emphasis on history
as a field of salvation through solidarity: that it is in and through
our acts of service in history that we respond to God’s gift of salva-
tion. It is in history that God has saved us by becoming human, by
becoming part of our history. It is in history that our own salvation
is realized by our response to God’s gift of love in our love for our
neighbor. There is no dichotomy between our hope for salvation and
our historical existence. Yet there is a real tension, a tension between
our hopes for human well-being in history and our knowledge that
such hopes have been dashed over and over again, that our true and
lasting hope lies in God alone and the Kingdom that is his free gift.
How much of our hopes should we invest in historical action, without
risking despair? What kind of detachment should we practice, so that,
while being committed to historical action and striving for justice, we
remain grounded only in hope in God and for a future beyond all hu-
man conflict and failure? What is the constitution of a historical hope
that genuinely offers our “blood, toil, tears and sweat” for our fellow
human beings and yet is able to come to terms with the destruction of
all the visible fruits of that passionate striving, putting its desolation
and emptiness before the infinite healing power of God?
By wrestling with these questions, Christians seek both to bear au-

thentic witness to the God of hope and to serve their fellow human
beings in the societies of which they are part. I want now to consider
how Christians can contribute to the different dimensions of a public,
political hope and how this contribution might relate to the distinc-
tions that Rawls makes between the background culture and the pub-
lic political forum. In particular, when Christians who are government
officials or who are seeking elected office aim to inspire their fellow
citizens with the language of Christian hope, can this be positively un-
derstood in terms of Rawls’s proviso? I will argue that one dimension
of political hope—the discernment of moral capacities—can meet this
proviso with relative ease, since it does not essentially require an intrin-
sically metaphysical affirmation about the future. The same cannot be
said of the other dimensions: Of its nature, political hope that affirms
the openness of the future to human striving and equips us to face that
future with both determination and detachment implies metaphysical
convictions about the character of that future. Can Christians who
hold or seek public office both use the language of their faith to make
these affirmations and offer an alternative language in publicly share-
able terms? What are the implications both for their own Christian
identity and for the health of public life if they seek to do so?
What, then, is the character of public, political hope in a liberal
society, and how can Christians contribute to that hope? If a society’s
hope is to remain hope, and not give way to despair, then it—like
Christian hope—will also be marked by the tension between striving
for a certain outcome, for certain consequences or “states of affairs,”
and the acceptance that these efforts may well be in vain. Its striving
will not be lessened by the knowledge that it may fail, and its accep-
tance of defeat will not succumb to despair. A hopeful society—and
political leadership that communicates hope—can live with this ten-
sion, constantly overcoming failure by a renewed hope for a better
world. A public political hope is not grounded in the predictability
of particular outcomes, since it is in essence the gift of being able to
come to terms with the lack of this predictability. Yet it also has noth-
ing to do with irresponsibility: It is sustained by the real achievability
of those outcomes. A demagogic conjuring with political fantasies has
nothing to do with hope, and everything to do with the manipulation

of fear and anxiety. Reflection on the character of hopeful social and
political action suggests three key traits: a discernment of human ca-
pacities that evokes moral virtue, a conviction of the openness of the
future to human striving, and a certain detachment from the fruits of
that striving.
The discernment of human capacities in hopeful political action in-
volves interpreting the circumstances of human societies in ways that
successfully appeal to human virtue—and that “bring out the best in
people.” It is a matter of common experience that most political situ-
ations are subject to a variety of interpretations, including cynicism,
scapegoating, “buck-passing,” fanciful optimism, as well as—in for-
tunate circumstances—hopeful and truthful assessments of a society’s
potential to overcome particular obstacles and achieve certain goals.
It is the mark of hopeful political leadership to be able to interpret
situations in ways that encourage the best ethical responses from fel-
low-citizens, to be able to tap the sources of courage, dedication, and
solidarity. In large-scale societies the potential for solidarity, as a tran-
scendence of individual concerns for the sake of the concerns of oth-
ers, although real and extremely valuable, is inevitably limited.3 The
surest sign of hopeful political leadership is its ability to draw out that
solidarity in ways that can be directed towards the common good.
The link between hope and solidarity is particularly close. Part of
the character of hope is to empower perspectives and attitudes that go
beyond immediate interests. Human beings are more likely to engage
in acts of solidarity if they are hopeful, more ready to devote some at-
tention to the needs of others if they are less fearful about their own
interests. The power of hope is to evoke human capacities for giving
beyond our own immediate circle of interest, to risk solidarity with
those whom we would otherwise ignore or even despise. Fear, in con-
trast, throws us back into ever-decreasing circles of defensiveness and
mistrust, throttling the capacity for imaginative concern for the needs
of others. While a selfish optimism is a regrettable but not necessarily
self-contradictory attitude to life, a selfish hope is a contradiction in
terms: it is in the nature of hope to be inclusive, to seek the common
good.
This appeal to the best of human characteristics is essentially an

act of imagination, motivated by hope. The hopeful social or political
leader is one who is able to imagine our better natures in ways that are
both realistic and visionary, whose leadership encourages individual
actors to contribute to the common good in ways that realize their
own interests but that also, to some extent, transcend them through
an appreciation of the needs and aspirations of others.
The discernment of human nature and moral capacities is a task
that can be attempted from a great range of sources of meaning, both
secular and religious, drawing on the resources of art, literature, phi-
losophy, religious tradition, and national tradition, as well as on the
various commonplaces of received wisdom. Since the evocation of
moral virtue for the sake of a public politics of the common good does
not, of its essence, require a religious ground, religious understand-
ings of human nature take their place beside other sources of insight,
rather than having any essential claim to priority. The role—and the
opportunities—for religious language in communicating the meaning
of moral virtue will also, of course, be dependent on the degree to
which religious language is a matter of cultural consensus in a particu-
lar context.
The value of any particular source of meaning for this task lies in
its power to shed light on a shared question: how can political leader-
ship—and all those social agents that attempt to form and encourage
political participation—evoke moral virtue for the sake of the com-
mon good? In particular, how can it foster a sense of social solidarity
that will reject a politics of fear and resentment in favor of a reasoned
appreciation of the implications for a particular society of the dif-
ferent forms of justice? Perhaps the most critical aspect of this chal-
lenge is in achieving some kind of equilibrium between vigilance and
trust in democratic electorates. Much of the wariness and distrust for
authority—whether in politics, the institutions of justice, the economy,
the professions, or the churches—stems from a widely held percep-
tion of the fallibility and weakness of those in positions of trust and
authority, which often leads in turn to deep-seated cynicism about the
very institutions that are essential to the maintenance of the common
good. A utopian conviction of the perfectibility of human institutions
is now rarely encountered, although populist politicians are some-

times successful in protecting some favored institutions (usually those
associated with national pride) from criticism through the stratagem
of scapegoating others.
The many examples of weakness and corruptibility that have be-
come public knowledge give ample reason for a keen sense of vigilance,
for the maintenance of procedures of oversight and accountability that
monitor the exercise of authority and public trust. Yet this vigilance
is self-defeating if it is not accompanied by a sense that its purpose
is to maintain and enhance trust in institutions that are essential for
the complex mediation of power and responsibility in a democratic
society.4 The difficulty of maintaining some sense of trust in complex
institutions is naturally heightened by the process of globalization,
through which vigilance for the sake of trust becomes not only a task
within a particular society, but an endeavor calling for new forms of
global cooperation.
From a Christian perspective, what is at stake here is our sense of
each other’s sinfulness. A thoroughgoing cynicism about the conduct
of public institutions expresses a sense of the all-pervading and ines-
capable power of sin, corrupting all who are exposed to the tempta-
tions of wealth and power. Such cynicism, since it seeks to convey a
sense of aloof judgment, is usually not accompanied by a chastened
sense that the cynic himself is equally corruptible. For Christian com-
munities, the primary response to this challenge is, clearly, to provide
as little as possible reason for cynicism about the conduct of their
own affairs and internal relationships. Yet they also have an extraor-
dinarily important role to play in terms of communicating a vision of
the human person and human society that acknowledges the universal
power of sin but at the same time recognizes the far greater power of
forgiveness and grace. This vision will engage and compete with other
perspectives—both sublime and ridiculous—on human behavior in the
welter of cultural images, and its communication will continue to be
a complex and exciting challenge for a range of Christian ministries.
There is every reason to hope that a Christian vision of the human
person as sinful, redeemed, and capable of virtue will continue to have
a broad and profound influence on democratic societies, both through
the direct efforts of the churches and its long-term influence on a great
range of cultural expressions.
The communication of this vision is, in general, the task of mem-
bers of the Church in the background culture. Can it also be employed
by elected officials or those seeking political office? Here it seems that
Rawls’s proviso is relatively easy to meet. This conception of the hu-
man person informed by Christian theology has a particular power
and resonance in and through its distinctive language and symbols,
but it is open to alternative forms of expression and appeals to com-
mon experience. This will clearly deprive it of its unique resonances,
but the need for the proviso stems from the fact that such resonances
can alienate some as much as they inspire others. Thus a Christian
politician may use such theological language and the loci classici of
scripture to illustrate the weakness and potential of human beings;
that same politician must also be ready to illustrate this weakness and
potential in more secular language and in terms of our common hu-
man experience, addressing both the human capacity for cooperation
and solidarity and our proneness to exclude and exploit others un-
less appropriate structures and sanctions are enshrined in law and in
public institutions.5 In moving from theological language to a secular
description of our human condition, the Christian politician will al-
ways be aware of the tension between fidelity to the Word of God and
the desire to communicate its meaning in ways that can be shared with
followers of other creeds. The Christian Gospel can evoke and inspire
insights into our common condition that can be communicated, to
some degree, in ways that do not require assent to Christian faith, yet
it can never be reduced to any other form of discourse.
Those dispositions of political hope that convey assurance about
the character of the future pose a much more difficult and interesting
set of questions. An appeal to the best human capacities would be
fruitless unless hope was also marked by a conviction of the openness
of the future. This is the conviction that, whatever happens, there is
always a point to human action, that the future is always open to the
efforts of human beings to make a better world. What can ground
such a conviction? Of its nature, it cannot be firmly grounded in expe-
rience, since the future may be very different from the past, and—for
all we know—hold challenges that we are inadequate to face. It could,

of course, be argued that hope is simply a reasonable, empirically
based prediction that future challenges can be dealt with in some way,
since past challenges have always been surmounted in some way and
to some degree. Yet such language, first, is recognizable as the self-
congratulatory perspective of the victors and survivors of history, for-
getful of the fate of those whom historical catastrophes wiped from
the face of the earth, and, second, takes no account of the radical dif-
ferences in kind, fuelled especially by technological change, between
past and future challenges. We need only remember the invention of
the hydrogen bomb in our own era or the virtual extinction of many
native peoples by the totally unexpected incursions of European dis-
eases to remind ourselves that the challenges of the future are utterly
unpredictable in character and magnitude. No confidence based on
an empirical assessment of human capacities in light of “past perfor-
mance” is adequate to meet them. It is in the nature of hope to be able
to face the future, despite the possibility of such horrors, as an open
future, a future in which human beings can persevere in their historical
existence and pass on their hope to succeeding generations.
A part of this openness to the future is a sense that whatever hap-
pens, the fate of humanity is not sealed: that the meaning of human
existence, and of human history, is not exhausted by one set of events
nor reduced to nothingness by a particular experience of defeat. Thus,
this openness is accompanied by a certain detachment, which can pre-
serve human integrity in the face of loss: not out of indifference, but
out of hope for that better future that remains the birthright of the hu-
man spirit. This detachment is the sense that history is important, that
life and death are at stake in it, and that the meaning of human exis-
tence remains inviolate despite its failures. With the true detachment
of hope, human beings—or particular societies—do not so identify
themselves with the course of a particular project, or particular striv-
ing, that they see no hope for themselves after its failure.6
I have argued that these dispositions cannot be justified by past
human experience nor by any kind of prediction of future human ex-
perience. In the most basic sense, they are essential for survival, since
without them we would be fatally prone to despair. Yet there are many
different ways of surviving: some characterized by fatalistic immobil-

ity, others by frantic competition and consumption of limited ecologi-
cal resources. Both of these imperfect forms of survival are prone to
radical insecurity: one from the exposure to alien influences that can
have a disastrously destabilizing character (as in the case of the con-
quest of the Aztecs by a tiny party of Spaniards), the other, in our own
case, from the knowledge that its technological powers, if unchecked,
are capable of destroying human life and the life of most other spe-
cies.7 The fact that these dispositions are essential to survival, and may
in the most elemental sense have an evolutionary explanation, does
not mean that they are simply givens. On the contrary, their character
is profoundly subject to interpretation by metaphysical worldviews
and religious traditions, and these interpretations are radically influen-
tial in the history of civilization.8 We need only to recall the role that
conceptions of fate played in ancient cultures to exemplify this point.
A belief in the openness of the future to human striving—that there
is a point to the sustained effort to build a civilization that seeks to
go beyond mere survival, despite the knowledge that it may be de-
stroyed by forces of unpredictable violence—implies a confidence that
the future will, in some way, be hospitable to human aspirations. The
sense of an open future implies that there is a real point to the work
of civilization, since in it human beings develop a world of value that
expresses their own economic, technological, cultural, and moral cre-
ativity. This creativity expresses human confidence that our works will
have some lasting value despite the chance that they will perish in fact
and in memory. At the same time, a detachment from these works, a
sense that they are not the ultimate word about ourselves, is essential
to our sense of independence from history, our sense that we can tran-
scend past failures and begin anew, that our own essence has not been
exhaustively poured out in one fragile historical project. Hope affirms
the confidence that our works in history are valuable, and it frees us
from a dependence on those works that would seal our fate along with
theirs.
Such a vision is at home in a religious conception of human exis-
tence, in a sense that the future is in God’s hands, and that our own
worth will not be measured by the success of our projects but by the
virtue that informed our effort to undertake them, virtue that is itself
a response to gifts received. In Christian terms the sense of the open-
ness of the future has its ultimate source and meaning in the Kingdom
of God, and the independence of our personal worth from historical
vicissitude is given an eternal foundation in the proclamation of the
resurrection of Christ from the dead. Human effort has a point, since
all that is good in it prepares in some way for the Kingdom of God, yet
our own destiny is never determined by the success or failure of our
efforts to build the earthly city.9
Christian “comprehensive doctrine” has played, and continues to
play, a crucial role in communicating and sustaining such a vision in
Western culture. For Rawls, this has its legitimate place both in the
debates of the background culture and among citizens’ sources of
motivation for allegiance to democratic ideals. In what ways could it
also be expressed by elected officials or those seeking office, subject to
the proviso? This tension between creative aspiration and detachment
can, of course, be maintained by those without any religious convic-
tions, since it is, in and of itself, a confident and yet realistic attitude
to life and a means of preserving self-worth in the face of failure. Yet,
as I have already argued, these dimensions of political hope have an
intrinsically metaphysical reference since they affirm something about
the character of futurity as such. Although an atheist can have politi-
cal hope, as a positive and fruitful disposition, this hope—as a radi-
cal conviction about the character of the future—cannot be justified
within an atheistic worldview. As a result, these dimensions of hope
are much more profoundly and inextricably linked to religious com-
prehensive doctrines and to the language and symbols of such doc-
trines, and meeting the proviso is a much more complex and diverse
challenge in a pluralist society. To what extent can the language and
symbols of religious hope have a place in public political discourse?
The degree of pluralism that characterizes a society is one evident
factor in assessing this question. Abraham Lincoln’s profound and ex-
plicitly theistic reflections on hope and divine justice were made in a
society whose enfranchised members were overwhelmingly Protestant
Christians in religious and cultural background. On the basis of this
shared scriptural heritage, he was able to develop an interpretation of
traumatic political events that linked divine justice with the fateful his-
torical consequences of slavery in civil war—a scriptural hermeneutic
of common experience that was part of a tradition of public reason.10
In more pluralist contemporary societies, images of hope are often
much more reduced in symbolic richness and religious associations.
In Australian political history a noteworthy example is the reference
to “the light on the hill” by the leader of the Australian Labor Party
and Prime Minister, Joseph Benedict Chifley, in a speech to a party
conference in 1949.11 Significantly, although this image may possibly
owe some of its resonances to Matthew 5:14–16, its expression is very
simple and free of any explicitly Christian references: its intention is
also immediately spelled out in highly practical language. In a politi-
cal party that included both militant atheists and daily-communicant
Catholics, this image was remembered and evoked by later party lead-
ers in ways that indicated that it had met Rawls’s proviso and was
accepted as a shareable symbol of practical political hopes.
Perhaps the difficulty in conveying political hope while avoiding
any divisive use of the language of a particular religious tradition is
demonstrated by the relatively frequent use of the image of dream ap-
plied to any bold political project or aspiration. This image, although
used in both testaments of the Bible as a means of receiving private
revelations, is not associated with Jesus himself and has only rare as-
sociations with a biblical vision of hope.12 Due to its lack of any strong
association with particular traditions, the language of dream can be
communicative in more pluralist societies, and has been put to inspir-
ing rhetorical use in some political contexts.13 Yet, perhaps since it can
suggest a passive and inchoate state of experience, with hints of day-
dream, rather than dynamic symbolic expression, it is prone to lapsing
into political cliché. This is one indication that the language of hope,
stripped of all traditional religious imagery, is confined to a somewhat
scant and austere vocabulary in the public political forum.
The challenge of the proviso for any Christian politician is to be
able to use Christian religious language in ways that can evoke share-
able human experience as a hermeneutical stimulus to exploring the
signs of hope in a particular political context, so that the use of such
language will not exclude but rather invite the citizens of a pluralist
society to reflect on their common human situation. The most criti-

cal implication of the proviso in this context is its exclusion of the-
ologies of doom: theologies, that is, that conceive hope as reward for
some and judgment for others, and that seek to exploit this form of
futurity for political purposes. Public reason insists that all public po-
litical language will affirm the rights of citizens: because of this, reli-
gious language that excludes any from divine favor, or that purports
to give “reportage” of the scenarios of divine judgment to justify such
exclusion, cannot meet the proviso. Only those images of hope that
inspire the language of universal and equal human dignity can enter
into public political language. This is both a sound criterion of politi-
cal language as well as a hallmark of authentic Christian eschatology,
which affirms the universal scope and intensity of God’s love, rather
than presuming to predict who—if anyone—might experience the self-
incurred loss of that love.
Another way to approach this question is to ask: Can a Christian
elected to or seeking political office exercise a prophetic role, not only
in the broad secular sense of acting with vision, courage, and foresight,
but also in the more specifically theological sense of witnessing to the
meaning of the Word of God within contemporary political life? In its
proper theological sense, prophecy is a public act of interpretation of
the Word of God, an explicit act of bearing witness to God. Clearly,
this will be part of the meaning of Christian faith in the background
culture and a source of personal inspiration to Christian political lead-
ers. It cannot, however, be an explicit aspect of their exercise of politi-
cal office, since that office calls for the affirmation of shared political
values rather than of the sacred texts and teachings of a religious tra-
dition. When they do use religious language, it will be for the sake of
evoking aspects of the human condition or of a national predicament:
Their emphasis will be on its hermeneutical potential to illuminate
and interpret shared meaning, rather than to witness to its sovereign
truth. This need not at all imply that they take it any less seriously, but
simply that they recognize that their role as elected office holders is to
affirm publicly shared political values rather than to bear witness to
a specific religious tradition. This emphasis on shared meaning does
not lessen the potential of religious language to disturb, challenge, and
unsettle established conventions and prejudices: “shared meaning” is

“shareable meaning” in the sense that the hermeneutic potential of
the Word of God can challenge accepted practices while at the same
time being at least potentially intelligible to those who do not share
Christian convictions.
Matthew’s “Last Judgment” discourse emphasizes that individual
salvation depends upon the encounter with the anonymous Christ,
that explicit knowledge of Christ, mediated by Christian tradition, is
not essential to that personal encounter with him that we face in our
neighbor. In an analogous way, Christians can recognize that their call-
ing to witness to Christ in the public political forum can have the same
kind of “anonymity.” Public political language calls for the expression
of shareable ethical values: In seeking to evoke and espouse such val-
ues, Christians are seeking the anonymous Christ in the person of their
neighbor, in the ethical challenges of social and political existence. Re-
fraining from religious language in circumstances where it may alien-
ate other citizens of good will is a form of respect, recognizing that
Christian witness must often take the form of anonymity precisely for
the sake of respecting the presence of Christ in our neighbor.
At the same time, the (perhaps inevitable) sparseness of the lan-
guage of hope in the public political language of contemporary plural-
ist societies alerts us to the urgent need for its constant revivification
in the background culture. The anonymous witness to Christ in our
neighbor expressed in the language of rights and civility in the public
political forum must be accompanied by that explicit witness and wor-
ship that affirms Christian identity and inspires Christians to commit
themselves to the demands of political integrity. In the background
culture, the mediation of hope to society calls for the explicit act of
evangelization: If the tension of Christian hope between concern for
history and independence from history is to serve society as a whole,
it must be communicated as a faith in the Kingdom of God and the
resurrection of Christ. In this way, Christian identity in contemporary
democracy can avoid both a reduction of religious faith to ethics and
an imposition of faith upon others. In the background culture it seeks
to communicate the power and richness of Christian faith both as
a form of evangelization and as a service to political culture. In the
public political forum, it is dedicated to affirming and extending the

ethical values that are mandated by Christian faith but that can also
be shared through public political language. It is both witness and ser-
vice: an explicit witness to Christ in word and sacrament, and service
to the anonymous Christ in our neighbor with whom we share the
language of public ethical and political life.
The Eucharist: Hope in the Midst of Ethical Failure
Christian identity and witness are primordially expressed in the cel-

ebration of the Eucharist. It was in the Eucharist that Christ gave
thanks for the bread and wine of creation as signs of the Kingdom,
and in his meals with sinners and the outcast that he symbolized their
acceptance into the Kingdom. It was in his last meal with his disciples,
in the midst of the rejection of his proclamation of the Kingdom that
was soon to be enacted in his arrest, that Jesus gave his own body and
blood to the Church as his living presence in its midst for all time. In
the Eucharist, Christians become Church as Body of Christ and live
in hope of the Kingdom through sharing the one whose resurrection
anticipates it. In this they are called to the world, since the Kingdom
that has its sign in the Eucharist is the transformation of the world: the
Church’s character as witness to the Kingdom calls it beyond itself to
live in solidarity with all those who strive to realize the values of the
Kingdom in the various ways and contexts that these are expressed
and experienced.
Yet, for many within secular society, the celebration of the Eucharist
is irrelevant to ethics, and specifically to the project of a liberal society.
For this perspective, respect for human rights is simply a response to
the givenness of human value: it needs no reference to God, and even
less a participation in religious ritual. This stance reflects both an over-
estimation of the self-sustaining strength of human ethical commit-
ments, and a misreading of the role of the Eucharist in Christian life.
Nonetheless, aspects of this stance still echo a tension that has biblical
roots. At least since the time of Amos and Isaiah, the relationship be-
tween the ritual and the ethical has been one of the most urgent points
of tension in the biblical tradition. The prophetic condemnation of
empty ritual, performed by the unjust and exploitative, is a classi-

cal touchstone for authentic religious life. Indeed, Isaiah’s conviction
of the irrelevance of the temple ritual to a true relationship to God
is so strong that he gives his rejection of it in 1:10–11 the elevated
status of “torah,” thus denying that the priests give true “torah” to
the people: “Hear the word of the Lord, you rulers of Sodom! Give
ear to the torah of our God, you people of Gomorrah! ‘What to me
is the multitude of your sacrifices? Says the Lord.’”14 The power of
this prophetic critique in the religious consciousness of later Judaism
is brought home to us in the mutually affirming encounter between
Jesus and the scribe in Mark 12: “The scribe said to him: ‘Excellent,
Teacher! You are right in saying, “He is the One, there is no other than
he.” Yes, “to love him with all our heart, with all our thoughts and
with all our strength, and to love our neighbor as ourselves” is worth
more than any burnt offering or sacrifice.’ Jesus approved the insight
of this answer and told him, ‘You are not far from the reign of God’”
(Mark 12:32–33).
For the post-exilic Jewish tradition, love of neighbor went hand in
hand with love of God, a God whom it was fitting to worship through
ritual sacrifice so long as that ritual was performed by those who had
“circumcised their hearts” (Deuteronomy 10:16, 30:6). Yet the radical
critique of ritual in the prophetic tradition had posed a fundamen-
tal religious question that Christianity inherited: if God is best wor-
shipped by the love of the pure in heart, as expressed in ethical action,
then what role can ritual have? Is a prophetic prioritization of ethics
really the end of religion in the sense of formal ritual acts of worship?
In our contemporary context, so different from that which the proph-
ets knew, has the prioritization of ethics become the marginalization
of religious ritual acts, even of the Eucharist itself, on grounds that
might seem to gain plausibility from the prophets of Israel? In the
contemporary context of a widespread sense of the irrelevance of re-
ligious traditions and religious practice to the life of liberal societies,
how can the fundamental importance of the Eucharist for social hope
be communicated, not as a denial of the ancient prophetic priority but
as its culmination?
It is well known that the tension between ritual and ethics, so force-
fully addressed by the prophets, has been resolved to the detriment of
religious practice in influential currents of modern thought. Whereas,
for ancient Judaism, authentic ritual had to be verified in ethical ac-
tion, many thinkers in the Enlightenment tradition have argued that
ethics does not need religious ritual—or, indeed, religious faith at all.
From this perspective, ethics is free-standing: its insights do not require
a logical connection with faith in God, nor do its commitments require
the sustaining context of religious ritual, which is, at best, a harmless
irrelevancy. This modern interpretation of the priority of ethics over
ritual has a well-worn popular rendition. Few assertions are more fa-
miliar to those seeking to hand on traditions of religious practice than
this one: “I don’t need to go to church to be a good person!”
For this perspective the ethical arises from the apprehension of
value, from insight into ethical need, which is self-sufficient and self-
justifying: anyone willing to adopt the “ethical point of view” should
respond to ethical imperatives through their own force and truth. Their
universality precludes any link to specific traditions and the forms of
celebration and ritual associated with those traditions. Commitment
to human rights, for example, proceeds from an insight into the value
of the human person that is accessible to us all. There is no need for
religious traditions to sensitize us to such values, nor for religious rit-
ual to enable us to be ethical: Whether in terms of the content of our
ethical obligations, or of the motivation to behave ethically, ethics is
perceived as quite independent of religion and religious ritual. There is
no need to draw on the resources of religious tradition, since the ethi-
cal commitment of liberal societies is self-sufficient.
In one sense, this is as it should be. There is a very important strand
in Catholic thought that emphasizes the independence of the ethical
from religious beliefs and ritual: the “natural law” tradition. It is part
of the Catholic tradition’s emphasis on the openness of the human
mind and heart to the goodness and purposefulness of creation that
ethical principles have their own universality and intelligibility. This
does not mean that these principles developed independently of the
great religious traditions of the human race, but it does mean that they
can have intelligibility and communicability between and beyond the

communities that bear these religious traditions.15 My critical concern
is not so much with the contention that universal ethical principles can
be intelligible across traditions or to those who share no religious tra-
dition: it is rather with the possibility of living by—of enacting—such
principles. While ethical principles can be stated as universal impera-
tives in ways that are free of any and all religious traditions, what can
give liberal societies the resources to live in an ethical way? While a
universalist ethics reflects a gradually increasing awareness of the ethi-
cal dignity of all human beings, including those whose marginal status
is obscured by ideology and the exercise of power, what can give us
the resources to translate such awareness into a life that actively sup-
ports human dignity in a global context? What enables us to make the
sacrifices that are essential to living in an ethical way? In the context
of a universalist ethics, what can enable us to comprehend and empa-
thize with such a world of desperate ethical need—or, indeed, to seek
to relieve this need?
In stating these questions, I do not at all intend to ridicule the aspi-
rations of a universalist ethics, but rather to point to the enormity of
the task it sets itself. Universalist ethical statements set a goal for hu-
man cooperation that can play a very beneficial role in global human
self-consciousness. At the same time, they inevitably highlight the gulf
between ethical aspirations and ethical achievement. Awareness of this
gulf is made possible by global mass media, so that a characteristic
mark of liberal societies is a strong public universal ethics coupled
with a constant level of awareness of how such principles are betrayed
and flouted in many and varied parts of the world. Commitment to
a strong universalist ethics implies, therefore, two things: a readiness
to sacrifice interests for the needs of others on a global scale; and a
willingness to persevere with universal ethical ideals despite constant
access to evidence of their betrayal. Of course, commitment to ethics
has always required readiness to make sacrifices and to come to terms
with the stark facts of ethical failure. The difference today is that this is
on a universal scale and with an extraordinarily high level of available
information on the realities of human conflict. This gives a particular
focus and urgency to the question: What can sustain the ethical? What
can enable both the sacrifices necessary to think and act ethically and
the patience and hope that can come to terms with ethical failure?
The extent of this sacrifice and the need for hope become clear when
we reflect on the degree of ethical commitment required to found,
maintain, and restore human communities of whatever scope and
character. The greatest sacrifices are called for from those who seek
to reconcile, to overcome barriers between people, to dissolve deeply
entrenched enmities. We need only to call to mind our current world
situation to remind ourselves sufficiently of the salient facts: We live in
a world marked by a high level of universalist ethical awareness, and
at the same time a world deeply scarred by fierce and intractable in-
terethnic and intercommunal enmities. In Western societies, we enjoy
many valuable forms of respect for individual autonomy, and at the
same time experience a sense of crisis in all those forms of life that re-
quire sustained fidelity and willingness to sacrifice individual interests
for the sake of communal forms of life.
A marked feature of many of these forms of commitment to ethical
community is their projective character: that is, they are commitments
to sustained fidelity to a future life, whose character can be portrayed
in hope but never guaranteed by limiting conditions. Those who take
vows of marriage or of religious and priestly life, or who dedicate
their lives to ministering to communities of faith, cannot predict what
sacrifices their lives will demand, yet they know that the community
of life they are committed to depends on the projective and faithful
character of their commitment. Many forms of ethical community de-
pend on the sacrifices involved in commitment to vocations that often
bear no evident fruits for those whose commitment is at stake. Doc-
tors, teachers, and members of many caring professions often do not
see the fruits of their labors, or receive the recognition due to them,
and must find other sustaining sources for their personal commitment.
Many politicians and public servants dedicate their careers to projects
sustaining the common good while knowing that the results of their
labors may be stillborn or overwhelmed by more powerful political
forces. Parents bear children in the hope, rather than the knowledge,
that the child they bring to adulthood will honor them and recognize
their sacrifices.
These brief reflections serve to remind us of the enormous demands

that are made on ethical consciousness, of the heavy burden that ethi-
cal aspirations seek to carry. It is here that the Enlightenment’s empha-
sis on the self-sufficiency of the ethical is most radically challenged:
Can this self-sufficient ethical project bear the crushing burden of sac-
rifice and the searing disappointment of ethical failure? A Christian
should not glibly or smugly deny the reality, as a psychological or so-
cial fact, of individuals or communities living a committed ethical life
from the resources of secular ethical insight and concern. Nor should
we ignore the positive dimensions of a whole range of secular rituals,
which can nourish ethical commitment through the experience of com-
munity memory and the evocation of cherished symbols of resistance
and solidarity. Yet if the enactment of a universalist ethics urgently
requires sacrifice and hope, we are led back to religious questions,
since both the act of self-sacrifice and the virtue of hope are signs of
transcendence, projecting beyond a given context of ethical reciprocity
or the known facts that can recognizably ground optimism. If ethics
has this projective character, can it place its trust in reality, in “Being,”
so that this projective hope can be sustained by the faith that ethical
action is, in some sense, in accord with the true character, the ultimate
mystery, of things? And if so, is the union with this ultimate mystery
in religious ritual the sustaining ground of ethical commitment? In
what sense is the Eucharist the enactment of that union with God that
comes to terms with ethical failure, and that gives sacrifice and hope
the strength to challenge the historical power of evil?
This aspect of the Eucharist comes into prominence when we recall
that its immediate context was the rejection of Jesus’s proclamation
of the Kingdom of God. The proclamation of God’s rule, as a realm
of transformed relationships of justice, peace, and reconciliation, had
been rejected by religious and political authority. Jesus’s attempt to
convert his people to a new religious and ethical vision, sustained by
a new relationship to the Father, had failed: like the prophets before
him, Jesus would be executed by the powerful in reaction to any at-
tempt to challenge their interests. In this sense, the first Eucharist was
a coming-to-terms with the failure of an ethical ideal. It was not an
ideal preached in abstraction from the nature of reality, since it was
based on Jesus’s Abba relationship, and thus grounded in the ultimate

meaning of human ethical destiny. Yet it was an ethical ideal in the
sense that it was the proclamation of a vision of human relationships
that ran counter to the brutal reality of Jesus’s time and place, and it
failed to convert that reality.
I have argued that sacrifice and hope have a projective character in
relation to ethics. In the face of ethical failure, what sustaining ground
can render sacrifice something more than mere self-immolation and
hope stronger than optimistic fantasy? It is here, of course, that the
meaning of the first Eucharist for ethics is so fundamental. Its charac-
ter as an expression of eschatological hope is clearly apparent: “Never
again shall I drink from the fruit of the vine until that day when I drink
it new in the Kingdom of God” (Mark 14:25). In Eucharist: Symbol of
Transformation, William Crockett emphasizes the context of the first
Eucharist in a tradition of meals anticipating the eschatological ban-
quet; he argues that this eschatological perspective links the Eucharist
to an offer of a share in the blessings of eschatological salvation.16 It is
this eschatological character that makes the Eucharist a sacrament of
hope: Through participation in the Eucharist, the Christian becomes
one with Jesus’s hopeful expectation of drinking the new wine in the
Kingdom of God, an expectation confirmed by the Father in Jesus’s
resurrection from the dead.
In the Eucharist, then, ethical action is given a new ground: Its
sacrifice and hope can come to terms with ethical failure because of
God’s gift of Christ to the world. Its projective character is not an
ungrounded optimism but a hope sustained by eucharistic love. The
true meaning of ritual is to enact, in the mode of anamnesis, God’s gift
of his own life to us in Christ, a life that can sustain us in the midst of
ethical failure. In this sense, ritual does not distract from ethics, nor is
it irrelevant to it: It is in the eucharistic ritual that we share in God’s
gift of new life, a gift that energizes the hope that is fundamental to an
ethical commitment that will not despair in the face of historical evil.
As Paul writes in Romans 8: “If God is on our side, who is against
us? He did not spare his own Son, but surrendered him for us all; and
with this gift how can he fail to lavish upon us all he has to give?”
(31–32).
For a eucharistic theology, the bond with Being, with a sustaining

source of life, is in the concrete historical reality of God’s gift in Christ,
a transformation of human history that gives grounds for hope that
the vision of the Kingdom is not an ethical fantasy but the truest de-
scription of human destiny. In this way, the Eucharist is not the aban-
donment of ethics in favor of ritual, but rather its full realization as
hope for the Kingdom. In the Eucharist, the ethical is brought into the
heart of the liturgical relationship to God, so that the fragile resources
of human ethical self-transcendence can be nourished by communion
with God’s infinite love and sustained by hope in God’s reconciling
future.
For David Power, “a deep union with Christ himself in the escha-
tological gift of the Spirit is what is offered and promised [in the Eu-
charist], but it has to be guaranteed by a communion with him in
suffering through the way of discipleship on earth.”17 This note of
ethical response returns us to the ancient concerns of Amos and Isaiah:
In the Christian Eucharist, ritual is freed of all trace of scapegoating
and immolation through the free self-sacrifice of Jesus of Nazareth,
and it is made one with ethical commitment since it is the foretaste
of the Kingdom of God. Yet experience tells us that even the Eucha-
rist can become a ritual divorced from ethical action, especially when
participation in Christian ritual is less a sign of commitment to the
demands of Christian discipleship than a means of marking out vari-
ous kinds of essentially secular group identity or of affirming a purely
inward-looking spirituality. The urgency of Paul’s call at the beginning
of Romans 12 is justified in light of the human tendency to revert to
ritual self-affirmation at the expense of ethical discipleship: “There-
fore, my brothers, I implore you by God’s mercy to offer your very
selves to him: a living sacrifice, dedicated and fit for his acceptance, the
worship offered by mind and heart” (Romans 12:1).
If the true meaning of the bond between Eucharist and ethics is in
the transformation of ethical failure into hope, of despair into the dis-
ciple’s readiness to take up the cross of unselfish love, then the answer
to the charge of the irrelevancy of the Eucharist to ethics will be in the
hope and love of those who participate in it. A focus on the Eucharist
as God’s gift of new life in Christ amid the betrayal of ethical ideals
can give Christians both the confidence to stand for those ideals in
the public forum and the sobriety to recognize the reality of historical
evil and the intensity of human suffering. The search to communicate
with infinite being that is at the root of religious ritual is transformed
through the Eucharist into the recognition that the eternal God is to
be found in the image of the suffering Christ, who hopes for the new
wine of the Kingdom. Because of this, all those who suffer can know
that they are not thereby alienated from the divine source of life but
drawn towards it by the God who became a suffering human being.
At the same time, the vision of the Kingdom reminds us that suffering,
and most of all the imposition of suffering on others, is contrary to the
destiny of creation. Nourished by the Eucharist, Christian discipleship
commits itself to the ethical task of helping to make a foretaste of that
Kingdom possible, together with all those who recognize that the true
God is to be found in acts of love.
Finally, the Eucharist can give ethics a true sense of the meaning of
self-sacrifice. David Power emphasizes that Christian use of the lan-
guage of sacrifice “reverses the quest to restore order by preparing vic-
tims and appeasing a threatening anger, whether that of God or that
of spirits that abide in the universe. Instead it points to a communion
of solidarity in love in God’s spirit that withstands human judgment
and prevails in the midst of suffering.”18 Likewise, ethical self-sacrifice
should not be thought of as appeasing the force of unreasonable de-
mands, or of expiating guilt by acts of self-immolation. The abuse of
the call to self-sacrifice, by both religious and political powers, is a long
enough litany of suffering. It is not the discarding of individual life in
favor of a future state conjured up by various ideologies. If Christ’s
self-sacrifice was the highest expression of his fidelity to the vision of
the Kingdom, then a Christian conception of ethical self-sacrifice will
focus on fidelity to community, on forms of life that can enable indi-
viduals to flourish through the quality of their sustained commitment
to each other. It is part of a Christian response to the Eucharist to seek
and support such forms of life, so that the bonds of love can be made
more visible in the world.
Notes
1. I owe the use of the term “disembedding” to Anthony Giddens’s work, in

particular his Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late
Modern Age (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991).
2. John Paul II, Redemptor hominis (1979): 18; www.vatican.va/edocs/
ENG0218/_INDEX.HTM. Although Christian faith makes no predictions
about the future of particular institutions or forms of society in human
history, it can certainly discern and wholeheartedly support the develop-
ment of a global consciousness of human unity and dignity as part of a
response to God—support expressed by Paul VI in his reflections on in-
ternational cooperation for development and peace in Populorum pro-
gressio (1967): “Some would regard these hopes as vain flights of fancy.
It may be that these people are not realistic enough, and that they have
not noticed that the world is moving rapidly in a certain direction. Men
are growing more anxious to establish closer ties of brotherhood; despite
their ignorance, their mistakes, their offenses, and even their lapses into
barbarism and their wanderings from the path of salvation, they are
slowly making their way to the Creator, even without adverting to it”
(79). www.vatican.va/holy_father/paul_vi/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-vi
_enc_26031967_populorum_en.html.
3. In The Common Good and Christian Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 2002), David Hollenbach cautions against excessive expec-
tations for solidarity in large-scale societies, and, in particular, too close a
link between the virtues of solidarity and charity. At the same time, he
emphasizes that solidarity admits of degrees, and, even in large societies,
“from a common good perspective, justice calls for the minimal level of
solidarity required to enable all of society’s members to live with basic
dignity” (192).
4. For a valuable discussion of the role of trust and credibility in political
leadership, see John Kane, The Politics of Moral Capital (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2001), especially ch. 2, “Moral Capital and
Leadership.”
5. Rawls puts a similar expression of the proviso thus: “On the wide view,
citizens of faith who cite the Gospel parable of the Good Samaritan do
not stop there, but go on to give a public justification for this parable’s
conclusions in terms of political values. In this way, citizens who hold
different doctrines are reassured, and this strengthens the ties of civic
friendship.” The Law of Peoples with “The Idea of Public Reason Revis-
ited” (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 155.
6. In his Common Objects of Love (Grand Rapids, MI: William Eerdmans,
2002), Oliver O’Donovan argues that the source of a Christian concep-
tion of secularity lay in Judaism’s sense of unfulfilled promise, as a society
that knew itself to be a “contradiction to be endured in hope.” Secularity
is truly meaningful only in an eschatological perspective, since it is a ten-
sion between what is “not yet” and what will be fulfilled: “the virtue that
undergirds all secular politics is an expectant patience. What follows from
the rejection of belief is an intolerable tension between the need for mean-
ing in society and the only partial capacity of society to satisfy the need.
An unbelieving society has forgotten how to be secular” (42).
7. In this sense, as Jürgen Moltmann points out, our powers of self-destruc-
tion mean that we live in “the eternal present of what has traditionally
been called the ‘Last Judgment.’” The Coming of God: Christian Escha-
tology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996), 208.
8. In his illuminating analysis in The Politics of Hope (New York and Lon-
don: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986), Bernard P. Dauenhauer empha-
sizes that “My account of hope does not preclude reference to God, but
neither does it necessarily imply such a reference. Rather, on my account,
hope can be directed either to divine or human others or both. Further,
the kind of hope pertinent to the domain of politics is explicitly, though
not necessarily exclusively, directed towards other human beings” (109).
Yet, although hope is a gift of the Spirit that is independent of explicit
religious beliefs, the conviction of a future always open to human striving
is inconsistent with an atheistic belief in the meaninglessness of the uni-
verse. For Zygmunt Bauman, in his The Individualized Society (Cam-
bridge/Oxford: Polity Press/Blackwell, 2001), part of the contemporary
process of individualization is the lack of cultural means to interpret such
dispositions as hope, contending that what we experience is “the denial
of collective public vehicles of transcendence and the abandonment of the
individual to the lonely struggle with a task which most individuals lack
the resources to perform alone” (5). Bauman’s Liquid Modernity (Cam-
bridge/Oxford: Polity Press/Blackwell, 2000) emphasizes the negative ef-
fects that this process of individualization is having on citizenship (36–
38).
9. Whether the Kingdom of God is a “rupture” with human history, or the
fulfillment of what is “immanent” in history is a matter of fundamental
theological debate. Moltmann’s The Coming of God is strongly critical of

Pannenberg’s conception of “universal history,” since, he contends, it mis-
interprets the apocalyptic character of key biblical texts. For Moltmann,
the “apocalyptic expectations of rupture and end . . . do not lend history
any meaning, but withdraw from it every legitimation” (134). Yet, as Pan-
nenberg notes in response, the promise of hope must stand in some sort
of positive relationship to the present reality of the one to whom it is ad-
dressed, since otherwise it becomes threat rather than promise. System-
atische Theologie, vol. 3, 199. A key point, in my own view, is that what
is “immanent” has developed within a salvation history formed by God’s
providence, so that the Kingdom of God will include those works of love
performed in response to the gifts of God within that salvation history.
Richard Bauckham and Trevor Hart, in their Hope against Hope: Chris-
tian Eschatology in Contemporary Context (London: Darton, Longman
and Todd, 1999), argue that “the potential for or capacity to produce the
new does not lie latent within the old, but relies utterly on a new work of
the God of the resurrection” (80), a conception that enables Christians to
“live up to the hilt in this life but with their sights set firmly on a horizon
lying beyond it” (209). Yet I would argue that the conjunction of hope for
the Kingdom and commitment to this world is better grounded in Gau-
dium et spes’s recognition of the sense in which this grace-filled history
can foreshadow the Kingdom of God: “When we have spread on earth the
fruits of our nature and our enterprise—human dignity, brotherly com-
munion and freedom—according to the command of the Lord and in his
Spirit, we will find them once again, cleansed this time from the stain of
sin, illuminated and transfigured, when Christ presents to his Father an
eternal and universal kingdom” (Flannery, 938, para. 39).
10. This is notably stated in Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, 1865: “The
Almighty has His own purposes. ‘Woe unto the world because of offenses;
for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the
offense cometh.’ If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those
offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which,
having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove,
and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe
due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any de-
parture from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God
always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this
mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it
continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and
fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood
drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as
was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said ‘the judgments
of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’” The Book of Great Amer-
ican Documents, ed. Vincent Wilson, Jr. (Brookeville, MD: American His-
tory Research Associates, 1987), 78–79.
11. “I try to think of the Labor movement, not as putting an extra sixpence
into somebody’s pocket, or making somebody Prime Minister or Premier,
but as a movement bringing something better to the people, better stan-
dards of living, greater happiness to the mass of the people. We have a
great objective—the light on the hill—which we aim to reach by working
for the betterment of mankind not only here but anywhere we may give a
helping hand. If it were not for that, the Labor movement would not be
worth fighting for.” For background and interpretation of this speech by
Joseph Benedict Chifley, see Sean Scalmer “The Light on the Hill,” at
http://workers.labor.net.au/17/c_historicalfeature_chifley.html (accessed
July 3rd, 2008), and David Day, Chifley (Sydney: HarperCollins, 2001),
485.
2. The key passage, especially through its role in Peter’s discourse in Acts 2,
1
is Joel 3:1: “Then afterward I will pour out my spirit upon all mankind.
Your sons and daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams,
your young men shall see visions.” In the Old Testament, “it is clear . . .
that in broad circles in Israel, even those which are incontestably theo-
cratic, the dream was regarded as a regular means by which Yahweh re-
vealed himself.” Albrecht Oepke, “’ονÎ±ρ,” Theological Dictionary of the
New Testament, vol. 5, ed. Gerhard Friedrich (Grand Rapids, MI: Wil-
liam Eerdmans, 1967), 230. Yet there is also strong prophetic criticism of
any reliance on dreams as a source of revelation, particularly in the strug-
gle between Jeremiah and false prophecy, cf. Jeremiah 23:25, 28: “I have
heard the prophets who prophesy lies in my name say, ‘I had a dream! I
had a dream!’ . . . Let the prophet who has a dream recount his dream; let
him who has my word speak my word truthfully!” In the New Testament,
apart from some references in Acts, the key references to dreams as pri-
vate revelation are in Matthew 1 and 2 (1:20, 2:13, 2:19). Jesus himself
never refers to dreams, and “no New Testament witness ever thought of
basing the central message, the Gospel, or an essential part of it, on
dreams” (Oepke, “’ονÎ±ρ,” 235).
13. Probably the most memorable use of this image in modern political ora-
tory is Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech of 1963. As part
of the background culture, King’s speech derives much of its power from
its explicit use of biblical imagery and the language of Negro spirituals, in
ways that are also communicated through shareable ethical ideals. It is
significant that he links his use of “dream” with the preexisting notion of
“the American dream,” developing this to a vision of future equality and
freedom: “Let us not wallow in the valley of despair. I say to you today
my friends—so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomor-
row, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American
dream.” www.stanford.edu/group/King/publications/speeches/address
_at_march_on_washington.pdf (accessed July 3, 2008).
14. Walter Dietrich, Jesaja und die Politik (Munich: Christian Kaiser, 1976),
216. Dietrich argues that for Isaiah the priestly torah or teaching, associ-
ated with the temple cult, had become irrelevant and worthless, since it
served only to distract from the true torah of justice between human
beings.
15. In the previous chapter, I attempted to illustrate the character of Christian
ethics as both drawing from tradition but communicable beyond those
participating in tradition-bearing communities by reflecting on noninstru-
mental relationships as definitively embodied in Jesus Christ, and at the
same time as inherently attractive and fulfilling ways of life that can be
communicated and realized in the pluralist context of liberal societies.
16. William Crockett, Eucharist: Symbol of Transformation (New York:
Pueblo, 1989), 5–14.
17. David Power, The Eucharistic Mystery (New York: Crossroads, 1992),
294.
18. Ibid., 322.
8
chapter five
Two Stories of Liberal Society and

Contemporary Catholic Identity
The previous chapters of this book have emphasized how much the
Church has to contribute to liberal societies in order to assist them to
tell their better story: in chapter two, through a theology of Church,
Kingdom, and secularity; in chapter three, through a Christian theol-
ogy of the virtues of noninstrumental relationships; and in chapter
four, through the theology of hope and the Eucharist. In this final
chapter I will be considering the effect of the Church’s relationship
to the two stories of liberal society on its own life. How does its rela-
tionship to liberal society affect the Church’s own process of identity-
formation in the contemporary world? Since the Second Vatican
Council, the Catholic Church has been involved in a profound and
often painful process of reforming its identity in relation to the world,
and much of that process has to do with its relationship to liberal
societies.
Contemporary concern about the meaning and shape of Catholic
identity reveals both an anxiety about the possible loss of identity,
but also, more positively, a recognition that the Catholic tradition can
be embodied in and through different sociocultural delineations, aspi-
rations, and achievements in response to changing historical circum-
stances and challenges. These changes in historical identity are not,
for Catholic faith, changes in the theological identity of the Church,
which springs from the once-and-for-all character of revelation and
the fidelity of the Spirit; but they are, nevertheless, changes in the ways
in which the Church addresses itself to the world and thereby in the
ways in which it expresses or crystallizes dimensions of Christian life
that are implicit in the tradition. In different historical periods, the
â•‡ 143
144â•‡â•‡ Chapter Five
Church is challenged to reflect afresh on the meaning of the Gospel,

so that it can shape its own life and its evangelizing message in ways
that genuinely do speak to contemporaries. In some periods—such as
the time of the classical councils—this resulted in the formulation and
enunciation of dogma. In others, such as at the time of Vatican II, it
was not expressed in new dogma but rather in new understandings of
the Church’s own life and of its relationship to the world.
Since Vatican II the Catholic Church has undergone a process that
has reshaped its social presence and deeply affected its sense of iden-
tity. The preconciliar forms of identity were no longer felt to be ad-
equate to meet the needs of the contemporary world. Yet it is clear that
the specific shape of the identity of the Catholic Church today is still
deeply contested, and much of that contestation stems from the ques-
tion how it should relate to liberal societies.
“Catholicism” in the “Age of Mobilization” and Its Demise
In order to gain some historical perspective on this question, let us

first consider the social identity that the Church had in Western so-
cieties prior to Vatican II. Here I will be drawing, in particular, on
Peter Hünermann’s essay “Catholicism in Europe: its diversity and
its future—an ecclesiological reflection”;1 and on Charles Taylor’s A
Secular Age.2 For both of these writers, in the period from the French
Revolution up to about 1960, the Catholic Church’s relationship to
modernizing liberal societies was characterized by practices of mobili-
zation and defensive demarcation. By considering the features of this
relationship, we can gain some historical insight into the challenges
and opportunities that face the Church today in its attempt to develop
a new response to liberal societies in the contemporary world.
Hünermann argues that the word “Catholicism” came into wide-
spread use only after the French Revolution, when the Catholic Church
ceased to be the established Church and the religious background and
underpinning to culture and society, and when it became instead an of-
ten beleaguered social movement—a movement that, in different ways
in different countries, attempted to assert and defend itself using the
new tools of civil rights that were the positive heritage of the French
Two Stories of Liberal Society and Contemporary Catholic Identityâ•‡â•‡ 145
Revolution.3 This new social phenomenon of “Catholicism,” which

became a largely lay movement under the direction of the hierarchy,
sought to define itself against dominant political and social groups
(e.g., Protestant majorities in Anglo-Saxon countries or dominant an-
ticlerical liberal elites in Latin countries) and to develop a range of
concrete communal and institutional identities: “What is meant by the
term ‘Catholicism’ or the ‘Catholic movement’ is the totality of those
tendencies and institutional formations . . . through which Catholics
react to the post-revolutionary situation, in order to affirm themselves
and their claims in society on the basis of the new possibilities offered
by public freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, etc.”4
In the France of the ancien régime, there was no separate entity
called “Catholicism,” since the Church was an omnipresent dimen-
sion of national life. After the French Revolution, the Catholic Church
was disestablished and largely lost its leading role in politics and cul-
ture. Rather than being the dominant cultural institution, it became a
particular group within national life—competing with other groups,
such as the anticlerical liberals or socialists, for popular allegiance.
“Catholicism” had to maintain its identity in cultural and political
struggles with other groups. However, in this process it could use the
new political tools of the liberal revolutions: freedom of the press, of
assembly, of electing political representatives.
Hünermann notes that, in past epochs, the Church had adopted—
and influenced—the political forms and practices of the wider soci-
ety: the Church’s institutional structures had imitated many features
of imperial, monarchical, and aristocratic polities. However, in the
postrevolutionary period, the new liberal institutions and practices did
not become part of the institutional life of the Church. They were,
however, taken up by lay Catholics in order to defend and assert their
own identity in this new situation: lay Catholics maintained their own
identity within society by forming political parties (e.g., the Catholic
Center Party in Germany), by developing their own newspapers and
periodicals, and by establishing their own cultural and political groups
and organizations. In societies with a Protestant majority, in particular
the Anglo–Saxon world of the United States and the British Empire, an
essentially similar process took place: whereas, in the British Empire,
Catholics had formerly suffered under political and legal restrictions,

the development of liberal institutions and practices gave them civil
rights and allowed them to become a social group able to maintain its
identity by invoking these civil rights.
So, both in the postrevolutionary formerly Catholic states and in
the Protestant British Empire, “Catholicism” developed as a largely
lay political, social, and cultural movement that exercised the new
liberal rights in order to maintain its identity. However, these liberal
rights could not be exercised within the church itself: there was no
longer a reflection of general political institutions in the institutional
life of the church. Lay Catholics used the tools of liberal society to
defend the rights of an institution that was strongly hierarchical and
authoritarian in its own internal life. Charles Taylor’s analysis of this
development is in essential agreement with Hünermann. For Taylor
the period from the French revolution to 1960 can be called the “Age
of Mobilization.” After the demise of the ancien régime, both religious
and secular groups sought to mobilize their followers in particular
ways. Taylor draws on Emile Durkheim’s understanding of religion
as the expression of social union to clarify the difference between the
ancien régime and the Age of Mobilization: whereas the ancien ré-
gime could be called “palaeo-Durkheimian” in that it was based on
the union of throne and altar, the relationship between religion and
society after the French and American revolutions can be called “neo-
Durkheimian,” in that, although these revolutions abolished estab-
lished churches, religion was still regarded as crucial to maintaining
civilized order and had great power to mobilize, organize, and com-
mand group allegiance.5
For Hünermann, this particular kind of Catholic identity began to
dissolve from the mid–twentieth century, a process that was hastened
by Vatican II. He emphasizes that it dissolved from its theological and
ecclesiological foundations: its failure to embody the new freedoms of
liberal society within the Church itself—and not only as a means of
defending the Church against external forces—meant that it was no
longer sustainable by the mid-twentieth century. The various forms
of pastoral and social engagement of “Catholicism” had presupposed
a socialization in faith through a Catholic religious culture that was

starting to break up by the mid-twentieth century. Whereas in earlier
times the personal search for meaning led to a commitment to Catho-
lic faith as the only socially available religious option, liberal freedoms
now offered a range of options for the exploration of personal mean-
ing. This change was exacerbated by the fact that “Catholicism” had
largely passed on the practices of faith by processes of socialization,
essentially neglecting the question of personal religious conversion.
The social expressions of Catholicism began to lose their inner plau-
sibility once this process of socialization no longer led to faith com-
mitment, as the question of personal choice and personal conversion
loomed larger. 6
Taylor sums up the change in terms of a transition from the “Age
of Mobilization” to the “Age of Authenticity.” Like Hünermann, he
emphasizes the tensions implicit in the way in which the Catholic
Church of the Age of Mobilization linked group allegiance and per-
sonal faith: the Church had difficulty “seeing how contradictory the
goal ultimately is, of a Church tightly held together by a strong hier-
archical authority, which will nevertheless be filled with practitioners
of heartfelt devotion. . . . The irreversible aspect of Vatican II is that
it brought this contradiction to the surface.”7 The key aspects of the
cultural revolution of the 1960s were, first, that it “undermined the
neo-Durkheimian alignments of faith with political identity; and sec-
ond, it undercut the close connection of religious faith and a certain
sexual morality, one of the important fusions of religion with sup-
posedly civilization-bearing morality.”8 For Taylor, the tragedy of the
Church’s teaching in sexual ethics is that it still, at least in appearance,
suffers from defects such as “the denigration of sexuality, horror at
the Dionysian, fixed gender roles, or a refusal to discuss identity is-
sues,” together with an “unfortunate fusion of Christian sexual ethics
with certain models of the ‘natural.’” This has a strongly repellent
effect in “the Age of Authenticity, with a widespread popular culture
in which individual self-realization and sexual fulfillment are inter-
woven.”9 The “irony is that this alienation takes place” just when
Vatican II removed many of the other obstacles to evangelization in
the contemporary world: “Unquestionably, clericalism, moralism and

the primacy of fear were largely repudiated. Other elements of the
complex were less clearly addressed.”10
Taylor’s and Hünermann’s reflections on the possibilities and chal-
lenges for the Church in the post-Vatican II world, in this Age of Au-
thenticity, are also in fundamental agreement, although reflecting their
respective disciplinary perspectives—for Hünermann theological and
ecclesiological, for Taylor philosophical and sociological. Hünermann
argues that the contemporary task of evangelization must be focused
on personal evangelization and a reform of Church structures. Evan-
gelization must now be undertaken on the basis of an understanding
of the individual person in modern, liberal societies—an individual
with a wide range of personal choice, and who will come to faith
through personal conversion. Socialization processes can no longer
be assumed to result in personal faith—indeed, Hünermann argues,
European Catholicism is rapidly ceasing to be able to pass on faith
traditions and practices.11 In terms of structures, the Church must be
willing to embody within its own life the “form and characteristics of
public life in the age in which it finds itself,” just as it did in the past.12
This is an implication of the Catholic tradition, which lives in dialogue
with rational truths publicly affirmed in a given epoch: the key “ra-
tional truth” affirmed in contemporary consciousness is human rights,
which imply, in political terms, the separation of powers and a free
flow of information, which is “profoundly at variance with the social
structure that the Catholic Church is trying today to maintain.”13
For Taylor, “we no longer live in societies in which the widespread
sense can be maintained that faith in God is central to the ordered
life we (partially) enjoy.” In this world “the fate of belief depends
much more than before on powerful intuitions of individuals, radiat-
ing out to others. And these intuitions will be far from self-evident to
others again.”14 Yet in an age that emphasizes personal search and
self-expression, there will still be a collective connection. An indi-
vidual search may still lead to strong community allegiances, based
in traditional forms and beliefs: “The new framework has a strongly
individualist component, but this does not necessarily mean that the
content will be individuating.”15 Much of the tension within religious
communities in our time, he argues, is the “site of a battle between

neo- and post-Durkheimian construals of our condition,”16 especially
in terms of the respective roles of spiritual authority and of contem-
porary modes of spiritual quest. Taylor emphasizes that we cannot
return to a neo-Durkheimian world of group mobilization, nor should
we forget its faults of hypocrisy and stultification.17 The flaccid and
self-seeking modes of spirituality of the Age of Authenticity, in turn,
should not be identified with the whole movement.18 In the terms that
I have used in this book, what Taylor emphasizes is a relationship of
individual choice to tradition as resource rather than as constraint.
In appropriating tradition-as-resource, individuals can indeed identify
with and be formed by communal forms of faith and worship, but
their choice to do so has become more and more a matter of personal
orientation and discernment.
Contemporary Catholic Identity: Between Solidarity

and Demarcation
The analyses of Hünermann and Taylor demonstrate that Catholicism

in the period 1800–1960, from the French Revolution to the Second
Vatican Council, developed a distinctive identity characterized by
powerful practices of demarcation from both secular liberalism and
anticlericalism and from Protestantism. These demarcatory practices
included, for example, mobilization in a range of groups and sodalities,
Church laws against mixed marriages, massive commitment to Catho-
lic education, and theological emphases and devotional practices that
emphasized the contrasts between Catholicism and Protestantism.
The end of this period of stringent and defensive demarcation—of
the old battles against the militantly antireligious expressions of the
Enlightenment, and the gradual disappearance of sectarianism in fa-
vor of ecumenism—has been an enormously liberating phenomenon
for the Catholic Church, a liberation that has enabled it to focus in-
creasingly on the task of witnessing to God’s love in solidarity with hu-
man suffering in a global context. Yet this profound and far-reaching
historical change in the Church’s situation has also required a mas-
sive change in the sense of identity of Church communities. As John
Thornhill writes in Sign and Promise: A Theology of the Church for

a Changing World, the post–Vatican II Church is in the midst of the
challenge of ideological change. Thornhill uses the word “ideology”
here in the broadest sense to describe the “consensus arrived at by a
particular group in history, through which they achieve their social
identity and common purpose.”19 For Thornhill the sheer magnitude
of the task of ideological change, in this sense of the word, calling for
the crystallization of new identities inspired by Vatican II, goes far
to explain why there has been so much tension and disillusion in the
Catholic Church after the euphoria associated—for many—with the
Council. As he emphasizes: “While it was not easy to appreciate at
the time, in retrospect we may recognize that such an outcome was to
be expected: it was inevitable that the Council’s decisions should give
rise to a painful period of transformation and uncertainty.”20
The work of the Council hastened the process by which Catho-
lics were “disembedded” from this previous identity, formed in post-
Reformation and postrevolutionary conflicts. It empowered them
both to return to the biblical and patristic sources of tradition—John
XXIII’s approfondimento—and to commit themselves to a universal
human solidarity in the contemporary world—his aggiornamento.
Yet these resources for a new theological identity—an identity that
has borne such rich fruit in new biblical and liturgical expressions of
Catholicism—have yet to find a stable ecclesial and social identity. The
end of the old forms of identity has been accompanied by a marked
decline in Church attendance and other markers of Catholic practice.
Paradoxically, the new openness and commitment to universal soli-
darity of the Catholic Church has developed at the same time as a
decline in formal religious practice, in the willingness to participate in
local Catholic eucharistic communities. The capacity of the Catholic
Church to serve the world is threatened by the diminution of local
communities, especially in the younger generation, which has been the
accompaniment of this deeply rooted process of ideological change.21
As Taylor notes, the irony of the Church’s contemporary situation is
that the rejection of institutionalized religion by many inhabitants of
the Age of Authenticity coincided—chronologically speaking—with
the very real achievements of the Council in freeing the Church of

some of the chief obstacles to evangelization in the modern world.
The gradual dissolution of the crystallizations of socioreligious
identity that Hünermann and Taylor analyze has been accompanied
by a new freedom and universality, a new sense of the Church’s call-
ing to be in solidarity with—to quote the first paragraph of Vatican
II’s Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World—“the
joys and hopes, griefs and anxieties, of the human beings of this age,
especially of those who are poor and afflicted.”22 Yet this new sense of
universal solidarity, because it has been accompanied by a dissolution
of the particular identities of the past, has developed hand in hand
with the urgent need to re-form the Church’s communal identity, the
local vitality that is the essential basis for a commitment to solidarity
on a global scale. If a new commitment to universal solidarity tran-
scends the defensive and demarcating postures of the past, what will
be the form of a new identity that will provide the strength to maintain
this openness to the world and commitment to stand with others in
their suffering? Can such openness foster new and vibrant communi-
ties that can resist the tendency to set up new forms of defensive or
self-affirming demarcation, and constantly renew the call to witness to
human solidarity in the name of the Gospel?
The major concern of this book is the Church’s relationship to the
two stories of liberal society. In this light, a constitutive dimension of
the Church’s process of identity-formation in the post-Vatican II world
must be to affirm the struggle for human rights in resistance to the li-
bido dominandi, which has so much of its contemporary expression in
the lust to instrumentalize and consume. In doing so, the Church will
be supporting the positive story of liberal society. In solidarity with all
people of good will, the Church can shape its sociocultural identity in
terms of the struggle against the reduction of individual freedom to
the selfish, grasping will in politics, economics, sexuality, and all other
forms of life. Its principal focus will be to resist a globalizing ideology
of individualist consumption, an instrumentalization of humanity and
of planet Earth itself. In this sense, a Catholic conception of human
rights, as a key part of Catholic identity, is directed against whatever
consumes the human person, whatever reduces the person to a com-

modity, whether that be an embryo reduced to a tool for research or a
process worker reduced to wage slavery.
There is, however, another possible form of identity for the Church
in liberal societies: that is, to see its main opponent as the exponents
of the Age of Authenticity itself. A large proportion of the members of
liberal societies are willing to support the Church or are at least poten-
tial allies in the struggle for the common good, but they are critical of
the Church’s teaching in a range of matters to do with life ethics and
sexual ethics. An appeal to personal autonomy and personal authen-
ticity is central to this criticism. One option for the Church’s future
presence in liberal societies is to make opposition to and demarcation
from these groups the principal factor in identity-formation. Inevita-
bly, this will include an insistence on the Church’s teaching authority
in the relevant areas in specific and comprehensive detail—an insis-
tence directed not only at its external critics, but also at those within
the Church who cannot give assent to all aspects of this teaching, and
who thereby jeopardize the clarity of this project of identity.
I want to argue that the Church should aim to shape its identity
within liberal societies principally through affirmation of the positive
story of liberal society, and in defense of humanity against what is
truly its negative story, rather than in demarcation from what it judges
to be distortions or falsifications of individual autonomy or authentic-
ity. This is not because what is at stake in questions of life ethics and
sexual ethics is in any sense unimportant. It is rather because the need
for the Church to oppose the instrumentalization and commodifica-
tion of humanity on a global scale is a more fundamental and uni-
versal criterion of identity: There can be no doubt that the Church’s
mission is to defend those who are oppressed by the libido dominandi.
There can be no dialogue with the lust for power, although there can
always be a call for conversion. To understand the Church’s social
identity in this way is not a matter of opposing particular groups of
people but rather the structures of sin themselves.23 Because of this, its
mission is both very difficult and truly Christian. It is difficult because
it is not a demarcation from particular, readily identifiable, groups of
people or ideas but an attack on the sinful tendencies to domination
and commodification that can be found in all social structures; and it

is Christian because it recognizes the universality of sin, especially in
ourselves. In contrast, dialogue is called for in relation to the contem-
porary concern for autonomy and authenticity, with those who work
for the common good in many areas of life and yet reject the Church’s
teaching on abortion, euthanasia, and areas of sexual ethics. Clearly,
this is often an extremely difficult form of dialogue, yet it is worth pur-
suing with those who share the Church’s concern to feed the hungry
and liberate the captive. To understand the contemporary challenge
in this way is not to underestimate the importance of ethical issues to
do with autonomy, but rather to highlight the temptations of forming
Catholic identity in such a way as to make demarcation from these
aspects of liberal society the crucial criterion.
Human Rights and Catholic Identity
What are the challenges for the Church in forming its contempo-
rary social identity in solidarity with the global struggle for human
rights? First of all, positively and uncontroversially, we can affirm that
the promotion of human rights is central to the contemporary self-
understanding of the Church, and that it has been so at least since
the promulgation of Pacem in terris. Consider, for example, Paul VI’s
address to the General Assembly of the United Nations in October
1965;24 the affirmation by the 1971 Synod of Bishops that the pro-
motion of justice is a “constitutive dimension of the preaching of the
Gospel”;25 and—among many possible statements—John Paul II’s No-
vember 2000 address marking the fiftieth anniversary of the European
convention on human rights:26 in all these statements, there can be
no doubt that the papacy has given the promotion of human rights a
key role in the Church’s relationship to the contemporary world and
thereby in the process of shaping a renewed Catholic identity that has
been underway since Vatican II and before.
The positive potential of conceiving Catholic identity with hu-
man rights as a fundamental concern and criterion is manifold. In the
first place, this form of identity does not have demarcation from an-
tagonistic ideological forces or estranged Christian communities as a
constitutive feature. Whereas nineteenth- and early twentieth-century

Catholicism was given much of its familiar sociocultural shape by de-
fensive demarcation from secularist movements and from Protestant-
ism, a Catholic identity dedicated to the promotion of human rights
is capable of initiating a wide range of alliances for a cause that is
gradually being recognized as the moral lingua franca of the human
race. Part of this, of course, is the result of a more fortunate historical
situation resulting from the development of Christian ecumenism and
from the demise of Marxism-Leninism as a state system in Europe
and as a creed capable of dynamic political mobilization in a global
context. However, this new sense of identity also has its roots in the
historically epoch-making theological insight, expressed most compre-
hensively in Gaudium et spes, that the Church is most truly itself when
it is at the service of all humanity. This insight was given a specifically
Christological shape in the emphasis on the union of Jesus Christ with
every human person, in whom we see the face of Christ.
In response to a globalized ideology of individual consumption, the
Church can proclaim a vision of humanity that, while not denying the
value of technological progress, sets such progress within a rich and
multidimensional context of human existence in the light of Christian
faith. In response to the vast distances of place and awareness in the
global economy between producer and consumer, which so militate
against solidarity, the Church can affirm its nature as communion:
a communion of local communities, which affords so many oppor-
tunities for mutual awareness, contact, and support between fellow
Christians—and between human beings of all creeds, and of radically
different national and economic circumstances. This commitment to
global solidarity with the oppressed, articulated through a philosophy
of human rights, is motivated and energized by a theological vision of
the human person and human community. As Robert Schreiter argues
in The New Catholicity: Theology between the Global and the Local,
the Church’s support for human rights is a “global theological flow,”
an example of a “theological discourse that, while not uniform or
systemic, represents a series of linked, mutually intelligible discourses
that address the contradictions or failures of global systems.”27
This “global theological flow” of commitment to human rights has

many different sources within the life of the Catholic Church: among
these are Vatican II itself, especially the Pastoral Constitution on the
Church in the Modern World; the writings of Paul VI, including his
Evangelii nuntiandi of 1975, which reflects on the relationship between
liberation and salvation; the writings of John Paul II, in particular
his Sollicitudo rei socialis of 1988, with its emphasis on international
solidarity, and Centesimus annus of 1991, with its reflections on the
global economic system after the fall of communism; the commitment
of the late Jesuit General, Pedro Arrupe, to lead the Society of Jesus
to take up the “preferential option for the poor”; and the influence of
both Latin American liberation theology and various forms of a theol-
ogy of public life and social justice in Europe and the United States.
These specifically theological and reflective contributions are instances
of resistance to the ideology of individualist consumerism and wealth
accumulation; others include networks of solidarity, which include ev-
erything from the international Caritas networks to partnerships be-
tween brother and sister schools in affluent and poorer countries. Such
networks can assist in overcoming the remoteness of the producers of
the consumer goods of globalized systems, helping in various ways to
show us the face of those whose harsh and low-paid work is the un-
seen hand behind the high-tech products that the members of affluent
societies consume.
At the same time, this new and very promising shape of Catholic
identity gives rise to a number of profound challenges and critical is-
sues, both in the internal life of the Church and in its external rela-
tionships. Internally, an emphasis on commitment to and advocacy of
human rights can help to give Catholic communities a more prophetic
character; yet it also has challenges in terms of sustaining long-term
motivation, since it is less concerned with affirmation and consola-
tion than with prophetic challenge and its inevitable risks. Precon-
ciliar Catholicism was, of course, a very demanding form of life in
many ways: in its often austere and rigorous spiritual ideals, and in
its high demands on personal behavior and family life (for example,
in the expectation of large families with all the attendant sacrifices).
However, it is also true that the point and the social context for being
Catholic—for maintaining an identity—were clear and palpable, since
confessional and ideological differences loomed so large in the imme-
diate social environment. This form of Catholic identity, although it
bore fruit in many extraordinary forms of practical compassion, was
less concerned with changing the world or the condition of humanity
as a whole than with maintaining Catholic institutions against their
opponents, with the imperatives of mobilization and demarcation.
A great challenge to a sense of identity based on the promotion of
human rights is that it is no longer concerned with maintenance or
with social demarcation, but with the affirmation of a global cause
with many potential allies. It is not something exclusively Catholic,
although it is something truly Catholic. A Catholic commitment to
human rights is not intensified by a sense of demarcation from other
readily identifiable ideological communities, since its struggle is with
the universal “structures of sin.” Its motivation must come from a
sense of human solidarity experienced in light of the Gospel as a part
of Christian formation. Of course, in the struggle for human rights,
Catholics will be opposed to all those who advocate unfettered exploi-
tation or domination, but this is a much less well-defined and socially
identifiable “other” than the confessional or ideological demarcations
that gave preconciliar Catholicism much of its social identity. (This
is generally true in the context of developed economies, although in
developing countries the face of the economic or social oppressor may
well be much more painfully visible.) Much of the energy of the Cath-
olic promotion of human rights is about forming alliances and inform-
ing conscience for the sake of the common good, so that, although it is
certainly shaped by the character of Catholic social teaching, Catho-
lic identity is focused much more on the needs of those whose rights
are oppressed than on the need to preserve appropriate markers of
demarcation.
An aspect of this is the complexity and wide-ranging character of
the questions involved: there is no single issue in the socioeconomic
debate, for example, that has anything like the same resonance as the
question of abortion or its role in marking Catholic identity. This com-
plexity is addressed by papal and conciliar social teaching, and by
the many different national expressions and theological developments

of this teaching. Embodying this teaching in the process of identity-
formation is, however, a formidable challenge, partly because of the
very fact that it is not a simplistic denunciation of capitalism, but
rather a critical appraisal of the market economy in relation to funda-
mental ethical and anthropological criteria. The oft-quoted quip that
“the Church’s social teaching is its best kept secret” hints nervously
at some difficult realities: the difficulty of communicating a complex
critique of the market economy; the human weaknesses of Church
members preoccupied with their own personal and family problems;
the temptation the hierarchy can experience to emphasize other issues
that have more demarcatory potential; and the lazy preference of the
secular media for copy that will confirm these demarcations on ques-
tions of individual choice rather than challenge some of the fundamen-
tal social practices and vices of Western societies.
One particular challenge is the difficulty of making a constructively
critical attitude to the global market economy a part of this identity.
One reason for this is that market capitalism and its phenomena are
such powerful givens that it is very difficult for many Catholics to
conceive of any alternative, and it is much less an identifiable “other”
than it is the ever-present background to our lives and decisions. An-
other important factor in demoralizing criticism is the extraordinary
technological progress made possible by the microchip revolution. For
consumers in affluent countries, globalization is associated with the
breathtaking speed of development of computers, the Internet, e-mail,
mobile phones, and a host of related technologies. This technological
revolution is so powerful and its products so astonishing that they can
give even the ordinary consumer a sense of being connected with an
innovative and dynamic world, a world made possible by economic
globalization. This is particularly true since they enable much greater
individual mobility and possibilities for communication. This em-
powerment of individual choice discourages criticism: surely a system
that produces possibilities like these should not be held back by gov-
ernmental or bureaucratic controls. Much of the marketing of these
goods betrays a conception of human nature as individualist, com-
petitive, striving for growth and power, unlimited by human frailty,
and untrammeled by traditional or communal bonds. This threatens

to become a new global ideology, an ersatz humanism of individual
consumption and empowerment.
This ideology and the consumer goods associated with it, together
with the remoteness of those who produce these goods, tend to make
the global market system a given that is far beyond the comprehen-
sion of the ordinary consumer. The demands of relevant and effective
criticism of this situation are high: because solidarity with those who
are remote is intrinsically difficult, because solutions to the injustices
of globalization are beyond the scope of national governments, and
because consumers are eager to share in the benefits of the microchip
revolution. Many Western consumers would be willing to pay more
for these products if they were confident that this would benefit those
who produce them. Yet achieving this goal depends on forms of orga-
nized solidarity that have the commitment and endurance to unsettle
and circumvent the power and elusiveness of globalizing economic
interests. This solidarity will require sustained moral commitment at
a personal level.28
How can the Church form its members in an identity marked by
solidarity with the global cause of human rights? In the first place
it must encourage practices of moral imagination, of empathy, with
those who suffer from the injustices of the globalizing economic sys-
tem and from political oppression and violence. Such practices are
always demanding, particularly as every member of a local Catholic
community has his or her own pain, his or her own need for consola-
tion, however comfortable or affluent their lives might be. It must also
encourage intellectual practices of discernment, the ability of mem-
bers of the Church to distance themselves from the givenness of the
economic system and its outcomes. Through a range of processes of
education, drawing on Catholic social teaching and on public sources
of information, Catholic communities can assist their members to
become aware of the critical issues at stake and the urgent need for
change. It must also encourage and inspire practices of self-giving,
the willingness to make sacrifices for those in need, whether these
are relatively modest contributions of time, money, and expertise, or
more demanding commitments of a front-line character. In the nature
of personal vocation, the character and scope of this self-giving is a

uniquely individual matter.
These virtues of empathy, discernment, and self-giving are formed
in Christian communities through hearing and meditating on Scripture.
The prophetic dimension of Scripture challenges Christians to distance
themselves from taken-for-granted circumstances and to confront them-
selves with the question: Is this, can this be, part of the Kingdom? Is it
God’s will that human beings, made in his image, should live like this?
Especially through the Psalms, Christians are empowered to respond to
God, to tell the story of their own struggles and consolations in com-
munal prayer. Most of all, the Scriptures communicate the person of
Jesus, the one in whom the Kingdom was and is present.
The virtues and practices that can shape an ecclesial identity marked
by solidarity with global suffering and prophetic criticism of the struc-
tures of sin make constant and extraordinary demands. The previous
chapter sought to emphasize the crushing burdens that the ethical con-
sciousness can impose on us when it attempts to respond to a world
of pain. For Christians, these burdens can only be borne through the
grace of God: Only by living on the bread of the Word and the bread
of the Eucharist can Christians have the strength to face a suffering
world with joy and hope. The Word is heard and preached, and the
Eucharist is celebrated, in eucharistic communities: it is in the experi-
ence of communion, of union with the triune God and with each other,
that Christians receive the strength to live in solidarity with a suffer-
ing world. The identity of the Church as missionary, as universally
human, is grounded in and energized by its identity as communio, a
community drawn together by the Spirit to remember Jesus of Naza-
reth and to share his life.29 These eucharistic communities are intrinsi-
cally local: Within these local communities individual members of the
Church can receive the care and affirmation that can help to give them
the strength to look outwards, to live within the Church as a universal
communion that seeks to practice universal solidarity. 30
I have argued that a constitutive aspect of the Church’s contem-
porary identity is support for human rights in a universal context,
a support that affirms the best features of liberal societies and that
identifies the structures of sin in the urge to dominate, commodify,
and instrumentalize human beings and other created goods. Such a

stance can also assist the Church to avoid processes of identity for-
mation that are essentially demarcations from specific “others,” from
social groups that are perceived to be inimical to the Church. Yet it
is clear that the cause of human rights is itself beset by ambiguity
and controversy, so that to make it part of the Church’s processes of
identity-formation must be a task informed by critical discernment.
While there have been powerful synergies between Catholic agencies
and a host of other religious and secular groups in what could broadly
be called “common good” issues, there has also been a great deal of
conflict between the churches and interpretations of human rights that
emphasize individual human autonomy in sexual identity and begin-
ning- and end-of-life decisions. The most recent, tragic example of the
breakdown of an alliance between the Church and a secular human
rights agency is the estrangement between the Church and Amnesty
International over the question of abortion rights. In the European
context, there has been considerable controversy over the meaning of
“homophobia” and the right of the Church to communicate its teach-
ing about homosexuality.31
Many of these issues do express real differences in anthropological,
and therefore ethical, perspectives between the Catholic Church and
other groups. However, it is crucial that these undeniably important
issues do not become the catalyst for the crystallization of a future
form of Catholic identity rooted in ideological demarcation from secu-
lar ethics in these areas, to the detriment of a comprehensive commit-
ment to the promotion of human rights in all the dimensions of the
human person and human community. As we have seen, the papal
commitment to this breadth of vision is clear.32 A comprehensive vi-
sion of human rights will see the development of solidarity with mak-
ers of consumer goods in industrial enclaves in developing countries
as equally urgent as, for example, the opposition to a sexual ethic of
uncommitted gratification closer to home.
Liberal societies often manifest such profound misunderstanding of
the Church’s teaching in the areas of sexual and life ethics, and subject
its stances to such hostility and mockery, that the temptation to define
Catholic identity through opposition to and demarcation from secular

conceptions of ethical autonomy is very strong. Much of this hostility
appears to stem from a sense that the Church has no right to make
judgments about personal life-choices, those that purportedly inflict
no harm on others. Yet this stance itself reflects a strange blindness in
much contemporary secular ethics: the refusal to consider the ethical
meaning of personal existence—of the true meaning of self-respect—
and the restriction of ethics to relationships to others, not to mention
the denial of the human fetus’s right to life. In its teaching on the
meaning of personal life, as expressed especially in sexual and bioeth-
ics, the Church continues the classical tradition of ethics as a reflection
on the human good, whether in relation to ourselves or to others, and
it communicates this in public debate.
Yet there are also very real dangers in making demarcation from
a secular ethics of human autonomy the key dynamic in forming the
Church’s identity in secular societies. One is that it maintains a fo-
cus on issues of individual choice: in this sense it concedes the field
to a particular kind of liberal individualism. Rather than resisting
commodification and instrumentalization of the human as such, the
Church is tempted to resist it most publicly and vehemently in the
field of personal choices in affluent societies. In this way, as often in
the past, the Church may develop forms of identity that are partly
dictated by its opposition to a particular historical challenge, some-
times with a consequent narrowing of vision. Another is that it is more
likely to lead to a demarcation from certain identifiable social groups
in Western societies, rather than to see the Church’s essential ethical
identity in its opposition to commodification and instrumentalization
in all their forms, as universal structures of sin. Finally, it can limit the
potential for cooperation in other human rights areas with people of
good will in liberal societies. These forms of cooperation must always
be guided by critical discernment, informed by the detailed Catholic
moral tradition on “cooperation with evil.” At the same time, it is
important that Catholics’ readiness to cooperate is informed by an ap-
preciation of how much those who may reject the Church’s teaching in
some areas can share a common commitment to justice in others.
Further, it needs to be acknowledged that a number of these issues

in sexual and life ethics are matters of continuing debate in the Catho-
lic community itself, and that constructive and respectful disagreement
with the magisterium need not be a denial of Catholic identity in this
regard—for example, in terms of the question of civil recognition of
homosexual unions, or indeed of some form of recognition of these
unions within the ecclesial community. In this sense, while opposi-
tion to abortion or the destruction of embryos is rightly part of the
Church’s promotion of human rights, there are areas where dialogue,
however difficult it may be in practice, should prevail over demarca-
tion. A Church that consistently and comprehensively identifies and
criticizes any form of commodification and instrumentalization of the
human is very well placed to engage in this dialogue. This comprehen-
siveness both emphasizes the importance of sexual and life ethics to
the Church’s vision of the human and avoids any exclusive emphasis
on these questions as a demarcatory mechanism.
The Church’s fundamental concern is not to demarcate itself from
the secular, since there are many groups and ideas in secular society
that the Church can work with in common opposition to the ideol-
ogy of individualistic materialism, although this commonality will
be limited by real differences of perspective on ethical issues arising
from different conceptions of individual autonomy. The desire to af-
firm identity by demarcation is an extremely powerful social tendency
that has deeply affected all religions: Its danger is to draw the energy
of religious communities towards the maintenance of such markers
and towards the personal and social consolations that a strong sense
of identity can convey. Yet the experience of the Catholic Church after
the Second Vatican Council offers an opportunity, however challeng-
ing, to resist the attraction of such a process and to seek Christian
identity primarily in an engagement with the world in the light of
the Gospel. The overcoming of any and all forms of commodification
through reverence of the human will not always provide us with read-
ily identifiable markers of psychological or communal identification,
but that has nothing necessarily to do with its closeness to the heart
of the Gospel.
Notes
1. Peter Hünermann, “Katholizismus in Europa: Seine Vielgestaltigkeit und

seine Zukunft. Eine ekklesiologische Reflexion,” in Theologie in Europa?
Europa in der Theologie, ed. Gerhard Larcher, 43–57 (Graz-Wien-Köln:
Theological Faculty of the University of Graz, 2002).
2. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, Harvard Uni-
versity Press, 2007).
3. The word “Catholicism” was first used by Dutch Protestants as a response
to the Catholic word “Protestantism.” Hünermann, “Katholizismus in
Europa,” 43.
4. Ibid.
5. Taylor, A Secular Age, 455. Hünermann describes the characteristic iden-
tity of “Catholicism” in terms similar to Taylor’s concept of an Age of
Mobilization: “The Catholicisms of the nineteenth and first half of the
twentieth century presupposed believers who were firmly rooted in their
faith and in the Church and, on this basis, could be animated to actively
commit themselves in the various organizations and groupings of Ca-
tholicism with the aim of achieving a fundamental renewal and perme-
ation of social life through the Christian spirit.” “Katholizismus in Eu-
ropa,” 52 (author’s translation).
6. Ibid., 52–53.
7. Taylor, A Secular Age, 466.
8. Ibid., 526.
9. Ibid., 503.
10. Ibid.
11. In “Evangelization of Europe? Observations on a Church in Peril,” in
Mission in the Third Millennium, ed. Robert Schreiter (Maryknoll, NY:
Orbis, 2001), Hünermann argues that “the European church as institu-
tion is in a process of dissolution,” in the sense of “the church as a public
and normative form of interaction and communication that makes pos-
sible a certain orientation in life and society, enabling people to relate to
one another” (58). The shrinkage of “the People of God in Europe since
1950,” according to the available statistical data, indicates a loss of
“Christian memory,” since there is no longer the basis for faith to be
transmitted from one generation to the next (60).
12. Ibid., 65.
13. Ibid., 68.
14. Taylor, A Secular Age, 531. This point reflects the key concern of Taylor’s
project in A Secular Age: “the change I want to define and trace is one
which takes us from a society in which it was virtually impossible not to
believe in God, to one in which faith, even for the staunchest believer, is
one human possibility among others” (3).
15. Ibid., 516. In “Europe in Crisis: A Question of Belief or Unbelief? Perspec-
tives from the Vatican,” Modern Theology 23:2 (April 2007), Lieven
Boeve emphasizes the Church’s need to engage with the meaning of con-
temporary individualization: “While it is true that Europe is no longer
understood in its totality from the perspective of the Christian conceptual
horizon, the ‘process of secularization’ did not simply lead to a primarily
secular society with which Christianity is thus obliged to interact. Europe,
rather, is undergoing a process of ‘detraditionalisation,’ whereby no single
given tradition (including—but not only—the religious) is capable of con-
tinuing unquestioned (including secular atheism). At the level of descrip-
tion, it is important to insist in this regard that there is a distinction to be
made between individualization (a necessary dimension of identity con-
struction on account of detraditionalisation) and individualism (absolute
self-determination). The rejection of the latter does not discharge the
Christian faith of its duty to come to terms with the former” (222).
16. Taylor, A Secular Age, 510.
17. Ibid., 513.
18. Ibid., 512.
19. John Thornhill, Sign and Promise: A Theology of the Church for a Chang-
ing World (London: Collins, 1988), 4. See also Thornhill’s more recent
articles interpreting the reception of Vatican II: “Creative Fidelity in a
Time of Transition,” Australasian Catholic Record, 79:1 (2002): 3–17;
and “Historians Bringing to Light the Achievement of Vatican II,” Aus-
tralasian Catholic Record, 82:3 (2005): 259–80.
20. Thornhill, Sign and Promise, 3.
21. There has been some Australian research in this vein. For example, in The
Catholic Community in Australia (Adelaide: Open Book Publishers,
2005), Robert Dixon reports that only “six to seven per cent of Catholics
in their twenties” attend Mass on a typical Sunday. “The graph strongly
suggests that the steady fall in attendances will continue for some time to
come, as the higher rates of attendance associated with older attenders are
unlikely to be reached by younger Catholics as they get older” (96).
22. In his Theologischer Kommentar zur Pastoralkonstitution über die Kirche
in der Welt von Heute Gaudium et Spes, vol. 4 (Herders Theologischer
Kommentar zum Zweiten Vatikanischen Konzil, ed. Peter Hünermann

and Bernd Hilberath [Freiburg: Herder, 2005]), Hans-Joachim Sander in-
terprets Gaudium et spes as a “topological project” of the Church, that
is, a reflection on its identity in terms of its “whereabouts,” meeting the
challenge to be able to “orient itself in an unfamiliar landscape” (587). As
a pastoral council, it conceived the world church in a pastoral way: “With
this identification of Christian faith it challenged the church and its mem-
bers to identify itself with a new place, that is in relation to the whole of
humanity, in their presence here and today. This relationship formed a
new community for the church, the pastoral community of the world
church” (585). For Sander, Gaudium et spes understood the church with-
out any exclusions of other human beings, whether or not they are part
of the church. He notes (729) that without the attention to human rights
there would be no “pastoral location” for the theological engagement
with human dignity, which is the pastoral expression of a renewed Chris-
tology: “Christ himself is the sign for the new location of the Church. It
does not exclude human beings, but approaches them” (741, author’s
translation).
23. In his Sollicitudo rei socialis, paras. 36 and 37, John Paul II writes of these
structures in terms that show the influence of Augustine’s emphasis on the
libido dominandi: “If the present situation can be attributed to difficulties
of various kinds, it is not out of place to speak of ‘structures of sin,’ which
. . . are rooted in personal sin, and thus always linked to the concrete acts
of individuals who introduce these structures, consolidate them and make
them difficult to remove. . . . And among the actions and attitudes op-
posed to the will of God, the good of neighbor and the ‘structures’ created
by them, two are very typical: on the one hand, the all-consuming desire
for profit, and on the other, the thirst for power, with the intention of
imposing one’s will upon others.”
4. www.vatican.va/holy_father/paul_vi/speeches/1965/documents/hf_p-vi
2
_spe_19651004_united-nations_fr.html. In this speech Paul VI extolled
the United Nations not only as a means of overcoming conflict but as
fostering human solidarity: “Ici s’instaure un système de solidarité, qui
fait que de hautes finalités, dans l’ordre de la civilisation, reçoivent l’appui
unanime et ordonné de toute la famille des Peuples, pour le bien de tous
et de chacun. C’est ce qu’il y a de plus beau dans l’Organisation des Na-
tions Unies, c’est son visage humain le plus authentique; c’est l’idéal dont
rêve l’humanité dans son pèlerinage à travers le temps; c’est le plus grand
espoir du monde; Nous oserons dire: c’est le reflet du dessein de Dieu -
dessein transcendant et plein d’amour - pour le progrès de la société hu-

maine sur la terre, reflet où Nous voyons le message évangélique, de cé-
leste, se faire terrestre” (6).
25. 1971 Synod of Bishops, Justice in the World, www.socialethics.us/images/
Bishops_on_Justice_in_the_World,_1971.pdf (accessed July 1, 2008):
“Action on behalf of justice and participation in the transformation of the
world fully appear to us as a constitutive dimension of the preaching of the
Gospel, or, in other words, of the Church’s mission for the redemption of
the human race and its liberation from every oppressive situation” (6).
26. www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/speeches/2000/oct-dec/docu
ments/hf_jp-ii_spe_20001103_convention-human-rights_en.html. This
speech emphasizes that the inalienable rights that spring from the invio-
lable dignity of the human person are at “the heart of our common Euro-
pean heritage” (2), and notes the “tendency to separate human rights
from their anthropological foundation—that is, from the vision of the
human person that is native to European culture” (3).
27. Robert Schreiter, The New Catholicity: Theology between the Global and
the Local (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1997), 16.
28. As Neil Ormerod argues in “Theology, History and Globalization,” Gre-
gorianum 88:1 (2007), 23–48: “the emerging reality of globalization is
making historically unprecedented demands on the moral self-transcen-
dence of the human subject. . . . Such a process is not automatic. It re-
quires moral commitment, but also a growing degree of psychic flexibil-
ity” (41).
29. As Walter Kasper argues in “The Church as Communion,” in his Theol-
ogy and Church (London: SCM, 1989), since the communion of the
church is a sacrament for the world, communion must be expressed in
mission: “In this way the church can and must be a sacrament—that is, a
sign and instrument of unity and peace in the world. For we cannot share
the Eucharistic bread without sharing our daily bread as well. The effort
for justice, peace and liberty among people and nations, and the striving
for a new civilization of love, is therefore a fundamental perspective for
the church today” (164). Conversely, mission cannot be sustained unless
it is nourished by the experience of communion. Responding to critiques
of communion ecclesiology, Richard Lennan writes: “It would, of course,
be imprudent to deny the possibility that the focus on communion can
decline into a mere inward-looking fellowship, which domesticates both
the radical edge and the missionary impulse of Trinitarian love. On the
other hand, an emphasis on mission that does not first appropriate its
grounding in the creative excess of divine love is also dangerous, since it

can reduce mission to a loveless duty.” “Communion Ecclesiology: Foun-
dations, Critiques, and Affirmations,” Pacifica 20 (February 2007): 34–
35. See also Lennan’s discussion of communion ecclesiology in Risking the
Church: The Challenges of Catholic Faith (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2004), 95–96.
30. Participation in the Eucharist also responds to the universally human and
religious desire for celebration, for the festive, which only a genuinely
communal faith can provide. As Charles Taylor notes in reference to the
tension between individual spiritual self-expression and communal tradi-
tions: “the strongly collective option will not lose adherents. Perhaps even
the contrary trend might declare itself. . . . One reason to take this latter
idea seriously is the continuing importance of the festive. People still seek
these moments of fusion, which wrench us out of the everyday, and put
us in contact with something beyond ourselves. . . . And what has perhaps
not sufficiently been remarked is the way in which this dimension of reli-
gion, which goes back to its earliest forms, well before the Axial age, is
still alive and well today, in spite of all attempts by Reforming élites over
many centuries to render our religious and/or moral lives more personal
and inward, to disenchant the universe and downplay the collective” (A
Secular Age, 516–17). Taylor sees the extraordinary influence of Taizé as
a recent sign of this.
1. For the text of the European Parliament resolution condemning “Ho-
3
mophobia” (April 26, 2007), see www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/get
Doc.do?pubRef=-//EP//NONSGML+TA+P6-TA-2007-0167+0
+DOC+WORD+V0//EN. For a study of the question of the legal recogni-
tion of homosexual unions from the perspective of a former legal advisor
at the Secretariat of the Commission of the Bishops’ Conferences of the
European Community, see Adriana Opromolla, “Law, Gender and Reli-
gious Belief in Europe: Considerations from a Catholic Perspective,”
Ecclesiastical Law Journal 9 (2007), 161–74.
32. In his many writings on social ethics in a global context, John Paul II
encouraged, and indeed did much to shape, an understanding of the
Church’s identity as constitutively related to a comprehensive commit-
ment to human rights, inviting alliances with all people of good will. In
his Evangelium vitae (1995), however, he gave strong support to a view
of liberal societies as allowing the “emergence of a culture which denies
solidarity and in many cases takes the form of a veritable ‘culture of
death,’” which is a “structure of sin” in its own right (12). He rightly
highlighted the contradiction between a general commitment to human

rights in these societies and the attack on human life through abortion and
euthanasia. However, his criticism of certain interpretations of freedom
and subjectivity includes practices, such as contraception, which, for
many Catholics, are radically different in kind from abortion and do not
necessarily “imply a self-centered concept of freedom, which regards pro-
creation as an obstacle to personal fulfillment” (13). Furthermore, his use
of the term “a culture of death” precludes dialogue with those who argue
for the right to abortion and euthanasia but who are also staunch oppo-
nents of death-dealing mechanisms of oppression and instrumentalization
of the human. As Charles Curran notes in The Moral Theology of John
Paul II (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2005), Evange-
lium vitae is distinguished by a particular eschatology that is affected by
its subject matter. According to Curran, John Paul knew “that the Catho-
lic position on these issues is strongly opposed by many in society. By
seeing this opposition in terms of a culture of death versus a culture of life,
he can give an even stronger support for his own position. But in the
process, his opposition to these practices leads him to adopt an eschatol-
ogy and a Christ-against-culture approach that goes against the positions
he takes elsewhere.” For Curran, this approach “cannot logically call for
Christians to work together with all people of goodwill for the common
good and authentic human development. This oppositional approach is
markedly out of keeping with the realistic transforming model accepted
in the other writings of John Paul II” (86).
Index
Age of Authenticity, 108n18, 147–49 20–23, 30n36, 31n39, 31–32n46,

Age of Mobilization, 144–49; 32nn48–49, 33n51, 49, 69n43, 77;
“Catholicism” in, 108n18, 144–49; on freedom and the will, 24–25,
and dissolution/demise of Catholic 35n62; and freedom in relation
identity/social expressions, 146–47, to two loves, 23–27, 34n52; and
163n11; Hünermann’s analysis, grace of salvation, 23, 34n53;
144–49, 163n5, 163n11; and and humility, 24–25, 26, 35n71,
postrevolutionary France, 144–46, 88, 98; and Joachim’s “age of the
163n3; post-Vatican II transition Spirit,” 53–54; and noninstrumental
to Age of Authenticity, 108n18, relationships, 77; and peaceful
147–49; and social identity of the communities, 25–27; on shared
Church, 144–49; Taylor’s analysis, commitment to community, 36n72,
144, 146–49, 164n14 79; on the virtues, 24–25, 26,
Alcoholics Anonymous, Twelve Steps 35n71, 85, 88, 98
of, 106n15 Australian Labor Party, 126, 141n11
Alison, James, 108n19
Amnesty International, 16, 41, 160 Bauckham, Richard, 139–40n9
Aquinas, Thomas: and Joachim’s Bauman, Zygmunt, 139n8
third age of the Spirit, 40–41, Becker, Gerhold, 62–63, 74nn65–66
53, 66–67n6; more positive view Benedict XVI, Pope, 73n60
of political realm in contrast to Boeve, Lieven, 164n15
Augustine’s, 27, 36n72 Boff, Leonardo, 67n14
Arrupe, Pedro, 155 Bovon, Francois, 72n56
Augustine: and ambivalence of British Empire, Catholicism in, 145–46
freedom, 20, 27; City of God and
the “two cities” as two loves, 3, Cahill, Lisa, 105n10
5, 20–27; and the civitas terrena Canning, Raymond, 35n71
(neutral public sphere), 21–22; “Catholicism in Europe: its diversity
and contemporary Christians in and its future—an ecclesiological
liberal societies, 22–27, 33n51; reflection” (Hünermann), 144
contemporary understandings of A Catholic Modernity? (Taylor), 4,
“earthly city”/”heavenly city,” 12, 14
169â•‡
170â•‡â•‡ Index
Catholic social teaching, 156–57 citizens, 101–2, 111n37; post-

Cavanaugh, William, 5, 39, 45–52; Vatican II decline in, 150, 164n21
on Chilean Church and solidarity Churchgoing and Christian Ethics
of Christians as the Body of Christ, (Gill), 101–2
45–49; and Christian “bodily “The City: Beyond Secular Parodies”
practices” (rituals), 49–50; and (Cavanaugh), 48
the Church as only genuine form City of God (Augustine), 3, 5, 20–27
of community, 51–52; conception Communism, 28n3, 110–11n33
of the Church and liberal secular Congar, Yves, 66–67n6
state, 30n36, 48–51, 69n45, contemporary Catholic identity (and
70nn47–48; on the Eucharist, commitment to universal ethical
47–48; on liberal secular state and ideals), 37–75, 151, 164–65n22;
Augustine’s “earthly city,” 30n36, Cavanaugh’s conception of the
49, 69n43; and Maritain’s political Church as only genuine form of
philosophy/”New Christendom” community, 51–52; and Christian
approach, 46–49; and tasks of social ethic, 55–56, 72n52; and
Church and state, 50–51, concept of human dignity, 2, 62–65;
70nn47–48 and differentiation from secular
Centesimus annus (John Paul II), world, 38–39; service to others
104n6, 155 and Christian witness, 52–53,
Chauvet, Louis-Marie, 95–97 57–66, 73n60; and “solidarity of
Chifley, Joseph Benedict, 126 the shaken,” 41–42, 43–45, 51–52,
Chilean church, 45–49 55; and universalist moral ideals of
Christianity and the Secular liberal society, 52–53, 56–57
(Markus), 21 contemporary Catholic identity (and
Christology: contemporary the Church-Kingdom relationship),
implications of reflections on 52–57, 61–66, 70n49, 71nn50–51,
self-giving and self-loss, 95–98; 72nn52–53; Cavanaugh and
and human rights, 74n61; and solidarity of Christians as the Body
noninstrumental relationships, of Christ, 45–49; Cavanaugh’s
93–102; sacrificial/non-sacrificial conception of Church and state,
interpretations of Jesus’s death, 30n36, 48–51, 69n45, 70nn47–48;
95–97, 109n23, 109n25; service and Joachim’s notion of third
to others and Christian witness “age of the Spirit,” 40–45, 53–57,
in secular society, 52–53, 57–66, 66–67n6, 67n14; and pluralism,
73n60; and Shanks’s notion of a 42, 44–45; and Shanks’s notion of a
new theology (a “third modernity”), new theology (a “third modernity”),
44 42–45; and “solidarity of the
“The Church as Public Space” shaken,” 41–42, 43–45, 51–52,
(Cavanaugh), 49 55; and transconfessional social
church attendance/formal religious movements, 42–45
practice: and influence on secular contemporary Catholic social
Indexâ•‡â•‡ 171
identity (and relation to liberal De doctrina Christiana (Augustine),

society), 6, 51–57, 61–66, 143–68; 31n46
and the Age of Authenticity, demarcatory practices, 149, 156,
108n18, 147–49; and the Age of 160–62, 167–68n32
Mobilization, 108n18, 144–49, De regimine principum (Aquinas), 36n72
163n11; challenges of global market The Desire of the Nations:
economy and technological progress, Rediscovering the Roots of Political
80, 85–86, 104nn5–6, 157–58, Theology (O’Donovan), 4, 12, 17
166n28; and Christian social ethic, Dietrich, Walter, 142n14
55–56, 72n52; Church structures, Dignitatis Humanae (Declaration on
148; decline in formal religious Religious Freedom) (Vatican II), 6,
practice, 150, 164n21; demarcation 18, 75n69
from secular social groups, 149, Divini redemptoris (Pius XI), 110n33
156, 160–62, 167n32; eucharistic Dixon, Robert, 164n21
communities, 159, 166n29, 167n30; Doak, Mary, 69–70n45
evangelization, 148; human rights Dogmatic Constitution on Divine
and challenges for, 151–62; human Revelation (Vatican II), 66–67n6
rights statements, 153, 165n24, Durkheim, Emile, 146
166nn25–26; Hünermann’s Dyson, R. W., 20–21, 22, 31n39
analysis, 144–49, 151, 163n5,
163n11; individualization, 148–49, Eastern Europe, 28n3
164n15; liberation theology, 155; ethical and ritual: and Catholic
post-Vatican II possibilities and “natural law” tradition, 131–32;
challenges, 146–53, 163n11, the Eucharist and tension between,
164nn14–15, 164–65n22; 114, 129–37; prophetic critiques
preferential option for the poor, of empty ritual, 129–30, 142n14;
155; pre-Vatican II social identity, sacrifices and commitment to ethical
144–49, 163n5, 163n11, 164n14; community, 133–34
sexual and life ethics, 147–48, Eucharist: Cavanaugh on, 47–48;
156–57, 160–62, 167–68n32; task and Christian hope in the midst of
of communicating virtues, 76–77, ethical failure, 113–14, 129, 134–
85–93, 100–102, 142n15, 158–59; 37; eschatological character of, 135;
Taylor’s analysis, 144, 146–49, ethical action in, 135–37; eucharistic
150–51, 164n14; transconfessional communities, 159, 166n29, 167n30;
social movements, 42–45; Vatican II the first Eucharist and Jesus’s
writings, 155 proclamation of the Kingdom of
Crockett, William, 109n25, 135 God, 134–35; and the Kingdom of
Crosby, Michael H., 106n15 God, 134–37; and tension between
Curran, Charles, 167–68n32 ethical and ritual, 114, 129–37
Eucharist: Symbol of Transformation
Dante Alighieri, 66n5 (Crockett), 135
Dauenhauer, Bernard P., 139n8 Evangelii nuntiandi (Paul VI), 155
Evangelium vitae (John Paul II), Girard, René, 95–96, 109n23

167–68n32 global market economy: challenges
evangelization, 128–29, 148 and critical issues for Church’s
commitment to human rights,
First Amendment to the American 157–58, 166n28; instrumental
Constitution, 13, 18 relationships and consumption, 80,
First World War, 91 104nn5–6; John Paul II’s critique of,
Fourth Lateran Council (1215), 40, 104n6; and liberal society, 85–86
66n5 God and Modernity: A New and
freedom, ambivalence of, 1, 2–3, 7–36; Better Way to Do Theology
Augustine’s reflections on human (Shanks), 39, 41–45
freedom in relation to two loves, 3,
5, 20–27, 34n52; and the demise of Hart, Trevor, 139–40n9
Christendom, 12–20; freedom and Hollenbach, David, 72n52, 75n72,
humility, 24–25, 35n62; freedom 138n3
as source of creativity, 2–3, 7, 11; homosexual unions, civil recognition
freedom of choice/voluntarism, of, 162
2–3, 7, 11, 28n3; negative/positive Honorius III, Pope, 66n5
freedom, 9–10; tradition-as-social hope, Christian, 5–6, 112–42;
resource, 4, 8–12 and Christian witness, 127–29;
French Revolution and communicating to others, 116; the
postrevolutionary France, 144–46, Eucharist as expression of hope
149, 163n3 in the midst of ethical failure,
Fuellenbach, John, 71n51 113–14, 129, 134–37; hopeful
dispositions necessary for survival,
Gaudium et spes (Vatican II), 3, 6; 123–24, 139nn7–8; hopeful political
and the Church’s commitment to leadership and the discernment of
human rights, 155; and the Church’s human capacities, 119–20; and
commitment to universal solidarity, Kingdom of God, 115–18, 125,
151, 164–65n22; and the Church’s 139–40n9; and the openness of
contributions to liberal society, the future, 122–25; and our sense
36n73; on the Church’s identity and of each other’s sinfulness, 121–22;
service of all humanity, 154; hope and the potential for solidarity in
and expectations of Kingdom of societies, 119, 138n3; and public
God, 139–40n9; the incarnation/ reason, 114–29; Rawls’s proviso and
paschal mystery and union of Christ public political forums, 114, 118,
with humanity, 60–61, 73n58; term 122, 125–27, 138n5; and tension
“earthly city,” 32n49 between inspiration to solidarity
Germany, Federal Republic of, 30n35, within history/independence from
62, 74n65 history, 115–18
Giddens, Anthony, 104n5 human dignity: the Church’s social
Gill, Robin, 101–2, 111n37 ethic, 55–56, 72n52; how the
Church can communicate its Dignity as a Basic Moral Attitude”

support for, 2, 63–65; and the (Becker), 62–63
modern liberal state, 18–19, 62–65; Insole, Christopher, 33n50, 75n72
for moral philosophers/professional instrumental relationships, 77, 79–81;
ethicists, 62–63, 74n64, 74n66 Augustine and the libido dominandi,
human rights: and Catholic sexual and 79, 80; dominative and exploitative
life ethics, 160–62, 167–68n32; and political relationships in liberal
Catholic social teachings, 156–57; society, 79–80; economic systems/
and challenges for contemporary markets, 80, 104nn5–6; personal
Catholic social identity, 151–62; satisfaction of needs and desires, 81,
and Christology, 74n61; and 104–5n8; and self-interest, 81. See
eucharistic communities, 159, also noninstrumental relationships
166n29, 167n30; and liberal secular intellectual discernment, 158
society, 1, 15, 18–19, 30n35; and Isaiah and prophetic critiques of empty
liberation theology, 155; preferential ritual, 129–30, 142n14
option for the poor, 155; statements
by contemporary Church, 153, Joachim da Fiore and Joachite
165n24, 166nn25–26; Vatican tradition, 5, 39–45, 53–57; and
II writings, 155; and virtues the Church-Kingdom relationship,
Church must encourage, 158–59 39–45, 53–57; condemnation by
humility: Augustine on, 24–25, 26, Fourth Lateran Council, 40, 66n5;
35n62, 35n71, 88, 98; contrast contemporary theological questions
between self-aggrandizement and, arising from, 41; notion of third “age
26, 35n71; and freedom, 24–25, of the Spirit,” 40–45, 53–57, 66–
35n62; Jesus Christ’s proclamation 67n6, 67n14; and Shanks’s notion of
of the Kingdom based on, 93–94; a new theology (a “third modernity”),
and noninstrumental relationships, 42–45; and social/historical doctrine
77–78, 87–89, 93–94, 98, 100, of trinity, 40–41, 42–43
106n15; and Twelve Steps of John Paul II: and the Church’s
Alcoholics Anonymous, 106n15 relationship to liberal society, 71n50,
Hünermann, Peter, 144–49; and post- 113; critique of economic systems and
Vatican II Catholic identity, 151; commodification/markets, 104n6; and
and pre-Vatican II Catholic social issue of Church’s demarcation from
identity, 144–49, 163n5, 163n11 other social groups/secular ethics,
167n32; statements on human rights,
“The Idea of Public Reason Revisited” 155, 166n26; on structures of sin in
(Rawls), 5, 63–65, 75n72, 114 liberal society, 165n23
Ignatius Loyola, 34n52 Johnson, L. T., 72–73n56
“I Have a Dream” speech, King’s John XXIII, Pope, 150
(1963), 142n13
individualization, 148–49, 164n15 Kant, Immanuel, 102n2
“In Search of Humanity: Human Kasper, Walter, 66–67n6, 166n29
King, Martin Luther, Jr., 142n13 Christian identity, 51–57, 61–66,

Kingdom of God: and Christian 143–68; contemporary marriage
hope, 115–18, 125, 139–40n9; and family, 83, 105n10; and the
and Christological understanding culture of churchgoing, 101–2,
of noninstrumental relationships, 111n37; defining, 7–8; and the
93–102; and the Eucharist, 134–37; demise of Christendom, 12–20; as
Jesus Christ’s proclamations of, 93– democratic, 8, 27n1; as guardian of
98; Joachite tradition and Church- the goods of creation, 56; and hu-
Kingdom relationship, 39–45, 53– manism, 15–16; and human rights, 1,
57; liberal secular society and the 15, 18–19, 30n35, 81–82; individual
Church-Kingdom relationship, 52– actions and choices in, 8–9; national
57, 70n49, 71nn50–51, 72nn52–53; politics and democratic procedures,
and service/witness, 52–53, 61–66; 82; negative story of, 14, 98–100,
and universalist moral ideals of 110nn32–33; and noninstrumental
liberal society, 52, 56–57; values relationships, 76–111; O’Donovan
of, 53; Vatican II and distinction and ambivalence of, 4, 12–14,
between Kingdom in history and the 16–20, 98–99; and “ontology of
Church, 71n51 the human,” 9–12, 28n2, 83–84;
Kirkpatrick, Frank, 103n3 and peaceful communities, 25–27;
Kraynak, Robert, 33n51 pluralism and communal activities
of, 86, 105n12; positive story of,
Latin American liberation theology, 155 81–84, 152–53; and “rights cul-
Lennan, Richard, 166n29 ture,” 15; secular moral ideals and
liberal secular society: and the ambiva- the Church, 37–51, 52, 56–57; ser-
lence of freedom, 1, 2–3, 7–36; Au- vice to others and Christian witness
gustinian heritage and contemporary in, 52–53, 57–66, 73n60; Taylor
understandings of “earthly city” and ambivalence of, 4, 14–20; and
and “heavenly city,” 20–23, 30n36, totalitarianism, 99–100, 110nn32–
31n39, 31–32n46, 32nn48–49, 33; and tradition-as-constraint, 4,
33n51, 49, 69n43; businesses and 10; and tradition-as-social resource,
workplaces, 82; Cavanaugh’s rejec- 4, 8–12; two stories of freedom/
tion of, 48–51, 69n45, 70nn47–48; conflict between, 2–3, 11–12, 28n3;
Christians’ secular identity as citi- virtues of, 76–77, 85–93, 100–102,
zens of, 100–101; and the Church- 142n15; and voluntarism, 7, 11,
Kingdom relationship, 52–57, 28n3, 98–99; voluntary social orga-
70n49, 71nn50–51, 72nn52–53; the nizations/communities, 82–83. See
Church’s contemporary task to as- also public political life and public
sist, 37; and the civitas terrena (neu- reason
tral public sphere), 21–22, 31n46; Lincoln, Abraham, 125–26, 140n10
and coercive Christendom, 14–15, Luke, Gospel of, 57–58, 72n56
29n21; and concept of human digni- Lumen gentium (Vatican II), 35n54,
ty, 18–19, 62–65; and contemporary 71n51
Macintyre, Alasdair, 69n45 The New Catholicity: Theology

Mackey, James, 70n49 between the Global and the Local
Mahoney, Jack, 106–7n16 (Schreiter), 154
Maritain, Jacques: and Church- Newlands, George, 74n61
Kingdom relationship, 46–49, 56; noninstrumental relationships,
and contributions of the Church to 76–111; and Age of Mobilization/
the common good, 68n29, 110n32; Age of Authenticity, 108n18; and
and Gospel’s influence on democratic Augustine’s two cities, 77; and
values, 47; and natural law as Christians’ secular identity, 100–
basis of human rights, 47; “New 101; Christological understanding
Christendom” approach, 46–49; of, 93–102; and “communal”
political philosophy, 46–49, 68n29 relationships, 78; contemporary
Markus, Robert, 31n46, 36n72; on marriage and family, 83, 105n10;
Augustine’s two cities, 21–22; and the culture of churchgoing,
on Augustine’s understanding of 101–2, 111n37; and development of
political community, 36n72; on an ontology of the human, 83–84;
the civitas terrena (neutral public and difference between society
sphere), 21–22, 31n46 and community, 78–79, 103n3;
Marx, Karl, 80 economic levels, 82, 85–86; and
Matthew’s “Parable of the Last everyday social transactions, 78–79,
Judgment,” 60, 61, 128 102–3n2, 103n3; and humility, 77–
McEvoy, James, 29n21 78, 87–89, 93–94, 98, 100, 106n15;
Médecins sans Frontières, 16 and individual freedom, 84–85; and
media technology, 85–86 instrumental relationships, 77, 79–
Meier, John P., 73n57 81; and Jesus Christ’s proclamation
Milbank, John, 21, 22, 102–3n2 of the Kingdom, 93–98; moral
Moltmann, Jürgen, 66–67n6, 67n14, formation and education in the
139–40n9, 139n7 virtues, 86–87; and negative story
moral imagination (empathy), 158 of liberal society, 98–100; and
moral philosophers/professional pluralism of liberal societies, 86,
ethicists and concept of human 105n12; political level, 81–82; and
dignity, 62–63, 74n64, 74n66 positive story of liberal societies,
Murray, John Courtney, 69n43 81–84; and reverence for others, 87–
89, 93–94, 97, 100; and self-giving/
natural law tradition: contemporary sacrifice, 87–98, 100, 108n19,
expressions of natural law in terms 109n25; self-identity and self-
of human rights, 56, 72n55; and fulfillment in, 90–92; social levels,
independence of the ethical from 82–83; virtues of (and the church’s
ritual, 131–32; O’Donovan on task of communicating), 76–77,
subjective rights and, 13, 17–18, 85–93, 100–102, 142n15, 158–59;
28n14; O’Donovan on universal voluntary social organizations/
human rights and, 18–19 communities, 82–83
O’Connell, Timothy, 106n13 language/symbols of hope in public

O’Daly, Gerard, 32n48 political discourse, 125–26; and
O’Donovan, Oliver, 28n14, 102– Shanks’s notion of a new theology (a
3n2; and ambivalence of liberal “third modernity”), 42, 44–45
modernity, 4, 12–14, 16–20, 98–99; Populorum progressio (Paul VI),
on Antichristic character of liberal 138n2
society, 14, 98–99, 110n32; on Porter, Jean, 28–29n14, 72n55
Christian conception of secularity, post-Vatican II Catholicism: Church
139n6; on end of Christendom and structures, 148; dissolution/demise
development of liberal society, 18– of Catholic social expressions,
19; on end of Christendom and First 146–47, 163n11; evangelization,
Amendment, 13, 18; and everyday 148; individualization, 148–49,
social transactions, 102–3n2; on 164n15; possibilities and challenges
natural law and notion of subjective for the Church, 148–49, 163n11,
rights, 13, 17–18, 28n14; on natural 164nn14–15; transition to Age of
law and universal human rights, Authenticity, 108n18, 147–49
18–19; on political authority and Power, David, 136, 137
reign of Christ, 12–14; on the state’s Prisoner’s Dilemma, 107n17
limited role in Christendom, 13; prophetic critiques of empty ritual,
and subjective dignity of the human 129–30, 142n14
person, 18–19 public political life and public
“ontology of the human,” 9–12, 28n2, reason: achieving equilibrium
83–84 between vigilance and trust in
Ormerod, Neil, 166n28 public institutions, 120–22; and
Christian hope, 114–29; Christian
Pacem in terris (John XXIII), 153 politicians and theological/secular
Pannenberg, Wolfhart, 30n35, 72n53, language, 122, 138n5; and Christian
139–40n9 witness/evangelization, 127–29;
Pastoral Constitution on the Church in hopeful political leadership and the
the Modern World. See Gaudium et discernment of human capacities,
Spes (Vatican II) 119–20; and hope in the openness
Patočka, Jan, 41 of the future, 122–25; the images/
Paul VI, Pope, 49, 138n2; address to language of dreams, 126, 141n12,
General Assembly of the United 142n13; language/symbols of
Nations (1965), 153, 165n24; and Christian hope in, 120, 125–29;
the Church’s commitment to human and pluralism, 125–26; political
rights, 155 leadership and moral virtue for
Peter Lombard, 40 sake of common good, 120–22; and
Pius XI, Pope, 110n33 potential for solidarity in societies,
Plant, Raymond, 104n6 119, 138n3; Rawls and how
pluralism: and communal activities Christians can contribute to public
of liberal society, 86, 105n12; and political life, 5, 63–65, 75n72,
75nn68–69; and Rawls’s proviso, Christological reflections on, 95–98;

64–65, 75n72, 114, 118, 122, Jesus Christ’s proclamation of the
125–27, 138n5 Kingdom based on, 94–98, 108n19;
and noninstrumental relationships,
Rahner, Hugo, 34n52 87–98, 100, 108n19, 109n25; and
Ratzinger, Joseph, 33n51, 73n58 risk of self-diminution (self-loss),
Rawls, John: and how Christians can 89–92, 107n17; sacrificial/non-
contribute to public political life, 5, sacrificial interpretations of Jesus’s
63–65, 75n72, 75nn68–69; proviso, death, 95–97, 109n23, 109n25; and
64–65, 75n72, 114, 118, 122, 125– term “sacrifice,” 96–97
27, 138n5; and “public reason,” Senior, Donald, 73n57
63–65, 75nn68–69 Sentences (Peter Lombard), 40
Redemptor hominis (John Paul II), 113 service to others, 52–53, 57–66,
Redemptoris missio (John Paul II), 73n60; and contemporary
71nn50–51 relationship between Church and
Reformation, 15 Kingdom/secular society, 61–66;
reverence for others: and international experiencing the Kingdom as, 58–
human rights statements, 89, 106– 59; and hope, 58–59; and salvation,
7n16; Jesus Christ’s proclamation 60; and witness, 59
of the Kingdom based on, 94; and sexual ethics teachings, 147–48, 160–
noninstrumental relationships, 62, 167–68n32
87–89, 93–94, 97, 100 Shanks, Andrew, 5, 39–45, 67n14; the
Riordan, Patrick, 75n69 Church-Kingdom relationship and
rituals: Cavanaugh and Christian Joachite tradition, 39–45; and new
“bodily practices,” 49–50; the transconfessional social movements,
Eucharist and tension between 42–45; notion of a new theology
ethical and, 114, 129–37; prophetic (a “third modernity”), 42–45;
critiques of empty ritual, 129–30, “solidarity of the shaken,” 41–42,
142n14. See also ethical and ritual 43–45, 51–52, 55
Rudman, Stanley, 106–7n16 Sigmund, Paul E., 36n72
Sign and Promise: A Theology of
Sander, Hans-Joachim, 164–65n22 the Church for a Changing World
Schreiter, Robert, 154 (Thornhill), 149–50
A Secular Age (Taylor), 144, 164n14 Silva Henriquez, Cardinal Raul, 49
secular society. See liberal secular Singer, Peter, 74n64, 107n17
society Society of Jesus, 155
self-giving, 87–98, 100; Augustine and “solidarity of the shaken,” 41–42,
self-giving in communities, 91; and 43–45, 51–52, 55
the Church’s challenge to liberal Sollicitudo rei socialis (John Paul II),
societies, 92–93; and the Church’s 155, 165n23
commitment to human rights, 158– Sources of the Self (Taylor), 14
59; contemporary implications of Spohn, William, 106n13
Stiltner, Brian, 68n29 Twelve Steps of Alcoholics

Summa Theologica (Aquinas), 40–41 Anonymous, 106n15
Symbol and Sacrament: A Sacramental
Reinterpretation of Christian Universal Declaration of Human
Existence (Chauvet), 95 Rights, 19, 30n35, 106–7n16
Synod of Bishops, 1971 affirmation, universal ethical ideals: and Church-
153, 166n25 Kingdom relationship, 52,
56–57; contemporary Catholic
Taylor, Charles: on Age of social identity and commitment
Mobilization/Age of Authenticity, to universal solidarity, 151,
108n18, 146; and ambivalence 164–65n22; contemporary liberal
of liberal modernity, 4, 14–20; societies and resolution of ethical-
challenging liberal society to be ritual tension, 131–33; Taylor on
open to Gospel of love of God, liberal societies and, 15–16. See also
16–17; on coercive Christendom contemporary Catholic identity (and
and liberal society, 14–15, 29n21; commitment to universal ethical
on end of Christendom and “rights ideals); human rights
culture” of modern liberalism, 15;
on liberal societies and development van Bavel, T. Johannes, OSA, 34n53
of a universalist ethic, 15–16; and Vatican Council II: and challenge of
ontology of the human, 28n2; and ideological change for the Church,
post-Vatican II Catholic identity, 6, 150; and Chilean Church, 49; and
150–51; and pre-Vatican II Catholic commitment to human rights, 155;
social identity, 144, 146–49, distinction between Kingdom in
164n14; on tension between history and the Church, 71n51; on
individual spiritual self-expression grace of salvation, 23, 35n54. See
and communal traditions, 167n30 also Age of Mobilization; Gaudium
Te Selle, Eugene, 31–32n46, 33–34n51 et spes (Vatican II); post-Vatican II
Theodosius I, emperor, 22, 32n48 Catholicism
Thornhill, John, 149–50 virtues and liberal society: Augustine
Tinder, Glenn, 110–11n33 on, 24–25, 26, 35n71, 85, 88, 98;
Tocqueville, Alexis de, 83, 105n9, and Christians’ secular identity,
110–11n33 100–101; the Church’s influence on
Torture and Eucharist: Theology, secular citizens, 101–2, 111n37; and
Politics and the Body of Christ the Church’s task of communicating,
(Cavanaugh), 45 76–77, 85–93, 100–102, 142n15,
totalitarianism, 99–100, 110nn32–33 158–59; education in, 86–87;
tradition-as-constraint, 4, 10 humility, 24–25, 26, 35n71, 87–89,
tradition-as-social resource, 4, 8–12 98, 100, 106n15; and market
transconfessional social movements, economy/media technology, 85–86;
42–45 and moral formation in Christian
communities, 106n13; and witness, Christian: and Christians

pluralism, 86, 105n12; reverence elected to political office, 127–28;
for others, 87–89, 100; self-giving, Christological perspective, 52–53,
87–98, 100 57–66, 73n60; and contemporary
voluntarism: and the ambivalence relationship between Church
of freedom, 7, 11, 28n3; fall of and Kingdom/secular society, 6,
Communism and freedom as, 28n3; 52–53, 57–66; explicit acts of
and noninstrumental relationships, evangelization in public political
98–99 forum, 128–29; and hope, 127–29;
voluntary religious organizations, Lucan passages on Jesus’ call to,
82–83, 105n9 57–58, 72n56; and service to others,
52–53, 57–66
Weimar Republic, 99, 109n31 Wordsworth, William, 116
Williams, Rowan, 32n48, 104–5n8

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The Church and Secularity

SELECTED TITLES FROM THE MORAL TRADITIONS SERIES

American Protestant Ethics and the The Context of Casuistry

Catholic Moral Theology in the The Ethics of Aquinas

Catholic Social Teaching,

georgetown university press

© 2009 by Georgetown University Press. All rights reserved. No part of this

This volume draws on material Robert Gascoigne previously published in the

“The Eucharist and Ethics,” in Eucharist: Experience and Testimony, ed.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

This book is printed on acid-free paper meeting the requirements of

Printed in the United States of America

Indexâ•‡ â•‡ 169

It is a great pleasure to record my thanks to those who have assisted

This book is concerned with the relationship of the Catholic Church

content—can also affect the motivation of members of society to de-

nourish all expressions of freedom in liberal society that are oriented

substantially to engage in the important debates about this complex

God can shed on this ambivalence of freedom and on secularity as a

ethical project of respect for human dignity. The chapter concludes

1. Oliver O’Donovan, The Desire of the Nations (Cambridge: Cambridge

Two Stories of Liberal Society

The Ambivalence of Freedom in Liberal Society

A key characteristic of a liberal society is its ambivalence, its pro-

liberal society is one in which, in principle, all limitations on indi-

development. In a liberal society, tradition becomes available as re-

of interpersonal commitment, such as marriage, enjoy? How much

individuals to a higher or deeper form of life are no better than those

insofar as some dimensions of an ontology of the human, especially

The Demise of Christendom and the

We can understand the nature of this task better by considering the

after Christ was a distinction necessary between the limited authority

political culture broadly in continuity with the Western liberal tradi-

coercion, the attempt to embody any creed—including Christianity—

universalist ethic that expresses an extension of moral concern without

“like a Son of Man” who brings justice, cannot a philosophy of the

The Augustinian Heritage: The “Two Cities” as Two Loves

To come to terms with this moral ambiguity in the post-Christendom

City of God for understanding our contemporary situation is not in

The two loves have their outcomes in different expressions of free-

Augustine’s reflections on the different effects of the two loves focus

Thomas Aquinas was to have a more positive view of the political

2. As Charles Taylor argues in Modern Social Imaginaries (Durham, NC,

natural rights to medieval canon lawyers” (344), who, in their develop-

modern “nation-state,” and Augustine’s analysis of the libido dominandi

political models.” Values in a Time of Upheaval (New York: Ignatius

however, be on our guard against a too simplistic interpretation of this

Church, Kingdom, and Secularity

Christian Identity and Secular Moral Ideals

to the Church’s mission, which is to live as an alternative society to

as a community of faith. It may lose its identity by giving more and

influential in Western religious and political history, and Shanks’s book

world, and of the Church, between Pentecost and Parousia, a differ-

the shaken?”8 His aim is to help develop a “trans-confessional ethos

past.”15 On this basis, Christianity can offer third modernity “a. a

Joachite tradition. The uniqueness of the incarnation, as the hinge of

experience. On pluralist grounds, the tradition of any one religion

that the effect of torture was to destroy human bonds of solidarity, to

Christ’s self-sacrifice.”34 Thus it is critical that the Church have a “vis-