Perspectief 2013-20

58 involves the universal call to holiness and, accordingly, the sanctification of everyday life, including the whole spectrum of culture. Of major importance here is that evangelical Catholicism has distanced itself from the historical ideal of the “old Christendom”, namely an ecclesiastically unified culture and its corresponding legal establishment of the Christian religion. Instead evangelical Catholicism embraces another historical ideal, a “new Christendom” with its call for a new style of lay sanctity, living and working for the salvation of the world in the world, exercised by truth, justice and, above all, by charity, engaging in integral evangelization, which is the renewal of the whole temporal order to God in Christ. In brief this is Weigel’s theological vision of evangelical Catholicism. But he also has a historical thesis about the ecclesial roots of evangelical Catholicism. This thesis is that evangelical Catholicism is a “new” form of the Church, but it has been in play for more than one and a quarter centuries, beginning with Pope Leo XIII (1878-1903), furthered by Pope Pius XII (1943 Encyclical Mystici Corporis Christi and 1947 Encyclical Mediator Dei ), revitalized by Pope Paul VI (1975 Apostolic Letter Evangelii Nuntiandi ) and deepened by the “pontificates of two men of genius, Blessed John Paul II and Benedict XVI”. Leo set in motion the dynamism of evangelical renewal in the Church by restoring the Gospel to the center of the Church’s life, by urging us to commit ourselves to Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior (Encyclical Annum Sacrum , May 25, 1899, no. 8) and by creating the conditions for the “revitalization of Catholic biblical, liturgical, historical, philosophical and theological studies in the mid-twentieth century”. This revitalization was given a definite direction by the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) and its teachings were given an authoritative interpretation by John Paul II and Benedict XVI, who treated the Council as “one of reform through retrieval, renewal and development”. Significantly, Weigel argues that Benedict is a transitional pope because he is the pope of the Church in transition to a new form of Catholicism, namely, evangelical Catholicism. Here is Weigel’s most significant historical claim: Leo initiates the beginning of the end of the Counter-reformation era in the Church, something that is now coming to fulfillment in the post-Vatican II Church with Benedict. The end of that era means that the Church has been moving beyond - since Leo - the tendency to foster an exclusively antithetical stance towards the world; beyond the tendency to legalism, clericalism and a passive laity; moving beyond an anti-ecumenical stance and more intellectualistic orthodoxism (where faith is understood as a mere assent to a set of propositions) as well as the historical ideal of an ecclesiastically- unified culture. But evangelical Catholicism also rejects the tendencies in progressive Catholicism, otherwise known as liberalism-in-a-Catholic key, to relativize religious truth vis- á-vis religious experience, to embrace at best a doctrinal minimalism. Also rejected are the tendencies toward horizontalism, a “this worldly” Christianity, to the cultural dialogue of accommodation - driven by a “lust for relevance” - and to an ecclesiological relativism. Likewise rejected are antinomianism, an anti-metaphysical tendency in theology and a reductionist Christology in which the cross, sin, and judgment are minimized in the Christian doctrine of redemption. As to evangelical Catholicism’s program of deep reform, Weigel devotes chapters in Part II to the episcopacy, priesthood, liturgy and the consecrated life, the calling of the laity, the Church’s role in public life, her intellectual life and the papacy. I cannot discuss these chapters here, but I must describe the nature and criteria for authentic reform. Deep reform that is authentic is “guided by the twin criteria of truth and mission”. Regarding the former: “all true Catholic reform is built out from the truth that is Christ and reflects the truths that have been entrusted to the Church by Christ”. Regarding the latter: “the criterion of mission emerges from and is inseparable from the first criterion: all true Catholic reform is reform ordered to mission, to the proclamation of the Gospel, to building up the Body of Christ for the healing and salvation of the world”. Being mission-driven, Weigel’s evangelical Catholic holds that the deep reform of the Church is measured by the criterion of mission, changing those things in the Church that “must be changed for the sake of mission”. But he