Liberation Sexuality is no more successful than Liberation Theology, writes Gavin Ashenden
“The Vatican is losing the largest Catholic country in the world: it’s a huge, irreversible loss,” said José Eustáquio Diniz Alves, a renowned Brazilian demographer and former professor at the national statistics agency. At the current rate, he estimates that Catholics will make up less than 50 percent of all Brazilians by early July.
According to a new Pew Research Centre survey on religion in 18 Latin American countries and Puerto Rico, tens of millions of Latin Americans have left the Roman Catholic Church in recent decades and embraced Pentecostal Christianity. Indeed, nearly one-in-five Latin Americans now describe themselves as Protestant.
The longer context is that for most of the 20th century, from 1900 through the 1960s, at least 90 per cent of Latin America’s population was Catholic. In the last fifty years that number has crumpled to 69 per cent and continues to fall.
There are many ways this can be interpreted. The sociologists can tell us that Pentecostal Protestantism is more reflective of the culture of the indigenous local community. Theologians might point out that the whole thrust of Liberation Theology was a failure, and based on a category error and a theological misapprehension.
Fr. Martín Lasarte, a Uruguayan priest present at the synod on the Amazon, believes that the Liberation Theology movement has often placed political and social issues above religious experience. It set out to try to gain political credentials from people who were hungry for an experience of God. It replaced spirituality with Marxism. It lacks the existential sense of the joy of living the Gospel, this personal encounter is what so many Pentecostal churches give to the person,” he remarks.
The survey asked former Catholics who have converted to Protestantism about the reasons they did so. Of the eight possible explanations, the most frequently cited was that they were looking for a more intimate experience or relationship with God. Many former Catholics also said they became Protestants because they wanted a different style of worship or a church that helps its members more.
What is particularly tragic in this situation is that the Catholic Church has been revived, restored and re-invigorated by the Holy Spirit working through the saints in particular in every generation. For a Church whose existence and vigour depends utterly on the Holy Spirit to have been unable to provide an experience of participation in the life of the Spirit is a mixture of tragedy and perhaps clerical ineptitude.
It is not as if the Church is unprepared by the dimension of the Spirit. Joachim of Fiore (1135-1202) was an Italian lawyer turned prophetic mystic. He was famous for predicting that there would be three ages of the Church. The first age is of the Father, the second of the Son and the third of the Holy Spirit. He thought that the age of the Spirit was coming in his generation. Like so many prophetic figures he may have got the analysis right but the timing some way out. Not that any age lacks the Holy Spirit, but the explosion of Pentecostalism at the beginning of the Twentieth Century may have a better claim.
Philip Jenkins, the well-known Church historian, also suggests that history might be categorised in this way but with a historian’s hindsight suggests that the age of the father might be from the early Church to the Reformation; that of the Son from the sixteenth century to the twentieth; and that of the Spirit, the watershed marked by the outbreak of Pentecostalism in 1905. Offering evidence that this may well mark the age of the Spirit, it is estimated that since then a quarter of the nearly two billion Christians are or have become Pentecostal or charismatic.
The crisis of the Reformation was met by the counter-Reformation as a creative and redemptive response. How has the Catholic Church responded to this outburst of global restorative spirituality?
Pope Paul VI officially welcomed the Catholic Charismatic Movement as an integral element in the Catholic Church in 1975. Cardinal Suenens oversaw the next stage in its growth through the International Catholic Charismatic Renewal Service (ICCRS). This is no small movement. The numbers involved are estimated at about 160 million within the Church. St John Paul II offered affirmation and theological analysis, saying in March 1992:
“At this moment in the Church’s history, the Charismatic Renewal can play a significant role in promoting the much-needed defense of Christian life in societies where secularism and materialism have weakened many people’s ability to respond to the Spirit and to discern God’s loving call. Your contribution to the re-evangelization of society will be made in the first place by personal witness to the indwelling Spirit and by showing forth His presence through works of holiness and solidarity.”
During Pentecost 1998, the Pope he set out to build a bridge between the coherence of structure and pneumatic dynamism:
“The institutional and charismatic aspects are co-essential as it were to the Church’s constitution. They contribute, although differently, to the life, renewal and sanctification of God’s People. It is from this providential rediscovery of the Church’s charismatic dimension that, before and after the Council, a remarkable pattern of growth has been established for ecclesial movements and new communities.”
Why has this become a crisis in the Catholic Church, and in particular in South America?
Perhaps in the same way that generals are always fighting the last war (instead of the present one) there is a propensity in the Church to misunderstand the triangulation which links what God has done in the past, integrating it with what He is doing in the present, and most difficult of all, what will be asked of the Church tomorrow. Living in the past is all too easy and convenient for an institution. The spirit of entropy is never the same as the Life-giving Spirit.
But in the same way that Catholics gave way to Marxism a generation ago with the blind alley of Liberation Theology which wholly missed the appetites and needs of those to whom it was tailored, the same mistake is being perpetuated by the cultural Marxists of this generation. They have ingested the spirit of the age and are convinced that a greater integration with secularist categories – what we might almost call “Liberation Sexuality” – are what the Church needs to revive its integrity.
The way in which Pentecostalism is legitimately and successfully meeting the needs of this generation for a vivid and transforming experience of God should be both acknowledged and matched.
Why should the Church restrict itself to the experience of absolution in the confessional when, as St Paul describes, the Acts of the Apostles and the lives of the saints suggest that there is so much more to be received at the hands of the Holy Spirit?
How can a Church that recognises the power of the Spirit to miraculously change the elements in the Mass avert its gaze from the capacity of the Holy Spirit to change the human heart and equip the Body of Christ with the spiritual gifts to provide the spiritual traction to transform society?
Instead of seeing the emergence of Pentecostalism as a challenge or threat to the Church (although it clearly is), it might instead be seen as an example of how the Catholic Church can do better. One analogy that has been made is that the institution of the Catholic Church is an exquisitely developed engine which requires and can make the most use of the highest octane fuel. The Holy Spirit and the Catholic Church are made for each other, unless the church opts for politics, power and sexuality as an alternative to the pneumatology of spiritual renewal.
In the same way that the Church responded with a Counter-Reformation as the age of the Son became a historical reality, it might consider responding to what has at least in terms of spirituality become the age of the Holy Spirit.
In this tragic hemorrhaging of Catholics from the Church, it has a mission to win back its lost people with a Counter-Pentecostalism. A movement is required in the Church which re-integrates the life and experience of the Holy Spirit into the sacramental and supernatural Church of the Mass.
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