The Church and Culture since Vatican II: On the Analogy of Faith and Art

Abstract

O OF the principal preoccupations and intentions of the Second Vatican Council noted by Cardinal Agostino Casaroli in his address to an international encounter of artists during the special Holy Year of Redemption in 1984 was the renewal of a positive dialogue between the Church and the world of culture. An entire section of the pastoral constitution Gaudium et spes, chapter 2 of Part 2, was devoted specifically to the promotion of culture on the part of the Church. This outward thrust of the Church to the world and to the world's autonomous concerns became in the course of the Council its fifth major goal. After the Council, in a variety of ways, Pope John Paul II has implemented vigorously this conciliar intention. He has revitalized the Pontifical Academy of Science. He has addressed in a fresh way past estrangements, notably by calling for a new study of the Galileo case and a frank recognition of wrongs from whichever side they came. He has praised the cultural experiments of Matteo Ricci, comparing his efforts to those in an earlier age of Justin Martyr, Clement of Alexandria, and Origen. The Pope has manifested his concern concretely by creating on May 20, 1982, the Pontifical Council for Culture and by appointing in the same year an auxiliary bishop for the Diocese of Rome, Pietro Rossano, with the unusual charge of the pastoral care of culture (la pastorale della cultura). More significantly in terms of our purposes in this article, he has given two discourses devoted to the topic of the relationship of the Church and art which, I hope to show, are helpful theological elaborations of the Christian humanist world-view he expressed in his inaugural encyclical, Redemptor hominis (the human person is the way for the Church), and an important contribution as well to a Catholic theology of culture. The analogy which he draws between faith and art clarifies in today's cultural context both of these expressions of the human spirit.