A newsmagazine asked me, several months ago, for replies to a set of questions about “a new spiritual revolution.” Although I knew well the tactic used - collect questionnaires from a number of churchmen, write a 2-page story using the most daring quotes, file the rest - I responded because I had a little more time in the hospital, and because I admire and appreciate the skill of good journalists. Besides, I think the Church should speak up.

(When the story appeared, I saw little evidence in it of any relation to the questions asked - and apparently all my answers were filed, either in the archives or in the waste-basket.)

The View From The Suburbs

City-dwellers today fight congestion. Rural dwellers fight isolation. The suburbanite appears to have the best of possible worlds: human association, plus grass and breathing room. But more and more of these residents tell me this is an illusion. They are fighting a disease worse than congestion - conformism, and the isolation of the suburb. Conformism sweeps into look-alike houses, and taste alike Kaffee-Klatches. It grows with the crabgrass and the impossible budgets. But at least it can be felt and fought, diagnosed and treated. The independent American has not vanished; he is still restless under a blanket of predigested culture and brand-name buying.

Suburban isolation is a more subtle enemy of the human spirit. In the early skirmishing, it is nothing but complacency. Rows of similar homes breed a security; no poor class, no offensive minorities, no threats to middle class way of life. But complacency is a false luxury, and these are false securities. They become ugly realities when normal respectable residents fight to keep a neighborhood for “whites” or “Gentiles” or “Anglo-Saxons” or any other exclusive ethnic group. The same occurs when residential property-values are given a higher priority over needed hospitals, welfare facilities and even churches. The moat went out with feudalism. We cannot, even in the most courtly communities, draw up the bridge against other human beings.

Is there a spiritual renewal in suburbia? A deeper question would be: is the virtue of mercy, of compassion, of care, growing out there amid the split levels and crabgrass? I think it is. From our suburbs come those who are articulate in their search for religious values that lie deeper than platitudes about brotherhood, and the deification of secularism as the American way of life. They staff our Liturgy Commissions; they take part in interracial councils; they follow through on ecumenical efforts. Their college background, and their current reading match their willingness to give time and energy to know the Church’s role and participate in it. Many of them refuse to be victims of a monotonous conformity and a tight exclusiveness.

Small beginnings, it is true. But every great Christian thrust - the initial apostolic witness, the monastic catharsis of the tenth century, the medieval hospitals and the 17th century St. Vincent de Paul program, the American parochial school drive -- each has had small beginnings. Compassion, like charity, cannot be contained. Since it can be called Christianity’s “second nature”, its contagion may prove the twentieth century’s real aggiornamento.

The problems of the suburban Catholic are serious. He should know that in his faith lies the root of their solution.

Signs Of Revolution

The well-publicized “spiritual revolution” of the late 1940’s was so shallow that most observers today are still skittish about measuring the ebb and flow of religious ground swells. But superficial as the post-war phenomenon turned out to be, there was something to it. The optimistic counting of growing congregations, conferences, and contributions meant openings, at least, for the injection of God’s words into our highly secularized lives. The much-advertised discovery of “faith” (which often begged the question, “faith in what?”) was not entirely empty. It bore a rather grim testimony to modern man’s discovery, through war and nuclear terror that bread was not enough.

Are today’s signs a more sure index of a new revolution in the things of the spirit? I believe some of them are, because they are forcing our intellects to probe, and our wills to risk more danger. These signs arise not out of the confusion and despair of Hiroshima, southeast Asia, and the Congo, but out of man’s own nature. Until his mind and will initiate ideas and action in a restless search for God, his religious identity will be flawed. He may be “Catholic-Protestant-Jew” in the Herbergian classification but this may be only a symbolic identity and not necessarily symbolic of religion.

Today new theological implications of Protestant and Jewish research study, and expression have revitalized religion. A mid-century marked by voices like Tillich and Niebuhr and a score more may lay considerable claim to historic landmarking. Within Catholicism, signs have been appearing for a generation, but to make dynamic factors out of them took the Vatican Council. Pope John’s humble boldness and Pope Paul’s intense faith. At three great levels, there is today an overwhelming consensus among the council fathers and the Church herself. One is on man’s relevance to God - the liturgy; the second is the Church’s relevance to man and society today - the nature of the Church; the third, the Church’s relevance to those of other faiths - ecumenism.

The vernacular, the downgrading of ancient titles, privileges and perquisites, the deletion of offensive phrases -- these are only surface signs of the Catholic revolution, although they have real significance. The basic change is not in the Catholic format; it is rather in the Catholic awareness. Many tend to fluctuate between a collective activism that is reminiscent of Pelagius, and a private passivism suited to the extant hermit, but hardly to the true mystic, or the contemplative monk. It is because “God lovingly takes the initiative”, as the Dominican theologian Edward Schillebeeckx, has written, that man lives in a condition of active and immediate communication with the one who becomes the “living God”. Our growing awareness of this, fructified by the new Vatican constitution and decrees on the Church, the Liturgy, and Ecumenism, is this century’s revolution. Its scope, its spread, and its results will have to be measured by history.

Changing Or Frozen?

The Catholic layman who has been reading the Scriptures about his church has no qualms about change. Change is becoming; the church has always been on pilgrimage - from her covenant years in Israel, through the precious brief physical life of Christ, through all the centuries of his mystical body on earth, on to her total fulfillment in the company of the Triune God in heaven. A century ago, Newman was a lone voice crying of her growth and development. Today Pope Paul uses the familiar figure of a living tree, its old roots and trunks, its fresh branches and blossoms.

What changes? The church’s speech and accoutrements; her accent and emphasis, her geographical spread, her historical stance. There are accidentals. The substance remains, but with this important modification for us - both teachers and faithful can grow in their awareness of it.

These distinctions get blurred over the years. We are at a unique point in the church’s history: we can restore these lines. Laymen - and all of us, - can restore them by a clarity owed to Catholicism’s charter; she speaks truly not because of a frozen attachment to the past, but because Christ lives in her. The Church is not a museum; it is a living vine and branches.

Paul J. Hallinan

Archbishop of Atlanta