UNITED STATES
National Catholic Reporter
Michael Sean Winters | Aug. 9, 2013 Distinctly Catholic
Father Helmut Schuller has wrapped up his speaking tour of the United States. The coverage of his talks here at NCR has been somewhat breathless and I am not sure why. Herr Schuller did not, according to the news reports, say anything that has not been said before by others.
When I was a teenager, I came under the happy influence of a priest whom I credit with keeping me in the Church. I played the organ at his church during the summertime and we would engage in conversations about our faith. He was an unreconstructed 60s liberal in both politics and theology. At one of our early conversations, he gave me a copy of Hans Kung’s “On Being a Christian” to read and I devoured it. In short, I shared many of the mundane liberal attitudes that Schuller continues to articulate.
In the intervening years, I have largely come to view the Church differently and have either severely qualified my early views or abandoned them. (Unfortunately, my priest friend was killed in a freak train accident and it is one of the great regrets of my life that he has not been able to accompany me on my subsequent intellectual journey.) I came to see that I had developed a penchant for taking ideas and intellectual constructs from the ambient, secular culture and placing them on the Church. As I came to learn more of the Church’s theology, and especially its history, I realized how often this habit of mind had, in fact, nearly wrecked the Church. Reforms that last and that help the Church to thrive can be deep, the pruning can be severe, but they are reforms that are rooted within the Church’s traditions.
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