General Audience with Pope Francis
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Duluth, Minnesota (OpEdNews) August 21, 2022: The 1998 book The End of the Modern World by the prolific and learned Roman Catholic priest and theologian Romano Guardini (1885-1965) includes two previously published separately essays in English translation by Guardini:
(1) "The End of the Modern World: A Search for Orientation," translated by Joseph Theman and Herbert Burke (pp. 1-113);
(2) "Power and Responsibility: A Course of Action for the New Age," translated by Elinor C. Briefs (pp. 117-220).
The 1998 book also includes a "Foreword" by the Reverend Richard John Neuhaus (1936-2009; pp. ix-xii); and an "Introduction" by the philosophy professor Frederick D. Wilhelmsen (1923-1996; pp. xiii-xxiii); and an "Author's Introduction" by Guardini (pp. xxiv-xxvi). In Guardini's "Author's Introduction," he says, "I should add that the ideas presented in this [1950 book in German] are related to those developed in the following studies: [1] Briefe vom Somer See (1927), [2] Welt und Person (1937), and [3] Freiheit, Gnade, Schiksal (1948)" (p. xxvi).
Now, the modern world to which Guardini refers in the main title of his prescient 1950 book in German had been resoundingly denunciated by various popes. See, for example, the papal document known as the Syllabus of [80] Errors associated with the modern age that Pope Pius IX (1792-1878; reigned 1846-1878) included in his 1864 encyclical letter Quanta Cura.
At first blush, the end of the modern world that Pope Pius IX denounced might sound like welcome news to like-minded Catholics in 1950. However, the then-emerging new age of mass man that Guardini delineates in his prescient 1950 book in German sounds so grim that it is hard to imagine that any Catholics in 1950 or subsequently would welcome it.
For example, the typically astute but circumspect American Jesuit Renaissance specialist and cultural historian Walter J. Ong (1912-2003; Ph.D. in English, Harvard University, 1955) comments carefully on Guardini's 1950 book in German in his essay "The American Catholic Complex" in his 1957 book Frontiers in American Catholicism: Essays on Ideology and Culture (Macmillan, pp. 1-23):
If I have made a great deal of the attitude of American Catholicism toward its historic past, this is not because the attitude is very close to the surface of the American consciousness but because it is different from what is at the surface. At the surface of the American Catholic consciousness is a tremendously vital know-how, an ability to keep alive the message of Christ, to keep Christ present in the face of changes which are so far along the trajectory of history that we are assured by Romano Guardini in Das Ende der Neuzeit that the word 'modern' no longer describes them. In so far as it is vital, American Catholicism is essentially adaptability, an adaptability keeping alive the spiritual, interior message of the Gospel in the present-day industrial world of [Guardini's] mass culture, and possible only where the Church is face to face with this world in its concentrated American form. (pp. 8-9)
We should pause here for a moment to reflect of the fact that both Guardini's 1950 book in German and Ong's 1957 book were published before Pope John XXIII (1881-1963; reigned 1958-1963) announced that he was convening the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965). However, in the decades after Vatican II, economic globalization spread certain features of what Guardini in 1950 and Ong in 1957 refer to as mass culture (i.e., post-modern culture) worldwide.
Now, years before he was elected the first Jesuit pope, Father Jorge Mario Bergoglio (born in 1936; elected pope in 2013) started a doctoral dissertation on Guardini, which he did not complete. See the Italian scholar Massimo Borghesi's book The Mind of Pope Francis: Jorge Mario Bergoglio's Intellectual Journey, translated by Barry Hudock (Liturgical Press Academic, 2018; orig. Italian ed., 2017; for specific page references for Guardini, see the "Index" [p. 306]).
The vitality of American Catholicism that Ong describes in his 1957 book gave way in the years following Vatican II to the retrograde neoconservatism that Massimo Borghesi (born in 1951) delineates in his incisive book Catholic Discordance: Neoconservatism vs. the Field Hospital Church of Pope Francis, translated by Barry Hudock (Liturgical Press Academic, 2021; orig. Italian ed., 2021).
Now, in Professor Wilhelmsen's "Introduction," he says that Guardini's thesis in The End of the Modern World: A Search for Orientation "is that, for the first time in history, man has absolutely no place in the universe. This alone cuts the new age away from the modern world which has gone before it" (p. xv). Professor Wilhelmsen also says, "Guardini's thesis may shock the mind educated exclusively in abstractions and theories. But if we meditate on the world in which we really live, the only world in which we have our being, then Guardini's assertion strikes home with the absolute rightness of one of those adamantine truths which are half-unseen because they are as light as the air and as elusive as the mist. . . . We exist in a medieval world [i.e., a pre-modern world]" (p. xvii; his italics; his ellipsis; my bracketed material).
Professor Wilhelmsen also says, "Some of Guardini's readers, appalled the more by his own prophecy of things to come, will redouble their effort in favor of reaction. Like [the prolific Catholic convert and lay theologian G. K.] Chesterton [1874-1936], they will see themselves as members of a band of men who 'shall be left defending, not only the incredible . . . sanities of human life, but something more incredible still, this huge impossible universe which stares us in the face. . . . We shall look on the impossible grass and the skies with a strange courage. We shall be of those who have seen and yet have believed.' Their motto will be the freedom of man against the blind tyranny of history. Others, while accepting Guardini's rejection of any return to the past and to an older world, will bridle at his grim picture of the new age of mass man. Echoing [the French Catholic personalist philosopher and lay theologian] Emmanuel Mounier's Be Not Afraid[: A Denunciation of Despair, posthumously published in English by Sheed and Ward, 1962 - and praised by Romano Guardini], they will continue to see in human history 'A deep continuous impulse driving . . . from one level to a better . . . a movement towards the liberation of man.' Their motto will be a declaration of faith in the benevolence of history" (p. xxii; his ellipses).
Professor Wilhelmsen concludes that Guardini "offers us Faith, neither in man nor in history, but in God alone and in His Providence" (p. xxiii). Unfortunately, Professor Wilhelmsen does not tell us what the motto would be for those Catholics who not only accept "Guardini's rejection of any return to the past and to an older world," on the one hand, but also, on the other, accept "his grim picture of the [emerging in 1950] new age of mass man" - as does Pope Francis in his 2015 eco-encyclical, but without using Guardini's terminology about "mass man."
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