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Western Christianity Confronts Other Cultures

The Second Vatican Council devoted chapter two of the first part of its Constitution on the Church in the Modem World, Gaudium et Spes, to 'The Proper Development of Culture'. It may not, all together, have proved a terribly good chapter, but it does perhaps at least deserve the degree of approbation Dr Johnson made of a woman preaching. It is like a dog walking on its hind legs: the wonder is not that it is not done well, but that it is done at all! (31 July, 1763). For a General Council to attempt to wrestle with the problems of defining and describing culture was undoubtedly something extraordinarily novel: it was indeed one of the most telling expressions of the Council's own culture an already slightly strange-looking, and not altogether convincing, mix of sixties' optimism and social inclusiveness upon the one hand, an underlying if relatively softly-edged Roman traditionalism upon the other. But in this chapter as in most of Gaudium et Spes it is the former mood that dominates. The Council is wrestling with the relationship of unity to diversity. It speaks of a 'plurality of cultures' and stresses that each human community has 'its proper patrimony', 'a specific historical environment' (53). Nevertheless, 'a more universal form of human culture is developing' (54), something which may, in the singular, be termed 'the culture of today' (57) but which may well, the Council fears, 'jeopardize the uniqueness of each people' (56) and threaten the preservation of 'the particular features of the different cultures' (54).