From Paul Fahey:
John Paul II’s fingerprints were all over every aspect of my Catholic formation.
As much as that American JPII culture helped me build a foundation of faith and religious practice, it was also deeply ill. Forged as a reaction to the “crazy season” after Vatican II and the widespread rejection of the Church’s sexual teaching, a central part of this generation’s Catholic identity was being opposed to, and fearful of, whatever was considered liberal.
The spirituality that I inherited from members of the JPII generation contained a lot of fear.
The turmoil of the culture—especially from the threat of Communism and the aftermath of the sexual revolution—I think provoked a tendency to see the Church and her teaching in a defensive way. The Church was seen as an objective, unchanging bulwark in opposition to the changing culture.
But this defensiveness came at a cost. It turned the outside world into something to be feared instead of persons to be loved. The comfort of the objective ideal left little room for the weak who were unable to live the moral law. It created a tendency to fill in the grey areas of Church teaching with clear black and white answers of our own making.
And from later in the same article:
Francis’s spiritual legacy is mercy. We don’t have enemies in a culture war, we have brothers and sisters who, like us, have been wounded by sin and need to be shown mercy. Francis wants us to meet others where they are at, to show them the love of the Father, and accompany them, step by step, back to Jesus. We are not soldiers fighting a war, we are field medics in search of the wounded and suffering.
I believe that his image of the Church as a field hospital and the centering of the Kerygma undermines the fear-based culture war Christianity that was so prominent in my Catholic formation.
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