Importance of Worldview

Over at Amy Welborn's blog, she reflects a bit upon the Death of Catholic Culture by quoting an article written by a James Matthew Wilson, a Sorin Research Fellow at Notre Dame. The article speaks quite powerfully on the current disconnect in the lives of Catholic lay men and women between our faith and our worldview. Here are a few selections:

Ignorance of the Church's faith, however, is just a symptom of an even more grave condition. It is one thing not to know the doctrinal expressions of particular sacred truths; it is another thing - and a more serious thing - to live one's life with a worldview blind to and uninformed by those truths. The great achievement of the so-called secularizing forces of modernity has been in reshaping the way in which we live in and perceive the world. Plenty of persons deny the religious truths their parents and grandparents approved and defended confidently. But plenty more persons affirm their belief in God, or confess they accept myriad other formal doctrines of our faith, while they see the world with the eyes of indifference and unbelief. One can claim to believe in the God Who died for our sins, while at the same time thinking about the world as if none of that business had happened. I do not speak of hypocrisy, but of a loss of religious feeling. . . .

The ignorance that resulted in misnaming abstinence "penance" is easily corrected. I have just corrected it. But how can one correct a worldview that blindly believes one's life of faith is entirely private - an affair between the individual soul and God and nobody else? I am no Church historian, but I bet it took many generations for the truth that Christians are "one body in Christ" to disseminate widely and become deeply meaningful. It has taken at most two generations to wipe out that truth, to make it appear repugnant to the average American, Catholic or otherwise.

The great vision of Christianity is that no person is an individual and no one exists alone. God created all things and keeps them in being through a personal act of His love. He creates us not separately, but for each other and in His Kingdom. The families, clubs and countries of which we are children, members and citizens are legitimate but relative analogues to our role as subjects of that Kingdom. When we worship together in mass, we perceive with our senses the fellowship of the Kingdom. When we pray in silence in a monastery, we experience that fellowship in the deepest part of our souls. Being part of Christ's spiritual body is what makes us most fully persons. From this perspective, there is no such thing as an individual, but only persons in one spiritual body (an analogue to the Blessed Trinity).

One of the goals of intentional discipleship is to help each other integrate this Christian worldview into our lives so that how we understand the world, the Church, and ourselves all flows from this worldview. We do so, however, not simply by assimilating ideas, philosophies, or theologies, but by encountering and nurturing our communal and individual relationship with Christ, the foundation from which the whole worldview flows like streams of living water.

Faith formation, therefore, should always keep this goal in mind. It is not simply about personal enrichment, but about preparation for mission.

Do read Mr. Wilson's whole article!