by Paul Eliefrom Georgetown University
In Rome This Week, Seekers and Dwellers
“… with regards to faith, there are `seekers’ and `dwellers.‘”
That – in veteran Rome correspondent Cindy Wooden’s formulation – is one of the core ideas of Charles Taylor’s thought, set out in A Secular Age and elsewhere. And that is one of the ideas undergirding the discussion at the Gregorian University in Rome this week. Here it is, in brief:
The seekers – baptized Christians or not – continue to question. The dwellers have found a home in a church and may have a tendency to nest there so thoroughly that they seldom reach out to others and only accept those who believe exactly as they do.
The conversation, sponsored by the Pontifical Council for Culture, is an offshoot of the Courtyard of the Gentiles project, meant to engage Catholics in a sustained way with committed atheists and their dispositional kin. Conceived by Pope Benedict, the Courtyard was meant from the beginning to be an ongoing effort – and conversations like the one in Rome are strong evidence that it really is ongoing and not just another paper initiative from a Vatican dicastery.
Further evidence is that the strongest voices are not priests, but lay people: Taylor and my Georgetown colleague Jose Casanova, for whom the project is part of a career’s reflection on the “post-secular” situation. Wooden explains:
Jose Casanova, a professor of the sociology of religion at Georgetown University in Washington, said the international group of philosophers, theologians and sociologists present at the Rome conference started the “Faith in the Secular Age” project “with a sense of concern, a sense that the disjunctions (including between seekers and dwellers) were growing larger and there were no real avenues to address them within the church or between the church and outside the church.”
“We were concerned by what could be called a self-referential church that had been too concerned about what could be called a 'moral confessionalism’ in which being Catholic was defined by certain moral criteria more than criteria of dogma or belief in doctrine,” he said. Positions on “moral issues having to do with gender and sex” seemed to be how Catholics themselves and the outside world were defining who was and was not Catholic.
The election of Pope Francis has created new opportunities to discuss ways to overcome the splits and heal the rifts, he said.
“The big, big issue,” Taylor said, is how to “accompany the seekers without shocking the dwellers.”
That’s a big issue, no question. But it seems to me the bigger question is how credibly to set forth a sense of things that acknowledges how deeply we are, most of us, at once seekers and dwellers. And there’s no place where this is more obvious than in Rome – which, as seat of the church and site of pilgrimage, is held in common by the seekers and the dwellers.
