and pluralistic people whose experience of Catholicism is also highly diverse and pluralistic.
Catholicism was a political empire that brought church and state together to rule most of Europe and then to colonize much of the rest of the world. It was a cultural synthesis that integrated reason and the arts, commerce, government, education, family life, with religion in Medieval Europe. It became a religious denomination, losing its political power in the rise of the modern nation-states and much of its religious and moral influence in the Protestant Reformation and the onslaught of intellectual criticism accompanying modernity’s turn to rationalism and empiricism. In many ways, the twentieth century is an important turning point for Catholicism–institutionally perhaps tragic, but providing also a great opportunity for the recovery of its spiritual identity in the retrieval of its origins and its unique blending of mythic power and practical wisdom. Its new context is global pluralism, democracy, and individual self-determinism. Catholicism can no longer control people, but it can inspire them. It can no longer claim political privilege, not even spiritual exclusivity, but it can persuade and influence and contribute much to the dialogue of meanings and values. It can no longer pretend to broker God to the world, but it can invite people to a rich spiritual experience in which they discover God through in and through the sacramental community, where the memory and presence of Jesus and the movement of grace leads to a profound personal and social experience of liberation.
The new vision of Catholicism means no longer clinging to a juridical past, grasping instead the real