From New Directions for Catholic Social and Political Research
ABSTRACT
This is the opening chapter of a series of essays (of mine and of other Catholic colleagues, including Jesuit scholars) I had gathered for a project at the Pontifical Gregorian University (Vatican) in 2015. The idea was to make up for a lack of radical thinking and concrete economic solutions in the Catholic Church for relaunching the welfare of communities in the world. The piece was to set the (sociological) tone by insisting that there is no such thing as “postmodernism” –a label by which we were given to understand that, purportedly, we now live in a “liquid” era, an era shorn by the collective atrocities of the twentieth century of any certainties, an epoch allegedly marked by the dissolution of centralized power and the concomitant immersion of all human interaction in a whirlpool of technicized, overwhelming change, all of which destabilizing shifts are said in the final analysis to have made our navigation of this world inevitably “complex” and perilous. I rather maintain that the world, that our System has not changed at all, but that it has rather exasperated, exacerbated its truculent anti-cooperative, belligerent, and classist countenance, masking it behind all kinds of deceitful propagandistic cries of logisticial impotence, existential fatigue, and practical haplessness in the face of “uncertainty.” Our times are rather “Hyper-Modern.” In light of this critique, I thereby present a variety of action items for the Church dealing with economic reform, education, a political re-orientation in general, in the face of ever more agressive imperial management on the world stage.
