These Are the Days!

Ah, for the Middle Ages and the Age of Faith, sighs many a modern Catholic, when the undivided Church was the warp and the woof of daily life, when men and not machines were the makers and doers. Nonsense, said the Rev. Walter J. Ong, S.J. last week to the 14th annual Spring Symposium of the Catholic Renascence Society in Manhattan. Today, according to Father Ong, an assistant professor of English at St. Louis University, is more an Age of Faith than the 13th century ever was.

''To think of a time when most of the human race had no contact whatsoever with the Church's teaching as a genuinely 'Catholic' age," said Jesuit Ong, "is not only parochial, but definitely scandalous. It suggests that Christ came to save not the human race but one's own family." Only Europe was Catholic in the so-called Age of Faith; today there are Catholics everywhere in the world.

"Their cohesion [is] more real than that of earlier Catholics living in much greater geographical proximity . . . and the faith has been disengaged from entanglements with errors of early physical science."

The world lives in an evolving universe, says Ong, in which geological ages, over the course of some 5 billion years, follow "one after the other in a mysterious, but unmistakably patterned, sequence." In this evolution of the earth from "brute nature" toward more and more "homanization," technology is the latest phase. Thus any idea that technology is opposed to humanism is "unreal." On the contrary, technology "is a great and inspiring human creation." Instead of fighting technology, Christians should join it. "The cause of humanism is served by dealing with reality, not by denouncing it."

Nostalgia for the past "is an old pagan disease. There is nothing Christian in it. The Church in her teaching and liturgy shows no signs of nostalgia. She does not dream of a Golden Age to which she longs to return. For her the Second Adam is infinitely better than the first. Man after the Fall, sinful but redeemed by Christ, is better off than before the fall . . .

"The Christian is at home in history and in a forward-moving, developing universe, whereas the pagan, radically, is not."

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