Steps Toward Vatican 3

Preface

I: Challenges For The Church In The Twenty-First Century

The Challenges Of A Syncretist New Age To The Church’s Mission

The Challenges Of Secularity, Migration, And Globalization

The Challenges Of Islam And Religious Fundamentalism

II: Is The Church Out Of Touch With The Modern World?

Scripture And Social Justice Issues

The Church’s Resistance And Openness To Modernization

III: Strategies To Help Us Bridge Our Divides

Interfaith And Crosscultural Implications Of Globalization

Historically-Informed Ecumenical Strategies

Communities Striving For Social Justice And World Unity

Appendix: Select List Of Catholic Reform Organizations In The United States

Notes

Bibliography

Index

About The Authors

Additional Info
The Catholic Church has a tradition of bridge-building, one founded on Christ and that began with the Apostle St. John and the convert St. Paul. It helped bridge the Hebrew, Greek, and Roman worlds. Later, it helped civilize the tribes that overran Europe. Limits appeared in the Church’s bridge-building ability when Europe was confronted with Islam, and later with the secular mentality that arose in Western Europe, as well as in its encounters with China, India, and Africa.

Steps Toward Vatican III examines the present dilemmas facing the Church and humanity in an age of globalization that daily brings people of various backgrounds into close proximity. It offers a “middle-way” to face such issues. It develops a global ethics and a global spirituality that can be incarnated within alert, loving, small Christian communities, as well as in the larger Church structures directed from the Vatican. It builds on Vatican II to find paths that may help bring peace and understanding in the world by a sympathetic evaluation of different world traditions. Such sympathy must be informed by the conversions that Jesus and the Church have demanded of their followers.