Where is the Church-Globalization and Catholicity

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WHERE IS THE CHURCH? GLOBALIZATION AND CATHOLICITY

VINCENT J. MILLER

Theological considerations of the cultural effects of globalizationhave focused largely on homogenization: the erosion of local cul-tures by some dominant globalizing culture. This article considersthree contrasting analyses. Globalization also fosters cultural frag-mentation and purification, the abstraction of culture and social

space from geographical space, and a reduction of culture to iden-

tity. These additional challenges are evaluated from the perspectiveof the mark of catholicity, which is proposed as a theological resource for an ecclesial response to the challenges of globalization.

IT IS WIDELY AGREED that globalization poses a pressing challenge to thechurch, but what is the nature of this challenge? Different analyses

engender varied diagnoses of globalization’s problems, which in turn sug-gest different prescriptions for how best to respond. This article exploresthe consequences that different understandings of the cultural effects of

globalization have for theological reflection and ecclesial response.Theological reflection on the cultural effects of globalization has long

emphasized homogenization: globalization erodes local cultures, replacingthem with either some version of Western culture or a global consumerculture. Sociologists and anthropologists, however, have long noted anopposing dynamic: heterogenization. The same economic and technologi-cal forces that make globalization possible also encourage people to thinkof themselves as members of distinct cultures and to join together in everpurer, smaller cultural units. Globalization reifies difference as much as it

homogenizes it.A third cultural dynamism is intertwined with these two: deterritorial-

ization. Mediated culture, easy travel and migration, and choice of com-munity unbind culture from geographical space. Deterritorialization inten-sifies heterogenization. These two dynamisms combine to give rise to a

VINCENT J. MILLER received his Ph.D. from the University of Notre Dame and isnow associate professor of theology at Georgetown University. He is grateful to the

Louisville Institute for funding the research for this article. His Consuming Reli- gion: Christian Faith and Practice in a Consumer Culture (2004) became the subjectof a symposium whose proceedings were published in Zeitschrift für Theologie inEuropa (2006, vol. 1). Projected is a book on theology and the cultural effects of globalization.

Theological Studies69 (2008)

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certain “cultural ecology” which fosters communities that focus on theirown identities. Religious communities are diminished as they ignore ele-ments of their traditions that ground a complex form of life in favor of

those that project a clear identity.These three cultural dynamisms pose profound challenges. The mark of

catholicity provides both a measure of these challenges and a resource foraddressing them. The challenges of homogenization are well recognized.The erosion of local cultures impoverishes communities, reducing personsto individual consumers bereft of traditional wisdom. Religiously, it fostersa generic, individualistic spirituality. Heterogenization, on the other hand,threatens that global intimacy will bring not communion, but polarizationand division. Heterogenization fosters a cultural ecology where communi-

ties close in on themselves, becoming ever-purer enclaves of the similar,threatening catholicity on both the global and the local level. Finally, de-territorialization threatens to sunder the church from its mission as a trans-formative sacrament of God’s salvation, engaging the goodness and suf-fering of the world, reducing church instead to a sectarian communitypolicing its identity.

This article proceeds in three stages. First, it considers the homogeniza-tion analysis and its theological and ecclesial reception. Second, it aug-ments this analysis with a consideration of heterogenization and deterrito-

rialization. Finally, it employs the mark of catholicity to measure global-ization’s challenges to the church and as a resource for responding to them.

GLOBALIZATION AS HOMOGENIZATION

Homogenization is the most popularly understood of globalization’s cul-tural impacts. It describes globalization as the imposition of a single cul-ture—whether a continuation of European colonialism or the reduction of the global diversity of cultures into one generic, consumerist conglomerate.

A review of titles reveals as much: Jihad vs. McWorld, The McDonaldiza-tion of Society, The Westernization of the World. Discussions of globaliza-tion and culture abound with terms that express homogenization, such as“coca-colonization,” “Americanization,” and “global hyperculture.”

1 Un-like European colonialism, however, which actively sought political controlthrough cultural disempowerment, today’s cultural imperialism is the sideeffect of global marketing and new communication technologies, whichspread American culture through goods, practices, and marketing. “Hege-

1 John Tomlinson, Globalization and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago,1999) 84–105; Robert J. Schreiter, The New Catholicity: Theology between the Glob-al and the Local (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1997) 10.

413GLOBALIZATION AND CATHOLICITY



mony is prepackaged in Los Angeles, shipped out to the global village, andunwrapped in innocent minds.”2

Similar analyses appear among theologians. Michael Amalados de-

scribes the dominant form of globalization as the spread of “a particularculture or country or ideology or economic system. Such globalization aimsat the subordination, if not disappearance, of the other cultures, ideologies,etc.”3 Teresa Okure sees in globalization “the destruction of the cultures of those places to which the globalized culture spreads.”4 Treatments followfrom diagnoses. When globalization is conceived in terms of homogeniza-tion, strategies of defense, closure, protection, and purification seem fittingresponses. Religious responses focus on inculturation in order to undo thedestructive legacies of colonialism to indigenous cultures and to ground

robust contemporary local forms of Christianity.Okure also wonders about the impact individualization and consumer-

ism have on Western cultural traditions. Her question helpfully contextu-alizes theological movements in Europe and North America that are alsoconcerned with cultural erosion and the preservation of particularity. Weare decades into a sustained reaction to liberal, critical, and pluralist ten-dencies in academic theology by esthetic, postliberal, and radical orthodoxtheologies. These emphasize the particularities of the Christian traditionover against secular Enlightenment reason, other modern master narra-

tives, critical perspectives, and overly accommodating practices of interre-ligious dialogue. To this list we could add a curious set of fellow travelers—various forms of identity-based and subaltern theologies, among themBlack and Latina/Latino theologies and varieties of Christian feminism.Beneath their clear normative differences, these movements have a strikingsimilarity. Across geography, culture, and ideological orientation we wit-ness the same concern for preserving cultural particularity.

There is much that is valuable in these approaches. Western colonialismdid enormous violence to other cultures. The destruction it wrought con-

tinues long after political independence is won. Although globalized capi-talism works through different processes toward different ends, it spreadsa global “hyperculture” that is no less destructive in both the global Westand South. In the West, the ongoing processes of secularization and reli-

2 Tamar Leibes and Elihu Katz, The Export of Meaning: Cross-Cultural Readingsof Dallas (New York: Oxford University, 1993) xi; cited in Tomlinson, Globaliza-tion and Culture 84.

3

Michel Amaladoss,“

The Utopia of the Human Family: Among the Religions of Humanity,” in Globalization and Its Victims, ed. Jon Sobrino and Felix Winfred,Concilium 293/5 (London: SCM, 2001) 81–88, at 81.

4 Teresa Okure, “Africa: Globalization and the Loss of Cultural Identity,” in ibid.67–74, at 67.

414 THEOLOGICAL STUDIES



gious deregulation have offered a flood of cultural and religious optionsthat erode the stability of cultural and religious traditions in a tide of liberating and individualizing choice. This erosion fundamentally alters the

social inertia hitherto lending continuity to a community’s traditions. Tra-ditions are unlikely to survive as living realities without reflexive, inten-tional efforts to preserve and hand them on. Programs of preserving par-ticularity are, therefore, much needed, but such approaches alone are anincomplete response to globalization’s cultural effects because they aregrounded in an analysis that does not attend to the full range of globaliza-tion’s effects.

THE HETEROGENIZING AND DETERRITORIALIZINGEFFECTS OF GLOBALIZATION

Although the homogenization thesis has dominated theological interpre-tations of globalization, sociology and anthropology have long noted acontravening cultural dynamic. The very technologies that make globaliza-tion possible also engender cultural differentiation. Globalization’s impactis complex and perhaps even contradictory. In Robert Schreiter’s words,globalization produces a cultural context marked by both “hybridity” and“hyperdifferentiation.”5 These technologies have another effect as well.

They enable culture to float free of geographical space. The consequencesgo beyond the virtual cultures of the Internet and global media. The culturewithin which we relate to one another (including religious culture) is un-bound from geographical space—deterritorialized—with profound conse-quences for the ability of the church to be present anywhere. The interplayof these two dynamics tends to reduce culture and religion to sources of identity. To respond to the challenges of the cultural effects of globaliza-tion fully, we must consider these dynamics as well.

HeterogenizationHeterogenization is primarily known in popular and academic literature

by the term “glocalization.”6 No matter how grand the aims of globalcapitalism, it must contend with the local cultures that receive its products.Arjun Appadurai provides evidence for this in opposition to facile descrip-tions of globalization as “Americanization.” He points to Philippine en-thusiasm for Kenny Rogers and the global reach of Coca Cola as examples.What appear at first glance to be perfect examples of the dominance of

5 Schreiter, New Catholicity 25.6 Roland Robertson, “Glocalization: Time-Space and Homogeneity-Hetero-

geneity,” in Global Modernities, ed. Mike Featherstone, Scott Lash, and RolandRoberston (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 1995) 25–44.




American culture, on second glance become more complex. Both are “in-

digenized” in their reception and use. Kenny Rogers enjoys more popu-

larity abroad than at home. Coke is mixed with indigenous ingredients to

yield a drink that has much more to do with local identity than neocolonial

cultural inferiority—the Cuba Libre.7 The global circulation of violent Hol-

lywood films inspires not only respect for the American empire but also

contributes to the imaginative resources of myriad militant groups that

fight against it.

But globalization does not encourage cultural particularity and hetero-

genization only because of the remnant ability of local cultures to function

as market niches for capitalism. Developments in transportation, commu-

nications technologies, and economic structures compress time and space,bringing all parts of the globe into relationship with the others. Long before

fundamentalist reaction against the unwelcome encroachments of the

broader world sets in, local cultures have already been constructed as

species within a broader genus and thus were relativized in relationship to

other cultures.8

Appadurai offers another account of how globalization feeds the rise of

smaller and purer cultural identities by building upon Benedict Anderson’s

argument that the emergence of the nation-state depended on print media

such as newspapers and novels that could sustain a national cultural iden-tity, or “imagined community.”9 Without this, the modern nation-state’s

project of subsuming regional identities into a larger geographical unit

would not have been possible. The cost of media has dropped so drastically

that only miniscule audiences are required for media outlets to be success-

ful. Indeed, free Internet weblog—“blog”—sites have now reduced the cost

to zero (on this side of the digital divide). Such changes are about much

more than the emergence of websites for alternative music or amateur

political commentary. Changes in media have long accompanied cultural

transformations, as the relationship between the printing press and the

Reformation makes clear. The technology that once allowed for the mas-

sive homogenization required for national-scale cultures now allows for the

emergence of ever smaller and more refined cultural units. The explosion

7 Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1996) 29; Tomlinson, Globalization and

Culture 84.8 Roland Robertson, Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture (London:Sage, 1992) 27, 97, 175.

9 Benedict R. O’G. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Originand Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991).




of media and its resultant cultural agency give rise to myriad heteroge-neous cultures.10

The growth of heterogeneous cultures is evident in contemporary U.S.

culture. The market niching of news and commercial culture separates thepopulation into a nation of “red and blue” and thousands of other subcul-tures. The “lifestyle enclaves” based on consumption separated from poli-tics and religion warned of by Bellah in the 1980s have grown to encompassincreasingly public dimensions of community.11 The demographics of U.S.neighborhoods increasingly reflect a concentration into enclaves of similarpolitical and cultural values.12

The church has the potential to provide a place of deeper communion tobridge such divisiveness. But these same dynamics are evident in local

religious communities. The “automobile scale” of suburban life and theexpectation of choice have transformed the Catholic parish from geo-graphical to a congregational model. The result is an intentional or con-sumer (these are harder to distinguish than we would like) understandingof parishes. People choose the community they attend, which leads to ahomogenizing effect within communities. Parishes cease to be places wherepeople with different theological commitments worship together and in-teract. Rather than challenging the heterogenizing tide rising in culture,churches unfortunately conform to it.

Deterritorialization

The same technologies of communication and transportation that fuelthe heterogenization of culture also break it loose from the moorings of geographic territory. Appadurai notes that, “because of the interplay of commerce, media, national policies, and consumer fantasies, ethnicity,once a genie contained in the bottle of some sort of locality (howeverlarge), has now become a global force, forever slipping through the cracks

between states and borders.”13

Culture is transformed as it is moves fromthe background, where it functioned as the system of shared assumptions,symbols, and practices that grounded social relations, into the foregroundwhere it is made a matter of intentional choice. This shift brings with it anepochal increase in personal freedom of choice, but equally significanterosions.

10 Appadurai, Modernity at Large 3, 10, 33.11 Robert N. Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in

American Life (New York: Harper, 1985) 71–

74.12 James G. Gimpel and Jason E. Schuknecht, Patchwork Nation: Sectionalismand Political Change in American Politics (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan,2003).

13Appadurai, Modernity at Large 33–34, 41.




Three erosions are particularly evident. First, what is chosen is not as-sumed to be shared. Culture ceases to provide common assumptions thatform the basis for judgment, deliberation, and conflict. Political uses of

culture—rallying around shared convictions, satire, prophetic gestures, thetransgression of subalterns on dominant culture—lose their traction. Withno shared terrain between distinct in-groups, one can offend but neverchallenge.

Second, culture loses its concern for and ties to specific territory. Whilevirulent nationalisms and ethnic identities flourish, they lose their sense of responsibility for the territories they claim. The emergence of microstatesserves as a surprising illustration of deterritorialized culture. Zygmunt Bau-man notes that they do not undertake the traditional tasks of larger states,

such as controlling their economies and ensuring their own security. Theyare built on the only remaining leg of the traditional tripod of the sovereignnation-state—the identity function of nationhood.14 Microstates (and, in-deed, many larger states that have embraced the limitations on economicsovereignty required by the global economy) no longer control their do-mestic economies. This ceding of control results in a decline in a politicalimagination for policy, for the business of running the laws and institutionsnecessary for the common good; policy decays into ideology.

Finally, when society is reduced to a conglomeration of individuals

choosing among heterogeneous cultural associations, people lose the abil-ity to conceive of the world as a place of specific moral responsibility.William Cavanaugh observes that the deterritorializing effects of global-ization build upon the nation-state’s “project of subsuming the local underthe universal.”15 Clearly the centralized government of the nation-stateusurped the power of a range of diverse local communal and politicalstructures including the church. To do so, the government constructed thenation as the fundamental unit of social belonging and moral concern. Withthe decline of the nation-state, however, we lose one of the larger-scale

mappings of moral concern that we possess. Society fragments into a hostof smaller communal obligations, which, as a result of their strictly volun-tarist nature, cease to correspond to a particular geographical space.Prayers for the “shut-ins of our parish” make sense in a geographicalmodel, not in a congregational one. What are the “local” political andcommunity issues for such a congregation? Jose Casanova describes terri-tory as analogous to history. Just as history is the narrative imbuing of time

14 Zygmunt Bauman, Globalization: The Human Consequences (New York: Co-lumbia University, 1998) 64.

15 William T. Cavanaugh, The Theopolitical Imagination (London: T. & T. Clark,2002) 99.




with meaning, so territory is the rendering of space humanly significant.16

Thus, deterritorialization threatens the church’s ability to be present in andto any particular place.

Identity

When community drifts free from geographical place, there is less needto engage recognized authorities or to undertake the rhetorical work of dialogue and argument with those who disagree. An identity-focused, de-territorialized cultural ecology reinforces the sectarian impulse. Commu-nities become ever more homogeneous, held together only by what theybelieve in common—negotiated not with a global ecumene of believers, but

within the bounds of small“

elective fraternities”

or focused movements.

17

Communities are sustained by their ability to offer clear identities. Thus weturn to religious traditions not for their complex wisdom, but for “senti-ments, whose greatest force is in their ability to ignite intimacy into apolitical state and turn locality into a staging ground for identity.”18

An example can be found in a common linguistic slide of the word“catholicity.” In conversations about the Catholic identity of institutions,one frequently hears “catholicity” used as a less onerous adjective for“catholicness.” Thus, the title of a recent editorial: “Now, it seems, con-

traception has become the acid test of Catholicity.”19

This linguistic shift of the term is utterly predictable in a situation where religion is reduced toidentity. Catholicity is defined in terms of the contested issues that can beused to project a distinct identity. Whereas the very doctrine of catholicitywould have once provided a theological mapping of the world that deniedthe possibility of not being implicated in the one church of Christ, the term“catholicity” is now merely a label of shallow particularity.

This task of projecting an identity is as different from fidelity to traditionas today’s wedge-issue politics is from building a broad political coalition.

This conflict of tasks manifested itself in a recent exchange between theleader of a conservative pressure-group focused on Catholic identity and asenior Catholic bioethicist. The activist had previously targeted the pro-fessor (a member of the Pontifical Academy of Life) as a “Professor of Death” who did not support John Paul II’s teaching on artificial hydrationand nutrition. The bioethicist responded, using the complex professional

16 Jose Casanova, “Religion, the New Millennium, and Globalization,” Sociologyof Religion 62 (2001) 415–41, at 428.

17

Danièle Hervieu-Léger, Religion as a Chain of Memory, trans. Simon Lee(New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University, 1993) 149–56.

18 Appadurai, Modernity at Large 41.19 Clifford Longley, “Now, it seems, contraception has become the acid test of

Catholicity,” Tablet 260 (April 4, 2006) 9.




hermeneutics of his field—a style of language quite different from theactivist’s heated press-release discourse. The exchange illustrated that thecomplexities and nuances that mark a lived tradition of moral reflection do

not translate easily into the rhetorical needs of identity projection. At-tempts to plumb the significance of the clause “in principle” in John Paul’sallocution, which is essential for practicing ethics in a Catholic healthcaresetting, appear as overly rigorous hairsplitting at best, and at worst ascasuist sophistry for those seeking to establish a clear identity. The twowere speaking different languages yoked to fundamentally different tasks.

This linguistic confusion poses a profound problem for the discipline of theology. “Identity,” for all the integrity evoked by its rhetorical use, is avery limited cultural practice. Far from preserving the complex orthodoxy

and orthopraxis of a tradition, it shears off what does not serve its limitedneeds. In his discussion of cosmopolitanism, Anthony Appiah expresses ahope that many theologians would readily embrace. He appeals to thecosmopolitan elements of religious traditions and to the learned figureswho espouse them as the hope for countering the violent use of religions.20

But when identity is the fundamental religious and cultural practice, cos-mopolitan traditions are suspect. Olivier Roy’s observations about the lackof hearing received by moderate Muslim voices are hauntingly relevant ina Catholic context. Scholars “wish to propound their academic theological

learning. They therefore do not appeal to born-again Muslims, who prefergurus to teachers, consider that too much intellectualism spoils the faith,and seek a ready-made and easily accessible set of norms and values thatmight order their daily lives and define a practical and visible identity.Liberal thinkers do not meet the demands of the religious market.”21

Our identity-focused ecology is almost identical to the conditions ScottAppleby describes for the emergence of ethnonationalist religious extrem-ism, which emerges in situations of high levels of religious commitment andlow levels of religious literacy. Identity is not only too narrow a social

function to support the richness of religious belief and practice; it also risksfueling conflict by depriving practitioners of the elements of their traditionswith which they can resist religiously fueled conflict.22

These other cultural effects of globalization present a range of urgentproblems for the church. Religious communities cease to image the diverse

20 Kwame Anthony Appiah, “What’s Special about Religious Disputes?” in Re-ligious Pluralism, Globalization, and World Politics, ed. Thomas Banchoff (New

York: Oxford, forthcoming, 2008).21 Olivier Roy, Globalized Islam: The Search for a New Ummah (New York:Columbia University, 2004) 31.

22 R. Scott Appleby, The Ambivalence of the Sacred: Religion, Violence, andReconciliation (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000).




unity of the Body of Christ and become instead enclaves of the like-

minded. Believers lose the habits of cohabiting with people who are dif-

ferent from them. The communication and rhetorical skills required to

engage and convince others are lost. The ongoing argument of a livingtradition fragments into myriad, dispersed monologues. At the same time

as communities are fragmenting, they are being lifted from rooted engage-

ment with the world around them. They retreat into distinct identities that

have less and less contact with anything beyond their borders. We face a

new situation caused by changes in the structures of community. The chal-

lenge facing the church is to preserve catholicity from dissipating into

abstract, virtual enclaves.

RESPONDING TO THE FULL RANGE OFTHE CULTURAL EFFECTS OF GLOBALIZATION

This three-part analysis of globalization calls for a different response

than the homogenization account. The challenge is not simply to preserve

particularity against erosion. If that is all we do, we are simply swimming

with the current of heterogenization by abetting the reduction of Chris-

tianity to a fractious collection of identity fronts. The mark of catholicity

provides both measure and means for engaging these cultural dynamics: an

ideal of unity as a harmony of difference that challenges the dominantsectarianism, and a call to the fullness of salvation that cannot settle for

purity abstracted from concrete engagement with the world. As a mark of

the church, catholicity is a theological ideal, joined to the structures and

practices of the church. Catholicity informs the church’s graced successes

and challenges it to a greater fullness. Catholicity can function as an ex-

ample of what Roland Robertson terms “the particularization of the uni-

versal”—a particular cultural understanding of the global whole that guides

action within it.23 By fostering relationships and exchanges not happening

elsewhere, the church, as a global community with a global infrastructure of its own, can foster a better form of globalization than the one promoted by

the forces of advanced capitalism.

Conceiving Catholicity

Recent theological debates about catholicity centered around two issues.

The first is the need to recover a qualitative conception of catholicity to

correct Scholastic and Counter-Reformation emphasis on geographical

breadth. Attention to patristic usage shows that the fullness denoted by

katholou referred to the fullness of faith as much as to geographical uni-

23 Robertson, Globalization 100.




versality. It “is the entirety of the divine gifts rather than their extensionthat is essential. Thus, even when it was only the community in Jerusalem,the pentecostal Church was already fully the Catholic Church of God.”24

The second focus of debate concerns the relationship of catholicity to themark of unity. Theological considerations of catholicity are often implicitlyor explicitly also debates about the mark of unity and the relationshipbetween the two. The problems posed by globalization provide an illumi-native evaluation of the strengths and weaknesses of different construals of this relationship.

Joseph Komonchak outlines two contrasting tendencies within theologi-cal reflection on the relationship between unity and catholicity. Each offersa distinct mapping of space. When catholicity is subordinated to unity,

locality and the diversity of the world’s cultures are likely to be viewed atbest as passive material to be transformed by being brought into confor-mity with a centrally mediated Christian truth. “Locality can only bethought of as the ecclesiological equivalent of individuating matter in scho-lastic philosophy, that is . . . without intelligible content.” At worst suchapproaches view locality as matter in a more Neoplatonic sense: as anincorrigible confusion of the unity of the church. This mapping of spacesees unity as constantly under threat from its centrifugal dissemination inthe cultural particularities of localities. If, on the other hand, catholicity is

understood in a more complementary sense as adding “dimensions of plu-rality and integration” to unity, then locality appears not as a threat to theunity of the church, but as its realization.25 This conception of catholicitymakes more sense of the concept as a distinct mark of the church in itself.

These two approaches to catholicity correlate with analogical and dia-lectical theological approaches. A close identification of catholicity withunity appeals to the pessimism of Augustinian anthropology. Cultures, liketheir members, are fundamentally fallen. The church’s relationship to themis one of proclaiming the truth the cultures lack; it is a paradigm of con-

frontation between grace and sin.26 Thus ecclesial space is mapped with abright center where the fullness of revealed truth is embraced. The periph-ery is the boundary (perhaps understood in cultural terms) where the cleardistinction between light and darkness is always in danger of being blurredinto a muted grey. Thus the local church is evaluated in terms of its unityand clarity of faith, not in terms of the depth of its engagement with itsculture.

24 J.-M.-R. Tillard, “The Local Church within Catholicity,” Jurist 52 (1992) 449.

See also Henri De Lubac , Catholicism: The Corporate Destiny of Mankind (SanFrancisco: Ignatius, 1988) 48–81 and passim.

25 Joseph A. Komonchak, “The Local Church and the Church Catholic: TheContemporary Theological Problematic,” Jurist 52 (1992) 416–47, at 445.

26 Ibid. 439.




The complementary understanding of catholicity is consonant with themore optimistic anthropology of the analogical tradition, which alwaysexpects God to be already at work abroad in the world. Each locality is a

potential bearer both of riches that contribute to the greater fullness of theentire church, and of retrograde aspects that require correction and con-version. The spread of the church is not the expansion of a cultural bound-ary, but the embrace of new cultures that provide greater insights into thegospel message.

The dialectical approach is both less and more at home in the contem-porary cultural ecology. On the one hand, it is deeply sensitive to thecentrifugal tendencies of the present. Lacking a complementary under-standing of catholicity, it tends to construe the contemporary moment as a

threat to unity alone. In so doing, the dialectic approach unwittingly rein-forces the very dynamics it seeks to remedy. By construing locality as athreat to unity, it is inclined to protect a kernel of orthodoxy by disowninganything that threatens it with disorder. The result is a smaller, purerchurch, one that unwittingly reinforces the heterogenizing dynamics of globalization by rendering unity sectarian.

A complementary conception of catholicity provides a much more ad-equate basis for engaging globalization. Nevertheless, such approaches canrest too secure in their assumptions of unity. (It must always be remem-

bered, however, that the unity of the church is a gift of the Holy Spirit; itdoes not come from human effort alone.27) The weaknesses of such as-sumptions may be evident in the changes of the past four decades. Gen-erations raised in a church that rigidly guarded identity compensated forthese extremes, often without providing sufficient clarity on what was es-sential for the following generations who had no experience of such rigid-ity. These historical accidents of Catholic history have overlapped with thewidespread detraditionalization of culture in the West. As a result, youngergenerations are left susceptible to reducing Catholicism to rigid identity

fronts. A position that presumes unity may be particularly unsuited for thepresent moment, when the church must engage a cultural ecology whereidentity projection has become a fundamental cultural practice. The churchmust engage a situation that demands clear identities without allowingitself to be reduced to a mere identity front.

These problems are not essential to a complementary understanding of catholicity. Indeed, this position neither presumes nor devalues unity, butrather presents catholicity as a complementary challenge. J.-M.-R. Tillardprovided a model of such an approach. He argued for a qualitative under-

27 Yves Congar, I Believe in the Holy Spirit , 3 vols. (New York: Seabury, 1983)2:24–38.




standing of catholicity as the divine gift of fullness of faith. But as the giftof salvation for the world, it cannot remain static. The eschatological ful-fillment of God’s promise is meant for all. “The gift of catholicity becomes

the task of catholicity.”28

A complementary model of catholicity provides analytical and practicalresources to address all challenges of globalization. It illuminates the threatposed by the heterogenization of communities and the reduction of cultureto a resource for identity projection. The fractiousness these dynamismsencourage is a direct attack on the essence of the church, but these cen-trifugal tendencies cannot be addressed by a withdrawal from the task of catholicity. The katholou is a burden that must be born in the church’smessy engagement with cultures in all their particularity. Catholic unity

cannot be achieved without engaging difference.Catholicity is multifaceted. It describes the fullness of the divine gift of

salvation to the church, the depth of its penetration into human existence,the breadth of its embrace of cultures, and the temporal dimension of itsextension through history.29 Three aspects of catholicity are particularlyrelevant for evaluating and responding to the heterogenizing and deterri-torializing forces of globalization: catholicity as breadth, harmony of dif-ference, and depth.

Catholicity as Breadth

Regarding globalization, geographical breadth is the most intuitivelyobvious aspect of catholicity. Patristic usage stressed the “fullness of faith”and the salvation of humankind fully present in the church, regardless of itsgeographical extension. This understanding bore within itself the missionto “make disciples of all nations” (Mt 28:19) because it presumed the unityof all humankind. Geographical breadth gained emphasis following Au-gustine’s conflict with the Donatists, and in Catholic Counter-Reformation

polemics against early Protestantism, which made an issue of its initialconfinement to Europe.30 Despite the reaction against this shallow geo-graphical account by 20th-century ressourcement theology, catholicity asfullness bears an expansionist imperative to set no limits to the breadth of salvation.31

The technologies of globalization allow a fuller realization of the koi-

28 Christopher Ruddy , The Local Church: Tillard and the Future of CatholicEcclesiology (New York: Herder & Herder, 2006) 69.

29

Avery Dulles offers a fourfold schema in The Catholicity of the Church (Ox-ford: Clarendon, 1985). Ruddy (Local Church 66–72) modifies this schema bydeveloping the notion of “depth.”

30 See Dulles, Catholicity of the Church 13–18; Ruddy, Local Church 67–68.31 Dulles, Catholicity of the Church 72–74.




nonia of the entire church. Tillard noted that the church in the West haslong depended on the centralized administrative and communicationsstructures of Roman authority.32 Schreiter argues that the new infrastruc-

tures provide the opportunity for the church to become more deeply catho-lic, that is, for a shallow sense of catholicity understood as mere geographi-cal dispersal to be deepened into a true communion among the localchurches of the world.33

Congar observed that globalization facilitates a greater depth of encoun-ter with the “other” that makes communion both more concrete and moredifficult.34 This is evident in the recent crisis in the Anglican communionbetween the American Episcopalian Church and the rest of the commu-nion over the ordination of Bishop Gene Robinson. Transcultural commu-

nion has moved from an abstract ideal affirmed in the Creed and symbol-ized in the hierarchy to a real, living challenge of negotiating similarity anddifference between cultures in real time.

Catholicity as Communion of Difference

Catholicity is, in Richard McBrien’s words, characterized by a “both/and” rather than an “either/or” approach.35 Johann Adam Möhler used theanalogy of the choir constituted in the contrasting contributions of differ-ent voices, which in its unity avoids both a “wearying monotone” and an“antagonistic discord.”36 Avery Dulles argues that “catholicity, far from ex-cluding differences, demands them.”37 There is a danger that such idealdescriptions can seduce us into assuming that certain forms of Catholicismare unquestionably robust, when habits such as unity in difference dependon particular practices and discourses that may be endangered.

John Paul II frequently expressed his hope of communion and dialoguefor a world rent with factionalism and conflict. Toward this hope, he fre-quently envisioned the church’s role in bringing about a “different” glob-alization, one that builds global solidarity and respects human rights, ratherthan reducing all things to the utilitarian calculus of neoliberal econom-ics.38 Such ad extra missions are inextricably tied to the ad intra cul-

32 Tillard, “The Local Church within Catholicity” 453.33 Schreiter, New Catholicity 132.34 Congar, I Believe in the Holy Spirit 25.35 Richard P. McBrien, Catholicism, rev. ed. (New York: HarperCollins, 1994) 10.36 Johann Adam Möhler, Unity in the Church or the Principle of Catholicism,

trans. Peter Erb (Washington: Catholic University of America, 1996) 194–98.37

Avery Dulles, Catholicity of the Church 167.38 For example, John Paul II, Ecclesia in America no. 55. Benedict XVI hascontinued this usage. In his July 3, 2006, address to the Ambassador of Uruguay, hesaid that globalization provides an opportunity for “weaving a network of under-standing and solidarity among peoples, without reducing everything to merely mer-cantile




tivation of habits, practices and structures of communion. The situationchallenges the church to deepen its structures and practices of catholicityand communion in order to more deeply bind the whole church of Christ

in a time when the cultural dynamisms of globalization are rending thechurch asunder.

This change in cultural ecology is crucial for an adequate ecclesial re-sponse. Theologically speaking, bishops are the “visible source and foun-dation of unity in their own particular churches.”39 The unity of the localchurch, however, has long been more the result of the simple inertia of social space—nominally unified because locale bound them together. Localchurches have been riven by ethnic, racial, and class divisions, and in manycases bishops have worked heroically to bring about communion and rec-

onciliation. The current deterritorialized, congregational model of commu-nity makes communion in place the exception rather than the rule. Thus,inclusivity of difference becomes more difficult to sustain as communitiesbecome more theologically and ideologically monochromatic and unboundfrom territorial space.

The situation demands an intentional cultivation of the habits of catho-licity to supplement what was once brought about by the inertia of socialspace. We are no longer forced to listen to others. Believers lose thereligious habits of acceptance and fraternal argument necessary for dealing

with intramural diversity. We must now intentionally work to hear thetruth in the other side and to preserve it as part of the fullness of thetradition. But this analysis makes clear that such a goal requires more thanexhortations; it also requires an institutional and structural response at theparish level and beyond. Therefore, catholicity calls for diocesan and in-terparish structures to weave parishes into local and global ecclesial net-works. The church must now intentionally cultivate its own practices of inclusion in order to be the sacrament of unity for the broader world.40

Catholicity as Depth

The various dimensions of catholicity are interrelated. The call to engagethe diversity of human cultures is also a call to enter into the depths of each. The call to universality and geographic breadth also necessitatesengagement in the particular and the local. The notion of catholicity asdepth provides resources both to elaborate the response to heterogeniza-

or pragmatic exchanges,” http://www.zenit.org/english/visualizza.phtml?sid 91975

(accessed February 16, 2008)39 Lumen gentium no. 23, http://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_const_19641121_lumen-gentium_en.html (ac-cessed February 16, 2008).

40 Ibid. no. 48.




tion found in catholicity as breadth and communion of difference, and toprovide insights for engaging the deterritorializing aspects of globalization.We will consider how the local church can function as a locus for the

concrete experience of unity; how it functions as a heuristic space wherethe particularities of cultures and societies are brought into focus for en-counter with the gospel; and how it can serve to ground people in the localamidst a world where the freedoms of access draw people into deterrito-rialized niches that float free of the places in which they live.

Depth as Unity Made Concrete

If catholicity complements the mark of unity with the imperative that thechurch embrace diversity, the local community provides a place where thisembrace of fullness is made concrete. Catholicity is not an abstract alle-giance that lifts one out of the burdens of place (the current cultural ecol-ogy exacerbates the Roman Catholic ultramontane tendency to do justthat). Rather, it roots the individual in a community that is enmeshed in aglobal network of relationships. The depth of local commitment groundsdeeper global relationships.

Cavanaugh argues that catholicity provides a fundamentally differentand better conception of universality than does global capitalism, whichserves as a false catholicity, a “universal mapping of space typified bydetachment from any particular localities”

41 that reduces diversity to the“merely different” required for formal exchange.42 This “simulated catho-licity” is problematic because, by its very workings, “it hides the way thatspace remains rigidly segmented” between first world consumers and bod-ies of producers and the predicaments of their locations. Against this de-ception, Cavanaugh poses a logic of catholicity derived from the Eucharistthat “maps space in such a way that one becomes more united to the wholethe more tied one becomes to the local.” “The action of the Eucharistcollapses spatial divisions not by sheer mobility but by gathering in thelocal assembly.”

43

The Central American solidarity movement in the 1980s provides a com-pelling example of this possibility. Local churches provided important con-duits of information and concern, as well as channels of agency for believ-ers to become aware of and involved in the plight of fellow Christians inCentral America. Reports from missionaries and delegations provided ac-counts of events transpiring in those countries. These accounts disputed

41

Cavanaugh, Theopolitical Imagination 98–

99.42 Ibid. 109; citing Kenneth Surin, “A Certain ‘Politics of Speech’: ‘ReligiousPluralism’ in the Age of the McDonald’s Hamburger,” Modern Theology 7 (1990)67–100, at 74.

43 Cavanaugh, Theopolitical Imagination 110, 115, 113.




those offered by the U.S. government and the mainstream media. Churchgroups organized to change U.S. policy, to provide aid, and to stand insolidarity with people in those countries.44 Ties to local communities deep-

ened believers’ knowledge of, concern for, and the ability to help distantothers.

Local communities’ ties to global networks of church institutions andcommunities remain an important resource for cultivating an alternativeform of globalization. These include formal interparish partnerships, dioc-esan networks, regional bishops’ conferences, global religious orders, net-works of religious colleges and universities, regional and hemispheric syn-ods, and major gatherings. These community and institutional networks areimbued with the values and goals of Christianity, rather than with the

instrumental rationality of global capital production, or with the consumermentality that inflects marketing and travel networks, or with the nation-alism of state boundaries and relationships.

Depth as Sacramental Realization

Tillard describes the catholic imperative to engage the depths of the localas the divine gift of fullness “‘plung[ing] its roots’ into the soil of diversehuman cultures.”45 Here salvation is rendered historically concrete, if al-

ways open to eschatological completion. If, as Rahner argues, the church isthe fundamental sacrament of salvation, it must show forth this salvation inthe concrete lives of particular communities in their full historical con-texts.46 The question posed by virtual forms of community is whether thechurch as fundamental sacrament effects what it signifies or merely servesas a shallow, postmodern signifier.

A sacramental understanding of church requires that we see its encoun-ter with the local in terms of both embrace and challenge. The good that ispresent is elevated in the fullness of the church, while the sinfulness is

rejected and transformed. Tillard speaks of the local community as anexegetical and hermeneutical agent that manifests catholicity by engagingthe tradition from the “tissue” of a particular human location.47 Particular

44 See Sharon Erickson Nepstad, Convictions of the Soul: Religion, Culture, and Agency in the Central American Solidarity Movement (New York: Oxford Univer-sity, 2004).

45 J.-M.-R. Tillard, L’É glise locale: Eccl é siologie de communion et catholicit é(Paris: Cerf, 1995) 126. Translation from Ruddy, Local Church 66.

46

Karl Rahner, The Church and the Sacraments, trans. W. J. O’Hara (New York:

Herder & Herder, 1963) For a discussion of the resources of Rahner’s thought fora theology of the local church see William A. Clark, A Voice of Their Own: The

Authority of the Local Parish (Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical, 2005) 163–86.47 Tillard, L’É glise locale 133; Clark, A Voice of Their Own 154–55.




cultures contribute insights that unveil the meaning of elements of theScriptures and tradition lying dormant within the church.

The confrontation between the gospel and the sinful aspects of culture

and society has two ties to locality. The first involves entry into the depthsof a particular sociocultural context. Oppression and inequality are deeplywoven into societies. Racism in the U.S. South was long abetted by con-formity of the Christian churches to racial segregation. Since racial divisionstructured the churches, it did not appear within them as a division to bechallenged.

The eucharistic community can provide a place where the tensions, injustices, and divisions of society can appear and be illuminated by thedemands of the gospel. Cavanaugh finds a model in Archbishop Óscar

Romero’s response to the murder of Rutilio Grande in the Salvadoran civilwar. Romero declared that Grande’s funeral mass at the cathedral wouldbe the only liturgy celebrated in the archdiocese that Sunday. The churchcould not fragment into different factions in response to his death. All musteither unite in the same Eucharist to face this murderous division withinthe community or place themselves outside of communion.48

It is precisely this power of holding the gospel in tension with the com-plexities of the local that is endangered by the heterogenizing forces of globalization. Rather than the local church constructing a space within

which the injustices of the local context can be brought to light, a sectariancommunal ecology makes it likely the church will segregate into enclavesalong local divisions. In this light, the territorial parish appears surprisinglyimportant. Far from being an inert organizational unit, it is a structure thatcan be used to stand against the deterritorializing effects of globaliza-tion—a place where the church can hold and frame the local.

While the church is called to bring spaces of communal salvation intobeing, it does so not by forming them de novo, but by using its doctrinaland liturgical resources to transform extant structures.49 It did not create

the structures of ekklesia, diokesis, village, town, or neighborhood. Never-theless, it has used them all. In so doing, it always had to push them beyondtheir extant limits toward their eschatological fullness. In light of the de-territorializing effects of globalization, it is important to attend to the valueof extant territorializing structures. Cavanaugh’s concern about the vio-lence and idolatry of the nation-state are well founded.50 Social forms bringwith them powerful ideological imaginaries that are very difficult tocounter. But when mediating structures are being swept away by the indi-

48 Cavanaugh, Theopolitical Imagination 122.49 See the discussion of tactics in Vincent Miller, Consuming Religion: Christian

Faith and Practice in a Consumer Culture (New York: Continuum, 2004) 174–223.50 Cavanaugh, Theopolical Imagination 9–52.




vidualizing tide of global capitalism, the nation-state remains an essentialstructure for enabling the church to engage particular localities. Demo-cratic institutions on all scales, whatever their manifest defects, provide

means to evaluate problems that face a given region or social unit, todevelop policies to address them, and to construct coalitions for a collectiveresponse. Thus from parish and diocesan engagement with municipal andcounty governments, episcopal conferences and national governments, orglobal level engagement with international governmental organizations,the church uses secular structures in its own broader mission to transfor-matively engage the world. The church must also challenge and transgressthe limits of these structures. John Paul II and the participants of the Synodof the Americas provided many examples of how the church can constitute

its own territorializing of the world in Ecclesia in America.This catholic task of engaging the local has another dimension as well. In

Tillard’s words, catholicity is the relation of the pleroma of God’s salvationto the “ pleroma of human suffering and misery” which “cannot be identi-fied with a kind of abstract, universal situation.” In patristic usage, suffer-ing is always particular—for example, the famine, earthquake, or sufferingof a specific city or region.51 The local community functions as a heuristicspace for expressing local problems and inviting a response from thechurch. The “church as such receives into its own flesh the realities of

creation or the fruits of human skill, together with the pains and efforts of people striving to transform the human condition into what their con-science teaches them it has to be.”52 Some issues appear only on the locallevel—homelessness, housing, environmental destruction, etc. In my ownparish, a protest about the child tax credit of 2004, which left out theworking poor, was given great strength by the framing of the liturgy. Ourdesire to be a eucharistic community and our attempts to realize this desirethrough multicultural liturgies and whole-parish celebrations were put tothe test by a political policy that cut through the parish along economic

lines.53

The local church territorializes Christianity in the sense of giving it ananalytical focus and political traction in the problems of the world. It tiesthe church to the needs and stories of those who live there. In WilliamClark’s words, “Here—where bonds of personal relationships and love canbe experienced firsthand, where the concrete demands of justice in the

51 J.-M.-R. Tillard, “‘Communion’ and Salvation,” One in Christ 28 (1992) 1–12,

at 7.52 J.-M.-R. Tillard, “Reception—Communion,” ibid. 307–22, at 321; cited inRuddy, Local Church 71.

53 Vincent J. Miller, “Politics in the Parish,” America 191.4 (August 16, 2004)18–20.




world can be recognized and engaged—the church’s own sacrament of

Christ’s presence is celebrated. Here both the possibility and the struggle

of genuine Christian community are ‘realized’ in the truest sense.”54

Parishes are, however, being rendered virtual from within. People gatherin the same place, but their mutual participation in the liturgy does not

draw them out of their separate cultural niches. Parishes were once terri-

torialized by the neighborhoods in which they were located. Now they must

consciously establish territorial connections themselves. The church can no

longer rely on geographic and social inertia to maintain communion; it

must take steps to actively foster it.

The good news is that the same communications technologies that foster

deterritorialized cultural niches also provide resources to anchor commu-

nities in place. It is striking how little these technologies have been ex-ploited for parishes, and telling how much easier it is to participate in

deterritorialized email and blog discussions for pressure groups and na-

tional figures than for local parishes or dioceses. Conversation on those

levels is limited to chats over coffee, dueling prayers of the faithful, and

perhaps letters to the editor in the diocesan newspaper. Read the discus-

sions on national blogsites such as the Paulist-sponsored bustedhalo.org or

Amy Welborn’s openbook.org. Where can parishioners find anything close

to that level of engagement in their own communities? Neighborhood

associations have flourished by using these technologies. What if such tech-nologies were made part of local parish life? Given the rising importance

of such virtual social spaces such as myspace.com and facebook.com, the

choice is not whether or not to use these technologies to deepen the ter-

ritorial space of the local parish. The actual choice between tying them to

the traditional spaces of the church or surrendering to them as deterrito-

rialized substitutes.

CONCLUSION

Different analyses of the cultural context lead to differing diagnoses of

the problems the church faces and diverse prescriptions for responding.

Descriptions of the cultural effects of globalization that limit themselves to

homogenization prescribe the preservation of the church’s threatened par-

ticularity in the face of the eroding and syncretistic maelstrom of global

hyperculture. Such a diagnosis works well with approaches that subordi-

nate catholicity to unity.

If, however, as this article argues, the cultural effects of globalization

include not only homogenization but also heterogenization and deterrito-rialization, then this strategy becomes insufficient. Far from combating the

54 Clark, A Voice of Their Own 171.


Where is the Church-Globalization and Catholicity

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