John L. Allen Jr., National Catholic Reporter Vatican correspondent, speaks to the audience during OST’s 2008 Summer Institute. Photo provided

With a growing number of critical challenges facing the world in the coming years, the Catholic Church will find dialogue more necessary than ever, National Catholic Reporter Vatican correspondent John L. Allen Jr. said in San Antonio. Allen gave three lectures June 24-25 in conjunction with the Oblate School of Theology’s 2008 Summer Institute, “Megatrends in the Church and Society.” More than 100 people attended each of his lectures at the Oblate Renewal Center. Canadian sociologist Reginald Bibby and OST president Father Ron Rolheiser also spoke.

Catholicism, he said, has the capacity to engage a number of critical issues in a uniquely creative and hopeful fashion. The church must increasingly work together with other Christians, other faiths and people of good will everywhere, Allen said.

For nearly 50 years, the paradigmatic relationship for dialogue with other religions has been with Judaism, but he said the church is in a new world in which the paradigmatic relationship of the future is with Islam.
“The dialogue with Judaism has been a template for all other (interreligious) relationships. It reflected the sense that we need to atone and reach out to the Jews and others we had victimized,” Allen said.

But he added many African bishops today have lived with Muslim intolerance and consider themselves victims rather than victimizers, he said. They didn’t grow up with the Catholic-Jewish memory of the Holocaust.
Since Christianity and Islam together make up 56 percent of the world’s population, sheer numbers would argue for the need for deeper dialogue between Islam and Catholicism, which is by far Christianity’s largest and most powerful segment.

“Even if Osama bin Laden had never been born and al-Quaida had never existed, relations between Muslims and Christians would be an enormous determinant in world affairs. We have no alternative to working out a new relationship with Islam. It’s a road without an exit,” Allen declared.

The Holy See is still groping for a vocabulary with which to build that relationship, but already the relationship is moving forward on two tracks.

Pope Benedict XVI clearly believes in reciprocity — each side respecting the other’s freedom to practice its religion openly — and challenges Islam when he senses the need.

But the fundamental dividing line that concerns the pope is not between Christianity and Islam; it’s between belief and unbelief, Allen said.

“When he criticizes Islam, it’s not from the outside, but from within a shared sacred space as a friend.”
The other track in the relationship is partnering with Islam on cultural and moral issues and combating the roots of terrorism.

Meanwhile, Allen described the effects of globalization as a “best-of-times, worst-of-times” situation, of both severe challenges and great opportunities if church leaders recognize them and have the imagination to seize on them.

He said deeply committed Catholic social justice advocates often tend toward knee-jerk reactions against globalization, but a more balanced, nuanced view is needed.

“Growth in China and India cut the share of the world that’s in extreme poverty from 40 percent to 20 percent.
“From that point of view, the evidence of free-market global capitalism is the most successful humanitarian anti-poverty program ever developed. The expansion of opportunities and creation of middle classes in places where they didn’t exist before is not to be lamented; it’s to be encouraged.”

Yet, he added, far too many millions of people still have no access to these opportunities. And three individuals in the world — Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and Carlos Slim Helu — control more assets than the combined gross domestic product of the world’s 42 poorest nations, whose combined population is 125 million.

And only five percent of the world’s people live in countries where the gap between rich and poor is narrow.
“Obviously, these issues will be enormous challenges and priorities for the church for two reasons. One, they’re major challenges for anyone who is ethically sensitive; two, they are increasingly front-burner issues in the global South, whose people experience the underside of globalization.”

Ecological issues also provide an enormous challenge.

Visiting Turkey in November 2006, Pope Benedict XVI spent much of his time with Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I discussing their shared desire to promote protection of the environment, he said. The world’s media, focusing on the Muslim reaction to the pope’s controversial address two months earlier at the University of Regensburg, virtually ignored this cooperative effort.

Water shortages will affect Africa, the Middle East, China and India in coming years.
“Water will become the oil of the 21st century. When water is scarce, people die. They die because they don’t have clean water to drink, because they can’t grow crops, and because when clean water isn’t available, they drink germ-infested, dirty water,” Allen said.

Meanwhile, the world balance of power has changed from a bipolar alignment, with the United States and its free-world allies on one side and the former Soviet Union and its communist allies on the other to a temporary unipolar world with the United States as the only superpower.

Now, the world’s military might is becoming more evenly distributed among multiple alignments of nations. Allen said one group of nations is Brazil, Russia, India and China; another is Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria and Central Asian countries. The first group has a combined gross domestic product that exceeds those of the United States and Europe together. Allen said these alignments will mean a new style of diplomacy for the Holy See.

In the past, the church’s diplomatic efforts have involved partnership in conversation with the great power of each period. Since the end of World War II, its chief partner was the European alliance, which offered a third way between American-style capitalism and Russian communism.

The Holy See more recently has embraced the United States as a dialogue partner, as a great world power that takes religion seriously, despite sharp disagreement over the war in Iraq, Allen said.

In the new order of things, he said, the Holy See is likely to work with Brazil, Russia, India and China on social justice issues, the United States on culture of life issues and the Iran-Iraq group of nations on moral questions.
At the same time, the rise of multiculturalism will mean more influence for cultures that have not been shaped by Christian tradition. The church’s ability to dialogue with them will be increasingly important.

A critical need will be to develop a universal vocabulary of human rights because the rights that Americans consider basic are anything but universal.

“They’re artifacts of Western culture. Our capacity to craft a global consensus for human rights is going to be an enormous challenge. It will call on us to recall a Thomistic natural law tradition that opens us up to conversation with others,” Allen declared.
Pentecostalism, the fastest-growing segment of Christianity, also is affecting both the Catholic Church and the world.

If Pentecostal Christianity were one denomination, it would be the second largest segment of Christianity with 386 million people, Allen said. Most of its converts come from other segments of Christianity, including Catholicism.

It’s lay-led and doesn’t have the kind of clerical caste that most Christian denominations have. It also is attractive because it has the capacity to empower women.

“It’s an enormous force in world Christianity. It’s a no-brainer to me that we need to reconsider where to invest our time and energy in ecumenical dialogue. We should be investing greater resources in active dialogue with Pentecostalism,” Allen said.

The Anglican-Catholic international dialogues have been the model for all Catholic ecumenical relationships and have been very successful. But Pentecostalism has more than five times the membership of the worldwide Anglican communion and far more pressing issues that need dialogue, he added.

At the same time dialogue with other religions is seen, there is also an increasingly visible and vocal evangelical Catholicism that is concerned about reasserting Catholic identity.
“There is a tremendous number of things to be excited about in these megatrends, but each one also has the potential for new heartaches, new divisions, lacerations and fractures that will play themselves out on a truly planetary scale.”

In fact, he said, today’s reality is that there is not one “Catholicism” but multiple “Catholicisms” that are at odds with each other.
“We’re no longer talking simply about ideological divisions of Western or American Catholicism. Now we’re talking about ideological division of global Catholicism,” he said.

Too often, Catholics of various factions are interested not in patient understanding of those who don’t agree with them but in scoring horrible cheap shots against them.

The greatest tragedy in American Catholicism in the 20th century is that “we spent the first half of the 20th century clawing our way out of a ghetto imposed by a hostile Protestant majority, only to spend the second half erecting ideological ghettos of our own choosing,” Allen said.

Catholics need to re-think their relationships with one another and find a way out of what he called “this blind alley” of internal tribal warfare.

Aging also confront the church and the world with new challenges.

Allen said the “old demography” said the “population explosion” would ultimately make human life unsustainable. But Europe will have lost 18 percent of its population by mid-century, a loss two and a half times more severe than that during the Black Death in the mid-14th Century.

Birthrates across Europe are well below the replacement rate of 2.1 children. The U.S. fertility rate, he said, is right at replacement level largely because the Hispanic birth rate is 2.7, but the Anglo birth rate is only 1.45.
“Fertility is declining everywhere. Of 237 nations in the world, all but 43 have declining fertility rates,” Allen said.

The cultural center of world Catholicism is also shifting from Europe and North America to the global South.
In 1900, the world had 266 million Catholics, of whom 200 million were in Europe and North America. In 2000, about 720 million of the world’s 1.1 billion Catholics live in the Southern hemisphere, which currently has five of the world’s 10 largest Catholic countries and by 2050 will have seven of the 10.

“The problems there are involved with growth, not decline,” Allen said. He described a Nigerian seminary that has 1,200 seminarians but doesn’t have the facilities to accommodate them.

“They can’t build new facilities fast enough. But this doesn’t mean these seminarians are an answer to our priest shortage (in North America).”

In fact, the developing world has a worse priest shortage than the United States, where the ratio of priests to Catholics is 1:1,300. In Africa, it’s one priest for every 5,000 Catholics; in Latin America, one for every 7,000; and in Asia, one for every 9,000.

“In fact, African bishops resent Western bishops asking African seminarians to stay here after ordination. They believe it’s up to the Western bishops to provide their own vocations. The African bishops desperately need resources to serve their own people,” Allen said.

J. Michael Parker is director of communications for Oblate School of Theology and a freelance writer. Contact him at (210) 341-1366, ext. 203 or e-mail mparker@ost.edu.