GEORGE WEIGEL: "how little can I believe, and how little can I do, and still remain a Catholic?"

"Ever since the Second Vatican Council, some Catholics and most of the world media have expected...that the Catholic Church follow the ...the path of accommodation to secular modernity and its conviction that religious belief, if not mere childishness, is a lifestyle choice with no critical relationship to the truth of things.

These expectations have involved both doctrinal accommodation (e.g., the question of whether Jesus is the unique savior of the world) and moral accommodation (e.g., the many issues involved in the post-Freudian claim that human beings are essentially bundles of desires).

...it is very, very difficult to argue that this strategy of cultural accommodation --- which in some cases bleeds into cultural appeasement --- has solved the 250-year-old problem of being Christian in the modern world.

Nor is it possible to demonstrate, empirically, that cultural accommodation or appeasement produce vital, growing, compelling Christian communities. Precisely the opposite is the case...

...the path of accommodation...has been the central assumption of what's typically called "progressive" Catholicism. That assumption has now been decisively and definitively refuted. The "progressive" project is over --- not because its intentions were malign, but because it posed an ultimately boring question: how little can I believe, and how little can I do, and still remain a Catholic?

...The really interesting question is, how much of this rich, vast, subtle tradition have I made my own?"

[Fonte]

Não me parece que sejam só os 'progressistas' que sigam a via 'minimalista'. (A começar por mim).