The modern democratic system’s transformation, sometimes toward authoritarian models, and the upheaval of the world order under the Trump administration’s international policy cannot be irrelevant to Catholic theology. However, Catholic theology is unprepared to intelligently and wisely interpret today’s political events, both in evangelical and civil perspective. The public square seems foreign to the ways theology is conceived and practiced within the Catholic Church today. The challenges and urgency of our time require theology to engage in a learning process that grounds it in the reality of human affairs and enables it to comprehend geopolitical dynamics.
At first glance, the question of a possible public dimension of theology seems entirely pertinent. A Christian understanding of faith is not self-contained—or at least, it should not be. However, if this is the case, we must ask ourselves why theology aspires to public recognition of its particular way of thinking. On the other hand, why should the public square be interested in theological discourses or allow itself to be questioned by them? These are clearly two different fields of discourse that could eventually converge, with different subjects responsible for organizing their own. This seems to be the model used by Jürgen Habermas (1929) from the moment he realized the inherent flaw in the procedures of Western public reason. This model is similar to that first practiced by modern apologetics and then by post-conciliar fundamental theology. There are, of course, significant differences between these two theological approaches, which characterized 19th and 20th century Catholic theology.
However, this model produces a series of paradoxes on both sides of theological and public reason. It cannot fail to produce them because, at their core, both think of themselves as totalitarian and are only willing to draw on fragments of the other to confirm their claim to overall sufficiency. The only assumption they have in common is the conviction that a truly secular person cannot be religious and that a truly religious person cannot be truly secular. On the one hand, we have theologians who practice the best that Western reason has produced, yet they never manage to leave the ecclesiastical perimeter and enter the public dimension of discourse. On the other hand, we have philosophers and sociologists who wholeheartedly resort to biblical and theological tradition, sometimes like bulls in a china shop, yet they never venture the gesture of faith. Nevertheless, they manage to draw all the necessary advantages for articulating a public discourse on faith symbolism without taking responsibility for it themselves.
The modern model has produced, on the one hand, a rational magisterium of theologians with little impact on Western public discourse, and, on the other hand, a religious teaching by secular philosophers. They seek to compensate for the decline of modern reason but, in doing so, intercept a public discourse semantics that remains inaccessible to professional theologians. While the rigor of theologians has confined them to increasingly empty classrooms, the recklessness of philosophers has boosted their morale. They have taken to the streets of human existence, abandoning the sidereal spaces of immune reason. However, this has produced a commercial version that is a poor copy of the maître-à-penser of yesteryear.
Brief historical excursus
These seem to be the results of the long historical journey of Western thought and power. When we talk about the public sphere, the question of control and domination always lurks at its threshold, both in the saeculum and in the religio. We should ask ourselves what ultimately made theological discourse inaccessible, whether the secularization of the secular is entirely responsible for the ecclesiasticalization of theology,[1] or if the Catholic Church’s choice at the beginning of European modernity also played a role.
It is certainly not possible here to retrace the thread of historical events that have led us to the present situation. However, we can attempt to sketch some working hypotheses. The episode of Cano (1509-1560) and his loci theologici is emblematic, particularly the three so-called aliens: natural reason, the authority of philosophers, and human history. Based on a proven scholastic tradition at the time, the magisterium of the Church desired to assume philosophical reason as a theological locus, which seemed entirely natural to Catholic theology. After all, theology itself had already appropriated and regenerated it—first in reflection on the Christological and Trinitarian councils and then thanks to the two founding fathers of great scholasticism: Anselm (1033-1109) and Aquinas (1224-1274). Though formally alien, philosophical reason was, by Cano’s time, already an internal instrument controlled by the Church and its theology. It was internalized to affirm the inadequacy of secular reason when its results did not coincide with theology’s interpretation.
The fate of the third alien place, history and its critical investigative tools, was different. Scholastic reason had essentially rendered a historical approach to Christian revelation useless by providing the conceptual basis for the division of common human history into sacred (that of the Church and all that falls under its jurisdiction) and profane (everything outside the Church). Thus, biblical salvation history was removed from both critical investigation and the place in which it unfolds—common human history.
To protect itself from a history that would highlight its partial perspective, the Catholic Church privatized the history of salvation, claiming it entirely for itself and producing a parallel narrative foreign to the common history of humanity. This created a shared space for human affairs that, being irrelevant from a theological point of view and ecclesiastically devoid of any salvific presence of God, could develop its own discourse and construct a history not controlled by ecclesiastical power. The Church did not participate in this space or its debates as a theological instance of Christian revelation of God. Rather, when it did participate, it did so as a purely worldly power among others. The Church was not interested in investing theology with the task of organizing its presence in this (public) space, which could have led to its loss of control. Instead, it entrusted this task to the rationality of ecclesiastical law.
The historical sacralization of the history of salvation—which emptied the locus affirmed by Cano as normative for understanding revelation and living faith of all theological relevance—was a gesture of power by the ecclesiastical magisterium with profound repercussions on the self-understanding of theology and its function within the Church. By privatizing the history of salvation (as sacred history that belongs only to the Church), the Catholic Church, long before any late-modern secularizing influence, decided not to be a theological part of the common space of human life, which would later become public debate and the public dimension of living together in a democratic regime of human coexistence.
Long before secularism excluded theology from public discourse, ecclesiastical power had already self-excluded theology from the public square. Before secularization imagined the privatization of faith, the ecclesiastical magisterium had already privatized the history of salvation by explicit will.
Today, we cannot question the possible public dimension of contemporary theology without considering this secular history, which is a direct expression of the Catholic Church’s will as it went through Western modernity.
What is meant by “common”?
Public theology has mainly developed in the Anglo-Saxon linguistic sphere without receiving much consideration or development in continental Europe. However, there are approaches of interest under another name[2] (I am thinking here of the work of Prof. Christian Bauer at the Institute for Pastoral Theology at the University of Innsbruck). As with any theological current, public theology is a diverse field due mainly to the geo-cultural and confessional backgrounds of its authors. Yet, across the board, one can perceive a need for justification when engaging in this type of endeavor.[3]
Theology seems uncomfortable with itself when dealing with what is common to all, as if it would fail in its specific task by doing so. This unease reveals an understanding of the universality intrinsic to Christianity’s and the Catholic Church’s truth claims: the idea that a particular entity can claim universality by making everyone like itself. Understood in this way, the common would be nothing more than the numerical expansion of one’s own. In the end, commonality would be one’s own colonizing the most varied territories of human life.
Theology becomes agitated as soon as the common goes beyond the limits of this expansionism and feels the need to justify taking charge of what belongs to everyone, not just to some.
A second issue to briefly consider is our awareness of the many ambivalences of what we insist on calling the public, as good sons and daughters of a modernity that has long since departed. In short, the US public space is not the German Öffentlichkeit because the public square is shaped by the institutional dynamics and constitutional processes specific to each political, social, and cultural community. We must engage with these dynamics, which are always partial, to understand how the public square is configured and determined historically in each social community. Therefore, when we talk about the public square, we are not talking about something invariable or a univocal figure that can be standardized beyond its historical and cultural context.
A theology aware of this and other ambivalences cannot do without dialogue with the history of law and the historical development of various legal systems as they have been constituted in social realities. It must also engage with political science — that is, disciplines that view politics as a fundamental anthropological fact without limiting themselves to its modern, essentially Western meaning.
According to this meaning, the public/common sphere contrasts with the private sphere, the intangible sphere of the individual. In the West, the private sphere has almost completely prevailed over the public sphere. Shortly after World War II, according to the Italian Catholic politician (and then friar) Giouseppe Dossetti (1913-1996), the private sphere became dominant and omnipresent, colonizing even the common institutions of living together. “It is a question of the fragility of the law — and of the institutions responsible for its application — in all countries. In particular, by the 1950s, large companies, especially multinationals, had replaced public magistrates with private bodies.” This takeover by the private sector has not spared even the most sacred sphere of the common: public/constitutional law.
Modern constitutionalism, based on the US and French models, arose as an explicit protection of the private sector and individual owners, for whom “possession is the most effective form of existence. The public subject is therefore clearly the isolated individual […]. An abstract individual, who is extracted from his historical context and isolated from the historical reality represented above all by his sociality […]. This individual is not a person because one is a person only when she/he is a subject in relation to others—a community subject, called to the family, the local and universal church, the guild, the union, the political party, and the local, national, and international political communities. This individual, who finds his own identity in modernity, is a qualitatively anonymous reality, marked mainly by an external appendage that is called upon to provide him with irreplaceable integration by insinuating itself into his identity and playing an exorbitant and distorting role. This role is distorting because it is exorbitant — that is, having.”[4]
At the intersection of these privatization dynamics, legal and economic-financial ones, the question of the public dimension of theology appears both problematic and decisive. However, we must ask ourselves what mentality distinguishes theology when it questions what is common and its destination for the benefit of all. Is it a mentality still in tune with the Western modernity paradigm—that is, the private sphere as the domain of what is exclusively one’s own? Is it a mentality in which the public square is essentially asocial because it is merely a place where a multitude of insular individuals crowd together, trying to assert themselves at the expense of others?
A theology that questions its public dimension, at least as something to which it should aspire, must frankly address the ambiguity inherent in this question. In other words, we must ask ourselves if the public or the common is a viable perspective for theology or if theology will continue to be practiced and understood as a private discipline. Doesn’t theology itself have an owner (namely the Catholic Church) who is exempt and immune to everything outside its exclusive, intangible sphere (even if its history of salvation interests only a small circle of the elect)?
Doesn’t Catholic theology, as a matter proper to the Church, carry within it the seed of its own innate immunity to everything public and common? By its very nature, the public sphere exists to the extent that everyone can collaborate in its edification, exercise, and transformation. Has the Catholic Church developed the ecclesiastical privacy of theology in order to maintain intellectual sovereignty over the history of salvation and control the cultural intelligence of the Gospel? Does this represent the maximum gradient of modernity with respect to an organization of legal systems and social structures marked by privatization and exclusive ownership as the overall law governing civil relations and human affairs?
If the beginning of modernity saw the Catholic privatization of the history of salvation, then its end saw what the sociologist Fraz-Xaver Kaufmann (1932-2024) calls the Verkirchlichung of Christianity at the hands of the two great churches of Western Europe.[5] With this, faith as effective practices of life in time and in the world has been resolved in the institutional instances of the Christian churches, declaring the complete irrelevance (theological and ecclesiological) of the daily experiences of Christian belief for the churches themselves. Once again, it is the institutional procedures of the Catholic Church that decree the privacy of faith, even within the Church itself, rather than inserting faith and Christian experience into the public square common to all.
He is not here, but elsewhere…
If one feels even the slightest repulsion at considering theology a private science of the Church and believes that what is common to all is not a superfluous corollary of its practice, but rather its intended purpose, then theology must consider the normativity of historical dynamics and processes of human affairs. These dynamics and processes place theology elsewhere than where it is currently practiced. They do so literally (dislocating theology from its ecclesiastical nest). If we aspire to a public dimension of theology but remain where we are, that aspiration is a chimera at best and a lie at worst.
Without this relocation—which represents a real dislocation of the theological corpus that emerged from modernity—theology will continue to consider human, social, cultural, and political affairs that unite us all as not only alien but also irrelevant to its exercise and self-understanding. The public dimension would be nothing more than a catwalk on which theology would parade to dictate a judgment formulated in a nonliving space. The fundamental question is whether Catholics want to live in the public square or merely instruct it as the exclusive possessors of the right way to live together (which would make everyone like us Catholics).
Is theology ready to accept the public square as an improper destination for its practice—improper in the sense of not being possessed, dominated, or owned? Here lies the true meaning of history as an alien place of God’s revelation.
Much of the epistemological discussion about the relevance of a public destination for theology hides the fact that theology is not willing to relinquish its exclusive ownership of the res of God’s revelation. In doing so, it continues to seek Jesus at the tomb—that is, exactly where he is not anymore—instead of moving toward the unknown elsewhere to which that absence destines it.
Not only does the history of the West point out the folly of such a claim, but the Gospel does as well: what we believe to be our right never is—it exceeds and eludes us, both historically and originally. It refers us to a practice and a destination that do not coincide with our desire for appropriation and our dream of immune sovereignty.
The virus, legal systems, and common fate
An invisible virus exposed the unwanted porosity of the privatization machine and legal systems. It dramatically showed the interstitial way in which the common has spread into the presumed impermeability and intangibility of the private and exclusive. This interstitial common, which cannot be seized and has no location because it fluctuates, is transversal, and is fleeting—whose trace is time, not space—represents a new way of thinking about the public square. This way of thinking stems from preceding resistance practices that make it possible and legitimate as a common-based way of thinking that escapes the logic of property and related credit logic, which unites by subjugating.[6]
The pandemic has shown that the interstitial common resists the corrosiveness of global privatization procedures and is a real social fact that escapes the prevailing logic of world governance. It is traversed by dynamics that instituted constitutional structures in the West, which have now faded. The interstitial common is a social fact, not an illusion of a beautiful soul who can still dream. It is a reality that escapes the control, localization, and allocation of space typical of the representative system of Western modernity.[7]
For modern reason, the interstitial common is elusive and not representable, evading the increasingly feeble overtures of representative democracy, which seems to have exhausted its power to promote social cohesion. We must not forget that representative procedures, even in their highest form of democracy, are based on a distrust of society. According to both Rousseau and Adams, real participation of the people in government politics should be avoided since society is characterized by “a creeping custom that is uncontrollable by authority and permeable to forces considered deviant.” This means trusting, and therefore relying completely on, the “political (understood in the strictest and most exclusive sense), which is assigned the task of permanent vigilance over civil society. This task is carried out by a class of professionals organized into an ideologically tight-knit community. At the center of this is the omnipotent assembly of representatives, which embodies and resolves the sovereignty of the people.”[8]
If the representative form of democracy is emerging as a new illiberal order, in which we surrender our freedom in exchange for governance of our fears and satisfaction of our insatiable desires as inalienable rights, the interstitial common proposes itself as the cradle of a new possible order. This order will be organized on a horizon of justice that neither law nor love can represent. It will emerge at the moment when love puts sensibilities for justice into practice and law configures the order of its social determination.
The individualistic and hyper-libertarian backlash against the measures states and governments have taken to deal with the pandemic’s spread is, in reality, a declaration of war aimed at annihilating the interstitial common—which continues to disturb the immune, solipsistic machine of the insular ego and the privatization of global freedoms. These are the last simulacra of constitutional modernity, which placed rigid individualism at the foundation of society and sacralized selfishness as self-preservation. This modernity closely linked individual property and freedom, sacralizing appropriation itself thanks to the inseparable link between the self and the mine.[9]
Today, the advocates of the new illiberal order and (post-)democracy emerging from democracy are embracing these insatiable rights, as the Italian legal expert Anna Pintore calls them: rights conceived and constructed regardless of others.
If the conjunction between privatized liberalism and illiberal political representation were to become systemic, we would enter a permanent world order in which not even the semblance of democracy concealing the transformation of self-denial would remain. In this order, the public dimension would be nothing more than a memory of a bygone era.
The public square and the interest of theology
If we want to address the concept of the public square and decipher the interstitial resistance practices within it today, the picture we have attempted to paint also presents a task for theology. In the midst of this epochal urgency, the common destiny of theology is also being decided. But what has theology done, and how has it positioned itself in this exodus, from which we have yet to emerge?
What does theology have to say to common human history today? Kurt Appel’s answer is blunt and merciless: “Theology has nothing to say since it has already said too much about salvation, love, and ‘everything is good.’ The problem lies in the inability of theological discourse to address the actual reality of human beings.”[10] Thus, theology is voiceless because it is estranged from common human experience and unable to feel ways of being as practices of living that meet and clash with each other. Years ago, the Italian historian Paolo Prodi (1932-2016) denounced the troubling silence of theologians in the Italian public debate about the invasion of salvific politics, which discussed areas of human life of an exquisitely moral nature, such as birth, death, love, and education. In short, theology remained inert in the face of the ideologization of politics, which absorbed “the question of good and evil, of salvation.”[11]
This distortion occurs when politics offers itself as the sacred pole of a lesser salvation, nullifying the dualism of powers and forums in the relationship between conscience and law on which our European civilization has been shaped.
While the Catholic Church adapted to the procedures implicit in politics’ salvific claim, replacing practices of conscience with the positivity of law, theology was absent when its voice was needed to develop a common discourse that could publicly argue the distinction between the planes on which human existence and its established government are situated. This existence, in its desire for a good and realized destination, cannot be biologized by technology nor positivized by law. This silence was recently repeated in a series of rulings by European constitutional courts in favor of assisted suicide as an individual right of self-determination without regard for society.
Theological voices have been silent on the consequences of this legal trend for the European democratic order, which concerns us all. It took the insight and historical awareness of Jonathan Sumption, a former judge of the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom, to recognize the dark side of this new form of governance by the courts: the monism that these rulings impose on the values underlying the conflicting dialectics of a political community in a democratic regime.[12] Yet here we touch on the supporting architecture of our current way of life, which shapes the near future of our shared existence—something that should be dear to Catholic theology, especially in light of Pope Francis’s encyclical Fratelli tutti.
Through these rulings, not only it is what is considered a good life being positivized, but this is also being done by advancing a redemptive claim before bare life, which is confused with the good life itself. In this regard, I find Jeffrey T. Bishop’s words in his book The Anticipatory Corpse enlightening: Medicine, Power, and the Care of Dying, enlightening: “The myth of our culture proclaims autonomy and the individual as sovereign at the very moment it hides the fact that we are constituted not as sovereign subjects, but as subjects of political and social power structures that shape life. It is with modern biopolitics that the violence of constituent power becomes invisible behind the language that merges bare life and good life. While bare life and good life should certainly not be merged, neither should they be opposed to the point of being mutually alien. In fact, good life and bare life unfold together along a dialectical tension that is constitutive of the human—never resolved once and for all on one side or the other. There is no overcoming of bare life in a good life that would definitively domesticate it at the hands of culture and moral consciousness. Rather, there is a continuous emergence of good life from bare life that remains and circulates within it.”
Bare life and good life never present themselves as discrete phenomena, but rather as an incessant process of emergence and transition, which we might call the lived time of human beings.
I have traced the dialectic between bare life and good life—emblematic of the many divisions and oppositions of modern mentality—back to the figure of lived time because it seems capable of accommodating their co-presence and co-belonging. Lived time is an ambivalent phenomenon, inhabited by singular individuation and generic commonality, the self and the exogenous, the actual and the potential. It happens and exists only in its happening, which removes it from the possibility of being classified in chronological and causal terms—an instituting constraint and the original porosity of the human.
The Gospel of Jesus is precisely destined for lived time: in the Gospels’ narratives, God’s work of revelation is to do justice to the lived time of men and women—restoring dignity to the time of the excluded, marginalized, poor, and forgotten by society. The time allotted to these lived experiences is discreet and partial. It is precisely this contingent eventfulness that demonstrates the inevitability and necessity of Jesus’ life passing through the small stories of individuals, whose meaning exceeds them and makes them stand out in each person’s life. It is a justice that not only wants to be preached but also to be felt — because only in this way can justice be what it must be.
Scripture functions as an entranceway and connector between each person’s lived time and God’s time — the time of the messianic event that undermines the chronological regime of domination by an irrefutable and unavoidable randomness, which is typical of our systems. This covenant between human lived and God’s time is always in a state of genesis and cannot be standardized to parameters that do not take into account the contingency and partiality of human life and the eventful character of God’s messianic time.[13]
The lived time of everyday life is all that Jesus needs to construct the scene of God’s messianic time irrupting into human life affairs.
Religious fellowship does not replace this necessary condition for the circulation of the Word in common human history. It is in this history that discipleship is realized as one small story among many. The life saved, arising from the intersection of lived and messianic time, bears permanent marks of the wounds engraved on the body of life — as was the case for the Risen One. Therefore, the question of the theological relevance of the public dimension or the common human experience is impertinent to the Gospel, since it is implicitly (already) answered by the events of Jesus’s life.
I have traced a series of human phenomena of our societies back to the concept of lived time because I am convinced that it is a fruitful way to reactivate the question of the public dimension within Catholic theology. This dimension has now been freed from its modern spatial configuration and the institutional allocation of spaces. In European modernity, philosophy and law took on the task of allocating religion. While theology has practically bled itself dry confronting philosophical reason, it has only marginally considered law and legal systems. Yet, in terms of the distribution of the fields and ways of religion’s presence in the common territories of Western Europe, the latter was far more decisive than philosophy.
The current crisis of the system of representation implies a weakening of allocative spatiality in the public square of living together and entails a decline of classical law as a determining factor in the positioning and limits of religion in the shared space of human sociality. Sociality, in order to remain such, nevertheless needs order and therefore new conceptions of law. To understand which aspects of modernity can and should be carried over into our unprecedented era and collaborate in constructing an order of human life that honors each individual’s experience, theology must forge new alliances with history and law. These alliances will help theology rediscover its intrinsic public dimension without epistemic hesitation or fear of distortion.
[1] See: P. Gisel, La teologia: identità ecclesiale e pertinenza pubblica, EDB, Bologna 2009.
[2] See, for example: G. Spallek, Tor zur Welt? Hamburg als Ort der Theologie, Grünewald, Mainz 2021; Ch. Bauer-M. Sorace (ed.), Gott, anderswo. Theologie im Gespräch mit Michel de Certeau, Grünelwald, Mainz 2019; H.-J. Sanders, Topologische Dogmatik I, Grünewald, Mainz 2019.
[3] Exemplary for many is the book by J.K.A. Smith, Awaiting the King III. Reforming Public Theology, Baker Academic, Grand Rapids 2017.
[4] P. Grossi, Mitologie giuridiche della modernità, Giuffrè Editore, Milan 2007, 148-150.
[5] See: F.-X. Kaufmann, Religion und Modernität: Sozialwissenschaftliche Perspektiven, Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen 1994.
[6] See: S. Harney-F. Moten, The Undercommons. Fugitive Planning and Black Studies, Minor Composition, New York 2013.
[7] See: M. Neri, Post-Representational Order and Naked Citizenship, in “International Journal for Religion and Transformation in Contemporary Society” 4/2 (2018) 322-331.
[8] Grossi, Mitologie, 133-134.
[9] See: Grossi, Mitologie, 181.
[10] G. Palasciano (ed.), Il paradosso e la rivoluzione. Intervista al teologo Kurt Appel, in “Il Regno Attualità” (2020) 593-596 – here 593.
[11] P. Prodi, Lessico per un’Italia civile, Diabasis, Reggio Emilia 2007, 278.
[12] See: J. Sumption, Trials of the State. Law and the Decline of Politics, Profile Books, London 2019.
[13] See: K. Appel, Tempo e Dio. Aperture contemporanee a partire da Hegel e Schelling, Queriniana, Brescia 2018.
