The Catholic Heritage [antikvár]

IntroductionThis book emerges from a number of personal concerns, convictions, and intellectual encounters.As a professor in a large state university I have been called upon regularly to lecture on the general topic of Roman Catholicism. A single semester course on something as global as "Catholicism" presents problems of structure, emphases, and readings about which 1 have already addressed myself in print and feel no need to repeat here.^ The basic problem I have encountered, however, is that time and again students lack any sense of the historical perspective of Western culture in general and the part Catholicism played in the formation of that culture in particular. They not only have scant memory of the Latin liturgy (hardly their fault), but have no sense of the kind of church which existed before the Second Vatican Council. Students have this strong conviction that what is important happens now and the "now" has little or no link with the past. They tend to see the life of the church rather as they see the surface of a video game screen: active, immediate, and graspable as a whole. I would argue that the Catholic tradition, or heritage, is more like a van Eyck painting or a poem by Yeats (perhaps these elitist examples are a proper giveaway!): dense, allusive, polyvalentrendering full meaning only by close attention, reflection, and a second look. There is no second look in a video game.This lack of feeling for historical texture in the church will not be easily assuaged for the many by an appeal to traditional