SECRETARIAT OF EVANGELIZATION
AND ON GOING FORMATION

Two Forms of Catholicity in a Time of Globalization
Robert J. Schreiter1

Introduction: Catholicity in the Second Decade of Globalization
This article sets out to explore two interrelated themes. The first has to do with where we find ourselves more than ten years on into the current period of globalization. Views about globalization and its likely trajectories began to be presented in the middle and late1990s, with an eye to what kinds of challenges would need to be met in the coming time.
Now — more than a decade further along in the process — it is important to reassess where developments have taken us and how the challenges perceived then need to be refocused today.
The second has to do with crafting a theological response to the challenges that globalization poses. When globalization was first being discussed, I made the proposal that we needed to revisit the concept of “catholicity” as a key theological site for addressing the issues that globalization would generate.2 I suggested that alongside the two traditional understandings of catholicity — catholicity as extension throughout the whole world (from the Greek kath’ holu) and catholicity as the fullness of faith handed down from the apostles), we needed to develop a third dimension of catholicity, namely, communication. Communication would ensure holding together the diversity of believers and communities in a unity that would make the extension throughout the whole world an organic unity and not just a scattering of communities, as well as develop pathways to maintain the fullness of faith amid the many efforts at inculturation.
What follows here, then, is first of all a taking stock of where we have come in the midst of this round of globalization. As we now know more clearly than a decade ago, the globalization we are now experiencing as a compression of space and time in the world, with greater possibilities of communication (or intrusion), is not utterly new in the world. Students of globalization today suggest that this is actually the third round of such globalization in the last half millennium. The first round began at the turn of the sixteenth century with the voyages of European discovery—a globalization that changed life in the archipelago called the Philippines forever (the very name is testimony to that).
The second round of globalization coincided with the high point of European colonization, roughly 1850 to 1914. New developments in transportation and communication (the steam and then the combustible engine, the telegraph and the telephone) fuelled developments at that time. It was the turbulence of this period that saw the beginning aspirations of Filipino independence and the end of more than three hundred years of Spanish rule (only to be followed by United States hegemony) here.
The fact that historians believe that it was the Great War of 1914-1918 in Europe that halted that round of globalization stands as a lesson that the current round of globalization we are experiencing is not inevitable nor unstoppable. While elements of it certainly appear to be (such as the Internet), the emerging ecological crisis could bring to an abrupt halt, for example, the flow of international migrant workers to jobs abroad and upset economic and social patterns that have become necessary for survival in some places.
So it is important to keep adjusting our picture of globalization and its effects within the complex interaction of social, economic, and political factors. In the first part of the article I will try to do this, focusing to some extent on how these changes might play themselves out in the Philippines.
What I had written a decade ago about how I thought the concept of catholicity might
lead us in responding to those challenges needs to be revisited as well. In the meantime, two distinctive understandings of a “new Catholicity” have indeed been taking shape.
The second part of this article will turn to these understandings to see how they are positioning themselves vis-à-vis where globalization is taking the world. In the course of this I want to make some reference to what this means for the Philippines.

The Second Decade of Globalization
Globalization comes about when qualitative changes in the technologies in transportation and communication make more intensive interaction possible. Christianity first moved out from Palestine along the roads built by the Roman Empire and in travel around the Mediterranean Sea. Christianity spread into South and East Asia along trade routes. It was the superiority of Arab sailing ships that brought Islam to Indonesia and the Philippines. The possibility of intensified communication is the foundation of periods of globalization. As a result of such communication, all sectors of life are influenced and often changed. This does not mean that globalization sweeps away everything in its path, but the impact of globalization cannot be ignored. It creates new conditions that call forth both innovation and resistance to change.
In what follows here, I want to look at four interlocking sectors where globalization is having an impact: the socio-cultural, the economic, the political, and the religious. The focus here will be on what a decade or more of globalization is doing in each of these sectors. Needless to say, because of the interconnectedness of these four sectors, what will be discussed cannot fall neatly into one of the four categories: each necessarily has an impact on the others. So the sorting of issues here is more for clarity rather than exploring all the intricate interactions that are going on. Then a concluding part will examine the global-local nexus: how does “the global” look in light of all of this, and what does it mean for “the local.” In the beginning of the current round of globalization,
there was a fear that the global would completely obliterate local cultures and traditions because of its sheer strength. The view is more nuanced today: the press of the global often strengthens the local by calling forth forms of resistance or heightening the importance of particular local forms. As we shall see in the political sphere, it can lead even to a further entrenchment of political power.

The Socio-cultural Sector
There are three things in particular in the socio-cultural sector that draw our attention: advances in communications technology, the impact of migration, and the challenge of multicultural societies.
New developments in telecommunications were well under way a decade ago, but wireless technologies have taken us further than we would have imagined. In the mid- 1990s both computers and telephones still relied largely on wired connections. The challenge then was how to bring these technologies to most of the world where the infrastructure of a wired system did not exist.
We are of course in a very different place now. Cellular telephones have become ubiquitous, at least in urban areas. Manila has a right to claim to be the text-messaging capital of the world. Wireless technology is also making the Internet more accessible for those who have computers. The prices of these technologies continue to drop, offering them a greater possibility for more of the poor.
What access to communication means is greater potential for education, for engagement in the broader networks of economic well being, and for political mobilization and solidarity. While authoritarian governments continue to try to restrict Internet and cell phone access, they can do so (at least up to this point) only in a very limited way unless they wish to opt out of the technological patterns of the world altogether. Even then, satellite dishes can circumvent such restrictions. For example, satellite dishes are forbidden by law in Iran, yet many in the middle class have them nonetheless.
The recent peaceful revolutions in Serbia, Georgia and Ukraine point to what kinds of mobilization of political sentiment can be achieved with the current communications technology. University students in Serbia exported their revolution first to Georgia and then to Ukraine through a network of computers and cell telephones.
Migration — either temporary, as overseas contract workers; or relatively permanent, as relocation — has increased to such an extent in the last decade and a half that it has become one of the most marked phenomena of the current situation in globalization.
This is especially the case for the Philippines, where some ten percent of the total
population is working overseas, and the remittances they send back make up a substantial part of the Gross National Product. For migrant-sending countries, the strain placed upon migrating workers and their families has longer-term social implications that have yet to be calculated.3 Questions are being raised about to what extent the remittances contribute to the overall improvement of the economic situation of the country. Most flow directly to the betterment of the lot of the families of the migrating workers (as well they should).
But some are concerned that too little is invested in the building up of the economic capacity of the country as a whole. At the same time, there is the legitimate fear of the workers and their families that efforts in this direction will simply be siphoned off by the oligarchs who control the government. Here is an instance where a potential to help lift people on a larger scale out of poverty can be thwarted by pre-existent patterns of power.
Migration is the major factor behind a third development, namely, the development of multicultural societies. Immigration has always created such societies, and imperial centers have always, to some measure, had multicultural populations. But the combination of the urbanization of the planet (with more than fifty percent of the world’s population now living in cities with a population of 100,000 or more, and more than four hundred cities with a population exceeding one million inhabitants) such multicultural settings are developing on an unprecedented scale. The capacity to maintain contact with one’s homeland (at least for those in the first generation interested in doing so) makes immigrants less likely to set aside previous cultural identities for the sake of the dominant culture into which they have entered.
An important question is how will multicultural societies function. Up to the turn of the twenty-first century, much attention was paid to respecting the “otherness” of newcomers and respecting their right to culture. Violence in cities, especially in Europe, has prompted a search for models that will promote greater interaction between cultural groups, as well as greater adjustment of the majority culture to accommodate better those more recently arrived. This search is part of a larger discussion of “cosmopolitanism” that is examining ways of understanding how diverse populations can interact without reverting to nationalism.4
There are, of course, other sociocultural features of globalization that could be taken up, notably global cultural and media flows. But these three — the continuing development in communications, migration, and the growth of multicultural societies — stand out perhaps most of all.

The Economic Sphere
The economics of globalization are no doubt the most immediately evident aspect of this phenomenon. Although the networks of communication and transportation form the conditions that make globalization possible, it is in the economic sphere that most people feel touched immediately by the globalization process.
I would suggest that there is no important new development in the economics of globalization over the past ten years. However, the profound paradoxes of global capitalism have come into ever sharper focus. On the one hand, global capitalism produces a great deal of new wealth, and at the macro-level, is transforming societies.
This was already evident in the “Asian tigers” in the 1980s and 1990s, but is most striking in China today. It is estimated that in 1980 sixty-five percent of all Chinese lived in extreme poverty. By 2000, that percentage had been cut in half. To do so in such a large population within a relatively short period of time shows that globalization can fulfill part of its promises. But the other side of the paradox has asserted itself just as quickly. Even as societies accrue more wealth through global capitalism, income differences within the population of these countries become even greater. These sharp differences work against social cohesion. They may also erode the middle classes, which have been key to economic development throughout the modern period. The differences also accelerate migration into the cities and out of the country. One sees similar stark contrasts of wealth developing in India which - like China - is experiencing rapid growth in some parts of
the country. The poor fall ever further behind.
The question that becomes more urgent in this is what are the limits of a society developing itself solely through its economic sector while neglecting social factors. Roland Robertson observed already fifteen years ago that globalization has, in itself, no telos or goal. Can a society really be a “good society” if it focuses only on generating wealth but turns a blind eye to the well being of its citizens?

The Political Sphere
Some of the political implications flowing from unchecked economic growth that is indifferent to those who cannot participate in it have become evident in the past ten years. The resentment that grows out of the frustration of exclusion from the benefits of economic globalization is a principal factor fuelling the newer terrorist organizations.
The world’s population outside the developed world is strikingly young; in many places sixty percent or more of the population is under the age of twenty-four. Unemployed young men in their late teens and twenties are the major resource for violence. The young men most prone to being recruited into this violence are not the poorest of the poor. More likely they are relatively well educated. For example, the group of young men who executed the 9/11 attacks in the United States (with two exceptions) were all within this age group, and all of them had had some measure of postsecondary education.
With this kind of bulge in the population of unemployed and frustrated young men, the potential is there for continued unrest and violence.
In the mid-1990s some European observers of globalization (especially in the German speaking countries) feared that the power of transnational business corporations would spell the end of the nation-state as it had developed. That has not proven to be the case.
The power of nation-states has been weakened but these entities will continue to be important, since there are certain kinds of service that can only be provided at a local or regional level. However, for postcolonial countries where the structures of the nation state had never been stabilized (either because of ethnic conflict or oligarchies left over from the colonial power), the power to act within a global context is even weaker than before. Such countries are especially at the mercy of transnational economic power and the international organizations (such as the World Trade Organization and the World Bank) that support and protect that economic power.
There are, on the one hand, new regional and even international organizations that can correspond to the organizations of global capitalism. The development of such entities as the International Criminal Court is an example of this. But whether they will be strong enough to act decisively, and organized enough to act expeditiously, remains to be seen. The looming crisis where this will be addressed is the ecological crisis now taking shape.
The poorest nations—and especially the poor island and coastal nations—will be the first to be affected. Wars between nations will likely be fought over control of those resources necessary for survival—most importantly, fresh water. The migration of whole peoples struggling to survive because of climate change will cause further instability: this is already one of the principal causes of the current conflict in the Darfur region of East Africa. Will the international institutions such as those part of the United Nations, or regional trading bodies be able to mobilize together to meet a challenge that knows no national boundaries?
The second decade of globalization, then, finds the political sector more unstable than even a decade ago, when there was a proliferation of intrastate conflicts, many of which had been kept down during the Cold War era. The number of those has now dropped, but a combination of other demographic, social, economic, and political factors are creating a class of conflict that may be more difficult to maintain than those localized conflicts of the 1990s.

The Religious Sector
Patterns in the religious sector that were already emerging a decade ago have come much more starkly into evidence now. Rather than dwindling away in the wake of secularization, there has been a clear resurgence of religion in much of the world today.
This resurgence is interwoven with the other developments already sketched out here in the socio-cultural, economic, and political sectors. As this resurgence of religion is developing, it is creating three special challenges.
First of all, religion has become more tightly entwined with many of the struggles over identity. As groups feel their identity and autonomy being eroded by the social and economic forces of globalization, they are using religion as a shield against these forces, and as a rallying point to mobilize resistance to these changes. This can be seen in the communal struggles in India between Muslims and Hindus, and in Hindus against Christians. It can intersect with ethnic and regional struggles as in northern Nigeria. In its worst forms, religion is allied with a violent agenda to eliminate believers of other faith, as has happened in parts of Indonesia.
Second, political instability has shifted or highlighted the need for one form of interreligious dialogue over the others: interreligious dialogue as a form of building peace. This involves both grassroots organizations, but also at very public levels in order to disengage an ideological use of religion to promote violence (as the development of anew interfaith council in Bosnia-Herzegovina), as well promote international cooperation of religions for the betterment of humankind (as in Religions for Peace 5 or in work toward a Global Ethic).
Third, religions must bring their traditions to bear on some of the great issues being lifted up by globalization if they are to remain part of the global conversation about the future of human society. These include addressing human suffering, a vision of the integrity of creation, the need for reconciliation and forgiveness, and a picture of the good human society.6 A number of these have been addressed by efforts such as that for a Global Ethic and in the meetings of The Parliament for the World’s Religions in 1993, 1999, and 2005.
Religion is an unmistakable player on the global stage today, opinions of secular thinkers notwithstanding. As it has throughout history, it has conspired with the worst elements of globalization as a social phenomenon, but has also been part of the best as well. Religion is still inadequately theorized in much of the writing on globalization, either because many sociologists and political thinkers disregard or disdain religion, or because the models employed are not capacious enough to grasp the breadth and complexity of religion’s interaction. These latter often hew too closely to established sociological models to be able to throw new light on the subject.7

The Interaction of the Global and the Local
Already early on in the current round of globalization, observers noted that the global— despite its formidable powers—would never completely obliterate the local. Rather, their interaction often created new social forms. The reception of the global by the local might reveal new or different aspects. Local practices could connect with similar practices in other places to create global “flows”. This has been evident in feminist, human rights, liberationist, and ecological flows.
What is perhaps most of need today is to find some new overarching visions that together can capture the imagination of people in such a way as to cause them to band together to create new social realities. 1989 marked in many ways the collapse of the grand socialist and utopian visions that had led to the protection of workers’ rights in the dawn of the industrial era. Marxist visions still flicker here and there, but have been discredited by the implosion of Communist regimes and the poverty of the anthropological vision those implosions revealed.
The World Social Forums, held annually in different parts of the Global South, have been intended as a way of re-igniting those visions. For those who attend them, they do create a great deal of energy, and perhaps something will come of them. They do attest to how local efforts might come together in a new way to belie the postmodern axiom of the “death of the master narrative.” Can energies be organized and a vision forged that can galvanize the attention not only of small groups, but of entire nations? Will the galvanic moment be found in common cause against a global threat, such as climatechange? This is certainly one of the major questions facing us in the coming years.8

Two Faces of Catholicity
I turn now to the response to where we find ourselves today, by revisiting the concept of catholicity. Catholicity is chosen because it would seem to have the capacity to embrace global phenomena and movements. What is needed is a holistic vision, and that has always been the intention behind this concept. What has become more evident as well is a focus on anthropology, that is, the vision of the human being in all of this. The distorted image of the human found in Communist theory of the “New Man”, and the distorted image of the human found in oppression will have to find a new face. Economic globalization represents, in many ways, the distortions of oppression in a new yet not unfamiliar way: the human as producer and consumer. Only those who produce and those who consume are counted to be of any importance.
As noted in the introduction above, I suggested in The New Catholicity that Christians must offer a catholicity that really does extend throughout the world, and offer a holistic vision of faith. To ensure interaction between these two dimensions, attention would have to be given to communication—both between the two dimensions of catholicity, and with the changing world affected as it is by globalization.
Ten years on one sees, at least within the Roman Catholic Church, two faces of catholicity taking ever clearer shape. They draw on the understanding of catholicity as extension and on catholicity as fullness of faith, respectively. What is missing, however, is that element of communication. If anything, these two forms of catholicity are polarizing. In so doing the holism of the vision is being lost.
There are different characterizations being given of these two forms. Timothy Radcliffe has called the Catholics who cluster around each of these “Gaudium et Spes” Catholics and “communio” Catholics, respectively.9 They have also been characterized as “Concilium” and “Communio” Catholics, after the two journals that serve as central organs for the two forms.
As Radcliffe’s denotation of the first group implies, the first group (which emphasizes the importance of the Church’s extension throughout the world) takes the Pastoral Constitution Gaudium et Spes as its charter document. The Church’s mission is to engage the world around it with the message of Christ, and at the same time listen to how God is speaking in the world today. In the phrase that became the watchword of this group during and after the Council, we must attend to “the signs of the times.” It is only in this profound embrace of the world will the Church achieve the mission entrusted to it by God, and will the world find its salvation.
The second group finds itself better expressed in the Constitution Lumen Gentium, especially read through a neo-Augustinian lens. As this neo-Augustinianism has been described, it is a fusion of Augustine’s reading of the Christian tradition with Neo-Platonic culture to forge a powerful identity that shaped much of Western theology. Herethe most powerful text of Augustine would be his City of God, written over many years but completed toward the end of his life. The City of God — which is the Church — stands over against the earthly city, and alone offers salvation and truth. It is in radical discontinuity with the world. Augustine had before him the image of the sack of Romeby the Vandals in 410. Only the Church holds God’s message. The world will only be saved by entering into the tutelage of the Church.
The “neo” comes from the appropriation of this Augustinian vision by Bonaventure in the thirteenth century. While his fellow theologian Thomas Aquinas embraced the newly discovered works of Aristotle to achieve a new synthesis of Christian faith for a changing world, Bonaventure retreated into the darker Augustinian vision.
There is not space here to elaborate on this vision in more detail. It has been outlined already by others.10 The Gaudium et Spes vision of catholicity might be situated with figures from the Second Vatican Council such as Yves Congar, Karl Rahner, and Edward Schillebeeckx. The City of God vision is evident in the works of theologians such as Hans Urs von Balthasar and Joseph Ratzinger. That Joseph Ratzinger has now become Pope Benedict has given the City of God vision a certain prominence in the Church.
What I would like to do in the rest of this second half of the article is to examine how each of these forms of catholicity deal with the issues of globalization that are now pressing upon us. Globalization itself pretends to a kind of catholicity—at least in the sense of being omnipotent and omnipresent. How we understand catholicity theologically will shape how we meet its challenges.

The Catholicity of Gaudium et Spes and the Challenges of Globalization
The catholicity of Gaudium et Spes is directed toward engagement with the world. Key to its vision is another assertion of Augustine: God’s revelation comes to us through two books: the book of the Scriptures and the book of nature. Forty years after the promulgation of Gaudium et Spes, nearly everyone would agree that its optimistic tone about the modern world and its prospects may have been exaggerated. But that does not disqualify its basic vision. I would like to note four concrete enactments of this commitment of extension throughout the whole world as evidence of how catholicity in this form is given expression.
Inculturation. The impulse to inculturation, which acknowledges the worthiness of every human culture to receive the “seeds of the Word”, is an explicit commitment not only to evangelization, but to seeing expressions of the Christian faith grow up that engage every human being directly. In a way, we will not come to understand the meaning of the great revelation that has been given to us in Jesus Christ until it has been allowed to take root in every human culture. To be sure, every culture carries with it not only traces of the divine but also traces of sin, from which it must be purified. But that purification can never take place if the culture is not engaged.
Networks of solidarity and liberation. The global flows spoken of in The New Catholicity (liberation, feminism, human rights, and ecology) are soteriological sites; that is, places where the redeeming and liberating grace of Christ is needed. Networking here is intended to be understood as structures that recognize and respect the local, even as they are linked into larger geographical relationships. Extension throughout the world is not a territorial imperative, it is a qualitative one that touches the joys and the hopes, the anguish and the fears of the human family.
A dialogical stance. Dialogue has come to be more than a means of establishing friendly relations, exchanging information, or (in its worst manifestations) a subterfuge to proselytize. Dialogue ceases to be seen only instrumentally in this vision of catholicity. It is a way of engaging others, affirming their dignity as created by God, and the rights to a full human life. Dialogue is something that marks every engagement of the Church with the world.
The practice of reconciliation. Reconciliation has become a major interest in many parts of the world today. This appears to be the case not only to heal wounded societies, but also because it is revealing a profound anthropological vision of humanity that is needed for the world in which we now find ourselves. Reconciliation is committed to opening up new social spaces where people can regain their humanity. It is attending more to how women especially are taking the lead in that kind of world. It is struggling to imagine societies where erstwhile enemies might find new venues where they can live and flourish together. Here the suffering of the world is engaged on another front: healing the past for the sake of the future.
All of these concerns — inculturation, liberation, dialogue, reconciliation — involve engaging the issues that are emerging in the sociocultural, economic, political, and religious sectors of the globalizing world today. At the same time, a closer examination of this form of catholicity shows some important weaknesses that need to be addressed.
Most notably, there are elements of the European Enlightenment that need closer scrutiny. There can be too much optimism about change as progress, and an overly naïve assumption that grand projects can really change things. There is an emphasis on human freedom that sometimes forgets human responsibility. There is not adequate attention to human sin: to lodge it only in social structures overlooks the perversities in the human heart. Indeed, it may underestimate the power of evil in thwarting the best-laid plans. In the acceleration and instability of the world created by the forces of globalization, this form of catholicity tries to ride the waves or steer a course that can become mere accommodation to what is, rather than standing for what should be. To some it looks as though the world sets the agenda for the Church, making the Church and its mission but a passive partner. It can also sacrifice depth in the interests of breadth; it can seem rootless even while it is expansive.
This form of Gaudium et Spes Christianity has been placed under greater scrutiny by those who question and criticize it than those who subscribe to it. Despite a bow toward self-critique, it is not often undertaken.11

The Catholicity of The City of God and the Challenges of Globalization
The form of catholicity represented by The City of God sees its stance to the world as a critical one that points to the sinfulness, failure, and shortcomings of the world. But to begin with that stance does not do justice to what is inherently attractive to many about this position.
The attraction lies in the strong sense of Christian identity that this form of catholicity can offer. Augustinian thought has its pessimistic or dark side, but it is also suffused with desire for God and a commitment to holiness. Its quest is for genuine wisdom. It has a clear vision of some of the deepest yearnings of humanity, and offers a path to fulfillment in God through a life in Christ. As such, it creates an identity with remarkable resilience, with resources to address a wide range of problems, such as human yearning, suffering, the quest for truth, and a place to dwell. Such a vision of identity clearly addresses one of the central challenges globalization now presents: identity. It was noted that here lies one of the great tasks for religion today—both in fostering integrated identities and deconstructing violent ones. Rather than focusing on the differences between cultures and honoring those cultures in their otherness, this form of catholicity seeks to plumb the depths of a common humanity that resonates through cultural difference. In this vision of the City of God, the Church is the site where truth, holiness and communion can be found. It is in cultivating a life in truth, a quest for ever greater sanctity, and a deepening sense of communion that a place is presented to which others are invited to enter. All of this is made concrete in the liturgy and in a spirituality that transforms and directs human desire to its only true goal: to God.
Because of the more stringent requirements of this vision, the Church in the future may be a smaller place, a “little flock,” but one so committed to its Lord that it will be a beacon on the hill, the City of God set over against the earthly city.
The vision of the City of God can exude an integrity and a serenity that contrasts sharply with the pell-mell rush of globalization that so often lacks any sense of telos or goal. This accounts for its attraction to a significant number of Catholics today, especially among younger Catholics who feel buffeted by waves of globalization and inadequately served by a theology of embracing the turbulence of a globalizing world.
But this vision too needs critical voices. Although it acknowledges (perhaps better than the Gaudium et Spes form of catholicity) the presence of sin and human limitation, it finds it difficult to see such limitations in the Church itself. Consequently it runs the risk at times of a triumphalism that is reminiscent of an imperial past. Rather than going out into the world, it is more likely to wait for the world to come in. Indeed, from the time of Augustine until the sixteenth century, the biblical motivation for mission was not Matthew 28:19-20 (“Go out to all nations”), but Luke 14:23 (“Make them come in”). By trying to pose an alternative to the earthly city, the City of God may not hear the voices of those who suffer—indeed may not really engage social problems at all beyond some very general platitudes. Dialogue is not really a medium of communication here, other than as a means of proclamation of what is seen as the truth: the Church has very little to learn from the world. The Church attracts through its beauty rather than its going out into the slums and shanty towns of the world.

Communication and Catholicity
These two forms of catholicity communicate with the world differently. The Gaudium et spes form sees itself as going out and risking engagement with an unstable and unreliable world. The City of God form sees itself communicating through the compelling character of its message, entrusted to it by Christ, that will attract those who are genuinely searching for the truth. That truth, in turn, will be transformative of the world. We have, therefore, two different approaches to how to embrace the world with a genuinely catholic vision.
At this point in time, these two visions are not doing well in communicating with each other within the Church. There is more likely a tendency of each to see the shortcomings in the other. Dialogue, a preferred form of communication in the Gaudium et Spes form, does not enjoy the same status in the City of God form of catholicity. Where God needs to be sought and where God is likely to be found are accorded different locations by the two approaches.
Communication is made more difficult by the fact that there are a considerable number of people in each form of catholicity that are sure they already understand the other party and so there is no need for further investigation. Breaking through the impasses that are building here is one of the principal tasks within the Church in the coming years.
In the meantime we must continue to seek ways to bring the Word of God in a more adequate fashion into the world in which we live. Both of these visions of catholicity are alive, in varying forms, in the Philippines. Important in all of this is the fact that the current pontificate seems more likely to favor the second of these forms over the first rather than seek a more adequate mediation of the two. That will affect the lives of Catholics here as it does elsewhere. Its meaning for the formation of religious and other ministers in the Church will have implications for a long time to come into the future.
The process of globalization is likely to continue for some time into the future. In that continuation, we will see the further development of recent trends already noted here, as well as new ones yet unknown. The Church — itself the oldest and the largest global entity — has a responsibility to offer a vision of its own catholicity to meet the challenges of globalization. Such a vision must be compelling to the world and faithful to the Church’s own tradition. Forging a unity out of the two forms of catholicity now with us is a requirement of that vision.

Endnotes
1 Robert Schreiter is Vatican Council II Professor of Theology at the Catholic Theological Union in Chicago, USA. He has written extensively on inculturation, globalization, and the mission of the Church.
This article is based on a lecture he gave at the Institute for Formation and Religious Studies in Manila on January 12, 2007.
2 This was done in The New Catholicity: Theology between the Global and the Local (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1997).
3 Two studies of Filipina domestic workers are notable here. Gemma Tulud Cruz, “Into the Deep: A Theological Exploration of the Sturggle of Filipina Domestic Workers in Hong Kong” (Ph.D. dissertation, Radboud University Nijmegen, 2006); and Pheng Cheah, Inhuman Conditions: On Cosmopolitanism and Human Rights (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 178-229 (on workers in Singapore).
4 See the discussions in Cheah, op. cit.
5 Known until 2006 as the World Conference of Religion and Peace
6 A number of these have been outlined admirably by Richard Falk in Religion and Humane Global Governance (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), 30-32.
7 An example of the latter would be the recent book of Peter Beyer, Religions in Global Society (Abingdon: Routledge, 2006) that relies too much (to my mind) on the system of Niklas Luhmann.
8 Peter Sloterdijk in his Zorn und Zeit (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2006) studies the organization of thumos or energy through the Greek classical period and the Hebrew Scriptures, down through the republican and socialist movements from 1789 to 1989. He concludes that we are at the moment in a time without this
thumos. One recent attempt to resurrect something of this vision may be found in Daniel Groody, Globalization, Justice, and Spirituality (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2007), where he tries to bring the three concepts in the title into new interaction with one another.
9 Timothy Radcliffe, What is the Point of Being a Christian? (London and New York: Continuum, 2006).
The designation for the first group expresses the tendency very well. The second I find less felicitous, since all Catholics embrace the communio of the Church.
10 See for example Joseph Komonchak, “The Church in Crisis: Pope Benedict’s Theological Vision,” Commonweal 132 (June 3, 2005), 11-14; Lieven Boeve, “Europe in Crisis: A Question of Belief or Unbelief? Perspectives from the Vatican,” Modern Theology 23(2007), 205-227.
11 Much of the thoughtful critique is coming from younger theologians in the neo-Augustinian mode.
Among the Radical Orthodoxy group, Simon Ward stands out especially in this regard.