Faith Inside an Immanent Frame

Abstract

Those who are charged with the responsibility of governing, leading or teaching in Catholic schools at this time are challenged by questions which go to the heart of their school’s mission. How is it possible for the mission of the Catholic school to be realised in a culture that is increasingly secularising? What is the secularising context and how is religious belief still possible today? These are questions of profound significance also for the families who seek a Catholic education for their children. Charles Taylor’s analysis of our secular age provides a foundation for addressing these questions as do findings from the Enhancing Catholic School Identity (ECSI) research. Whilst the secularising context is sometimes painted as the enemy of Catholic education, it is presented here as being the context in which Catholic schools must realise their mission and this cultural context, like any cultural context, has elements which support the mission and elements which impede it. The following key concepts from Taylor’s analysis are reviewed because of their relevance for Catholic schools: the Expressivist Age, the Cross-Pressured context and the Immanent Frame. The Post-Critical Belief Scale from the ECSI research is also reviewed, as a key finding is that Post-Critical Belief is the only viable option for faith in a secularising context.

1. Introduction

This paper has its origins in a recent keynote I gave to an international Jesuit education seminar. The theme I was given for my address was ‘Forming a resilient faith: Teaching for in-depth faith formation in our secular context today’. As I prepared my contribution, I considered questions like: ‘What does “our secular context” mean?’ ‘What does a “resilient faith” look like?’ and ‘What does it mean to teach for the “in-depth faith formation” of our students today?’ Questions like these raise deep cultural and theological issues and the research literature that addresses them is vast and contested. Rather than surveying the literature in its breadth, the following reflections draw chiefly from two sources: the cultural philosophy of Charles Taylor and the Enhancing Catholic school identity research led by Didier Pollefeyt.

Charles Taylor’s analysis of secularism is seminal in the field and provides a firm and hope-filled foundation for sharing the Gospel in our day.1 I focused in particular on concepts such as the ‘Immanent Frame’ and the cross-pressure that people in a secular age feel as they are squeezed between a self-sufficient, exclusive humanism on the one hand and a sense of finitude on the other. This cross pressure can be experienced as a sense that there must be something more to life than what we can see, know and achieve purely through our own human powers.

As the name suggests, the purpose of the Enhancing Catholic School Identity (ECSI) research is to strengthen the religious identity of Catholic schools. The ECSI research is undertaken in partnership with a growing number of school governing authorities and provides a first-class example of the transdisciplinary approach to theology recently promoted by Pope Francis (Pope Francis 2023).2 In this paper, I focus on the Post-Critical Belief scale which is one of the three empirical instruments used in the ECSI research, and in so doing I open a conversation between Taylor and ECSI that focuses on how post-critical faith is still possible in a secularising context where many have relegated religion to a previous age.

The purpose of the paper is to highlight the possibilities in our secular age for students in Catholic schools to grapple with the meaning and destiny of their lives in an educational process that is systematically engaged with the Catholic faith at the same time as it truly embraces the freedom, diversity and active engagement of students that is so characteristic of our secular age. With this purpose in mind, the paper is divided into two parts: Part One draws primarily on Taylor’s analysis to present the secular context as one that is open to religious belief, even as it is also open to a range of alternative spiritual and non-religious life-stances. In Part Two, I consider how it is possible to engage students with Catholic faith in a secular context where many believing and non-believing life options are much more visible than they used to be and where support for religious traditions is declining on many measures. We do not proceed far into this discussion before we find ourselves in deep theological and philosophical waters, and so I employ a genre recommended by Max van Manen, which I have called the ‘phenomenological anecdote’. The paper concludes by drawing on the Enhancing Catholic School Identity research, particularly from the Victoria Scale and the Post-Critical Belief Scale, to explore the pedagogical implications for Catholic schools of the secularising context.

2. The Secular Age

A key challenge for anyone leading a Catholic school is to understand the ways in which the secularising process both enables and impedes the realisation of their school’s mission. Taylor is quite explicit in A Secular Age that he is telling the secular story as it has unfolded in Western modernity. One of the lessons for me from the international Jesuit Seminar that gave rise to this paper is that secularisation in one form or another is a worldwide experience, not a phenomenon that only unfolds in the so-called ‘West’. It was clear to me that key concepts from Taylor’s analysis resonated in different ways with delegates from countries in Africa and Asia, as well as in countries whose national identity was grounded in Latin Christendom. Notwithstanding this resonance at a macro level, the secularising process unfolds idiosyncratically in different cultures, even among nations that would identify as being grounded in Western modernity. For example, church attendance in the United States has typically been much higher than in many other Western countries, although this outlying phenomenon is rapidly changing (Pew Research Centre 2019).

The adversarial nature of some elements of the secularisation literature has been mentioned, and it is therefore important to distinguish between scholarly research and adversarial texts which are ideological, polarising or highly politicised in tone. Lieven Boeve makes this distinction when he discusses the difference between secularism as an ideology and secularisation as a social process (Boeve 2016). The writings of some New Atheists provide examples of an anti-religious polemic where religious dialogue partners can feel they are being bludgeoned for their faith rather than engaged in a genuine debate about the significance and meaning of religion in a secularising culture. On the other side of the ideological coin, there are religiously committed writers who see ‘the world’ purely in deficit terms and portray secular culture as being the enemy of faith. There is no problem with strongly held views; the ideological problem arises when there is a refusal to engage in good faith with those who hold alternative positions.

The stance taken in this analysis is that secular culture is neither the friend nor the enemy of religion; rather, the secularising culture should be seen as the context in which religious faith might be expressed. It is true that atheism is possible today in ways that were inconceivable in previous ages but the possibility or probability of agnostic or atheistic life-stances does not mean that religious belief is impossible in our day. It is true that there are radical secularists who are ‘enemies’ of Catholic schools in the sense that they are opposed to religious schools receiving any funding from the taxes paid by their families. The stridency of school funding debates should not, however, poison the world-affirming approach religious schools need to take as they name and nurture transcendence in the lives of those they educate.

Lieven Boeve provides a helpful way into a discussion of the secularising context when he offers the following three categories in his analysis: detraditionalisation, individualisation and pluralisation:

Every form of identity construction today, including classical-religious or atheistic identities, is determined by the fact that traditions are no longer self-evident (detraditionalization), that identity formation requires the individual’s choice and continuing effort (individualization), and that there are a number of traditions, religions and philosophies at one’s disposal to give shape to one’s identity (pluralization).

(Boeve 2016, p. 8)

With these categories in mind, Catholic schools operate in an environment where students will not be drawn into religious commitment simply because their parents or grandparents are committed Catholics. Faith is not ‘passed on’ from one generation to the next in the way that it once was. Students are well aware that there are many religious and non-religious options available to them and they see themselves as being personally responsible for their beliefs. The individualising sensibility does not respond well to religious authorities who are perceived as offering faith in pre-packaged (and therefore less authentic) forms.

2.1. The Expressivist Age

Boeve’s analysis aligns well with Taylor who has also emphasised the active engagement that is necessary if ‘seekers’ are to embrace a faith commitment in an ‘Expressivist Age’. The following sentence from Taylor is often quoted because it captures succinctly a key feature of the Expressivist Age that many Catholic educators will recognise in the lives of their students and even in their fellow members of staff:

‘Each one of us has his/her own way of realising our humanity, and it is important to find and live out one’s own way as against surrendering to conformity with a model imposed on us from outside, by society, or the previous generation, or religious or political authority’.

(Taylor 2007, p. 475)

In an Expressivist Age, religious or non-religious worldviews are considered to be authentic when they are individually constructed by seekers who potentially draw from many sources, as distinct from faith being built within the scaffolding and language of the religious tradition of one’s family, as was the case for many of us in the past. To return to Boeve’s terminology of individualisation, pluralisation and detraditionalisation: religious or non-religious beliefs are constructed by individuals who find their own way into faith/non-faith, fully aware that there are many options, rather than being formed from within the locus of a particular religious tradition. Taylor has highlighted the risk of relativism in this individualistic approach, but he has also recognised the importance of authenticity as a ‘powerful moral ideal’ at work underneath the quest to be true to oneself (Taylor 1991, p. 15). In the Australian context, Hughes has noted that 55% of respondents to the Australian Survey of Social Attitudes agreed with the statement ‘Life is only meaningful if you provide the meaning yourself’, and only 21% disagreed with it (Hughes 2010a, p. 32). Hughes went on to observe that creating meaning is not a straightforward task and that in another study 78% of students affirmed that at least sometimes it was hard to know what to believe about life (Hughes 2010a, p. 33). When interviewed about these statistics, Hughes noted the confusion that young Australians can experience in this context (Hughes 2010b), and this confusion is not restricted to traditional doctrinal issues; it can reach right down deep into identity issues as basic as one’s sense of gender. One of the challenges for a Catholic school is to accompany young people by listening to them deeply, by accepting their experiences but without necessarily endorsing their choices. Religious accompaniment in an Expressivist Age is a delicate dance but one whose steps Catholic educators need to learn if they are to draw effectively from the Tradition in ways that are received as being culturally plausible.

The shift into the Expressivist Age, which Taylor identifies as occurring in the 1960s, obviously raises some fundamental issues for Catholic schools but before considering these in greater depth, it is helpful to clarify which aspect of secularisation Taylor is addressing in his analysis. Taylor helpfully distinguishes between three different understandings of secularity: Secular 1 (the retreat of religion in public life); Secular 2 (the decline in religious belief and practice); and Secular 3 (the change in the conditions of belief). In classical secularisation theory, as societies modernise, religion ‘loses its social significance and becomes a purely private matter among a diminishing number of people’ (Dixon 2018). Here we see a combination of Secularity 1 and 2, using Taylor’s categories.

Taylor focuses on Secular 3 in A Secular Age (Taylor 2007), and we do likewise in this paper, as we want to look underneath declining religious practice to understand the changing ways in which religious belief is still possible in our day. We adopt this focus with the paper’s purpose in mind which is to highlight the possibilities in our secular age for students in Catholic schools to experience a strong witness to Catholic faith in an educational process that genuinely appreciates the pluralising and detraditionalising cultural context in which individuals construct their faith. We have, however, leapt ahead in our reflections as it is fundamental to Taylor’s analysis that if we want to understand where we are now in an Expressivist Age, we need to understand where we have come from and if we are to do that, we need to start the story 500 years ago in ‘the Enchanted Age’.

2.2. The Enchanted Age

When Catholics reflect on the secularising process, they sometimes turn the clock back six decades to the Second Vatican Council and when 1960 is chosen as the starting place for reflections on secularisation, the narrative easily collapses into a sad Secular 2 Catholic story of deficit and decline. Taylor offers a more hopeful view, however, when he pulls the lens back 500 years to what he calls the Enchanted Age in his analysis. Taylor asks the question: ‘Why was it virtually impossible not to believe in God in, say 1500 in our Western society, while in 2000 many of us find this not only easy but even inescapable?’ (Taylor 2007, p. 25) Up until the sixteenth century, events were understood through the prism of blessings and curses, not as a result of factors which could be identified and controlled through scientific investigation and human intervention. Taylor names the period up until 1500 the ‘Enchanted Age’, and it was an age of superstition, blessings and curses. On a structural level the socio-political world was understood in the Enchanted Age as being ordained by God, rather than as a human construction. There are vestiges of this Enchanted view of governance, power and politics even today when the King of England was crowned by the Archbishop of Canterbury and had as his motto: Dieu et mon droit (God and my right). The full compass of Taylor’s reflections on secularisation lies beyond the scope of this article, but we focus here on the themes of transcendence, human rights and human agency because they have a particular relevance to the mission and identity challenges that currently confront Catholic schools.

2.3. The Immanent Frame

With the exception of a small minority, most people in Western cultures could not contemplate turning the clock back 500 years to return to an Enchanted Age where events such as pandemics were seen as being a curse from God, rather than being caused by a virus. Not only is it impossible to unknow science, but also none of us want to return to the mediaeval world where the human person is buffeted by curses and blessings beyond their control and where human rights as we now understand them were unimaginable. Taylor uses the expression ‘Immanent Frame’ to describe the Western worldview where superstition has been left behind, where the world is regarded through a scientific lens and where human rights and human agency have become foundational and permanently embedded. Hughes has questioned whether we are living in a ‘post-Axial age’ given the advances in human knowledge which have led many people to question whether there is ‘anything beyond the reality that science can investigate’ (Hughes 2019, p. 12).

Taylor presents the secular age as a significant human achievement that unfolded over centuries of socio-cultural processes which include the Renaissance, the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment and the recognition of human rights reflected in developments such as the abolition of slavery and the right of men (and eventually women) to vote. I find it helpful in my work with Catholic educators to begin a consideration of secularism by emphasing the positive dimensions of the culture in which their students are being educated. Of course there are many aspects of the secular context that radically challenge the mission of Catholic schools, but I find it helpful to begin with the positive because those who lead and govern Catholic schools can easily become overwhelmed by the decline in religious practice and the loss of religious identity coherence that was experienced in a previous age prior to the rise of the individualising, detraditionalising and pluralising cultural currents that have been considered above. In the secularisation workshops I conduct with Catholic educators, we begin by naming positive human achievements from the past five centuries. Together we generate lists of achievements such as the following: the right to vote, married women being able to continue in paid employment, the inclusion of aboriginals in the Australian census, the legal recognition of aboriginal custodianship over land and a dawning awareness of the beauty and spiritual depth of first nations peoples. The list lengthens considerably when the many benefits that flow from science and technology are included. Once we have painted this picture on the large canvas of human achievements, we step back to recognise the many benefits inherent in our secular age and no one wants to wind the clock back to the Enchanted Age. This recognition provides a basis for appreciating secularisation as the context for the expression of religious faith, rather than being its enemy.

The following two snapshots from the United States provide two brief examples of the increasing human agency that has grown over the past five centuries in the West:

We the people … do ordain and establish this Constitution.

(Preamble to the US Constitution 1787)

In this example, it is ‘we the people’ who ordain and establish the Constitution, and here we see a shift in sovereignty from God to ‘the people’—a shift which would have been unimaginable in the Enchanted Age. The example below reflects further Enlightenment themes such as human rights, liberty and happiness.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

(American Declaration of Independence 1776)

In this Declaration, ‘the Creator’ is still present as the source and endower of the rights that men (sic) enjoy. As the centuries unfold, however, it becomes increasingly possible for societies to embrace what Taylor calls ‘Exclusive Humanism’ which he defines in the following terms:

The coming of modern secularity … has been coterminous with the rise of a society in which for the first time in history a purely self-sufficient humanism came to be a widely available option. I mean by this a humanism accepting no final goals beyond human flourishing, nor any allegiance to anything else beyond this flourishing. Of no previous society was this true.

(Taylor 2007, p. 18)

Whilst Taylor notes that agnostic or atheistic stances are possible now in ways that were inconceivable previously, Taylor also points out that an experience of transcendence is still possible from within an immanent frame.

2.4. Cross Pressure and the Nova Effect

Taylor notes that there are open and closed takes on the Immanent Frame when it comes to transcendence. Exclusive humanism is not the only option within the Immanent Frame as it is eminently possible to live the life of faith and at the same time accept the findings and benefits of scientific methods. The following quote from Taylor sets the scene well for our consideration of the possibilities for a viable faith formation in our secular age:

‘We can either see the transcendent as a threat, a dangerous temptation, a distraction, or an obstacle to our greatest good. Or we can read it as answering our deepest craving, need, fulfillment of the good’.

(Taylor 2007, p. 548)

Taylor counters simplistic secular narratives such as, on the religious side, those who regard the secularising process as an inexorable descent into godlessness or, conversely, those secular humanists who see secularisation as a necessary liberation of the human spirit from the shackles of religion and superstition. The real story in Taylor’s view is much more interesting and nuanced. It is a story of human flourishing with many noble achievements that we wish to keep, and it is a story that still leaves open the possibility of religious belief, even though many non-believing positions have now also become possible. Whilst Taylor recognises the worthy human achievements associated with the secularising process, he also acknowledges the limitations. He highlights, for example, the sense that many have that there must be a transcending reality beyond, underneath and within a merely scientistic–materialist worldview. There is a tension between the experience of human flourishing on many fronts and a sense that there must be ‘something more’. Taylor calls this tension a ‘cross pressure’, and this pressure fractures and multiplies worldviews into a ‘supernova’ of options.

The religious life of Western societies is much more fragmented than ever before, and also much more unstable, as people change their positions during a lifetime, or between generations, to a greater degree than ever before. The salient feature of Western societies is not so much a decline of religious faith and practice, though there has been lots of that, more in some societies than in others, but rather a mutual fragilization of different religious positions, as well as of the outlooks both of belief and unbelief. The whole culture experiences cross pressures, between the draw of the narratives of closed immanence on one side, and the sense of their inadequacy on the other, strengthened by encounter with existing milieux of religious practice, or just by some intimations of the transcendent. The cross pressures are experienced more acutely by some people and in some milieux than others, but over the whole culture, we can see them reflected in a number of middle positions, which have drawn from both sides.

(Taylor 2007, pp. 594–95)

Of course, the human story is not only characterised by flourishing and liberation; it is also characterised by finitude, depravity and oppression. With this in mind, participants are invited in the secular workshops I lead to list events that undermine human flourishing. Typical items on the list of human failures include wars between nations, the holocaust, decreasing mental health, the sexual abuse of children, the impact of colonisation on first nations peoples, the increasing possibility of nuclear war and the very future of a habitable planet, to mention just a few examples. Once this list has been created, we are well on the way to a collective recognition of the cross-pressured and fractured secularising context that Taylor names in his analysis. In many ways the fractures and fragilization Taylor describes provide the fault lines and frontiers on which evangelisation might unfold in our secular age. We recognise that it is not a matter of working against the secularising context; it is a matter of working within it. Statistics such as the 50% increase in defined mental health disorders among 16- to 24-year-olds in Australia (McIlroy 2024) or the record-breaking floods or mega fires wreaking havoc internationally provide just a few examples where it is possible to challenge the narrative of exclusive humanism. Further opportunities for opening out into transcendence arise on the positive side of the ledger as people share their hopes for a life-partner, vocational aspirations and other elements associated with the joy, meaning and destiny of their lives.

With the above very brief review of the secularising cultural context, we are almost ready to consider the implications of secularisation for the mission of the Catholic school. Before doing so, however, it is helpful to highlight some points which have a particular relevance to Catholic education. Human flourishing and self-determination are taken as both norms and imperatives in an Expressivist Age, and any attempt to impose a way of seeing the world on the basis of religious authority is unlikely to be received positively. The cross-pressured dimension of human experience provides an opportunity for recognising and appreciating transcendence. Whilst it is possible now in a secular age to embrace an exclusive humanism where there is no room for transcendence, atheism is by no means the only possibility or even the choice of the majority. The nova effect has given rise to a pluralising array of life-stances, albeit within the context of the characteristics that have been noted regarding the Immanent Frame. The mission of the Catholic school is realised most effectively when leaders and teachers are able to till the secular soil in ways that help seeds of faith to grow, rather than retreating from the secularising culture to try to grow faith in some other soil.

In my work with educators, I challenge narratives which present secularisation as a cultural force that overwhelms any possibility of realising a Catholic school’s religious identity or mission. For example, my experience in working with staff in Catholic schools is that they respond well to the Victoria Scale in the Enhancing Catholic School Identity research (Pollefeyt and Richards 2020). The key message from this Scale is that teachers in a Catholic school should not feel that they have to choose to be either Catholic in their approach or to be inclusive; they should be both Catholic AND inclusive. Instead of diversity being seen as a threat to Catholic identity, it can become an enriching enlivenment of the mission in schools when the requisite expertise, witness and pedagogical skills have been mandated and developed. In a pluralising context, it is expected that differences and disagreements will arise in any discussion that involves meaning, and this obviously includes any discussion that has a religious dimension. When properly handled, these differences provide the energy and impetus for students to be challenged and educated in the learning process. In an Expressivist Age, or in an age characterised by individualisation, pedagogies need to be employed that involve students actively in their learning. In a Catholic school this active engagement unfolds in the context of a systematic engagement with Catholic perspectives and beliefs. This requires teachers who can witness to their faith and who know the Catholic tradition well enough to accompany students into issues and questions that matter to the students. The challenge to embrace diversity and provide a Catholic engagement, both at the same time, is only met by teachers who can enact pedagogies where students feel that they are engaged in a genuine dialogue that welcomes their perspectives, even as the dialogue is explicitly, systematically, openly and unapologetically illuminated by the light of Catholic faith. A more detailed account of this pedagogy is available in the WSM (Witness, Specialist, Moderator) approach to Religious Education developed in Flanders, Belgium (Pollefeyt 2008).

3. Faith on the Frontier

In a memorable phrase that is often cited, Pope Francis observed that ‘we are not living in an epoch of change but in a change of epoch’ (Pope Francis 2019). In this new epoch, Francis noted that ‘Christendom no longer exists! Today we are no longer the only ones who create culture, nor are we in the forefront or those most listened to’ (Pope Francis 2019). Francis quoted from one of his predecessors (Pope John Paul II 1990) who urged the Church to ‘push forward to new frontiers’, and we head now to one of those frontiers.

3.1. Catholic Faith Inside an Immanent Frame

We have seen in our review of the secularising process that the world is experienced from within an Immanent Frame—a frame of reference in which there is no place for demons, spirits or superstition, and where there is a rejection of religious beliefs that are imposed forcefully or even subtly on the basis of divine authority. We live instead in a world where faith can only be received when it is proposed, not imposed—to take up a phrase that Pope Benedict made popular (Pope Benedict 2008). How can Catholic faith be proposed in ways that enable it to be received within an Immanent Frame?

Paul Ricoeur was a French philosopher whose reflections on post-critical belief provide a sound foundation for designing formation programs within an immanent frame. Ricoeur described the movement from naïve belief, through critique, into a post-critical appropriation, or to use his terminology into a second naïveté. Ricoeur argued that it is impossible to ‘live the great symbolisms of the sacred in accordance with the original belief in them’, or we might say in these reflections that it is impossible to believe as a person in the Enchanted Age might have believed. Whilst we cannot go back to a ‘primitive naïveté’ we can ‘aim at a second naïveté in and through criticism’ (Ricoeur 1967, p. 351). Ricoeur’s philosophy has provided a basis for the development of the ‘Post-Critical Belief Scale’—the empirical instrument we are considering from the Enhancing Catholic School Identity research.

The Post-Critical Belief (PCB) Scale is formed on two axes: a horizontal axis that measures the extent to which one is open or closed to transcendence and a vertical axis that measures the degree to which one is open or closed to interpreting the contents of religious belief. The combination of these two dimensions of transcendence and interpretation gives rise to a typology comprising four different believing styles which are named as follows in the ECSI research: Literal Belief, External Critique, Relativism and Post-Critical Belief. As is the case with any typology, people typically exhibit a mixture of typological traits, rather than being located purely in one type or another. The following description presents extreme examples of the four types, however, for the sake of clarity. We begin by considering the pair of types (Literal Belief and External Critique) that are closed to interpretation but differ markedly in their attitude towards transcendence.

Although ‘Literal Belief’ and ‘External Critique’ sit at opposite extremes of the PCB scale when it comes to transcendence, they share a certainty that their way of seeing the world is the only valid one. Context and interpretation play no role in Literal Belief and External Critique and in extremis genuine dialogue is impossible. Those who take the stance of External Critique reject religious belief on the basis of a fixed understanding of what it entails and on the basis of a rejection of the experience of transcendence. Those who take the stance of Literal Belief embrace religion on the basis, again, of a fixed understanding of what it entails and there is no room for dialogue because the contents of faith are perceived to have been communicated directly, rather than being interpreted through some mediation—for example through scripture or doctrine that is formulated in a particular context and in a particular genre.

The second pair of stances towards religion in the PCB model (Relativism and Post-Critical Belief) share an appreciation for the constructed and contextual dimension of all human knowing but they differ in their experience of transcendence. The Relativist has no sense of transcendence being revealed in human experience and history, and so religious beliefs for the Relativist are merely human constructions that have no real anchor or referent beyond the self: ‘each individual’s way of interpreting meaning is one equal option among a vast many, since all religions are equally untrue’ (Pollefeyt and Richards 2020, p. 82). The ultimate authority for Relativists is the self as there is no recognition of a living, transcendent being who is revealed and apprehended in, through and beyond the religious mediations. Unlike those in External Critique, Relativists are able to engage in a dialogue with religious people, even though they do not accept the truth claims that are inherent in religious belief. Dialogue with relativists is possible because they believe each person has their own way of seeing the world, and there is no authority, standard or truth beyond the self by which the relative merits of interpretations might be measured.

The fourth stance in the PCB typology is Post-Critical Belief—a stance which is characterised by a strong experience of transcendence combined with an appreciation that the contents of faith always need to be interpreted because they are mediated in some way—never grasped directly and literally. The ECSI researchers argue persuasively in my view that post-critical belief is the only viable faith option in our age because to believe is only possible and meaningful after interpretation (Pollefeyt and Bouwens 2014, p. 197). It is not easy to hold the Post-Critical Belief space open, as on the one hand, Literal Believers can consider Post-Critical Belief to be a form of relativism, whereas Relativists and those in External Critique can see Post-Critical Belief as having fundamentalist or superstitious overtones. Post-Critical Belief from a Catholic perspective reflects a sacramental realism where the contents of faith are always experienced via a mediation but a mediation that nonetheless carries real presence, rather than being an empty sign that carries nothing within itself beyond a human construction.

At this point in our reflections, we find ourselves facing deep theological and philosophical questions. What is the status of human knowing? Is there an objective reality that is able to be known, at least in some way, through and beyond a human construction? How can transcendence be apprehended within the context of finite human experience? What sense can be made of the claims of Christians that at the heart of their faith is not a doctrine but a human person who is also the second person of a Trinitarian God who is revealed as love at the heart of the universe? How can Catholics experience this second person of the Trinity as being truly and really present to them in Catholic sacraments?

Rather than address these questions theoretically I find it helpful to address them through the genre of the anecdote given in Max van Manen’s presentation of phenomenology for qualitative researchers (van Manen 2014). The details of van Manen’s consideration of the ways in which phenomenology might enrich qualitative research lie beyond the scope of these reflections but, in short, Van Manen offers the anecdote as one among many phenomenological tools for qualitative researchers. I have included two anecdotes in these reflections because I agree with van Manen’s observation that anecdotes convey ‘something noteworthy or important about life, about the promises and practices, frustrations and failures, events and accidents, disappointments and successes of our everyday living’ (van Manen 2014, p. 250). Anecdotes come in a variety of forms; they can be superficial, or they can be deepened through phenomenological reflection to prompt important insights into the essential features of life experiences that matter. The anecdotes are offered in these reflections as a bridge between the cultural analysis in Part One of the paper and the pedagogical considerations that are opened up in Part Two. We move now into a consideration of the secularising context in which Catholic schools seek to realise their mission.

The following anecdote is offered as a window on a moment of post-critical belief as it unfolded recently in my own experience.

3.2. In Sacred Liturgy

In recent years, I have rediscovered the joy of attending weekday Masses. The quiet prayerfulness of the little group that gathers each weekday to celebrate the Eucharist transports me in ways that are impossible to convey or replicate. The mystery and presence of Christ who is uniquely present in this smaller and more intimate ritual has become very rich and real for me. It had been a busy week, and I had a real sense of relief as I walked towards the parish Church that finally I was going to be able to enter the transporting peace of my contemplative time.

As I enter the Church, though, I am stunned to see four or five hundred people inside, and the place is abuzz with conversation that seems most unliturgical to me. What is going on? Is this a funeral? Why would they have a funeral clashing against the morning mass? No, there must be some other explanation. There it was on the screen above the sanctuary: “Grandparents and Special Friends Day”. With a sense of disappointment and frustration, I conclude that there is no quiet to be had here today with the Year 3s bustling up and down the aisles searching for their grandparents. The place was a hive of activity. Shall I turn around and go home? Am I going to be the archetypal grumpy old man who complains when ‘the school’ ruins the parish liturgy? No, I’ll stay.

As the Mass is about to begin, the principal makes her way to the grandparents in the pew behind me and asks them would they carry the bread and wine down the aisle in the gift procession. She tells them that their granddaughter had been specially selected for this ministry. There is a pause, and grandfather says ‘no’ just as grandmother is saying ‘yes’. How awkward. The principal asks ‘no?’ to grandfather who then reverses his position and says ‘yes’. We all breathe a sigh of relief. This is not the liturgy I was expecting, but I have to admit that I let go of some of my disappointment when the Gathering Hymn begins, and the children open up a uniquely reverent space though their innocent singing. As the ritual unfolds, I make my peace with the liturgy I wasn’t expecting, but I do find myself wondering as Communion approaches whether with so many people, we will be able to keep the sacred space open while communicants are being fed from the altar.

We are not long into the Communion procession when the grandmother in front of me turns to the little person in my pew to remark upon the beauty of his eyes, and a conversation with his proud parents opens. I can’t help noticing the two cups of coffee that grandmother has brought with her into the Church, and these must have been consumed before the liturgy began. I also can’t help being edified as the two families converse and affirm each other. What matters more I ask myself: the breach of the post-Communion silence or the communion of a different order that these two families are opening up? In which experience is Christ more present? I ponder these questions on my journey home, and I have continued to do so.

I offer this little anecdote because talk of transcendence, finitude, epistemology and ontology doesn’t find an easy home in the busy lives and hot action of most school leaders and teachers that I know. They will, however, recognise the issues that the anecdote raises. They will recognise, too, the window into transcendence that is opened up in the following reflection from a Year 11 student who had recently returned from an indigenous immersion experience in Lake Mungo with about 20 of her classmates.

3.3. On Sacred Country

It was the second day; I was sitting, and we had just gone for a walk to the dunes and a big focus was writing in our journal and reflecting and being present to what we were experiencing at that time. And I remember we had just been taken into the desert by the aboriginal elder, and there were 15 of us walking around these untouched sand dunes, and the elder said ‘this artefact is 60,000 years old: Do you want to hold it?’ And I remember journaling afterwards and looking at the sand dunes and looking at the girls and realising how small we are. I think, I always had that sense that we are quite miniscule in the grand scheme of things, but it really just dawned on me how long everything has existed and just the whole putting stuff into perspective, and from there I was just so grateful for everything, and I had a moment where I was like wow, I matter, but I don’t matter. A real paradox.

At the same time, it was kind of a moment of click, but I also got more confused, I was like if I’m so small and minuscule and what I do doesn’t matter at all, and I am just a tiny little blip in the universe’s existence, but then I think if I am lucky enough to be this little blip, then shouldn’t every moment be so important because it’s the only moment you get on a big scale so I was just mind blown for a pretty long time. A good mind blown, not a bad mind blown.

These are two very different anecdotes: one from a man reflecting on his experience of liturgy after a lifetime of catechesis in Catholic faith and another from a young woman standing on the threshold of adulthood and opening herself up to the vastness of the universe that she is moving into. One way to understand the four types of the Post-Critical Belief Scale is to imagine how their exponents might respond to these two anecdotes. It should be remembered that the PCB Scale is not concerned with the contents of religious belief but with the significance given to interpretation, transcendence, experience and context by the four believing/non-believing types. The reflections which follow consider the anecdotes indicatively with these elements in mind.

A person of faith who is not inclined towards interpretation or sensitive to context might be quite critical of the grandparents who brought a cup of coffee into the Church and their breach of protocol during Communion. Such a person might also feel that the grandfather who initially refused to participate in the gift procession was acting responsibly if he did not believe that the gifts he was carrying were going to be transformed at the consecration. Such a person might also question why students in a Catholic school were being exposed to aboriginal ways of understanding the universe when they should have been studying this from a Catholic perspective. Those in External Critique might feel, however, that everyone was wasting their time in the grandparents’ liturgy as we all would have been better off simply gathering for coffee and building community on a human level. The person in External Critique might also feel that the aboriginal dreaming stories were well and good as long as the students appreciated that the real truth lay elsewhere—in the sciences of astronomy and geology. The Relativist on the other hand would be open to all of the experiences conveyed in the anecdotes as long as no truth claims were made in them.

Post-Critical Believers have a keen sense of transcendence in their experience, and they are also attuned to the necessity of interpretation and the importance of context. Liturgy for the Post-Critical Believer is not just a human construction; it has a reality across time and place that transcends the experiences and opinions of individuals. For the Post-Critical Believer, the sacred time and space of the liturgy is real, not a fluid human fabrication that can be reshaped at will. In a Catholic context the Mass is an experience where Christ is truly and really present in the bread and wine, in the proclamation of the sacred text, in the gathered community and in the person of the priest. Because there is a sensitivity to context, the Post-Critical Believer is also aware, however, that many of the people in a ‘Grandparents and Special Friends’ liturgy may not be familiar with the ritual and its rubrics and that in equivalent situations in the gospel, Jesus prioritised people over rules. The tension between the sacredness of the liturgy and the lack of appreciation of that sacredness by some of the assembly would not, however, be easily resolved by the Post-Critical Believer, as might be the case with the Relativist who takes the live-and-let-live approach that is so easy to adopt when there is no truth claim at stake in the different perspectives. The Post-Critical Believer might also want to engage critically with the daily mass goer to ask him about his openness to the presence of Christ in the gathered assembly and in the spirituality of communion that was such a ‘distraction’ for him at points during the liturgy. Similarly, the Post-Critical Believer might seek to savour the young woman’s experience of awe and wonder in the night sky while she was on Country. There could be an affirmation of her cogent grasp of transcendence and its implications for her life and this affirmation could open a deep dialogue about how she makes sense of the aboriginal dreaming, given her context as a person who has a very different cultural and religious background. In each of these cases, the Post-Critical believer engages in critique, interpretation and context but always with a view towards a post-critical appropriation of transcendence, meaning and commitment in truth.

Transcendence is mediated through liturgy, sacred text and the gathered assembly in the liturgical anecdote, whereas in the Lake Mungo anecdote, transcendence is experienced through creation and an elder who stands in the most ancient of aboriginal traditions. Transcendence, by definition, is not confined to one category of human experience but is apprehended across the full spectrum of life. The following reflection on this point is taken from the spirituality of Saint Ignatius of Loyola as expressed in the first characteristic of Jesuit education:

God is present in our lives, “labouring for us” in all things; He can be discovered through faith in all natural and human events, in history as a whole, and most especially in the lived experience of each individual person.

(ICAJE 1986)

Catholic education offers the possibility to consider the educational process through the prism of God labouring for us in all things. The whole curriculum in the Catholic school is rich with opportunities for transcendent spaces to be opened—for example, in the school’s policies, pastoral care, budgets, outreach programs, pedagogy and in each and every classroom. In a secularising cultural context, however, transcendence is experienced from within an Immanent Frame, and so those who lead and teach in a Catholic school need to be intentional and explicit in their approach to transcendence if the mission and Catholic identity of the school is to be expressed authentically. As well as being explicit in their approach, Catholic educators also need to be comprehensive in the breadth of human experience that is addressed in the curriculum. For example, one of the more recent findings of the ECSI research is that students reject faith as an authentic option if they are fed a saccharine and two-dimensional religious diet. which implies that God is only found in certainty and positive human experiences, rather than also in the equally revelatory experiences of doubt, anxiety, vulnerability and complexity (Pollefeyt 2021).

4. Conclusions

The secularising culture has been presented in these reflections as being the context for Catholic education, not its enemy or its friend. Whilst it is possible in our age for a self-sufficient, exclusive humanism to be embraced that is circumscribed by science and a totalising sense of human agency that leaves no room for transcendence, this is only one of many possible options in a secularising cultural context. Once the ties to particular religious traditions are broken, people are free to put life together in their own ways and this gives rise to so many options that Taylor has referred to them as a ‘supernova’ of believing and non-believing life-stances. Notwithstanding this diversity, some important characteristics of our age are described clearly and well in Taylor’s presentation of the Immanent Frame. We are no longer buffeted by spirits and curses as people in an Enchanted Age were. In an Expressivist Age, we see ourselves as having agency and rights and we believe we are responsible for finding our own way in life, as distinct from being formed in the context of a particular religious tradition.

These characteristics of the secularising cultural context present obvious challenges for Catholic educators but they need not be insurmountable if the opportunities for opening the Immanent Frame out into transcendence are recognised. The cross-pressure that is created when human flourishing meets human finitude is a creative pressure that can be harnessed in the service of the mission and identity of Catholic schools. Whilst it can be exciting to make your way out onto the frontiers of belief and meaning, it can also be frightening and exhausting, particularly for young people who are still deeply in the throes of identity formation. Catholic educators have the opportunity to draw deeply from the Catholic well as they accompany their students in a quest for meaning and commitment that is worthy of them. The ECSI research has more to offer when it comes to considering how this accompaniment might mediate between faith and culture or how the tension between identity and inclusion might be reconciled, but these are topics that are already addressed elsewhere and will continue to be explored by those of us who are committed to the seminar theme that gave rise to this paper: ‘Forming a resilient faith: Teaching for in-depth faith formation in our secular context today’.