{"id":4705,"date":"2006-11-09T12:02:25","date_gmt":"2006-11-09T12:02:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2006\/11\/allen-in-sc.html"},"modified":"2006-11-09T12:02:25","modified_gmt":"2006-11-09T12:02:25","slug":"allen-in-sc","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/11\/allen-in-sc.html","title":{"rendered":"Allen in SC"},"content":{"rendered":"

Speaking of Gashwin (sort of – see below), John Allen spoke at the University of South Carolina last night, and has reflections:<\/a><\/p>\n

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Finally, a young woman from Belgium, whose name I unfortunately didn\u2019t catch, wanted to press me on what I said about the crisis of faith in contemporary Europe. First, she asked, isn\u2019t some of the extreme secularist sentiment one finds in Europe today a product of an overly cozy relationship between church and state in Europe in earlier centuries, which has produced the equal and opposite reaction of wanting to drive religion into a completely private sphere? Second, isn\u2019t part of the reason that the so-called \u201cnew movements\u201d have prospered in Europe but not to same degree in the United States precisely because they fill a gap in a depleted European church that doesn\u2019t exist to the same degree in America?<\/p>\n

To both questions, I could but respond \u201cAmen.\u201d <\/p>\n

Amplifying the questioner\u2019s point, I told the story of a meeting between Cardinal Roger Mahony of Los Angeles and Pope John Paul II, when Mahony asked the late pope why he was such a big supporter of \u201cthe movements\u201d \u2013 groups such as Focolare, the Neocatechumenate, Regnum Christi, and so on. As Mahony tells the story, John Paul replied that the United States is the only country in the world where the revitalization of the parish intended by the Second Vatican Council (1962-65) had actually happened, so that America perhaps doesn\u2019t need the movements in quite the same way. Given the depleted state of many European parishes, the pope said, the movements remedy an important ministerial deficit.<\/p>\n

These are no more than snatches of a much broader conversation, but if nothing else they serve to illustrate the thoughtfulness and interest with which so many American audiences engage religious issues \u2013 and that in itself is another reason why, despite everything, I continue to hit the road.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Speaking of Gashwin (sort of – see below), John Allen spoke at the University of South Carolina last night, and has reflections: Finally, a young woman from Belgium, whose name I unfortunately didn\u2019t catch, wanted to press me on what I said about the crisis of faith in contemporary Europe. First, she asked, isn\u2019t some…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4705","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nAllen in SC - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/11\/allen-in-sc.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Allen in SC - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Speaking of Gashwin (sort of – see below), John Allen spoke at the University of South Carolina last night, and has reflections: Finally, a young woman from Belgium, whose name I unfortunately didn\u2019t catch, wanted to press me on what I said about the crisis of faith in contemporary Europe. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4705","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4705"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4705\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4705"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4705"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4705"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}