instilled by Christian faith, but on the other hand, it also reflects the general
atmosphere of progress and prosperity in the 1960s. The‘civilization of death’
had not yet spread to the extent that it has today. Vatican II declares that
every Christian, through his or her holy life, is called to sanctify the world
from within. He or she does this with full respect for the autonomy of the
secular spheres of economic, political, and family life, while simultaneously
uniting with God in prayer and liturgical life, grace, and faith in order to
decipher God’s will in Scripture and in the nature of things. Christian hu-
manism is the unity of the natural and the supernatural dimension in the life
of the baptized Christian. What is the abiding relevance of this decision for
us today?
The Civil Society as the Church’s HabitatIn order to elucidate the relevance of this teaching for a Catholic understand-
ing of Christian humanism and Christian secularity in our present situation,
we must consider what it means for the church to be active in‘civil society’.
The church has chosen civil society as thefield in which her social teaching
and her contribution to Christian humanism should be put into effect. This
choice means having accepted the‘rules of the game’of liberal democracy, but
on one condition: the Catholic Church has not and cannot accept the idea of
privatization of Christian faith.
Casanova’s analysis of the public and private dichotomy helps us under-
stand this caveat.^34 The binary code of public and private is essential to
modern society in order to grant individuals a space of private liberty upon
which government must not encroach. Religion is intrinsically connected to
this distinction, because the idea that‘religion is a private affair’is constitutive
of Western modernity with its right to the freedom of religion, which means
that government must not interfere with religious beliefs. Religion becoming
private is also coextensive with the process of differentiating between secular
spheres of worldliness, because this meant emancipation of earthly affairs
from ecclesiastic authority.
It is difficult, however, tofit the reality of modernity, which is tripartite
(family, civil society, and state), into the classical liberal division of private–
public, which to a large extent derives from the classical Greek distinction
betweenoikosandpolis. What was lacking in antiquity and in the Middle Ages
was‘civil society’or‘the social’, which stands between family and state, private
and public. The liberal conception of society tends to limit the public sector to
thegovernmentalpublic sector; all the rest gets thrown into the‘private’sector.
(^34) José Casanova,Public Religions in the Modern World(Chicago, IL and London: The
University of Chicago Press, 1994), 40–66.
208 Martin Schlag