Amazing Church: A Catholic Theologian Remembers a Half-Century of Change

Gregory Baum shows the “extraordinary evolution” of Catholic Social Teaching over the past half century. He writes: “I am convinced that what has emerged in the Church’s official teaching is a new form of Catholicism that finds expression in the first sentence of Gaudium et spes, the conciliar document on the Church in the Modern World: ‘The joys and hopes, the griefs and the anxieties of the people of this age, especially those who are poor or in any way afflicted, these too are the joys and hopes, the griefs and anxieties of the followers of Christ.”rnrnBaum challenges those Catholics today who lament the indifference of the ecclesiastical bureaucracy to a number of urgent pastoral problems. For Baum, inconsistencies in the hierarchical church are not reason enough to mute his admiration of the “wonderful” development of the Church’s official teaching – a Catholicism truly at the service of humanity.