Inculturation: True or False?

Why Inculturation Can Only Go So Far

Part I

Editor’s Note: N. M. Friar is a young Indian convert, very well known to me, who has already distinguished himself academically in both his home country and elsewhere. As a native Bengali and convert to Catholicism, as well as an academically trained historian, he has a great deal to offer on questions regarding East and West, globalisation and the like, and we are very proud to present him here.

This is part one of a two-part essay containing my personal reflections on liturgical inculturation and historiographical prejudices.

I.

We moderns are eager to condemn. The academic more than most. It isn’t too much of an exaggeration to say that very often academic historians are little better than scolds. This attitude is born not of the sensus iustitiae that all men share; the animating spirit is something different.

In most cases, the critic’s posture is no longer one of careful discernment, but of indictment. We don’t seek to understand, but to expose, to humiliate. Our ancestors become as mounted specimens, and the past morphs into a tableau of moral failures in whose unwholesome light the historian can gloat. What we lose in this transaction is not only context but compassion. At best, it is preening; at worst, a ceaseless trial without hope of mercy.

This wouldn’t have been as much of a problem were the standards for judgement clear. Inquisitions we can understand. A struggle session we can adapt to. But to say in the same breath that we have transcended all judgement and also that the historian must judge – never say so aloud? That is, as the saying goes, a bit much.