Progressing the Church into the Modern Age

I read a book review sent to me by Albert. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/10/books/review/book-review-absolute-monarchs-a-history-of-the-papacy-by-john-julius-norwich.html?pagewanted=all How long are those critics of the Roman Church going to lament the Church's failure to bring the Church into the "modern age"? It gets to be a tired argument, especially from those not immersed in the spirit of Catholicism. From the book review:


“It is now well over half a century since progressive Catholics have longed to see their church bring itself into the modern age,” he writes. “With the accession of every succeeding pontiff they have raised their hopes that some progress might be made on the leading issues of the day — on homosexuality, on contraception, on the ordination of women priests. And each time they have been disappointed.”

What is the modern age? Where do the "progressives" want the Church to go? The following is a description of "modern" culture written by David Bentley Hart in a recent issue of First Things.:

" Late Western modernity, especially in its purest (that is, most American) form, certainly values the available and the plentiful, but not necessarily the intrinsically pleasing. As far as the actual senses are concerned, ours is in many ways a culture of peculiar poverty, evident even—perhaps especially—in its excesses. The diet produced by mass production and mass marketing, our civic and commercial architecture, our consumer goods, our style of dress, our popular entertainments, and so forth—it all seems to have a kind of premeditated aesthetic squalor about it, an almost militant indifference to the distinction between quantity and quality.
...
Today it often seems as if truly aesthetic values have been moved out of the social realm altogether, into ever smaller private preserves. Certainly they are not central to our concept or experience of the common good, even though we may occasionally make a public pretense of caring about such things. Our culture, with its almost absolute emphasis on the power of acquisition, trains us to be beguiled by the bright and the shrill rather than the lovely and the subtle. That, after all, is the transcendental logic of late-modern capitalism: the fabrication of innumerable artificial appetites, not the refinement of the few that are natural to us. Late modernity’s defining art, advertising, is nothing but a piercingly relentless tutelage in desire for the intrinsically undesirable."

Is this where the progressives want the Church to go? For a change we should put away our addiction to immediate gratification. Let's look at the Church seeking the beautiful in it with gratitude for the gift that it is and with an appreciation for the monumental battles it has waged against the excesses of human nature and still managing to retain its essence.