Encouraging a More Participative Church: Vanishing Opposition between the Religious and the Secular in a Czech Catholic Diocese
Abstract
In the presented text, we describe a four-year applied research process, the aim of which was to support the transformation of a church in one Czech Catholic diocese into a more participative organisation both internally and externally. This process allowed us to see different positions in the relationship between the religious and the secular within the highly secularised Czech Republic.
In some places, the religious and the secular appeared incompatible. Elsewhere they influenced each other and intermingled.
And still, in other places, the religious was looking for ways to fit into the secular world. In all cases, however, it was evident that we can no longer consider religious and secular as mutually defining categories.
This definitional opposition is disappearing, and the terms religious and secular are themselves losing a clarity of content and a capacity to organise the life of Western subjects. The post-modern emancipation of spirituality from the realm of the religious also manifests in religious institutions.