The Crisis of Korean Catholic Church in the Post-Secular Society: In the Light of the Legitimacy Crisis

초록

What can the Korean Catholic Church say about the ‘Church crisis’? This article tries to answer this question by reconsidering secularization from the perspective of the sociology of religion, borrowing Habermas’ concepts of legitimacy crisis and post-secular society and reflecting on theological issues in the light of the Second Vatican Council. First, the sociological theory of secularization, reflecting on the Church’s legitimacy and crisis in Western European societies, constitutes institutional differentiation, cosmic-symbolic invalidity of religion, and the privatization of religion as the relevance of religion has weakened for modern individuals’ life-worlds. It is consequently related to ‘declining religious authority’. In particular, the Church crisis in Europe and the U.S. includes individual priests’ immorality (i.e., pedophilia), a lack of institu-tional accountability and organizational responsibility on the part of the Church, and social distrust of the Church. However, the Church crisis as social phenomena needs to be understood in the post-secular social con-text in which religion has not lost its power in the public sphere and the religious and the secular are in conflict. The primary task of the Church is to bear witness to the ‘fullness of life’ or ‘happiness’ in the immanent frame. Symptoms of the legitimacy crisis in the Korean Catholic Church can be found in both institutional churches and clericalism. On the one hand, some institutional churches reveal CEO styles of secular triumphalism based on ‘spiritual worldliness’. The bureaucratic governance of the Church appears to be of the ancien régime, not of the current society of information and networks in which people aspire toward de-authoritarian, horizontal communication. On the other hand, the problems of clericalism include the human immaturity of church leadership, the lack of authen-ticity and spiritual sensibilities in priesthood, the patriarchal culture of gender inequality, and the lack of collaborative, caring communities/net-works among clergy and the religious. This article suggests multi-dimensional conversion as pastoral alterna-tives in response to the problem of the Church crisis. Church leaders (bishops, priests, religious, and lay) need to recover ‘inner authority’ through sincerity and authenticity at an individual level. ‘Companionship of empowerment’ as an antidote to clericalism can help the Church to bear witness to the Heavenly Kingdom at a communal/organizational level. Prophetic commitment requires liminality from the center to the periphery at a social level. Finally and most importantly, the Church needs to put its initiatives into the hands of God following the guidance of the Holy Spirit.

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