CONTEMPORARY RADICAL CATHOLICISM ON YOUTH MORALITY. VITO MANCUSO AND THE ETHICAL PROBLEM OF CONTEMPORARY SOCIETY
CONTEMPORARY RADICAL CATHOLICISM ON YOUTH MORALITY. VITO MANCUSO AND THE ETHICAL PROBLEM OF CONTEMPORARY SOCIETY

Summary/Abstract: Vito Mancuso is a lay Catholic theologian whose books and articles have cause significant unrest within the Vatican and throughout Italy for the past decade. With two exceptional best sellers, The Soul and Its Destiny as well as I and God, Mancuso demonstrates his propensity for a liberal understandingof Christianity which, in his view, is an attempt to adapt Christian doctrines to contemporary Western society dominated by secularizing tendencies and scientific discoveries. Despite such trends and developments, the idea of man's spirituality acquires new meanings even if, in Mancuso, spirituality is the result of man's constitutional materiality based on his conviction that matter is the mother of everything, including the human soul. Spirituality is important enough to shape man’s behavior in the world, so ethics is a crucial component of spirituality, as pointed out in chapter six. Our society, however, has a problem, and this has to do with the fact that most human beings, despite their age, want to stay young forever. Consequently, their behavior alters in a way which does not favor the development of their spirituality. Their spiritual growth is hindered because the very essence of youth is immaturity. Mancuso investigates the social consequences of such a thinking pattern, especially the fact that man cannot fully make sense of his existence in the world which eventually ends in death. The result is an empty life which can neither understand death, nor life in its fullness as meaningful existence despite the reality of death. For Mancuso, death is a fact not only because it is the natural end of being in the material world, but also because the very essence of matter is changed. Everything in the world changes one way or another, so change must be understood as a force which drives both the universe as a whole and the human being as a particular form of matter in the world.

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