Fides et ratio, in other words, is a frontal challenge to the cult of meaninglessness which may have legitimate roots in the bloodshed and cruelty of the twentieth century but which has often become as much the fashionable, unexamined stance of our time as sentimental optimism was of the nineteenth century.

Catholics are pretty much of one mind in rejecting this stance. They vary only in the degree of their awareness of the stark gulf that can separate them from some of their cultural peers or, if equally aware, in the particular mix of empathy, adaptation, and confrontation with which they think it best to communicate the Good News. Here, then, is common ground for fruitful dialogue among Catholic thinkers.

The pope’s message to the church? The philosophical dimension of theological training must be strengthened because the complicated interaction between faith and reason requires a mutually supporting relationship between theology and philosophy. In this regard, the greatest potential for "original, new, and constructive" thinking lies with efforts to build on a tradition of Christian philosophizing, relating contemporary thought to a long and living heritage.

Fides et ratio notes that such rigorous analytic and speculative thinking, rooted in a long tradition, has been overshadowed since Vatican II by the renewal of Scripture studies and interest in sociology, psychology, comparative religion, and history. The encyclical could have added that this shift was also due to the abstract, enclosed, and self-satisfied character that marred too much of this thinking in preconciliar years.

Precisely because of this memory, some Catholics may be wary of the pope’s call. Nonetheless, there is a growing sense, at least in the United States, of the need for what could be termed a "re-intellectualization" of Catholicism. To be sure, there are Catholic fundamentalists (either of Scripture or Vatican decrees) as well as those whose faith and spiritual life seem organized around apparitions and special revelations. There are social activists who shrug off doctrine as inconsequential and seekers who reduce it to therapeutic and meditative practices. Between these extremes, however, a great many Catholics long for a tuning of the church’s intellectual muscles, a stretching and strengthening of the sinews of belief, and a more demanding standard of discourse, whether from the pulpit, in religious education programs, from conservative and liberal protagonists, or in the pages of Catholic-inspired journals like this one.

Not that all those who share this longing would necessarily agree on exactly how the church’s intellectual fitness can be achieved, or how a venerable and rich philosophical tradition can be maintained and invigorated. Fides et ratio stops well short of spelling out practical strategy; and, like most papal documents, it could even be read and used in authoritarian ways fatal to the very enterprise the pope urges. That would betray the encyclical’s spirit and squander an opportunity for productive discussion rather than polemical squabbling.