Nevertheless what the church will have to give up is

Nevertheless, what the Church will have to give up is the kind of
13 Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1989), pp. 73-78.
14 Peter Jonkers , “A Purifying Force For Reason. Pope Benedict on the Role
of Christianity in Advanced Modernity ,” Towards a New Catholic Church in
Advanced Modernity. Transformations, Visions, Tensions (Münster: Lit Verlag,
2012), pp. 96-101.
15 Staf Hellemans , “Tracking the New Shape of the Catholic Church in the
West,” Towards a New Catholic Church in Advanced Modernity , pp. 28-32.

The Contingent Meeting of a Catholic Minority Church with Seekers 11
ultramontane mass Catholicism which used to dominate in the 19
th
and
early 20 th centuries. 16 It will have to make room for a kenotic church, for
a seeker-friendly church – without guarantees. 17
In the final section of this introduction we want to situate the
suggestions and strategies for a conjunction of the Catholic minority
church with the seekers against a broader background. Again, we want to
emphasize that the success of these suggestions and strategies for
conjunction is anything but guaranteed, since all of them are
fundamentally marked by the contingencies that characterize the relations
between church and society. The observations of the previous section
confront all churches with a fundamental dilemma: should they confine
their pastoral care to the existing in-crowd, in other words, the dwellers
inside these churches, thereby putting up with the fact that this group is
dwindling and aging, or should they reach out to the seekers (inside and
outside the churches), thereby taking the risk that the latter will only take
scattered pieces of their narratives, teachings, and practices to heart. As
the title of this book already suggests, we are convinced that the churches
should take the latter option.
Theoretical Considerations Regarding the Conjunction Strategy
What are the sociological, philosophical, and theological considerations
supporting the main thesis of all contributors to this volume, namely, that
the Catholic Church should opt for a conjunction with seekers? When the
question of how to conjoin church and society is raised, two contrasting
strategies are often put forward: a conservative, sectarian one, and a
liberal, merging one. From a sociological perspective, both strategies fall
short of expectations. The conservative strategy puts its odds on a highly
demanding religion and tight community building. However, this strategy
to confine the conjunction of the Church with society to the in-crowd of
strongly believing church members risks the Church ending up only with
‘the happy few’. The liberal strategy wants to renew, along the lines
of Gaudium et Spes , the alliance between the Church and the modern
world. But this strategy fails to see the abstractness and lack of relevance
of its proposals in the current societal setting, which predominantly
consists of people who are quite indifferent to religious issues, and who