"Christian spirituality by reason of its excusive interest in the affairs of the 'soul' was [in the 19th and early 20th centuries] seen as playing a probably fateful role; it was in danger of leading Christianity towards a neglect of the public character of its message and promise and ... favouring an unnatural union of excessive inward virtue and inhuman relational structures. One might well ask whether this dichotomy of inwardness and outwardness 'private' and 'public' was characteristic of Christian spirituality in the past; and if that was the case whether this tendency was grounded in the Gospel or was the religious consequence of a social phenomenon." [Quote p.13]

"It is premature to [present] secularisation as a product of faith and [identify] it with the public character of faith liberated from the ecclesial handicap and religious interpretation." [Quote p.27]

1. to accept a measure of hesitation
2. to take the way opened by the institutional Church's renunciation of the public role of Christianity without ratifying the formal aspect of secularisation
3. to draw attention to economico-political conditions which produce the variables of the relations between private and public
4. not to decide that faith is enclosed in one of these spheres and hence to refuse to allow it to become the transcendendent justification of our alienations

It is impossible to determine a priori the private or public character of Christianity. The private or public spheres have neither the same meaning nor the same function in accordance with the relation between the Church and the world in which they are integrated. ... We are entering an era in which the ecclesial monopoly has disappeared and each individual so it would seem can live the inward and social dimension of faith other than by proxy and without fear of schizophrenia." [Quote pp 27-28]