Needless to say, the Catholic faithful are not exempt from these influences. All too many Catholics resist the teaching that living the whole Christian faith means living the preferential option for the poor. That is an enormous challenge both for the Holy See as an actor in international settings and for all Catholics. And of the two, formation must have priority. The Church's work in the ever-changing world is thus perhaps best regarded as an ongoing crusade to shift probabilities in favor of what John Paul II calls the civilization of life and love.
Globalization undoubtedly poses formidable challenges to that never-ending task.
But the resources that the Church brings to meet those challenges are formidable as well. The recognition by the 1985 Synod of Bishops that globalization offers new opportunities for the spread of the faith inspired the catechism of the Catholic faith, now available in many languages. With regard to the problem of how to move from the principle of solidarity to its practical implementation under diverse social and political conditions, the Church's principle of subsidiarity is attracting increasing attention from political thinkers and actors. In an era when relativism and historicism prevail in secular academic circles, the Catholic Church stands as an unabashed defender of reason.10 Hers is not the calculating reason of Hobbes in the service of the passions, nor narrow scientific rationalism, but rather the dynamic, recurrent, and potentially self-correcting processes of human knowing. Her commitment to reason, moreover, both invites and requires her to engage the modern natural and human sciences at the highest levels.