Liberal Catholicism, Dead Again?
It is as clichéd as the swallows’ return to Capistrano, as predictable as another Donald Trump sex scandal, and as reliable as the turn of the seasons. Every few months or so you will come across another self-styled “orthodox” Catholic quoting the late Cardinal Francis George’s immortal words pronouncing the death of so-called “liberal Catholicism.” Rarely has a death notice been written so often for a corpse that stubbornly refuses to be interred.
The most recent example I’ve come across was in The Catholic Thing, written by a Msgr. Robert J. Batule and titled “The Decline of Liberal Catholicism.” Batule begins by lamenting the views of the so-called Vatican II priests he served under in the 1980s. They indulged in annoying practices such as “‘co-ministry’ with women religious,” endless discussions concerning the marginalized, and perpetual meetings. They failed to encourage Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament, never preached against cohabitation and contraception, and failed to offer instruction in natural family planning. According to Batule, now that a new generation of more conservative priests has arrived on the scene, Holy Hours have returned and Pre-Cana sessions now emphasize the evils of cohabitation and contraception. Batule sees a direct correlation between these Catholic developments and a broader ideological conservatism. He quotes Bishop Robert Barron celebrating the success of the recent National Eucharistic Congress, and especially its procession of the Blessed Sacrament through the streets of Indianapolis. That was something “liberal Catholicism could never pull off,” Barron remarked.
I don’t have any problem with such devotions, but whether they are really evidence of a Catholic renewal, as Batule suggests, is a different question. The monsignor contends that a big part of the problem is that liberal Catholics want to “re-define the meaning of the Real Presence and transubstantiation.” I’ve been around so-called liberal Catholics most of my adult life, and while some may scratch their heads at the Thomistic explanation of transubstantiation, I haven’t come across many who would deny the Real Presence. It is also true that, historically, the belief of most ordinary Catholics in the Real Presence has had little to do with the Aristotelian distinction between substances and accidents that Catholic theologians adopted in the thirteenth century.
It is at this point in the discussion that Batule introduces Cardinal George’s pithy judgment, issued twenty-six years ago, that “liberal Catholicism is an exhausted project.” As it happens, George said more than that. “Essentially a critique, even a necessary critique at one point in our history, it is now parasitical on the substance that no longer exists,” he continued. “It no longer gives life.” Batule contends that he can’t “recall ever seeing or hearing a solid refutation of the cardinal’s judgment.”
He must not have looked very hard. After Cardinal George made these remarks, Commonweal immediately invited him to expand on it in our pages. A solid and nuanced refutation was presented to the cardinal by former Commonweal editor Peter Steinfels at a symposium organized by Commonweal, attended by George, and subsequently published in the magazine (“The Crisis of Liberal Catholicism,” November 19, 1999). I cannot do justice to the subtlety and comprehensive nature of Steinfels’s presentation on the history of liberal Catholicism. However, I do recall that after listening to Steinfels, George said he couldn’t really disagree with anything he had heard. And to be fair to the cardinal, in his own remarks, he regretted his use of the term “parasitical” and conceded that a “conservative Catholicism obsessed with particular practices” is not an answer to the challenges of modernity either. Conservative Catholics, George added, also make “the same error as liberals in an excessive preoccupation with the Church’s visible government.”
Contrary to the conservative Catholic critique, Steinfels argued that liberal Catholicism has its roots in Romanticism, not in the “atomistic rationalism” and anticlericalism of the Enlightenment. Moreover, liberal Catholics have always had a complicated relationship with secular liberalism, a relationship that has become even more complicated, Steinfels noted, as abortion, euthanasia, and “various postsixties quests for personal emancipation” have come to dominate liberal culture at the expense of traditional liberal concerns about economic justice and democratic freedoms. To be sure, while nineteenth-century popes condemned modernity and liberalism in unqualified terms, liberal European Catholics could not. They urged the Church to accept economic and social change as “an opportunity rather than denounce it as an affliction.” Efforts by liberal Catholics to evangelize the culture could not but raise questions about Church reform. “Their faith in freedom of inquiry could not be abandoned at the gateway to theology,” Steinfels observed. Steinfels himself confessed that he had doubts about Humanae vitae and the Church’s refusal to consider the ordination of women.
Unfortunately, repression was all too often the reaction of Church authorities to the sorts of questions posed by liberal Catholics. The tragic consequence was the Church’s alliances with reactionary and authoritarian forces and often a loss of credibility among the laity. Yet new liberal Catholic movements eventually arose “from the seedbeds of conservative or reactionary milieus tilled and fertilized by new experience.” This is a familiar dynamic. Pope Francis’s evolution from a doctrinaire Jesuit superior in Argentina to a surprisingly open-minded universal pastor is one good example.
Steinfels also addressed what he considered to be legitimate criticism of liberal Catholicism. To the extent that Catholic liberals had failed to challenge what he characterized as the excesses of “left Catholicism,” categories he borrowed from the work of historian David O’Brien, its conservative critics had a fair point. Left Catholicism, as opposed to liberal Catholicism properly understood, too often displays only a “grudging attention to compromise, incrementalism, or extended analysis and debate.” Its narrow focus on the supposed errors of papal authority regarding priestly celibacy, the ordination of women, and homosexuality is too often indifferent to the difficult theological challenges posed by a reckoning with Scripture and tradition. In too much of the criticism from the left, there is a “near rejection of hierarchy, and a consistently political style of lobbying and mobilization organized around the demand of various special constituencies,” he warned. “I do not think that any position on Church authority, sacrament, or morality should be excluded from discussion,” Steinfels continued. “But the discussion must be a real one in which time, knowledge, and atmosphere are sufficient to allow the exploration of those positions in relationship to the Catholic tradition in its fullness.”
In short, Steinfels wrote, the Church needs the “self-criticism, open inquiry, and spirit of dialogue that liberal Catholicism has provided.” Perhaps if Batule had been familiar with Steinfels’s presentation, he would have come to a better understanding, if not appreciation, of liberal Catholicism—as Cardinal George himself apparently did.
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