Hierothee passed along a link to one of the several articles that Time has run in the wake of B16’s visit to the U.S. As usual, they select commentators (see e.g. here and here) whose individualist libertinism distorts their world view and so corrupts their ability to adequately understand the Church and so the attendant dynamics of Church life.
That is not to say, that these commentators do not adequately understand the viewpoint of those mostly affected by current culture, perhaps including the majority of Catholics in the West. However, it certainly saddles them with biases, leaving them confused and unable to adequately explain the Church’s response to cultural challenges.
In this article, David Van Beima asks if “Liberal Catholicism” is dead. The first thing to note is the uncritical acceptance of such a misleading term. Van Beima does not even try to define it, presupposing that it is universally understood. In fact, what he means by the phrase one would have to try to draw from his article. In doing so, one would be led to suppose that he intends: those who wish to consider themselves Catholic while at the same time rejecting Church teaching AND actively working to change the Church structures and teaching to accord with their political/social agenda.
Van Beima believes that Vatican II is the watershed event in the “liberal rebellion” in American Catholicism. It is good that here he seems to limit his scope to the Catholic Church in the U.S. Like too many U.S. journalists, he is apparently quite myopic in his view of the Church and the world, not seeing its scope beyond that of its U.S. context. Furthermore, rebellion is the correct term. However, this rebellion would not have been possible to have exploded to the extent it did in the wake of the Second Vatican Council had it not already been underway for some decades prior to the Council. Thus, suggesting that Vatican II was the sole, or at least primary, cause is not defensible.
He interprets the Council has having “overhauled much of Catholic teaching and ritual.” Of course, no Church teaching was overhauled. In fact, there was nothing “new” from the Council in terms of Church teaching. It did clarify and make authoritative many developments that had matured over the previous centuries. Neither can the Council be saddled with the “overhaul” of, and confusion associated with, the liturgy that occurred in its aftermath. Of course, that is the view of those whom Van Beima has in mind with his “liberal” referent. He writes:
But Vatican II meant even more to a generation of devout but restless young people in the U.S. rather than a course correction, Terrence Tilley, now head of the Fordham University’s theology department, wrote recently, his generation perceived “an interruption of history, a divine typhoon that left only the keel and structure of the church unchanged.”
Tilley confirms as appropriate the “hermeneutic of discontinuity” to which B16 often makes reference as accurately characterizing those theologians who fall into this camp. They are “liberal” precisely because they adopt the agenda to spread their disintegrating hermeneutic to the rest of the Church. What characterized these “liberals” was the desire to impose a secular political structure on the Church. Van Beima calls it democracy while I would argue their agenda was rather an oligarchy of the libertine intelligentsia. Another feature of this “liberalism” was a primacy of conscience which I would more properly characterize as a replacement of the Magisterium instituted by Christ with a magisterium of individual whim. He identifies the main organs of this movement:
Its perspectives were covered in The National Catholic Reporter, Commonweal and America. Martin Sheen held down Hollywood, and the movement even boasted its own cheesy singing act: the St. Louis Jesuits. The reformers’ premier membership organization was Call to Action, but their influence was felt at the highest reaches of the American Church, as sympathetic American bishops passed left-leaning statements on nuclear weapons and economic justice.
There is no surprise here. But it is interesting to note that Van Beima clearly sees the so called St. Louis Jesuits’ and their music as an organ of “liberal rebellion.” With all there is to dispute with Van Beima’s view of the Church in this article, one observation that is not up for debate in my view is his characterization of them as “the movement['s] . . . own cheesy singing act.”
In fact, I do believe that this “cheesy” music and its imposition on the liturgy has done major damage to the laity’s self-understanding of the Church through its diminution of the transcendent experience of the Mass. When the Mass becomes the venue for campy music and the insipid taste endemic in the personal creative expression rampant during these decades (and not yet completely expunged from the scene today), it is no wonder that so many poorly catechized Catholics stopped practicing their faith and others grew in disdain for the Church which no longer seemed to mediate to them in the Mass, albeit through accidents but important accidents, the Sacrifice of Calvary but now subjected them to an aesthetic milieu that they would have turned off if it had been on the TV.
But I digress. Van Beima again quotes Tilley on the state of this movement:
Remarks Tilley, “For a couple of generations, progressivism was an [important] way to be Catholic.”
Then he adds, “But I think the end of an era is here.”
Van Beima says that “progressives” have essentially been so successful in changing the views of the average Catholic that they no longer seem relevant with any sort of unique message. He says that for a short time, they had a rallying cry around the perceived heirarchy’s complicity in the sex abuse scandal since JPII “remained mostly silent.” But now with B16’s visit and in his taking the issue on directly, he has changed the dynamic.
The first one can say is that it would be hard to argue that JPII was silent about it. He called the U.S. Cardinals to Rome within two months after the Boston Globe kicked off the press frenzy and said to them:
Like you, I too have been deeply grieved by the fact that priests and religious, whose vocation it is to help people live holy lives in the sight of God, have themselves caused such suffering and scandal to the young. Because of the great harm done by some priests and religious, the Church herself is viewed with distrust, and many are offended at the way in which the Church´s leaders are perceived to have acted in this matter. The abuse which has caused this crisis is by every standard wrong and rightly considered a crime by society; it is also an appalling sin in the eyes of God. To the victims and their families, wherever they may be, I express my profound sense of solidarity and concern.
Regardless of the erroneous contrast between JPII and B16, it is interesting to me the way that B16’s visit and especially his words have been taken. Whether this is a watershed event in the way that the media will cover the Church in this regard and the way the Church will be viewed by the laity, I doubt. It rather reflects the fact that there has been very little in terms of new news to keep the flames fanned. Nevertheless, it is gratifying that for once, the majority in the media have allowed the Catholic Church, in the person of B16, to express without skeptical commentary, its remorse for what has happened in the past and its resolve to ensure that nothing like this happens again in the future.
Van Beima’s quoting of Fr. Thomas Reese’s observation that “reform” movements need a visible enemy against which to organize as his rationale for the lack of steam among the graying activists is worth noting. The libertine rebels did everything they could to demonize Church teachings they did not like along with the hierarchy. But JPII was even more visibly affable than B16 and this did little to change the way he was demonized. Rather, what we are seeing is the dying out of the old guard and its replacement by a worldly and largely religiously indifferent generation.
The newer generations are not the social activists that arose in the rebellious 1960s. The Gen Xer’s and later generations are not rebels in the same sense. Their parents were the rebels and so in order to reject their parents, they are more content to just indulge themselves in all that the culture of hedonism has to offer.
Nevertheless, Van Beima is correct in his general assessment. “Liberal Catholicism” is dead but this does not mean that there will be a large return to orthodoxy. Rather, there will simply be a largely impassive laity who will either stop practicing their faith or simply go to church on Sunday and do what the culture tells them they need to be doing for their self-fulfillment the rest of the time.
This provides much opportunity, however. There will be less and less confusion generated by activist dissenters within the Church as the dissenters die out. The work in pre-evangelization of the wayward Catholics who remain will no longer not need to be focused on trying to clarify the confusion within the Church and instead will be able to be focused on the authentic beauty to be found in Church teaching and the genuine joy to be attained in conforming one’s life to the truth of the Gospel.
The damage that dissenters have done to the faith has been incalculable. Perhaps some will come to recognize that their desire for an socially activist church devoid of truth and any demands for self control can never be realized. Without truth one can only offer hedonism as an attraction to fallen man. The grim fruits of hedonism is an inward turn to dehumanizing selfishness and around this no church can flourish. So yes, “liberal Catholicism,” using Van Beima’s definition, is dead. However, now the hard work toward the new springtime in the Church can begin to start showing fruit.
Italian activist Gabriele Paolini earned five months in jail for a 2005 incident of accusing Pope John Paul II of being ‘gay‘. He interrupted a live broadcast when he yelled his ‘offensive’ words against JPII as the state run television was updating the pontiff’s deteriorating health. Italian law forbids any interruption of a public service which carries a sentence of up to one year in jail. For offending Italy’s state religion, one can be punished with up to two years in prison.
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