Posted on 08/22/2003 1:41:13 PM PDT by sinkspur
Is John Paul II too liberal?
The question cuts against most conventional wisdom. If the man who said “no” to women’s ordination, gay marriage, and decentralization of power isn’t a conservative, many people would insist, then there’s no such animal.
But what if one has in mind not the sense in which Ted Kennedy is “liberal,” but in which virtually all Westerners are “liberals,” i.e., the classic notion of liberalism as belief in democracy, human rights, and free markets? If that’s the standard, then John Paul, though not uncritically, stacks up as a basically “liberal” pope.
Witness his proud claim that Christianity actually shaped the core tenets of liberalism in his August 17 Angelus address: “The Christian faith gave form [to Europe], and some of its fundamental values in turn inspired ‘the democratic ideal and the human rights’ of European modernity,” the Pope said.
Not everyone in the Catholic world approves. Although the movement has largely flown under media radar, John Paul faces a growing conservative opposition to this embrace of liberalism, understood in the classic sense.
“I wish the Pope were right,” said Catholic thinker Robert Kraynak of Colgate University, “but I don’t think it’s working out the way he expected. Human rights are not being used to serve the whole truth about God and man, despite the Pope’s continuous reminders.”
Who are these critics? In addition to Kraynak, they include influential Anglo-Saxon Catholic intellectuals such as Alasdair MacIntyre, David Schindler, and Tracey Rowland, whose works are fast becoming required reading in conservative Catholic circles, even if they represent, for now, a minority view. Most Anglo-Saxon Catholics, as creatures of Western culture, tend to take its compatibility with their religious beliefs for granted.
MacIntyre is a Scottish-born philosopher. Schindler, an American, is the editor of Communio, an international theological journal that serves as a platform for this school of thought. Rowland is dean of the John Paul II Institute in Melbourne, Australia.
Members of the hierarchy such as American Cardinal Francis Stafford, president of the Pontifical Council for the Laity, Archbishop Angelo Scola of Venice, Italy, and Archbishop Marc Ouellet of Quebec, Canada, can also be loosely identified with this circle of opinion.
Make no mistake — these are not “dissenters.” All are strong admirers of John Paul II. (In fact, many teach at “John Paul II” institutes in various parts of the world). All would pass the most stringent tests of orthodoxy. Yet all worry that the Pope, and the bulk of the post-Vatican II Catholic Church, have gone too far in assimilating the values and vocabulary of modernity.
The key figure is MacIntyre, one of the fascinating personalities in 20th century intellectual history. Born the son of a doctor in Glasgow in 1929, MacIntyre studied at the University of London and other British universities, then began teaching. In 1947, he joined the Communist Party, and though he soon left, he continued to flirt with Trotsky-style socialism. In 1969, he moved to the United States where he taught at a succession of universities.
In 1981, MacIntyre published After Virtue, in which he posed his famous choice between Niezstche and Aristotle. Either ethics is the assertion of personal preference, as Nieztsche would have it, or it corresponds to something objectively real, as Aristotle believed.
In 1983, MacIntyre converted to the Catholic Church.
Through these twists and turns, the unifying constant in MacIntyre’s thought has been hostility to the bourgeois values of liberalism. MacIntyre tends to drive secular liberals crazy, since his point of departure is the same alienation from capitalism they feel, yet he arrives in a very different place: Thomism.
MacIntyre argues that when Thomists and secularists refer to human rights, for example, they sound like they’re saying the same thing, but this linguistic resemblance conceals radically different worldviews. Secularists emphasize rights because, having rejected the idea of an objective moral order, they exalt unfettered freedom. What freedom is for gets second shrift.
Kraynak, in his 2001 book Christian Faith and Modern Democracy, lists five reasons why Christianity should be resistant to the ideology of human rights:
Duties to God and neighbor come before one’s own rights.
Pronouncements of a hierarchically structured church grounded in divine revelation take precedence over individual conscience.
Original sin implies distrust of weak and fallible human beings.
The common good must come before individuals.
Charity and sacrificial love are higher goods than the potentially selfish assertion of rights.
Some of these thinkers believe the concept of human rights can be “redeemed” by giving it a Christian content, which is John Paul’s project. Others, such as Kraynak and MacIntyre, believe it would be better to abandon the language of “rights” altogether.
John Paul is himself, of course, no unalloyed booster of liberalism. He coined the phrase “a culture of death” to describe its bioethics, and he has repeatedly criticized its rapacious capitalism. Most Communio-style thinkers are less concerned with the Pope than with the penetration of the liberal worldview into the Church’s bureaucratic structures, especially bishops’ conferences.
Lurking behind such debates is a broader analysis of the relationship between liberalism and Christianity. While “Whig Thomists” such as George Weigel and Michael Novak see a basic consistency, reflecting their drive to reconcile Catholicism with American patriotism, thinkers associated with the Communio school are more dubious. They tend to believe that liberalism is actually toxic for authentic Christian living.
The movement is so loosely organized it does not even have a name. Rowland has proposed “postmodern Augustinian Thomism,” though it’s hard to imagine that on a bumpersticker. Yet its skepticism about the compatibility between faith and culture has profound implications.
On social justice issues, it tends to push the Church into sharper confrontation with economic, political, and military policies based on the classic liberal worldview. Many observers were startled last spring, for example, when Stafford, known as a conservative, came out against the U.S.-led war in Iraq. Anyone familiar with the doubts he harbors about the values of contemporary America, however, should not have been surprised. In that sense, the anti-liberal instinct favors social causes dear to the left, such as pacifism and advocacy for the poor.
At the same time, it tends to side with the right in internal church debates. By accenting what makes Catholicism distinct, it favors traditionalism in liturgy, art and architecture, and theology. It is skeptical about the characteristic structures of liberalism, such as bureaucracy and reliance on so-called “experts.” When the Vatican in April convened a symposium of non-Catholic scientific experts on sexual abuse, for example, the event played to generally good reviews as a sign that Rome was listening. Catholics steeped in MacIntyre’s thought, on the other hand, were dubious, wondering if “experts” who don’t share the Church’s moral and metaphysical assumptions would end up doing more harm than good.
The fear is, as Swiss theologian Hans Urs van Balthasar once warned, “a mere mechanical adoption of alien chains of thought with which one can adorn and garland the Christian understanding externally.”
This counter-cultural movement’s future is yet to be determined, but if nothing else, it illustrates the limits of “conservative” and “liberal” labels in sorting out the currents in the Catholic Church. The perils of liberalism, like so much else, are in the eye of the beholder.
* * *
I reached Kraynak by telephone at Colgate to discuss this negative judgment about Western, especially American, culture.
“I share that to a large degree,” Kraynak said. “The whole Enlightenment underlay is the problem.”
Kraynak argued, in fact, that the sexual abuse scandals in the American Church have their roots here.
“I trace the scandals to the corrosive effect of American culture on the Church,” Kraynak said. “It started with the sexual revolution, plus the unwillingness of the hierarchy to assert its authority in the proper way. They more or less concluded that we share with liberalism a concern for social justice, so sexual ethics aren’t so important.”
I asked if such a sweeping indictment of modern culture doesn’t risk a sort of self-imposed ghetto.
“In the extreme case it might come to that,” Kraynak candidly replied. “If Catholics have to live in a world in which our view of the family, of human sexuality, of raising one’s kids, is considered contemptible by the larger culture, it could come to that in a generation.”
“My parents’ generation lived more like ghetto Catholics than we do. They had an inferiority complex, but spiritually and morally it had many benefits. They were able to live a life that was separate from mass culture, but still part of America. And along with feelings of inferiority, they could take pride in their distinctiveness as ethnic Catholics.”
Kraynak acknowledged that it would be impossible to return to the self-enclosed Catholic world of 1950s-era America, but he said the search for an analogous “safe haven” will intensify if present cultural trends continue.
I asked Kraynak which figures in the American hierarchy he felt were most sympathetic to his concerns. He named Cardinals Francis George and Avery Dulles, along with Bishop Fabian Bruskewitz of Lincoln, Nebraska.
“They are keenly aware of the tensions between Catholicism and American culture, but they are in a minority, as far as I can tell.”
Obviously many Catholics would have reservations about the way Kraynak sizes things up, but he represents an important current of opinion, raising serious questions about the spiritual and moral dangers of consumer culture. This is a familiar discourse from the left; what is intriguing about this movement is that its energy and center of gravity is on the right, seeking to combine doctrinal orthodoxy with a strong counter-cultural impulse.
Are you thinking of Ortega y Gasset's Revolt of the Masses?
Yes, this is an excellent question. Is a society based on enlightenment principles good for Christianity because it allows religion the freedom of separation from the state? This has been the reigning philosophy of the last few decades, based on John Courtney Murray and others.
However, a more sophisticated analysis might point out that the "opposition" of enlightenment society is much more insidious than the opposition of crude repression, working as a continuous corrosive and effecting a much more complete destruction of faith in the ultimate analysis. It's like the difference between the Leninist approach and the Gramsci approach. Gramsci is much more dangerous.
Would Christianity be better under communism?
The comparison makes it seem that communism is not a branch of enlightenment liberalism. Certainly it is true that they have been seen as separate, and communism has defined itself in opposition to "bourgeois" society. But when one examines the foundational principles, should they be classified in the same genus or a separate one?
Thanks for this great link. Too long to read right now, but I have saved it.
Just curious ... which religion do you practice?
Statism--Nazi, Communist, or Big SCOTUS/Fed--
Perfectly said. Succinct and true.
Good question. It might be argued that Christianity thrived best, at least in America, during the period of time referred to by some as the Old Republic. That time, and that system, before FDR's modern welfare state was created. Before the State replaced the Church as the ultimate authority and moral arbitrator, and Man replaced God as Supreme Being.
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