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.
U remember?
I remember that the author tied liberalism to Protestantism. Good book.
Schindler's critique of American culture, as it exists presently, is spot-on. Let's see what he has to say:
... So, as a culture, we have an enormous problem -- and it's a religious one. Catholics need to respond by working to reinstate a sense of God so that we can regain an adequate sense of our own creatureliness -- in other words, "I'm not the source of my own being, my own moral norms. I'm not the author of my life and therefore not the one who decides about my death."The debate over public display of the ten commandments is a perfect example of the problems discussed by Schindler.What's happened in U.S. Catholicism -- thanks in part to [Jesuit Father] John Courtney Murray, who did many good things otherwise -- is that we now assume that we can't bring God into the heart of this discussion because, there are a lot of non-believers out there. But that's precisely the point. It's because religious questions have been so radically removed from our culture that we're so vulnerable to phenomena like Jack Kevorkian and abortion.
As the philosopher Will Herberg observed in his book, "Protestant, Catholic, Jew," Americans are privately very religious, but then in public we all agree to subscribe to the virtues that make us good democrats and good free marketeers, so that faith becomes essentially a fragmented, private reality. In effect, we're private theists and public atheists.
...Americans are religiously sincere and morally generous. This country has a tremendous energy and abundance of good will. In the light of God's infinite mercy, that's always a good reason to hope.
My fear is that we don't see the subtlety of how -- as the pope says in Evangelium Vitae -- democracy can invert into totalitarianism. We have the illusion that we're free because no one tells us what to do. We have political freedom. But at the same time, a theological and philosophical set of assumptions informs our freedom, of which we're unconscious. A logic or "ontologic" of selfishness undermines our moral intention of generosity. We don't have the requisite worldview that would help us address abortion or the more general, current threat to the family.
Can we unmask the assumptions of our culture and deal with them in a way that will free the latent generosity of the culture? Or will those hidden assumptions overcome our generosity? This is the real battle, both globally and in America. It calls for a new effort of evangelization -- which consists, above all, in first getting clear about the ideas in Evangelium Vitae; understanding the logic of self-centeredness in a post-Enlightenment liberal culture. Alasdair McIntyre has a great line: that all debates in America are finally among radical liberals, liberal liberals and conservative liberals.
....the conservative wing of liberalism... wouldn't even deny that, insofar as their project is to show that a benign reading of American liberal tradition is harmonious with Catholicism. That's what I'm challenging. Their approach doesn't go to the roots of our [cultural and spiritual] problem, as identified in this pontificate and in the work of theologians like De Lubac and Balthasar.
Contemporary U.S. culture is rooted in] self-centeredness. A false sense of autonomy centered in the self; an incomplete conception of rights. So we need to reinstate a right relation to God on all levels -- not only at the level of intention, but at the level of the logic of our culture. Our relation to God has to inform not only our will, but how we think and how we construct our institutions.
And so we have an implicit violation of the First Commandment.
More and more we pile up evidence that the Commandments are a "unity," inseparable and integrally related--and NONE can be separated without some damage to society.
Hmmmmmm.
That being the case, what WAS the cause of her own failure? Archbishop Lefevbre claimed that it was a 3-fold acceptance of the principles of the French Revolution by Vatican II. He saw the issue of religious liberty as even more fundamental than the question of the Mass. This coincides closely with some of the analysis mentioned in this article.
That's what it used to mean. Now it means Bolshevik.
The Leftists are hijacking our language. (e.g., Have you felt gay lately?)
Yeah, but...
It has been argued that the Church's recognition of "religious liberty" in VII was no more than acknowledging the liberty of individuals to believe, sincerely, in a religion other than Christian, while at the same time NOT practicing that which is contrary to the common good.
Thus, JPII's distinction between "liberty" and "freedom."
JPII maintains that freedom, properly understood, gives us the liberty to do what is right OR WRONG; but at the same time, no one has the right to do what is wrong.
Man oh man, there are a lot of intelligent + well-read Catholics in here.
We are supposed to have three co-equal branches of govt. We don't. The easiest way to illustrate this is to ask anyone - Can the SCOTUS declare the POTUS has acted UnConstitutionally? Nearly everyone will answer,"of course." Ask that same person if the POTUS can declare the SCOTUS has acted UnConstitutionally and he will look at you as he were a bartender and Ted Kennedy was turning down their offer of a free round.
When the Supremes overturned the abortion laws of the States, what should have happened was the POTUS should have issued an executive order delcaring the SCOTUS ruling was UnConstitutional and the Legislative Branch should have voted articles of Impeachment against the usurpers of the Supreme Court for acting UnConstitutionally
Our Constitution and our government is so way out of whack that not only has there never been an Impeachment proceeding against a SCOTUS Justice, people could not even bear hearing it advanced as an idea. We no longer have our govt and we no longer have our Constitution.
Nowhere and by nobody was it ever envisioned that one of the three co-equal branches of government could legitimately declare its own interests were superior to the other two branches. But, it has happened. And we can see the evil that results.
Heck, in the Penn case re abortion, the SCOTUS declared itself a party to the case and ruled in its own favor saying it had to uphold Roe to maintain its own legitimacy.
This is Constitutional? This is legal?
Sure, in the same way it would have been legal for the Referees at the last Super Bowl to expel from the game every single Raider and every single Buccaneer and declare themselves the Super Bowl Champions.
Wait a sec, that wouldn't work. Amricans care about football. That would have caused a riot.
I'll have to check that out. The ten commandment issue in Alabama is certainly symbolic of the secular crowd's antipathy toward any reference to religion. Can't help but admire Moore's preference.
That's because Congress has gotten into the business of impeaching nominees during the confirmation process. If a nominee can survive confirmation, he/she is pretty much untouchable; it's as if being sworn in as judge is comparable to ordination. Yet another role of the church, the government has usurped. Won't get into the infallibility comparison here.
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