A Blog for Dallas Area Catholics

Part 2 of an examination of ‘liberal Catholicism’ June 14, 2011

I posted last week portions of part 1 of James Hitchcock’s essay ‘The Failure of Liberal Catholicism.”  The conclusion of Part 2 below:

As the history of modern Protestantism and Judaism shows, the principal achievement of liberal religion is to persuade people that they do not need religion at all. Liberal Catholicism has achieved its goal of undermining many traditional beliefs and practices, but it has thereby also undermined itself—issues like women’s ordination do not interest people who belong to the Church in the same way they might belong to a health club. A decreasing number of liberals even bother to call themselves Catholics, and in a sense the “best” liberal Catholics are those who have left the Church entirely.

But by no means all those who leave the Church do so because they consider its doctrines too rigid. On the contrary, an unknown number have joined fundamentalist Protestant groups, often complaining that their liberal priests offered them only a worldly version of the Gospel.

Liberal Catholics are in full flight from what they consider the neurotic guilt inflicted on them by their religious upbringing, but this sense of oppression is mainly confined to teachings about sex.

The concept of “social sin”—racism, colonialism, unjust economic and social structures—whatever validity it might have, imposes on people a burden of guilt that they can never lift, because social sin is precisely defined as sins whose perpetrators do not fully recognize their complicity, so that they must be lashed over and over again.

Massingale asserts that white people are so deeply implicated in a racist culture that those who think they are free are complicit precisely for that reason. An NCR editor praises a book (published by Maryknoll) that denies that racism can even be addressed within the context of American culture, because “racism and genocide are constitutive of the United States….”

In the end, modern liberalism—both secular and religious—has to do with control in the name of freedom. The bitterness that now suffuses the once-optimistic liberal movement is a belated awareness that—at least in the Catholic Church—that program has failed.

You should read the whole thing, if you can  make it through it.  I’ve read alot, seen a great deal of heresy, but what was presented by Dr. Hitchcock took even my breath away at times – I had to look away.  While some may argue he has cherry-picked egregious examples, the sheer number of and outlandishness of many of the claims make his point rather convincingly – that liberal Catholicism is neither. 

And he gives extensive coverage to the Leadership Conference of Women Religious own personal theologian, and one of our favorites – Dr. Rick Gaillardetz! 

At the 2010 meeting of the Catholic Theological Society of America, two lay theologians—Catherine Clifford and Richard Gaillardetz—warned that in the past, tradition “has been cooped to convey values of ideology and dominant self-interest.” But liberal Catholicism is now itself an ideology, and the rationalization of self-interest is nowhere more obvious than among organized professionals.

Clifford and Gaillardetz complained that theologians labor under “episcopal suspicion” and asserted that theologians “exhibit loyalty to the magisterium only insofar as the magisterium exhibits its own proper service to God’s word,” a formula that allows theologians the final judgment as to what constitutes God’s word.

Part of the liberal conceit is the claim that Vatican officials are ignorant and do not understand the theologies they judge, a claim that by implication applied even to Pope Benedict when he was head of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, even though he is one of the great theologians of the age.

Some theologians now claim to be a “second magisterium” whose teaching authority is equal to, even superior to, that of the hierarchy, a claim that ignores the fact that throughout the history of the Church it has always been the hierarchy—usually gathered in councils—who have rendered final judgment about doctrine.

Clifford and Gaillardetz defined the role of the theologian as that of preserving “the priority of the lived faith of the Church over its doctrinal formulations,” implying that the two are incompatible. But, having excluded both hierarchical authority and “popular opinion,” the two theologians seemed by default to leave the professionals as the people uniquely qualified to determine what is or is not “lived faith.” (McBrien denounces the lived faith expressed in Eucharistic adoration.)

I seriously pray for these folks, several times a day.  I pray they have the humility to convert and submit to the Authority that Christ instituted in His Church.  We all deal with pride, and I’m one of the worst offenders of egregious self-love, but I perhaps have a kernel of humility that tells me I’m not nearly as great as I think I am, and I need the Church to help me improve, to shuck off the old man and put on the new.  Traditional Catholic religious life and spirituality has been a tremendous aid to me – the examples of the Saints and God’s Grace has allowed me to make whatever little progress I have. I really pray that these folks convert before their particular judgement, and before that – that they can know the joy and peace that comes from submitting to an Eternal Truth, not one made up on the fly or that changes every other day, but one Eternal Truth that is a constant guide and applies to all men everywhere.  That is the beauty of the Church.