Liberalism

[MC Just]

Liberalism

A free way of thinking and acting in private and public life.

I. DEFINITION

The word liberal is derived from the Latin liber, free, and up to the end of the eighteenth century signified only "worthy of a free man", so that people spoke of "liberal arts", "liberal occupations". Later the term was applied also to those qualities of intellect and of character, which were considered an ornament becoming those who occupied a higher social position on account of their wealth and education. Thus liberal got the meaning of intellectually independent, broad-minded, magnanimous, frank, open, and genial. Again Liberalism may also mean a political system or tendency opposed to centralization and absolutism. In this sense Liberalism is not at variance with the spirit and teaching of the Catholic Church. Since the end of the eighteenth century, however, the word has been applied more and more to certain tendencies in the intellectual, religious, political, and economical life, which implied a partial or total emancipation of man from the supernatural, moral, and Divine order. Usually, the principles of 1789, that is of the French Revolution, are considered as the Magna Charta of this new form of Liberalism. The most fundamental principle asserts an absolute and unrestrained freedom of thought, religion, conscience, creed, speech, press, and politics. The necessary consequences of this are, on the one hand, the abolition of the Divine right and of every kind of authority derived from God; the relegation of religion from the public life into the private domain of one's individual conscience; the absolute ignoring of Christianity and the Church as public, legal, and social institutions; on the other hand, the putting into practice of the absolute autonomy of every man and citizen, along all lines of human activity, and the concentration of all public authority in one "sovereignty of the people". This sovereignty of the people in all branches of public life as legislation, administration, and jurisdiction, is to be exercised in the name and by order of all the citizens, in such a way, that all should have share in and a control over it. A fundamental principle of Liberalism is the proposition: "It is contrary to the natural, innate, and inalienable right and liberty and dignity of man, to subject himself to an authority, the root, rule, measure, and sanction of which is not in himself". This principle implies the denial of all true authority; for authority necessarily presupposes a power outside and above man to bind him morally.

These tendencies, however, were more or less active long before 1789; indeed, they are coeval with the human race. Modern Liberalism adopts and propagates them under the deceiving mask of Liberalism in the true sense. As a direct offspring of Humanism and the Reformation in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, modern Liberalism was further developed by the philosophers and literati of England especially Locke and Hume, by Rousseau and the Encyclopedists in France, and by Lessing and Kant in Germany. Its real cradle, however, was the drawing-rooms of the moderately free-thinking French nobility (1730-1789), especially those of Mme Necker and her daughter, Mme de Staël. The latter was more than anybody else the connecting link between the free-thinking elements before and after the Revolution and the centre of the modern Liberal movement both in France and Switzerland. In her politico-religious views she is intimately connected with Mirabeau and the Constitutional party of the Revolution. These views find their clearest exposition in her work "Considérations sur les principaux événements de la Révolution française". She pleads for the greatest possible individual liberty, and denounces as absurd the derivation of human authority from God. The legal position of the Church, according to her, both as a public institution and as a property-owner is a national arrangement and therefore entirely subject to the will of the nation; ecclesiastical property belongs not to the church but to the nation; the abolition of ecclesiastical privileges is entirely justified, since the clergy is the natural enemy of the principles of Revolution. The ideal form of government is in smaller states the republic, in larger ones the constitutional monarchy after the model of England. The entire art of government in modern times, consists, according to Mme de Staël, in the art of directing public opinion and of yielding to it at the right moment.

II. DEVELOPMENT AND PRINCIPAL TYPES OF MODERN LIBERALISM IN NON-ENGLISH-SPEAKING COUNTRIES

Since the so-called Liberal principles of 1789 are based upon a wrong notion of human liberty, and are and must forever be contradictory and indefinite in themselves, it is an impossibility in practical life to carry them into effect with much consistency. Consequently the most varying kinds and shades of Liberalism have been developed, all of which remained in fact more conservative than a logical application of Liberal principles would warrant. Liberalism was first formulated by the Protestant Genevese (Rousseau, Necker, Mme de Staël, Constant, Guizot); nevertheless it was from France, that it spread over the rest of the world, as did its different representative types. These developed in closest connection with the different Revolutions in Europe since 1789. The principal types are:—

(A) Anti-ecclesiastical Liberalism

(1) The old Liberalism, first advocated by Mme de Staël and Constant. It may be described as the drawing-room Liberalism of the free-thinking educated classes, who, however, did not condescend to become practical politicians or statesmen; they were superior observers, infallible critics, standing above all parties. In later days some few of these old Liberals, animated by a truly liberal chivalry, stood up for the rights of suppressed minorities against Jacobin majorities, for instance, Littré and Laboulaye in France (1879-1880).

(2) Closely connected with this old Liberalism of Mme de Staël is doctrinaire Liberalism which originated in the lecture-hall of Royer-Collard and in the salon of the Duc de Broglie (1814-1830). It was the Liberalism of the practical politicians and statesmen, who intended to re-establish, maintain, and develop, in the different states, the constitutional form of government based upon the principles of 1789. The most prominent representatives of this body were, besides de Broglie, Royer-Collard, Guizot in France, Cavour in Italy, von Rotteck and his partisans in Germany.

(3) Bourgeois Liberalism, was the natural outgrowth of doctrinaire Liberalism. It adapted itself more to the interests of the propertied and moneyed classes; for the clergy and nobility having been dispossessed of their political power, these were the only classes which could make use of the new institutions, the people not being sufficiently instructed and organized to do so. The rich industrial classes, therefore, were from the very beginning and in all countries the mainstay of Liberalism, and Liberalism for its part was forced to further their interests. This kind of bourgeois Liberalism enjoyed its highest favour in France during the time of the citizen-king, Louis-Philippe (1830-40), who openly avowed his dependence upon it. It flourished in Germany, as "national Liberalism", in Austria, as "political Liberalism in general", in France, as the Liberalism of Gambetta's Opportunist party. Its characteristic traits are materialistic, sordid ideals, which care only for unrestrained enjoyment of life, egoism in exploiting the economically weak by means of tariffs which are for the interests of the classes, a systematic persecution of Christianity and especially of the Catholic Church and her institutions, a frivolous disregard and even a mocking contempt of the Divine moral order, a cynical indifference in the choice and use of means — slander, corruption, fraud, etc. — in fighting one's opponents and in acquiring an absolute mastery and control of everything.

(4) The Liberal "parties of progress" are in opposition to the Conservatives and the Liberals of the bourgeois classes, in so far as these, when once in power, usually care little or nothing for further improvements according to their Liberal principles, whereas the former lay more stress on the fundamental tenets of Liberalism themselves and fight against a cynical one-sided policy of self-interest; for this reason they appear to an outsider more fair-minded.

(5) Liberal Radicals are adherents of progressive modem ideas, which they try to realize without consideration for the existing order or for other people's rights, ideas, and feelings. Such was the first Liberal political party, the Spanish Jacobinos in 1810. This is the Radicalism, which under the mask of liberty is now annihilating the rights of Catholics in France.

(6) The Liberal Democrats want to make the masses of the common people the deciding factor in public affairs. They rely especially on the middle classes, whose interests they pretend to have at heart.

(7) Socialism is the Liberalism of self-interest nurtured by all classes of Liberals described above, and espoused by the members of the fourth estate and the proletariat. It is at the same time nothing but the natural reaction against a one-sided policy of self-interest. Its main branches are:

* Communism, which tries to reorganize the social conditions by abolishing all private ownership;
* Radical Social Democracy of Marx (founded 1848), common in Germany and Austria;
* Moderate Socialism (Democratic Socialistic Federation in England, Possibilists in France, etc.);
* Anarchist parties founded by Bakunin, Most, and Krapotkin, after 1868, for some periods allied to Social Democracy. Anarchism as a system is relatively the most logical and radical development of the Liberal principles.

(B) Ecclesiastical Liberalism (Liberal Catholicism)

(1) The prevailing political form of modern Liberal Catholicism, is that which would regulate the relations of the Church to the State and modern society in accordance with the Liberal principles as expounded by Benjamin Constant. It had its predecessors and patterns in Gallicanism, Febronianism, and Josephinism. Founded 1828 by Lamennais, the system was later defended in some respects by Lacordaire, Montalembert, Parisis, Dupanloup, and Falloux.

(2) The more theological and religious form of Liberal Catholicism had its predecessors in Jansenism and Josephinism; it aims at certain reforms in ecclesiastical doctrine and discipline in accordance with the anti-ecclesiastical liberal Protestant theory and atheistical "science and enlightenment" prevailing at the time. The newest phases of this Liberalism were condemned by Pius X as Modernism. In general it advocates latitude in interpreting dogma, oversight or disregard of the disciplinary and doctrinal decrees of the Roman Congregations, sympathy with the State even in its enactments against the liberty of the Church, in the action of her bishops, clergy, religious orders and congregations, and a disposition to regard as clericalism the efforts of the Church to protect the rights of the family and of individuals to the free exercise of religion.

III. CONDEMNATION OF LIBERALISM BY THE CHURCH

By proclaiming man's absolute autonomy in the intellectual, moral and social order, Liberalism denies, at least practically, God and supernatural religion. If carried out logically, it leads even to a theoretical denial of God, by putting deified mankind in place of God. It has been censured in the condemnations of Rationalism and Naturalism. The most solemn condemnation of Naturalism and Rationalism was contained in the Constitution "De Fide" of the Vatican Council (1870); the most explicit and detailed condemnation, however, was administered to modern Liberalism by Pius IX in the Encyclical "Quanta cura" of 8 December, 1864 and the attached Syllabus. Pius X condemned it again in his allocution of 17 April, 1907, and in the Decree of the Congregation of the Inquisition of 3 July, 1907, in which the principal errors of Modernism were rejected and censured in sixty-five propositions. The older and principally political form of false Liberal Catholicism had been condemned by the Encyclical of Gregory XVI, "Mirari Vos", of 15 August, 1832 and by many briefs of Pius IX (see Ségur, "Hommage aux Catholiques Libéraux", Paris, 1875). The definition of the papal infallibility by the Vatican council was virtually a condemnation of Liberalism. Besides this many recent decisions concern the principal errors of Liberalism. Of great importance in this respect are the allocutions and encyclicals of Pius IX, Leo XIII, and Pius X. (Cf., Recueil des allocutions consistorales encycliques . . . citées dans le Syllabus", Paris, 1865) and the encyclicals of Leo XIII of 20 January, 1888, "On Human Liberty"; of 21 April, 1878, "On the Evils of Modern Society"; of 28 December, 1878, "On the Sects of the Socialists, Communists, and Nihilists"; of 4 August, 1879, "On Christian Philosophy"; of 10 February, 1880, "On Matrimony"; of 29 July, 1881, "On the Origin of Civil Power"; of 20 April, 1884, "On Freemasonry"; of 1 November, 1885, "On the Christian State"; of 25 December, 1888, "On the Christian Life"; of 10 January, 1890, "On the Chief Duties of a Christian Citizen"; of 15 May, 1891, "On the Social Question"; of 20 January, 1894, "On the Importance of Unity in Faith and Union with the Church for the Preservation of the Moral Foundations of the State"; of 19 March, 1902, "On the Persecution of the Church all over the World". Full information about the relation of the Church towards Liberalism in the different countries may be gathered from the transactions and decisions of the various provincial councils. These can be found in the "Collectio Lacensis" under the headings of the index: Fides, Ecclesia, Educatio, Francomuratores.

[God Conquers]

MC Just, What's your source for this?

[MC Just]

New Advent.org

[MC Just]

Bump

[RandomProddy]

[quote name='MC Just' date='Jul 21 2004, 04:28 PM'] New Advent.org [/quote]
In other words, 90 years oiut-of-date. Liberalism now isn't liberalism then....

[dUSt]

[quote name='RandomProddy' date='Jul 22 2004, 05:54 AM'] In other words, 90 years oiut-of-date. Liberalism now isn't liberalism then.... [/quote]
What's the difference?

[ironmonk]

[quote name='RandomProddy' date='Jul 22 2004, 07:54 AM'] In other words, 90 years oiut-of-date. Liberalism now isn't liberalism then.... [/quote]
Liberalism is a weed among the wheat.

The Catholic Encyclopedia from 1908 is not out of date. The latest version of the CE compliments the older versions.

God Bless,
ironmonk


[b]How Liberalism Fails the Church[/b]
by [u][b]Cardinal [/b][/u]Francis George

"Liberal Catholicism is an exhausted project," says Cardinal Francis George. "It has shown itself unable to pass on the faith in its integrity."


February 27, 2001 / As some of you might know, this event [the Commonweal Forum] was conceived, in part, because of a fortuitous coming together of two circumstances.

The first was my Jan. 17, 1998 homily at a Saturday evening liturgy during a National Center for the Laity meeting in Chicago. I had not prepared a homily, because I understood someone else was to preach and I was only to give a few remarks at the end of Mass. More important, I had been told the day before by the apostolic nuncio that the Holy Father would announce on Sunday that twenty-two bishops, myself included, were to become cardinals.

As I sometimes do at turning points or crises in my life, I turned to Cardinal Newman for counsel when I learned that I was to be named a cardinal. Fresh in my mind as I celebrated Mass at Old Saint Pat´s were the words of Newman´s speech when he accepted the official notification of his being named cardinal.

He explained on that occasion that all his life he had contested liberalism in religion, liberalism in that context meaning relativism. Reading his speech got me thinking about the context of religion today; and when I came to say a few words after I read the Gospel, I figured that, in the absence of a prepared homily, I might try to provoke a discussion among all these rather liberal folks in front of me. I believe I did. A portion of my remarks I wrote down as best I could remember later that night:

We are at a turning point in the life of the church in this country. Liberal Catholicism is an exhausted project. Essentially a critique, even a necessary critique at one point in our history, it is now parasitical on a substance that no longer exists. It has shown itself unable to pass on the faith in its integrity and inadequate, therefore, in fostering the joyful self-surrender called for in Christian marriage, in consecrated life, in ordained priesthood. It no longer gives life.

The answer, however, is not to be found in a type of conservative Catholicism obsessed with particular practices and so sectarian in its outlook that it cannot serve as a sign of unity of all peoples in Christ.
The answer is simply Catholicism, in all its fullness and depth, a faith able to distinguish itself from any cultures and yet able to engage and transform them all, a faith joyful in all the gifts Christ wants to give us and open to the whole world he died to save. The Catholic faith shapes a church with a lot of room for differences in pastoral approach, for discussion and debate, for initiatives as various as the peoples whom God loves.

But, more profoundly, the faith shapes a church which knows her Lord and knows her own identity, a church able to distinguish between what fits into the tradition that unites her to Christ and what is a false start or a distorting thesis, a church united here and now because she is always one with the church throughout the ages and with the saints in heaven.

I regret now a phrasing that gave some people offense because of my use of the adjective "parasitical" to describe a set of ideas and a movement which defines itself and takes life from an idea of church no longer adequate to the church´s self-consciousness since the Second Vatican Council. But I regret as well the deliberate misrepresentation of what, I still believe, was clearly expressed.

I have a number of friends, mostly from graduate school, who regard the Catholic church as a hypocritical system. Their judgment on the church doesn´t mean they believe me to be a hypocrite, and I take no personal offense at their misunderstanding of a church I love as my mother and spouse. I understand what they are saying, even though I think they are profoundly wrong. I am saddened by their convictions and pray for their conversion, but they remain friends.

Conflating ideas with the persons who espouse or even cherish them makes critical conversation impossible, in the church or anywhere else. If everyone whose cherished convictions I believe mistaken must feel insulted, we should end this conference now and bring closure as well to most other public discussions about anything of ultimate or even of purely personal importance.

Making these remarks at a turning point in my own life combined with a second, perhaps providential, circumstance: Commonweal editor Margaret O´Brien Steinfels was present at that Mass. In person that evening during supper and in a later well-constructed Commonweal editorial, she asked me to "please explain" my remarks, especially the part about "simply Catholicism." In our conversation after Mass at Old Saint Pat´s, I told Peggy that I didn´t "relish getting into a national debate at this time." The time I was thinking about, of course, was the time of a Roman consistory added to the time needed to grow into being archbishop of Chicago. But perhaps now the time has come; not to say the last word, of course, because my remarks were offered as a thesis and not as an indictment, but to move along a conversation important to all Catholics, and especially to those who do not have a vested interest in personal conflict, those disturbed by the divisions which too often paralyze the mission of the church in our time.

To clarify terms, let me enumerate several contexts which enter into the definition of "liberal" and "conservative," and which need to be made explicit to advance the discussion. First, there is the political context, from which the terms take their primary meaning. Political liberals and political conservatives both define themselves in relation to government and its exercise of power. Conservatives usually associate themselves with the constituted authorities, giving them the benefit of the doubt so that the order which saves us from anarchy and social violence can be maintained.

Liberals contribute to the common good by beginning most often with a suspicion about abuse of authority and a critique of the exercise of power. They are a "loyal opposition," loyal to the goals of good government but not to the established rulers when the rulers themselves impede the achievement of those goals. In the economic context, so closely connected with the political but not identified with it unless one is a Marxist, liberals are more concerned with the distribution of wealth and look to government to see that the political equality of all citizens is mirrored, at least roughly, in their economic equality. They tend toward a suspicion of wealth comparable to their suspicion of government, because both are instances of power. Wealth´s "social mortgage" easily becomes a social penalty.

Conservatives, on the other hand, tend to be more concerned with the conditions of the creation of wealth and understand that the right to economic initiative cannot be separated from other individual rights and freedoms. In a business economy, they argue, all are enriched in time, even if there are serious inequalities for a time. The effects of governmental deregulation of the economy are softened, in the meantime, by personal generosity toward the poor.

The political and economic contexts, therefore, slide easily into the psychological. In the psychological context, "liberal" and "conservative" describe attitudes or mindsets toward societal change. Conservatives are closed to changes which threaten good order and liberals are more open to the risk of proposed change. Grossly caricatured, therefore, conservatives are "closed-minded" and liberals "open-minded."

In epistemological theory, the point of reference is neither political government, economic order, nor mental attitude toward societal change. Rather, respective stances toward the foundations of knowledge differentiate liberals and conservatives in the epistemological context. This was the context of Cardinal Newman´s biglietto speech, as it was the context for his Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (1845) and his Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent (1870).

Conservative certitude and the legitimate quest for certitude about the foundations either of faith or of an intellectual discipline can be pushed into fundamentalism; liberal criticism of the same foundations can degenerate into skepticism or the relativism Newman constantly contested.

Finally, there is the context of American religion, the historical context in which we profess the Catholic faith. In this country, liberal religion treats God as an ideal, a goal expressing all that is best in human experience, while the real agents of change in the world are human persons. Religious language is important poetry, agnostic about who God is, but expressive of our experience of wholeness.

The traditional sacraments are signs of our own interior dispositions and intentions. Worship may be structured but, at its heart, religion is ethical and the social agenda central. By contrast, conservative religion is keenly aware of God´s agency. God is real, independent, powerful, active. God´s presence is felt in prayer and in the reading of his holy word. Religious language is most often literal, and the Bible is often read much like a newspaper.

Sacraments are signs of the interior faith given us before we receive them. The social agenda tends to be peripheral, because God will change things at the beginning of the millennium or at the apocalyptic rapture or at some other moment we can only wait for.
either of these historical and actual models of American religion is able to capture the Catholic sense of the church as mediator of God´s life and teacher of God´s truth, the church as a hierarchical communion, an organic body which comes into being as the gifts of Christ are shared and to which one is joined in order to be changed, to be converted, so that, with the help of God´s grace, one can accept Christ´s mission to preach the gospel to all peoples and transform the world. Before we get into "simply Catholicism," however, it would be good to stay with the historical context in exploring what I, at least, understand by liberal Catholicism.

First, I will provide a brief sketch of the "necessary" liberal Catholic project, which began in the mid-1800s and culminated with the still inadequately received Second Vatican Council. Second, I will discuss why I believe it is not unfair to call contemporary liberal Catholicism an "exhausted project," even though some of my best friends are liberal Catholics. Third (and in order to alienate myself from all personal support), I will critique "a type of conservative Catholicism" which makes the same error as liberals in an excessive preoccupation with the church´s visible government. This point will be short, since I presume most of you tend toward liberal Catholicism and there is no point in preaching to the choir about the deficiencies of conservative Catholicism. Lastly, I will attempt to stroke in lightly my picture of "simply Catholicism."

By the early 1800s, the church was besieged by a movement that she had, at least in part, helped to create: the Enlightenment, or modernity (I will use these terms interchangeably). While difficult to define, modernity has at least the following two premises at its core:

First, all men and women possess a dignity or value which dictates, using Kant´s formulation, that they never be treated as a mere means but always as an end. All human beings ought to be free from unfulfilling conditions simply imposed upon them by other human beings. While the specific conditions conducive to personal fulfillment are still a subject of great debate, particularly in a "postmetaphysical" era wary of any essential or even general conception of human fulfillment, these conditions are generally referred to as "rights." These rights exist in two forms: "negative" rights (that is, "freedoms"); and "positive" rights, which are conditions that must be received from others and thus imply further duties that deeply condition freedom.

Given its emphasis on every person´s freedom from being used by others, this first strand of modernity has come to be known as "liberalism." It is political and economic, psychological, epistemological, and religious, as outlined above, yet each context blends into the next. In Marxist psychology and cultural criticism, for example, acceptance of a revealed religion creates a form of personal as well as social alienation.

The second core premise of modernity is the imposing of scientific method as the point of contact between human beings and the world and society into which they are born. Science is the means to social liberation as well as the unique means to liberation from the strictures of the material world. It is a method of knowing that tightly circumscribes what can be considered truly "known" and thus simply "true." As much as it was about rights, the Enlightenment was about science as the means to human fulfillment.

In general, the founders of modernity believed that through observation of sensed objects and induction, the laws of the material and human worlds could be discovered and their discovery would make possible the perfecting of life in this world. Since medieval remainders such as religious claims and dubious "universals" neither promoted human fulfillment nor accorded with the epistemological rules of the scientific method, they were to be consigned to the status of interesting examples of now superseded consciousness made irrelevant by human progress.

The Enlightenment and its two strands -liberalism and science did not, of course, emerge spontaneously. Its precursors are well known, and are located in that thousand-year period we call the Middle Ages.

Enlightenment thinkers radicalized or appropriated, and then combined, what had been bequeathed to them: humanism, philosophical nominalism, the Copernican revolution, and the implications of the Reformation. From humanism came the Enlightenment celebration of the universal dignity and rights of the individual, and a commitment to moral perfection in this world.

From nominalism they adopted skepticism about traditional ethics and theology. From the Copernican revolution came a supreme confidence in science as the primary means through which the improvement of life in this world would occur. From the Reformation and its consequent religious pluralism developed the secularization of politics and culture.

Among these sources, humanism has Christian roots, as has the conviction that a well-ordered universe contains an intrinsic intelligibility. The Reformation is a Christian movement. The gradual recognition of the dignity of all men and women and their capacity for responsible freedom is difficult to understand unless one traces those notions, at least in part, to the gradual working out of the implications of the Incarnation.

The Enlightenment, therefore, was not devoid of semina verbi. The challenge for the church lay in distinguishing the erroneous aspects of modernity from those that were compatible with, and even developments of, the Christian faith. The challenge was compounded when major Enlightenment figures regarded the church´s doctrines and her hierarchy as the primary enemies of modern enlightenment.

In some ways, they were and we are. The church´s first historical encounter with the Enlightenment project - which it would thereafter simply refer to as "liberalism" -was the French Revolution. The memory of thousands of priests and nuns exiled, imprisoned, tortured, and executed; of state control of religion and the suppression of the church; of a dictator who was a Lenin before his time, these determined the church´s officially negative attitude toward liberalism for a century.

Formal denunciations of liberalism, in whole or part, appeared in Pius IX´s Syllabus of Errors, and in Leo XIII´s Immortale Dei, Libertas praestantissimum, Longinque oceani, and Testem benevolentiae.

But in the midst of the controversy, a group now known as the "liberal Catholics" began to distinguish and assess the various aspects of modernity-cultural, political, and economic. Their names are familiar: Lamennais, Montalembert, Lacordaire, Ozanam, Acton, Newman, and Döllinger. While they differed profoundly in their analyses and their conclusions, common to each one´s thinking was a rejection of certain cultural aspects of modernity, particularly materialism, secularism, moral relativism, and individualism. Also common to each was the conviction that only a unified, energetic, convincing, and engaged church could solve these developing cultural problems.

In their search for means to promote such a church in the midst of pluralism and increased state power, they began to use the church´s own history in order to question the church´s nineteenth-century thinking on the political and economic aspects of liberalism. While state-protected religious freedom had been associated with indifferentism, they pointed out that religious establishment also held the potential for state interference and even suppression, and for church corruption as well. They argued that freedom of religion would make the church more effective, and the American experience, for all its difficulties, supported this conclusion. The clash between faith and culture could be best addressed by embracing liberal political and economic institutions rather than by rejecting them out of hand.

The church´s assessment of economic and political liberalism continued throughout the better part of this century, adding new rationales and nuances that are now part of our teaching. Rights language was appropriated not only to protect private property and the free market but also to protect against their misuse by early capitalists. Because of their dignity, all persons possessed the right to family wages and safe working conditions. As the ultimate guarantor of human rights, the state had the duty to exercise a concern for the poor and family life and intervene in the economy when necessary.

A representative, well-constituted democratic state would be more likely to intervene appropriately. But the state was not to be the only solution to social problems. Nonstate institutions such as unions and social-service agencies were equally or more capable of solving social problems; a limited state was apt to be less corrupt and more efficient; and the relational and self-constituting nature of the person meant that voluntary, mediating institutions were critical for the formation of persons and culture. Most important, the family is the foundation of any culture and the building block of any society, and the state has the obligation to protect and foster family life. From this logic, the principle of subsidiarity was crafted and endorsed. The church´s engagement with the modern world it had both resisted and helped create eventually resulted in the endorsement of a free society found in Dignitatis humanae, Gaudium et spes, and Centesimus annus.

Do these societal developments and the liberal economic and political institutions born of them provide models for the church´s internal life? Yes and no. As the teaching of the Second Vatican Council-particularly that of Lumen gentium makes clear, the church is not merely a society. In the early modern era, Cardinal Robert Bellarmine, arguing against a Protestant conception of the church as simply invisible with adventitious visible expression, created an ecclesiology of the visible church defined as a society. The church could be understood by looking at the Kingdom of France or the Republic of Venice. This reactive model is flawed to the extent it loses the relationships between the visible and invisible gifts that constitute the church. These relationships are the stuff of ecclesial communion. They are created among and for us when the gifts of Christ are shared. These gifts, beyond invisible grace itself, are the visible government of pastors in succession to the Twelve, the gospel as developed in the creeds and Catholic doctrine, and the seven sacraments which sanctify men and women through the action of the risen Christ.

Through these gifts, Christ is always present as the Way (our shepherd or pastor), the Truth (our teacher), and the Life (our sanctifier).

Because her relationship to her Lord is always one of dependence and her relationship to her apostolic foundation is normative, the church´s teaching and constitution cannot simply be apprehended and analyzed at will, using societal categories from any age. Yet neither is the church´s history unrelated to the designs of Providence.

Given historical circumstances, concepts such as personal autonomy, political sovereignty, and democratic equality can contribute to human fulfillment and should be instantiated in political and economic structures and enter into the church´s social doctrine. The church is indebted to the early liberal Catholics not only for restoring to the center of the church´s consciousness the gospel´s assertion that Christ set us free, but also for the insight and analysis that enabled the church herself to break free of the conservative societal structures in which she had become imprisoned.

But because democracy is a legitimate and desirable form of political governance doesn´t make the Lord´s own gift of ecclesiastical hierarchy illegitimate, even though it can raise good questions about how power given by God should be used to make his people holy. The primary criterion in judging any idea or form of church governance remains the church´s fidelity to her Lord.

Instead of understanding Vatican II as a limited accommodation to modernity for the sake of evangelizing the modern world, the liberal project seems often to interpret the council as a mandate to change whatever in the church clashes with modern society. To caricature somewhat, the project both for ecclesial renewal and for mission in the world takes its cues from the editorial page of The New York Times or, even worse, USA Today.

The church provides motivation and troops to meet the world´s agenda as defined by the world. This is a dead end, because the church´s mission would then have nothing original to contribute to the world´s self-understanding. This is not to say that many so-called "gospel values" or semina verbi are not to be found on the editorial pages of the New York Times, or even USA Today; it is to say that God´s ways are not our ways and that the greatest contribution the church makes to the world is to preach gospel truths in ways that, inevitably, will both comfort and confront any society in which she takes up Christ´s mission.

Behind the crisis of visible authority or governance in a liberal church lies a crisis of truth. In a popular liberal society, freedom is the primary value and the government is not supposed to tell its citizens how to think. The cultural fault line lies in a willingness to sacrifice even the gospel truth in order to safeguard personal freedom construed as choice. Using sociology of knowledge and the hermeneutics of suspicion, modern liberals interpret dogmas which affront current cultural sensibilities as the creation of celibate males eager to keep a grasp on power rather than as the work of the Holy Spirit guiding the successors of the Apostles.

The bishops become the successors of the Sanhedrin and the church, at best, is the body of John the Baptist, pointing to a Jesus not yet risen from the dead and, therefore, a role model or prophet but not a savior. Even Jesus´ being both male and celibate is to be forgotten or denied once the risen Christ can be reworked into whomever or whatever the times demand.

Personal experience becomes the criterion for deciding whether or not Jesus is my savior, a point where liberal Catholics and conservative Protestants seem to come to agreement, even if they disagree on what salvation really means. Liberal culture discovers victims more easily than it recognizes sinners; and victims don´t need a savior so much as they need to claim their rights.

All this is not only a dead end, it is a betrayal of the Lord, no matter the good intentions of those espousing these convictions. The call to personal conversion, which is at the heart of the gospel, has been smothered by a pillow of accommodation. The project for a liberal Catholic church is as unoriginal as the project for a liberal reinterpretation of the mission for the church.

A church, all of whose ministries, construed only functionally, are open to any of the baptized; a church unwilling to say that all homosexual genital relations are morally wrong; a church which at least makes some allowance for abortion when necessary to assure a mother´s freedom; a church accepting contraception as moral within marriage and prudent outside of marriage; a church willing to admit the sacramentally married to a second marriage in complete sacramental communion; a church whose teaching has to stand the acid test of modern criticism and personal acceptance in order to have not just credibility but legitimacy-there is nothing new in all this. It already exists, but outside the Catholic church.

Liberal Catholicism, in the too general and somewhat unfair way I have sketched it here, has not sufficiently distinguished between the properly theological warrants necessary to argue convincingly to some of its desiderata and the reasons for ecclesial change that take their strength merely from a liberal culture which tells us, as all cultures do, what to think and how to act. In an apostolic church, however, the burden of proof for changing established doctrinal and moral teaching rests on those who ask for change.

The faith of the Apostles and martyrs, of Iraeneus and Augustine, of Bridget of Sweden and Catherine of Siena, of Thomas of Canterbury and Thomas More, of Elizabeth Ann Seton and John Neumann, of Edith Stein and Maximilian Kolbe, of our parents and grandparents cannot be set aside to make our contemporaries happy or ourselves free of personal responsibility and its consequent guilt. When the apostolic faith is preached in its integrity to the young, to those who have not grown up in a church which confined them and who have found themselves, instead, trapped in our secularized culture, they take notice.

Here is something different. They do not always agree, but they are open in ways surprising to those whose own liberating experiences are still bound up with the immediate aftermath of the Second Vatican Council.

Alexis de Tocqueville suggested that the centrality of the idea of equal individual rights sets Americans up for the triumph of relativism and individualism. Are these cultural proclivities, which make it hard to hear the gospel, the immediate result of liberal political institutions? Criticizing John Courtney Murray, David Schindler argues that rules of engagement between faith and culture that prevent the state, which helps to shape a culture, from informing itself religiously inevitably favor world views that demand public silence about God.

Personally, I tend to think that the practical case for making our liberal political and economic institutions responsible for the culture which now clashes so grievously with the faith is still to be adequately made. Nonetheless, these liberal institutions have not prevented our developing a culture which is increasingly hostile to revealed truth or any truth that is not "made true" by personal choice.

In response to both a secular liberal culture and its perceived impact on the church, a certain type of conservative Catholicism picks up the debate on the wrong terms. Seeing that, in a genuine clash between modern or any other culture and the apostolic faith, the faith remains normative, conservative Catholicism in some of its reaction takes refuge in earlier cultural forms of faith expression and absolutizes them for all times and all places.

While certain that it differs fundamentally from liberal Catholicism, this conservatism shares the Bellarminian understanding of the church as society. The hierarchy therefore become central, responsible for all good as well as for all ills, able to correct all aberrations by invoking their authority.

Correct in understanding that the church is essentially conservative in handing on the apostolic faith, contemporary conservative Catholicism can fail to see that the church is also, for that very reason, radical in its critique of any society. Just as liberal Catholicism is frequently uneasy with the church´s understanding of the gift of human sexuality when her teaching runs up against the popular Freudianism of the sexual revolution, conservative Catholicism is often uneasy with the church´s understanding of a just society when her social teaching draws conclusions about social services and the distribution of wealth from the premise of universal human solidarity.

The neuralgic point, therefore, is the human person. Both conservatism and liberalism, in religion and other fields in America, tend to look on the person as a bundle of desires or dreams, animal impulses and higher aspirations, which are synthesized individually by choice and controlled socially by law. Law, therefore, is always an imposition, an imposition gladly internalized in some areas by liberals and in others by conservatives.

In religion, liberal pastoring means assuring people that the unconditional love of God means putting aside even moral laws when they get in the way of personal fulfillment; conservative pastoring means insisting on law without linking it clearly to the truths that Christ reveals about the dignity and freedom of the human person. The human person is the way of the church, but her understanding of what it means to be human is taken from her belief in who Christ is, a belief born of our living together, in ecclesial communion, Christ´s own life.

The church does have power given her by Christ, the power to proclaim the gospel and celebrate the sacraments and pastor his people. Since any claim to power in a popular liberal culture has to be justified by pointing to it as service or by claiming its popular ratification or reception, the church in this culture is called to examine constantly her use of power. She cannot reduce the gospel, however, to what the culture will bear.

We are back to "simply Catholicism," which locates power in Christ and in his gift of authority to the Twelve. The church preaches Jesus Christ, not herself; but Christ cannot be adequately known except from within his Body, the church.

Within the church, the bishops are the reality check for the apostolic faith. They are not free to change established dogma or create new doctrines, unless they want to become heretics. In being presented as a revolution rather than a development of doctrine, the Second Vatican Council has left some Catholics with the impression that bishops control rather than preserve the apostolic faith. If bishops won´t change, it must be fear or willfulness or perhaps stupidity that prevents their being enlightened.

It is then up to Catholics with an agenda to force them to change or to make the changes themselves, in a separate peace. But a church of such factions not only cannot evangelize, it cannot think. That is the greatest practical difficulty, it seems to me, in the use of the terms "liberal" and "conservative." When they are applied now, or even as they were sometimes applied in papal documents in the last century, people stop thinking things through. In thinking things through in the church, bishops are the verification principle in the development of doctrine.

Pastorally, bishops are ordained to headship, which does not exhaust leadership. Leadership is influence; sometimes it is based on office, sometimes on charism or purely personal gifts; always, in the church, it is more obviously from Christ when the leader´s friendship with the Lord is evident. When headship and leadership are not adequately distinguished, then either every leader has to become a priest or every priest has to recognize the injustice of co-opting leadership and become just like those who minister only out of the sacraments of baptism and confirmation. In either case, Christ´s original gift of the Twelve disappears or is no longer adequately visible.

Cardinal Francis George, O.M.I., is the archbishop of Chicago.

Edited July 22, 2004 by ironmonk

[Don John of Austria]

I recommend a book called Liberalism is a Sin-- And yes agianst the wishes of the Bishop whose Diocese it wass published in it pasted the muster of Rome-- Who declared that it had nothing in contradiction to the Faith-- Check it out.


[quote]In other words, 90 years oiut-of-date. Liberalism now isn't liberalism then.... [/quote] And actually it is, We just refer to people as conservative who are old fashion liberals and we Call Liberals People who would have been regarded as either insane or radical Communist and the like.

Edited July 23, 2004 by Don John of Austria

[MC Just]

The answer is simply Catholicism, in all its fullness and depth, a faith able to distinguish itself from any cultures and yet able to engage and transform them all, a faith joyful in all the gifts Christ wants to give us and open to the whole world he died to save.


In this case of America, Liberals arent letting the Church transform the Culture, the Liberal's culture is trying to transform the Church.... That's a no no. You dont change the Church, the church changes you.

[Chris Zewe]

I won't lie to you, I didn't eevn attempt to read all that nonsense, but you clearly said that free thinking and acting needs eliminated altogether. For this I feel that you are a danger to society and must be locked away forever.

[MC Just]

[quote name='Chris Zewe' date='Jul 23 2004, 11:11 AM'] I won't lie to you, I didn't eevn attempt to read all that nonsense, but you clearly said that free thinking and acting needs eliminated altogether.  For this I feel that you are a danger to society and must be locked away forever. [/quote]
Take a look at vatican City. Free Thinking and will is not eliminated. But there the culture of Death is (eliminated). We're not trying to eliminate free will. Just the culture that is destroying souls.

Edited July 23, 2004 by MC Just

[Chris Zewe]

[i]Liberalism

A free way of thinking and acting in private and public life.[/i]

Oh? And what you said also eliminates free will. If people WANT to act a certain way and they can't, you're destroying it. And you realize that the USA is secular, right?

[MC Just]

[quote name='Chris Zewe' date='Jul 23 2004, 11:17 AM'] [i]Liberalism

A free way of thinking and acting in private and public life.[/i]

Oh? And what you said also eliminates free will. If people WANT to act a certain way and they can't, you're destroying it. And you realize that the USA is secular, right? [/quote]
Take Vatican City for Example. People are free there.

[Chris Zewe]

[i]Liberalism, We need to rid the Church of it.....

Liberalism

A free way of thinking and acting in private and public life.[/i]

Edited July 23, 2004 by littleflower+JMJ

[Kilroy the Ninja]

[quote name='Chris Zewe' date='Jul 23 2004, 11:17 AM'] And you realize that the USA is secular, right? [/quote]
Actually the US is far [i]less[/i] secular than any other major country in the world. In fact, it's become a popular joke in Europe to muse about the naivety of the Americans in their beliefs that God still exists. Not very Nietzsche of us and all that.

The human secularists in America want America to be secular. But it's not. It was founded by deists and populated with Christians. Certainly NOT secular.