Believing Scholars: Ten Catholic Intellectuals

Chapter 9: Liberal Catholicism Reexamined

c h a p t e r 9 Liberal Catholicism Reexamined peter steinfels I often think it’s comical How Nature always does contrive That every boy and every gal, That’s born into the world alive, Is either a little Liberal, Or else a little Conservative! (Iolanthe, act 2) I was born into the world a liberal Catholic. Exhibit A: My liturgically oriented parents sent out not the standard birth announcement but a card with simple religious symbols and the wording, The Lord of life has visited Margaret and Melville Steinfels with a child Peter Francis born a child of Adam on July 15, 1941 reborn of water and the Holy Ghost a child of God on July 27, 1941. In 1941, this kind of announcement was enough to cause a stir. One irreverent wag in the family wrote back ‘‘Who is this fellow Adam? And does Mel know about him?’’ I was born into the world, as I said, a liberal Catholic. Which is to say that, contrary to W. S. Gilbert, I was not either a little liberal or else a little conservative. I was, and I remain, both a little bit liberal and a little bit conservative. Nothing better illustrates the Catholic Liberal Catholicism Reexamined 135 tendency toward both/and instead of either/or than liberal Catholicism . How can one define liberal Catholicism? One way is that it is what the Syllabus of Errors had in mind when, in its famous final salvo, it condemned the idea that ‘‘the Roman pontiff can and ought to reconcile and harmonize himself with progress, with liberalism, and with modern civilization.’’1 Another way to define it is that liberal Catholicism is simply papal teaching a hundred years too soon. Liberal Catholicism is, in fact, a controverted and approximate label. It was applied, often pejoratively, to nineteenth-century figures like Lamennais, Lacordaire, Montalembert, Bishop Dupanloup, and Marc Sangnier in France, to John Henry Newman and Lord Acton in England, to Daniel O’Connell in Ireland, to Isaac Hecker and John Ireland in America, and to a host of other thinkers and leaders in Belgium, Italy, Poland, and Germany. Its history overlaps with that of Christian Democracy, social Catholicism, and modernism. But it is important to note that liberal Catholicism was rooted in Romanticism more than in the Enlightenment. Its rebellion against the old alliance of throne and altar, and its eventual embrace of freedom of religion for all, was restorationist, not revolutionary: it began not with the Enlightenment’s desire to free politics from the stranglehold of priestcraft but to free the church, indeed with the papacy at its head, from bankrupt regimes so that the faith might again conquer society through witness and persuasion rather than coercion.2 If those are conservative DNA sequences in liberal Catholicism’s genetic constitution, the liberal DNA sequences are perhaps more obvious . First, liberal Catholicism insisted on discriminating rather than blanket judgments about the French Revolution and the modern liberties and social upheavals the revolution signaled. Second, liberal Catholicism believed that change and development had become the normal, not the exceptional, state of things, a reality to be embraced as opportunity rather than lamented or denounced as affliction. Believing Scholars 136 Third, liberal Catholicism trusted in the power of truth to prevail if allowed free play on the terrain of free discussion. Fourth, liberal Catholicism defended the relative autonomy of distinct spheres of human activity, whether of politics or religion or science or art and literature; each field has its independent criteria that must be scrupulously respected, although ultimately the formed conscience must make moral judgments. Finally, liberal Catholicism, despite its protagonists’ piety and papal loyalties, found it impossible to separate its project of evangelizing society from issues of internal church reform. None of this was taught me in a liberal Catholic version of the Baltimore Catechism. My parents just read Commonweal and the Catholic Worker and novels by Mauriac and Bernanos. Our bookshelves carried lots of books published by Sheed and Ward, indeed lots of books written by Frank Sheed and Maisie Ward.3 My father belonged to a generation of artists that hoped to rescue liturgical art from the mass-produced images and statuary of the religious goods companies. The family entertained the idea, then verging on heresy, as I found out when I voiced it at St. Paul of the Cross school, that the Mass...