The Blue Voice

Saturday, June 18, 2005

Catholic conservatives

George Weigel of the Ethics and Public Policy Center gives us a good snapshot of the viewpoint of a conservative Catholic (himself) on the new Pope Benedict XVI in this article: What Benedict XVI Means by George Weigel The Catholic Difference 05/06/05.

The opening paragraph gives a good clue to where he's going, because it praises the new Pope, Joseph Ratzinger, as "one of the great Christian minds and spirits of our time." Ratzinger is a theologian. But his main contribution - if we can call it that - to Christian theology has been to enforce a rigid and reactionary policy in his former office as head of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith.

Weigel makes his agenda even more clear in the second paragraph:

In the long view of history, though, April 19, 2005 [the date of Benedict's election as Pope], may mark the moment at which the forty-year effort to force Catholicism to tailor its doctrine and its message to the tastes of secular modernity crashed and burned.

That is a hostile polemical reference to the Second Vatican Council of 1962-65, in which the Church officially abandoned most of its effort to cling to the Middle Ages.

Catholic conservatives are currently saying that it what they see as the namby-pamby Vatican II outlook has caused a decline in the Church because of its lack of religious zeal. Now, this criticism makes some superficial sense in Europe and North America, where a probably irreversable secular trend has been at work for some time. But the reality is that in Latin America and Africa in particular, the Church has enjoyed a spectacular growth in recent decades.

Weigel explicitly complains about the reform Council:

Ever since the Second Vatican Council, some Catholics and most of the world media have expected - and in certain cases, demanded - that the Catholic Church follow the path taken by virtually every other non-fundamentalist western Christian community over the past century: the path of accommodation to secular modernity and its conviction that religious belief, if not mere childishness, is a lifestyle choice with no critical relationship to the truth of things. These expectations have involved both doctrinal accommodation (e.g., the question of whether Jesus is the unique savior of the world) and moral accommodation (e.g., the many issues involved in the post-Freudian claim that human beings are essentially bundles of desires). [my emphasis]

That quotation gives a glimpse at some of the religious and cultural perspectives that provide emotional, religious and political common ground for the various elements of what we call the Christian Right in the US. The fear of "modernity" (i.e., the last six hundred years of Western history), the exclusive claim of the Christian faith to religious truth and a pronounced fear of normal human "desires," he touches all of them in that short comment.

And he dismisses the ecumenical goals and modernizing impulses of Vatican II - including such changes in the ritual as using the language of the congregation rather than Latin in church services - with the following sneer:

Yet it is very, very difficult to argue that this strategy of cultural accommodation - which in some cases bleeds into cultural appeasement - has solved the two hundred fifty year old problem of being Christian in the modern world. Nor is it possible to demonstrate, empirically, that cultural accommodation or appeasement produce vital, growing, compelling Christian communities. Precisely the opposite is the case. Christian communities with porous doctrinal and moral boundaries wither and die. Christian communities with clear doctrinal and moral borders flourish, even amidst the acids of modernity.

Yet it was expected that the Catholic Church would, indeed must, take the path of accommodation: that has been the central assumption of what's typically called "progressive" Catholicism. That assumption has now been decisively and definitively refuted. The "progressive" project is over - not because its intentions were malign, but because it posed an ultimately boring question: how little can I believe, and how little can I do, and still remain a Catholic?

Protestant fundamentalists don't want to have church services in Latin. But this essentially reactionary impulse, the desire to go back to an idealized good old days, is very much a common denominator among the fundamentalists, Pentecostals and conservative Catholics that are attracted to the Christian Right and its causes.

Tags: catholic church, catholic fundamentalists, george weigel

posted at 6:32:00 PM by Bruce Miller

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