Tuesday May 13, 2008

"Is liberal Catholicism dead?"

"Is liberal Catholicism dead?" asks David van Biema in Time magazine. It's a pretty good essay, actually. And the answer, it seems, is yes, pretty much. Excerpt:

But the familiar progressives-versus-Vatican paradigm seems almost certain to be undone by a looming demographic tsunami. Almost everyone agrees that the "millennial generation," born in 1980 or later, while sharing liberal views on many issues, has no desire to mount the barricades. Notes [liberal Jesuit Father Tom] Reese, "Younger Catholics don't argue with the bishops; they simply do what they want or shop for another church." And Hispanic Catholics, who may be the U.S. majority by 2020, don't see this as their battle. "I'm sure they're happy that the celebration of the Eucharist is in the vernacular," says Tilley, "but they don't have significant issues connected to Vatican II."

And so, unless Benedict contradicts in Rome what he said in New York, the Church may have reached a tipping point. This is not to say that the (overhyped) young Catholic Right will swing into lay dominance. Nor will liberal single-issue groups simply evaporate. But if they cohere again, it will be around different defining issues.

This is actually food for a more interesting discussion than the usual left-right, orthodox-liberal shoutfests. Diogenes at Catholic World Report makes the critical point that even if the liberal Catholic project is moribund, the liberal establishment can drag out the expiration by controlling the institutions (chanceries, rectories, departments of theology). But I think Fr. Reese makes a pretty devastating point by saying that the young don't even see the point in arguing with the bishops. The implication is that younger Catholics don't consider the matter of authority worth arguing about, because as a practical matter, they don't recognize it.

The old progressives-vs.-conservatives battle of the post-conciliar soixante-huitards is ceasing to matter, not because the orthodox have won the day -- would that it were so! -- but because they marched through the institutions and created a new generation that neither knows the substance of its faith, nor considers that important. In all sincerity, I don't really understand the complaint of the Catholic left: true, they don't have women priests, but otherwise, Moralistic Therapeutic Deism has largely won the field. Again, from my point of view that's a tragedy, but there it is. The outward form still exists, but the inner life?

This is going to take at least a couple of generations to sort out, but I would suggest the example of Europe as indicative of where US Catholicism might be heading. Those Catholics who have held on to the faith across generations are the traditionalists and otherwise orthodox who have not accomodated themselves to the culture. Van Biema, I think, makes a mistake in calling liberal Catholicism "dead" because its passions aren't shared by the younger generation. This reminds me of the mistake a lot of pepole make about Barack Obama, thinking of him as a post-Boomer figure capable of putting the obsessions of the 1960s behind us. He is, but only superficially: he has absorbed the core beliefs of the Sixties generation, and expresses them without agonizing over them.

What think ye?

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Filed Under: dead, Diogenes, liberal Catholicism, Time, van Biema

posted by Rod Dreher @ 2:49pm Permalink Email This Add to: