Religion: The New Counter-Reformation

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In the eight years since the end of the Second Vatican Council, the Roman Catholic left has commanded much of the public's attention. Escalating protest has often led to the slamming of doors—priests leaving their ministry, nuns leaving their orders, theologians like Britain's Charles Davis dropping out of the church entirely.

To a newly vocal conservative element in the U.S. Catholic Church, however, all too many liberals have not only remained in the church but moved quietly into control of the chanceries, the seminaries and parochial schools. Moreover, conservatives complain, some bishops are now wielding against the right the same hierarchical clout that they once used against the left.

A case in point: in a speech at Catholic University in Washington, D.C., last March, Bishop James Rausch, general secretary of the U.S. Catholic Conference, intervened in a feud between some liberal Catholic biblical scholars and several right-wing Catholic columnists who had charged the scholars with heresy. Taking the liberals' side, Rausch accused the journalists of scholarly incompetence; he deplored them as "third parties" who were trying to usurp the bishops' power to decide what is "orthodox" in Catholic theology. Freedom of the press, he said, "should not protect them from public criticism and public rebuke."

The scholarly squabble demonstrates a shift in priorities on the part of the Catholic right. In the 1960s it was largely concerned with political issues like attacking Communism and defending the Viet Nam War. Today, conservatives are more worried about church doctrine, liturgy and education. The biblical imbroglio, for instance, focuses on such questions as the literal reality of the Virgin birth, the nature of original sin, the historical accuracy of the Resurrection accounts and even, conservatives claim, the deity of Jesus Christ.

Many conservatives—or traditionalists, as some prefer to be called—are also alarmed at what they see as the casual abandonment of a culture that once seemed both rich and reassuring. They miss not only the Latin Mass and many familiar old hymns but many other pious practices that have been widely discarded since Vatican II: novenas, benediction, meatless Fridays, priests wearing cassocks and birettas, nuns wearing wimples. The old rituals and disciplines were visible symbols that Catholics were different from (and perhaps better than) other people. Many who resent the passing of traditional Catholic ways seem to feel that a comfortable certainty has vanished with the piety.