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Saturday, September 3, 2011

THE UGLINESS OF CATHOLIC LIBERALISM OR PROGRESSIVISM



Let's be clear. I consider my self a middle of the road moderate in the Catholic Church but lean to the right mostly but also to the left infrequently. Just to be clear.

I grew up in a conservative town, with conservative, strict Catholic principles that could easily be classified as pre-Vatican II because our Catholicism was pre-Vatican II. We were a cusp family and the transition to a post-Vatican II Catholicism was not always pretty and in fact fragmented our family in terms of Catholicism just as it fragmented the Church of the 1960's and 70's.

I went to a very liberal seminary in the 1970's, St. Mary's in Baltimore, Maryland. However, I had many great teachers and they did an excellent job of comparing pre-Vatican II and post-Vatican II approaches to theology and doctrine. While the manner in which the liturgy was celebrated was very much of its period, it was done well even with the many liberties various priests took with the Mass, some more egregious than others. Some priests refused elevations and genuflections. Our Masses definitely emphasized "meal" over "sacrifice" and "low church" over "high church," as well as "low Christology or high Christology." And believe me you that is the crux of most of Catholic lite or liberalism, low, low, low, Church, Christology and Ecclesiology--the human dimension overemphasized and the divine dimension diminished or marginalized. It's Pope Benedict's apt description of the "closed circle" horizontal view of being Church that excludes the Vertical dimension that is Divine and opens us to God and directs us away from our smallness.

What I never liked though about progressive Catholicism was its arrogance, bullying and subversiveness. As seminarians we were explicitly told by the administration not to go back to the diocese and bad-mouth the seminary or tell our bishops of the more unusual liberties the seminary allowed or turned a blind eye toward.

If a seminarian gave any appearance of being enamored with the more traditional aspects of Catholicism (and this antipathy of seminary authorities says more about them than those who liked these) such as praying the rosary, making holy hours before the Blessed Sacrament, desiring Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament on a frequent basis and a desire for high church liturgy, that seminarian would be ridiculed, marginalized and ask to leave the seminary for being rigid and pre-Vatican II. I cringe today when I think about the great number of seminarians who either left the seminary disillusioned by the liberal tactics and bullying of the administration and/or other more liberal seminarians and who had their more conservative beliefs and values shattered by unthinking, uncaring and intolerant liberals. Yes, liberals are bullies when they think their agenda for the Church is being challenged or threatened by more conservative, right thinking individuals.

Look at the priests in Austria bullying their Cardinal Archbishop and bringing Austria to the brink of schism and the formation of yet another Protestant denomination, this time a new form of Protestantism that most Protestants would decry as unnecessary since there already exists numerous Protestant expression of the Church that embrace everything these bullying Clerics desire to establish. They simply want the Catholic Church to bend to their decrees and demands. They are truly bullies.

David Mills in a First Things article writes the following about progressive and dissident Catholics:

It’s the usual story: lifelong Catholics (who are women), love the Church, feel called to priesthood, Church misogynist, hope for future change, women were priests in the early church, have to stay to promote change, accepted someday, international movement, and so on, though it leaves out the almost inevitable “the church is not the magisterium” line and adds the faux reassurance that excommunication “does not remove one from the church” but only bars one from the sacraments. (Not, of course, that they care.) Blah, blah, blah! (my comment).

That type of speaking and thinking is quite prevalent amongst those who feel they have a mission to make the Catholic Church into something she simply isn't nor the Documents of Vatican II ever declared or intended. Yet, they continue to spew forth an errant theology claiming Vatican II supports them 100% of the way. They rely on the "dead" Magisterium that formulated the documents of Vatican II (all men as I recall) and yet deplore the male only hierarchy/Magisterium and its teaching authority that is living today. What hypocrisy!

Just read more progressive blogs and periodicals and comments that are written like PrayTell and The National Catholic Reporter. There is so much venom and hatred for official Catholicism. One wonders why in the world they don't leave and join the Episcopal Church or simply join together in a separate church with like-minded negative thinkers? Many of these characters display attitudes and contempt that could easily be diagnosed as "arrested development" when it comes to one's response to authority. It is no secret that many priests and religious have unresolved authority issues with their parents, particularly their fathers and bring that baggage and beat that adolescent drum as they project their hostility away from unresolved parental authority issues onto the authority figures of the Church, especially the hierarchy.

I did not despise the pre-Vatican II Church but recognized the rigid legalism of many Catholics of that period needed purification. I do dispise post-Vatican II promoters of the "spirit of Vatican II" which misled me and many others during that time and sowed confusion rather than clarity concerning Catholic identity. They were dead wrong and promoted an agenda that was alien to Catholicism and what Vatican II actually taught. But confusion is often the product of misguided renewal.

Today we are in a spiritual battle for the soul of Catholicism. For my part, no matter what, I will always be a papist. For me the heart of Catholicism is union with the Holy Father and the bishops in union with him including my very own bishop. I will never stray from that and I pray for an ever stronger and more glorious Catholic identity that is challenging and sacrificial and leads to true discipleship in the modern world.

14 comments:

Anonymous said...

Fr, understanding the objective of the enemy is important. At least as important as knowing your own objective. This is inadvertently expressed when the writer the writer acknowledged that separation from the sacraments was trivial to the 'reformers'. Where we consider this an important leverage point in the battle the enemy sees this as cheap to surrender. This has the short term benefit of damaging the souls of his followers but also betrays his intent, which is not to win the soul of the Church, but destroy it. This is great benefit to us because the enemy will not contend for those sacraments but will simply ingore or replace them with blasphemous copies. Those copies are betrayed by their horizontal nature, as our Pope so well said and that is not lost to the people. Turning to face the Lord is a profound statement of this difference and as powerful an action as can be made in this war. As is often the case in a war, holding the right position predicts the winner.

However, I must admit there is a certain temptation to follow the Siren with the banjo in that second photo. You can sing many beautiful hymns with a back beat. The people feel included when you do that. ;-)

rcg

Anonymous said...

"Let's be clear. I consider my self a middle of the road moderate in the Catholic Church but lean to the right mostly but also to the left infrequently. Just to be clear."

Beautifully stated.

The part about leaning to the right mostly but also to the left infrequently reminds me that Catholics often find themselves "polically homeless."

Anonymous said...

Oops! Of course, I meant politically homeless in the previous post.

Anonymous said...

Funny, I thought you meant 'polemically'.

And agreed.

rcg

Rood Screen said...

"If a seminarian gave any appearance of being enamored with the more traditional aspects of Catholicism...that seminarian would be ridiculed, marginalized and ask to leave the seminary for being rigid and pre-Vatican II."
This was exactly my first experience in the seminary in the early 1990's. It was just dreadful. First a trip to the psychologist, and if that didn't help, the boot.
After ordination, many priests still find that orthodox teaching and traditional worship and devotion are all still taboo, and punishable in various, indirect ways.
I wish the laity were more aware of this situation. Many priests suffer in silence.

Anonymous said...

How can we spot these lonely clergy? The progressives are easy enough. It could be that blogs such as this are a good place to find people with a balance of liberal and conservative love of the Church and desire to express it more fully in a faithful rendition of the Litergy.

I do not shop for parishes but do small 'pilgrimages' when I hear of a priest who is pointing toward God and leading worship beyond self and local politics.

I expect the free market will continue to work for the Church. As participation has dropped off in progressive parishes, and seminaries and orders die, unwatered by the Blood of new thirsty acolytes so has the parishes who exhalt the Lord grown and fed new interest in vocations. To follow on Templar's excellent quote there may not be many here today; but we have enough.


rcg

Gene said...

This very thing was going on in Protestant seminaries and Divinity schools in the 60's and 70's. Fr., you and I were only a few years apart in our respective seminaries. I was there for the seminars under some of the big name Protestant theologians, went to the COCU (Committee on Church Union) meetings, listened to lectures by Kung, Berger, Hodgson, Marty, and Gilkey....then I puked. I quit the PhD. program, settled for an STM and an M.Div. and took a parish. Finally, after pastoring and preaching for a few years, I felt purified of the seminary poison. Now, I am finally home in the Catholic Church.
Most, if not all, of these liberal types do not believe the tenets of the Creed. Their entire theology and preaching is done tongue-in-cheek. Put simply, many of these Prot ministers and Catholic Priests
do not believe Jesus was the Son of God, they do not believe in the Resurrection of the body and the life everlasting, they do not believe "He shall come again in Glory to judge the living and the dead and His kingdom will have no end." Listen...they do not believe these things. I have talked to them, confronted them and, on a couple of occasions, told them exactly what frauds and phonies I think they are.
They view Jesus pretty much like Buddah or Lao Tzu or, for the real looney tunes,Che Guevara (who I notice is profiled in the USCCB commentary on the Catechism, along with a couple of other nut case Catholics). Resurrection is merely existential awareness and self-renewal, and their hope is in creating some benign world government to give everybody everything they need. Their God is government; it has to be. That is why there is such a close association between Left Wing liberals and nut case progressive Catholics. They eat from the same trough. These people are the enemy, folks. If that sounds too harsh, then you don't get it.

Gene said...

Let me correct myself...the USCCB commentary profiles Caesar Chavez, not Che Guevarra (although it would not at all surprise me for the USCCB to profile Che). I got my Third World rabble rousers mixed up for a minute. Sorry.

Manny said...

Fr, an excellent blog. This is my first time visiting here. May I ask how you would define a "a middle of the road moderate in the Catholic Church"?

I consider myself very conservative on the big issues (abortion, gay marriage, women priests) but I do think there should be some flexibility on things not biblically proscribed. For instance, I cannot understand the Church position on birth control between a married couple or I would be perfectly fine with married priests. What exactly makes a moderate in the Catholic Church?

Vianney1100 said...

"It is no secret that many priests and religious have unresolved authority issues with their parents, particularly their fathers and bring that baggage and beat that adolescent drum as they project their hostility away from unresolved parental authority issues onto the authority figures of the Church, especially the hierarchy." Father, you just diagnosed the homosexual problem in the priesthood.

Fr. Allan J. McDonald said...

A middle of the road moderate Catholic for me at least means striving to accept and believe everything that the Catholic Church "believes, teaches and professes to be revealed by God" as we ask our adult Candidates for full communion in the Church to profess (I might have paraphrased the actual words). So I try to believe and defend what the Church teaches even in moral matters such as those you described. However, we know that in all moral matters there are shades of gray. I wholeheartedly endorse the Commandment "Thou shalt not kill." It doesn't need to be solemnly defined as infallible by the Church because it come directly from God in the Old Testament. However, we all know there are exceptions to this rather clear commandment, i.e. self-defense and just war.
So in lesser defined moral matters, such as artificial birth control, while I support the teaching and strive to help those I teach to understand its underpinnings in natural law and the two aspects of the "marital act" unitive and procreative, I do realize how married couples and wives in particular struggle in their sexual relationship and have anxieties about more children. So I'm doctrinally very conservative and pastorally flexible but I never try to make moral decisions for my parishioners. I always tell them that if they make a moral decision that is not fully supported by the Church then that's between them and God and if they've made a mistake, it's their mistake, not mine! In other words, I don't want them to say at their personal judgment "Fr. McDonald said we could do this!" And at my personal judgment, I don't want to be held accountable for other people's sins by having counseled them to sin.

Manny said...

Thank you for your reply Father.

Anonymous said...

It's rather saddening to read that many priests are forced to suffer in silence regarding a love for those things that are Catholic traditions.

Perhaps, at the local level, through informal chatting with the laity more of them will become aware of this situation.
Perhaps some laity under one nose are suffering in silence too.


~SqueekerLamb

Anonymous said...

Perhaps, instead of using political labels of liberal or conservative, we should describe ourselves as being orthodox or heterodox.