IS CATHOLIC LIBERALISM ON THE ASCENDENCY OR IS IT THE LAST HORRAH OF AN AGING GROUP OF BISHOPS, PRIESTS AND LAITY?

 

My comments first. I was schooled in liberal Catholicism and about eight years into it, I became somewhat disaffected by it and the loss of Catholic identity that liberal Catholicism foments. Bishop Lessard who lived at the Cathedral when I arrived there in 1985 mentored me into a more mature Catholicism, a solid Catholicism of the post-Vatican II era. Bishop Lessard would be considered a progressive in his embrace of Vatican II, he was solid on what Vatican II taught but unfortunately bought into the meme of bishops of the 1970’s that the church could heal all kinds of aberrations and reintegrate aberrant people back into the full life of the Church. Psychology and spiritual direction would accomplish this miracle. It was a Utopian pipe dream that has caused untold tragedy and grief in the Church from victims of sexual abuse of priest supposedly healed of it through therapy, prayer and reintegration. Bishop Lessard was not alone in this ideology unfortunately but he was a part of it and for only one priest that I am aware of who has cause grief galore for so many but who now is mercifully dead and reaping his just reward.

But with that said, Ross Doubthat thinks liberalism is on the ascendancy in the Church at large, with President Biden who epitomizes the “spirit of Vatican II” Church of liberalism and Pope Francis who does also but with more nuance than Biden, thank God.

There are bishops, priests and laity, my age, young and older, who still want to recover the heady days of the 1970’s before Pope St. John Paul II. I am 67 years old. They seem to be having their day under Pope Francis. 

We know in the political realm of the USA liberalism is on the ascendancy among many young Americans who would be in the Bernie Sanders and Ocasia camps. 

But I am not sure of young Catholics who are informed in their faith. I live in a bit of a bubble in Richmond Hill but it seems to me that 20, 30 and 40 somethings in my parish long for tradition and stability and are not necessarily enamored with Pope Francis. But Richmond Hill is a bubble and a very conservative community. 

Where do you think young Catholics are today, especially those of college and graduate school age?

I copy this from the Deacon’s Bench which he copies from the New York Times:

The conservative Catholic columnist for The New York Times, Ross Doubthat has some thoughts on how the new president represents and defines a kind of liberal Catholicism — and what that means:

Many emergent forces are changing liberalism’s relationship to religion — wokeness, secularization, even paganism. But the new president personally embodies none of them. Instead he has elevated his own liberal Catholicism to the center of our national life.

Calling a form of religion “liberal” can mean two different things: On the one hand, a theological liberalism, which seeks an evolution in doctrine to adapt to modern needs; on the other, support for policies and parties of the center-left. In practice, though, the two tend to be conjoined: The American Catholic Church as an institution is caught between the two political coalitions, but most prominent Catholic Democrats are liberals in theology and politics alike.

But more than a set of ideas, liberal Catholicism is a culture, recognizable in its institutions and tropes, its iconography and allusions — to Pope John XXIII and Jesuit universities, to the “seamless garment” of Catholic teaching and the “spirit” of the Second Vatican Council, to the works of Thomas Merton and hymns like “On Eagle’s Wings” (which Biden quoted in his victory speech).

And, of course, invocations of Pope Francis. A decade ago it was a commonplace to regard liberal Catholicism as a tradition in decline. Its period of maximal influence, the late 1960s and 1970s, had been an era of institutional crisis for the church, which gave way to the conservative pontificates of John Paul II and Benedict XVI. Conservative Catholics felt that liberal ideas had been tried and failed, liberal Catholics felt that they had been suppressed.

But then Francis gave the liberal tendency new life, reopening controversies that conservatives assumed were closed and tilting the Vatican toward cooperation with the liberal establishment and away from associations with conservatism.

The papacy does not issue political endorsements, but there seems little doubt that many figures in Francis’ inner circle welcome a Biden presidency. When the American bishops’ statement on his inauguration included a stern critique of his position on abortion, there was apparent pushback from the Vatican and explicit pushback from the most Francis-aligned of the American cardinals. So the conservative Catholics who spent the election year arguing that Biden isn’t a Catholic in good standing find themselves (not for the first time) in tacit conflict with their pope.

…If you wanted to make a case for its prospects and potential influence, you would emphasize three distinctive liberal-Catholic qualities: an abiding institutionalism, in contrast to the pure dissolving individualism of so much American religion; an increasingly multiethnic character, which matches our increasingly diverse republic; and a fervent inclusivity, an anxiety that nobody should feel discriminated against or turned away.