The Nonsense of Liberal Catholics

At a Catholic university recently I listened to a discussion between a liberal Catholic theologian and an atheist. “Tell me,” said the atheist, “what is a Catholic? What must one believe if he is to consider himself a good Catholic? Must he believe in heaven and hell and in the immortality of the soul? In papal infallibility? Must he believe that premarital sex and artificial birth control and remarriage after divorce are all morally wrong, seriously sinful?”

“Most of that is mere legalism, mere negativism,” the liberal Catholic theologian quickly responded.

“Well,” the atheist persisted, “if people needn’t believe any of these things to consider themselves good Catholics, what must they believe? What isn’t mere legalism? Just what do you people mean when you say you are in the church? What does being a Catholic really mean?”

The theologian clearly did not like this line of thought. Such questions are considered “unecumenical” and “divisive” by the contemporary Catholic liberal. They stress “differences rather than similarities” and belong to the old, the “closed,” the “defensive,” and “medieval” church, to the world of “mere apologetics.” They are “irrelevant” to the new, the “open and authentic” church; and it is considered bad form to raise such questions these days. Nevertheless, after careful thought the liberal theologian attempted an answer: “Being a Catholic means awareness of community—awareness of human unity related to Christ.”

Bemused, the atheist replied: “That’s interesting, because by your definition I am a Catholic.” And, of course, he was right; by the liberal’s “definition” practically anyone qualifies as a Catholic.

I cite this theologian’s remarks because they typify what, in honesty, I can only call the nonsense flourishing in liberal Catholic circles today (a nonsense particularly repugnant to me because my sympathies have always been far more with the liberal than with the conservative wing of the church). And one need not attend theological seminars or lectures or read esoteric theological journals to discover this sort of thing in all its plentitude, for it has become a favorite subject of the popular press. Consider, for instance, the following answers to the question, “What is a Catholic?”—answers given by prominent liberal Catholic theologians, the Rev. Robert Adolfs and the Rev. Leo Alting Von Geusau, and prominently displayed, not in Cross Currents, but in Look magazine (January, 1968). Being a Catholic, says Father Adolfs, is “the experience of human unity related in one way or another toward the person of Jesus of Nazareth.” Father Von Geusau says that “belonging [to the Catholic Church] is not determined by sociological or sacramental criteria but by one’s awareness of community” (my italics). By such answers, by such “definitions,” Baptists and Methodists and Quakers, Hindus and Buddhists and Jews, Holy Rollers and Satanists and members of the YMCA and of the Ku Klux Klan are all Catholics. This kind of writing is typical of many liberal Catholic thinkers today. Read any of a number of prominent liberal Catholic theologians, philosophers, and journalists—among them, Leslie Dewart, Father Gregory Baum, Michael Novak, Daniel Callahan—or any of a number of the various popular liberal Catholic publications, such as Commonweal or the National Catholic Reporter, and you will find example after example of the same kind of thing.

And when today’s liberals aren’t producing the terribly vague—indeed, quite meaningless—assertations mentioned above, they seem to be engaged in saying things that are either clear but wrong, or vague and wrong. For example, consider the following statements—also in Look—by prominent liberal Catholic theologians, clerics, and laymen: (1) It is meaningless to talk about heaven and hell, since we can know nothing about the hereafter; (2) of course remarriage after divorce is permissible for Catholics; (3) Catholics not only may practice artificial birth control but have a moral duty to do so (because of the population problem); (4) papal infallibility is not a valid dogma but only a medieval, outmoded notion; (5) premarital sex (either heterosexual or homosexual) is not sinful if it is “humanly integrated” or “directed toward a total human relationship.”

Now anyone—Catholic or non-Catholic—knowing anything about Catholic moral teaching should recognize that for persons to hold these beliefs and still regard themselves as good Catholics is wrongheadedness of the most obvious kind. And anyone who respects the integrity of language should be able to see the vagueness of such statements as number five. Phrases like “humanly integrated” and “directed toward a total human relationship” are as meaningless as the following definition of God given by the well-known Catholic theologian Leslie Dewart: “that which lies in the openness of the transcendence which we grasp in consciousness as constituting the spiritual substance of man.”

The prevalence of this sort of thing is in large part, I think, what has motivated Pope Paul to reaffirm strongly and clearly in recent months many of the church’s basic teachings, not only on birth control but on such teachings as Christ’s divinity and the immortality of the Soul. What the Pope seems to realize is that while de-emphasizing the differences between Catholics and non-Catholics (the major goal of the “ecumenical,” the “relevant,” the “liberal” church) is thoroughly laudable, denying these differences, as do many liberals today (by, for example, defining a Catholic as anyone with “an awareness of community”), is nonsense; for when these differences are denied, definition becomes impossible, and the identity of the church is destroyed. No matter how much we may favor the liberal’s goals of “ecumenism” and “relevance” (and I strongly sympathize with both), and no matter how unsympathetic we may be to particular pronouncements of the Pope (such as the birth-control statement), I think it only fair that we recognize what seems to me to be the Pope’s general concern with liberals and liberal reforms. He is obviously concerned that, in the name of “ecumenism” and “relevance,” the church may become little more than an organization of social workers. And obviously he realizes that when questions like “What is a Catholic? Why be a Catholic?” are considered irrelevant, immature, inauthentic; when concern over eternal life, over heaven and hell, is thought to be, in Leslie Dewart’s words, “mere childishness”; when, in short, the Catholic Church becomes nothing more than an international (and probably not very efficient) welfare agency, then people of common sense are going to demand in quite justified disgust: Who needs Catholicism? Why don’t we simply beef up UNESCO?

Increasingly, Catholic liberals of the sort I’ve been discussing are coming under attack, not by church conservatives, but by liberals who have left the Catholic Church. If, these former Catholics contend, today’s Catholic liberals were really intellectually honest and morally courageous, they would state their heresies clearly instead of obscurely, and, much more important, would have the courage to follow their heresies to their logical end—that is, to leave the Catholic Church. An example is an exchange between David Perkins, a former Catholic, and the editors of the National Catholic Reporter (August 14, 1968), the most widely circulated of the American liberal Catholic publications.

Responding to the confused thinking of the many liberal Catholics, including the NCR editors, who have denied the morally binding nature of the Pope’s encyclical on birth control and other key Catholic teachings, Mr. Perkins reminds the liberals that the Catholic Church is (1) authoritarian and (2) voluntary. “Rational men and women,” he says, “do not remain in an authoritarian structure when they no longer accept the authority.” He points out that, beyond the bad reasons of “ceremony and nostalgia,” liberals like the NCR editors have no reasons for staying in the church. The editors’ answer to his question, “Why do you stay in the Church?,” is typical of the sort of thing I’ve been talking about.

Although Perkins makes it absolutely clear that, as an intellectually honest man, he has left the church because he no longer believes in essential church teachings, the editors begin by saying that Perkins’s trouble is that he insists on regarding the church as “an institution rather than a movement.” In other words, if he would only think of the church as a “movement,” incredible teachings would somehow become credible. Then—though Perkins makes it clear that he has left the church, that, indeed, he is hostile to the church, whether it be thought of as institution or movement—the editors go on to declare that Perkins stands “to our left performing for us the same useful service Rap Brown performed for Martin Luther King, Jr.” Obviously, it would make more sense to say that Perkins stands to the NCR, not as Rap Brown stood to Martin King, but as Rap Brown stands to Jim Eastland. But the editors, I fear, don’t do a very good job of making sense. Consider the remainder of their answer:

You stay because of the Eucharist, because of its connection with the Last Supper, because of the connection with men you think it gives. You stay to be taught; the magisterium can be misused, unused, or abused, but it has things to say. You stay because of people like Martin Luther King (Baptist), Martin Marty (Lutheran), William Coffin (Episcopal), Dorothy Day and the Fathers Berrigan, who supply something not so often found in the secular saints. You stay because outside the community you probably won’t pay much attention to Christ—and even though you know the structure of the community sometimes denies him.

One stays in the church “because of the Eucharist, because of its connection with the Last Supper, because of the connection with men” one thinks it gives. What does this mean? What do the editors mean by “Eucharist”? Do they mean the traditional Real Presence, the presence that distinguishes the Catholic Eucharist from the Eucharists of other groups? If this is what they mean (and as a regular reader of the NCR, I’m sure it is not), why don’t they say so? The truth, I fear, is that the editors, like so many Catholic liberals today, while they regularly use the term, can provide no sensible definition of it. (Asked what he meant by “Eucharist,” the liberal Catholic theologian I mentioned at the beginning, a priest sympathetic with the Delano, California, grapestrikers, replied: “Having dinner with Cesar Chavez and the grapepickers at the Filipino mess hall in Delano.”) For the clear (if, from the point of view of most non-Catholics, incredible) traditional meaning of the Eucharist, today’s liberal Catholics have substituted what amounts to little more than a pretentious vagary. Father Adolfs calls the Eucharist a “coming together to pray and break bread.” But who needs the Catholic Church to do this? One can “pray and break bread” in any number of organizations or institutions or, for that matter, in any number of “movements.” What the NCR editors mean by the term “connection,” and why one can only think—that is, why a Catholic can’t, assured by doctrine, know—that the Eucharist can give him this “connection,” are other questions they leave unanswered.

One stays in the Church, the editors next tell us, “to be taught” (taught what?); “the magisterium can be misused, unused, or abused, but it has things to say.” That the magisterium has “things to say” seems rather obvious. The question that should be answered is What things? And, more important in answering Perkins’s question, Must Catholics believe these things if they wish to call themselves legitimate Catholics?

The editors next tell us that one stays in the church because of “people like William Coffin (Episcopal), Martin Luther King (Baptist), Martin Marty (Lutheran), Dorothy Day and the Fathers Berrigan, who supply something not so often found in the secular saints.” I find the logic of this hard to follow. Why should a Catholic stay in the Catholic Church because he admires any of the well-known Protestants the editors mention? Wouldn’t it make more sense for such a Catholic to become an Episcopalian or a Baptist or a Lutheran? Who, one wonders, are the “secular saints”? What is the “something” the secular saints, whoever they may be, cannot supply, at least “not so often” as can these persons whom the editors apparently regard as “religious saints”?

Next, we are told that one stays in the church because “outside the community you probably won’t pay much attention to Christ—and even though you know the structure of the community sometimes denies him.” What do they mean by “paying attention to Christ?” And why must one stay in the Catholic Church to do this? Many scholars dedicated to proving Christ a charlatan have spent their lives “paying attention to Christ”; Ernest Renan undoubtedly paid more attention to him than most Catholics ever have or ever will.

Wrapping up their answer, the editors conclude:

There are other reasons for staying including inertia and the nostalgia [my italics] Mr. Perkins mentions. For some people who would rather fight than switch, the reason may be that the Church supplies an effective filter against too harsh realities. The good reasons and the bad reasons aren’t coercive. Thank God you no longer feel obliged to prove your case.…

What this implies is that there are no good reasons for staying in the Catholic Church. Yet the intention of this full-page editorial essay was to answer the question, “Why stay in the church?” I find this all rather confusing, and in charity toward the editors I would like to write it off as mere clumsiness. But the editors apparently regard lack of clarity as a virtue. At one point, in fact, they actually condemn Perkins for being “too utterly clear.” “One’s idea of the Church,” they admonish him, “ought to be fuzzy at the moment, not for the sake of fuzziness but to be true to the reality. To what reality? That is another of the many questions the editors apparently feel no obligation to answer.

After reading this editorial, one might suspect that perhaps truth itself is one of those “too harsh realities” the editors claim the church protects Catholics from. For refusal to face the truth, the desire (conscious or unconscious) to conceal the truth (not only from others, but often from ourselves) rather than to reveal it, is, in George Orwell’s words, “the great enemy of clear language.”

I refuse to believe, however, as Mr. Perkins believes, that the rhetoric of liberal Catholics reveals wide scale, willful intellectual dishonesty and moral cowardice; and in dwelling on that rhetoric I have not intended a broadside attack on either the National Catholic Reporter or the institution of liberal Catholicism. I have long admired and championed many of the NCR causes, and, as I said previously, my sympathies have always been far more with the liberal than with the conservative wing of the church. Many of the liberals Perkins attacks, liberals who stay in the church for no good reason, do so, I am sure, because they wish to use the weight and moral authority, the tradition of the Church, to achieve good ends in civil rights and similar causes—to achieve, for instance, fair wages for the grapestrikers by reminding grapeowners (many of whom are Catholic) that the encyclicals bind them to paying a just wage. (The problem with these liberals is that they invoke and abide by only the encyclicals they agree with, thus making a farce of the “authority” they claim the grapeowners must abide by.) And though I cannot intellectually sympathize with these liberals, I certainly think their intentions are good. I also share their openness to dissent, to the idea of an open church, to dialogue with non-Catholics; but I wonder how we can have either real dissent or real dialogue unless we first have a rigorous respect for the integrity of language and logic, unless we recognize that clear definitions and distinctions are as indispensable to genuine dissent and dialogue as is recognition of the principle of contradiction. And I firmly believe that, while the tone and some of the conclusions of some critics of liberal Catholicism may be rabid, there is certainly much truth in what they are saying.

What they are saying, at its most charitable and valuable, seems to be something like this: Perhaps it is time for Catholic liberal intellectuals to quit dismissing the rational discussion of religious matters as “mere apologetics.” Perhaps, indeed, it is time for these liberals to present a new apologetic in place of the old one they have so thoroughly abandoned. Perhaps it is time for them to stop declaring smugly that Catholics need “no longer prove their case,” and to start, if not proving, at least clearly presenting that case. Behind the harsh voice of these critics there seems a much gentler voice; and what, finally, that voice seems to be saying to the Catholic liberals is simply this: You have demonstrated your ability to love God with your hearts; is it not time to demonstrate your ability to love him with your minds as well?

James P. Degnan is associate professor of English literature at the University of Santa Clara, California. He also teaches advanced writing courses there. His writing has appeared in such periodicals as “Commonweal,” the Atlantic Monthly,” and the “Virginia Quarterly Review.”

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