The Crisis of Conservative Catholicism by Ross Douthat (10/30/15)

[Music] it's really my pleasure to introduce Ross Douthat he doesn't really need I think much of an introduction in this crowd he's emerged as the I think one of the most important public voices for Christians in contemporary American society and he's here this evening to speak to us about the crisis of conservative Catholicism so lost out there welcome [Applause] [Music] thank you so much it's a pleasure to be here at the third session of the Synod on the family Walter Kasper will be speaking over drinks later and no no it really is a pleasure to be here I'm not sure I can live up to that overly kind introduction but I actually grew up reading first things as a teenager it was one of the many provocative lying around the house and at that time I only read Richard John new houses column and skipped over Rene Gerard's theories on scapegoating in Christian theology but now I pretend to have read them both but so yeah so it's a distinct honor for me to be here tonight and obviously this is a very fraught and interesting time in the history of Roman Catholicism and I'm going to be speaking on that theme I guess and I thought I'd begin by sort of telling a story which is a story that I've heard in various versions many times as a first things reader from a tender age and it's one I've told more than a few times myself in public and private in my journalistic career and arguments with friends and so on and it's a story about the Catholic Church in the second half of the 20th century and it goes something like this once upon a time 50 years ago now there was an ecumenical council of the church its goal was to reorient Catholicism away from its 19th century fortress mentality to open a new dialogue with the modern world and to prepare the church for an era of evangelization and renewal this was not intended to be a revolutionary council it was pastoral knock doctrinal and nothing in its deliberations documents and reforms were meant to rewrite dogma or Protestant eyes of faith but the council sessions happened to coincide with an era of social upheaval and cultural revolution in the West and an apparent convergence between liberalism and Catholicism swiftly melted away and the council's hopeful hope forward was hijacked in a sense by those for whom renewal came to mean an accommodation to the spirit of the 1960's and 1970's and eventually the transformation of the church along liberal Protestant lines and so soon two parties developed within Catholicism one which followed the actual documents of the council and urged the church to maintain continuity with the Catholic past and one loyal to a more nebulous spirit of the council that just happened to coincide with some of the cultural fashions that came in in its wake the second party had its way in many Catholic institutions seminaries religious orders liturgical conferences Catholic universities diocesan bureaucracies for many many years and the results were overall disastrous collapsing massive tendance vanishing vocations a swift erosion of Catholic identity almost everywhere you looked but fortunately for the church by the grace of God a pope was elected who belonged to the first party the party of continuity who rejected the hermeneutic of rupture who carried the true intentions of the council forward while proclaiming the ancient truths of Catholicism anew and while liberal Catholicism what marry a burst at in the pages of first things to which you should all subscribe dub Catholicism light failed to reproduce itself and began to many ways quite literally died out the Catholic witness of this Pope and then his successor inspired exactly the kind of renewal that the council fathers had originally hoped for a generation of bishops priests and laity prepared to witness to the fullness of Catholicism the splendor of its truth and by the turn of the millennium it was clear with anyone with eyes to see that this generation that John Paul the second generation owned the Catholic future that the liberal alternative had been tried and failed and that the Church of the 21st century would involve a successful and increasingly settled synthesis conservative and modern rooted in tradition but not traditionalist of conciliar and pre conciliar Catholicism in the Church of 2,000 years of history and the Church of Vatican 2 so the story I've just told or sketched is think what you might call the master narrative of conservative Catholicism in the West or at least in the United States it's a story that was waiting for me in the pages of first things and elsewhere when I became a Catholic in the late 1990s late in John Paul's pontificate but while he was still hale and firmly in command it's a story that seemed confirmed by developments outside the church and outside in the United States the collapse of mainline Protestantism the emergence of a kind of Catholic moment in American politics and culture the rapid growth of Catholicism in Africa and the faiths continued fade in the home territory of the hermeneutic of rupture northern Europe you can poo there if you want no okay and anyway and more like I said Cardinal Kasper will be here later and when Joseph Ratzinger succeeded John Paul is Benedict the sixteenth the hermeneutic of rupture seemed all but defeated the triumph of conservative Catholicism seemed all but ratified and the story I've just told all but confirmed as true but now it's a story in crisis and that crisis I think has been building for a little while it began in certain ways with the sex abuse crisis which was not a crisis of conservative Catholicism per se its roots twined much too deep for that but it cast a shadow over John Paul the second last years it raised significant questions about his governance of the church and it discredited figures from Bernard law in Boston to the nightmare that was Marcel Macy l who had once seemed like pillars of the John Paul the second revival the scandal could be partially assimilated to the conservative narrative since the sex abuse itself looked like it had peaked in the chaotic years after vatican ii and the lacs seminary and episcopal culture of that era clearly contributed to its spread but the cover-up went on for far longer and it didn't fit neatly with the conservative narrative of post 1970s revival and renewal suggesting as it did a persistent clerical assigned Nisour de neri catholics a corruption in the hierarchy that couldn't be blamed on liberalism alone and then hard on the heels of that crisis came the sudden rout of cultural conservatism in the United States on a number of issues and most notably on same-sex marriage which had once seemed like a place where a natural law understanding of marriage and sexual sexuality still had some post sexual revolution traction and the route on marriage overlapped with and probably contributed to the rise of the so-called nuns Americans with no religious affiliation whose growth in the millennial generation undercut 1990s era hopes that America might be on the cusp of a sustained religious revival and while the growth of this population was spread across almost every faith tradition the Catholic losses were still striking ex Catholics would be one of the country's largest religious groups if they were religious and absent Hispanic immigration trends Catholic affiliation and practice would resemble mainline Protestantism a little more than many Catholics would be eager to admit and then finally came the struggles of Benedict's pontificate which began with the hope that he would finish John Paul's work of restoration and also fully clean up what he famously called the filth within the church but which ended with a sense of an essentially on governor believe a de Caen blind to contemporary media realities corrupt and leak ridden and beyond the capacity of the man who had been Joseph Ratzinger to master so all of these developments were challenges at least to conservative Catholic optimism and they were signs that John Paul's era had perhaps stabilized and purified the church and influenced the wider culture less than many Catholics and hoped but they didn't suggest a clear alternative to the john paul ii synthesis or call it's ascendance within the church into real doubt the conservative master narrative might have looked more questionable in 2010 than it did in 1999 or upon Ratzinger's election as benedict but there was no vibrant potent plausible alternative the waning of liberal catholicism seemed to be continuing a pace an outside of certain theology departments universities in the Jesuit tradition and the pages of the National Catholic Reporter the idea that the church needed a fresh round of revolution seemed to have lost its once intoxicating appeal until the election of Jorge bergoglio as Pope Francis that is now this will not be a detailed talk you may be relieved to hear about what I think the current pontiff really thinks on any given topic I'll just say something briefly and suggest that he is not a theological liberal as we understand the term in the United States he is - super naturalistic - pietistic too much of a moral conservative - Catholic for that however his economic and environmentalist views are clearly more radical and more strongly felt than those of his immediate presses predecessors he clearly feels that the church under John Paul and Benedict laid too much stress on issues like abortion and marriage and not enough on social justice and he has sympathy with liberal Catholic proposals particularly around divorce remarriage and communion that seemed to promise to bring more people back to the sacraments back to a full participation in the faith and when you put those tendencies together you have what we have seen a pontificate that inwards deeds and appointments has reopened doors that seem to be closed since the late 1970s and offering liberal Catholicism a kind of second chance a new springtime of the sort that would have seemed hard to imagine just a few short years ago and the response to this opening should be revelatory I think for conservative Catholics accustomed to think of the church's theologically liberal wing as essentially moribund frozen in amber with felt banners and guitar masses and the call to action conference because it turns out that liberal Catholicism was more resilient than the conservative master narrative suggested that it had and has resources personnel in a persistent appeal that were only waiting for a more favorable environment to make themselves felt and make themselves felt they have the entire senato process to say nothing of the many arguments swirling around it has been shot through with ideas that many conservatives thought had been put to rest by John Paul the second from sociological arguments that conservatives feel are substitutes for gospel faith - claims that at the very least flu with harrassing two visions of an essentially Anglican eyes structure for Catholicism didn't we win these arguments already I've heard many conservative Catholics say over the last year or so and the answer is yes but not as permanently as they had thought and some of this liberal Catholic resilience was always visible conservatives just tended to close their eyes to it a little bit most of the legacy institutions of Western Catholicism the bureaucracies and committees and prominent universities and charitable organizations never reconciled themselves to the john paul ii era or they went along with it half-heartedly the waiting a different era a different pope a different church and the fact that many conservatives sometimes think of these institutions as functionally post Catholic or caricature them as such doesn't make them any less a part of the church as an organism a culture a lived experience for the average mass goer or Catholic family far more American Catholics graduate from colleges and universities run by the Jesuit Order than graduate from say colleges that advertised in the pages of first things and in that sense even after three decades and two conservative popes there are many places where conservative Catholicism is still a counterculture with in important institutions in the church and then in the pews to Western Catholicism is a faith deeply deeply divided and nothing that's happened in the last few decades has changed that conservatives complain and I think justifiably that polls showing high levels of dissent from church teaching the kind of polls that feature prominently in many American newspapers whenever Catholicism is in the news these polls lump church-going Catholics together with the Christmas and Easter variety and that's true it's a fair criticism but in the United States for instance even frequent Mass goers are deeply split on questions that conservatives consider part of the clear and unchangeable teaching of the church everyone is aware that only a small minority even of practicing Catholics accept the church's teaching in humanity tie on artificial contraception but it isn't just that issue where dissent from the church's view of marriage and sexuality is pervasive to take the pressing issue of the moment 42% of American Catholics who attend Mass weekly think that the divorced and remarry should be allowed to receive communion 48% think that cohabitating catholics should be allowed to receive I'm actually kind of shocked that the numbers aren't flipped but really that last number shouldn't be surprising since only 46% of weekly massive tenders believe that living together outside of wedlock is a sin so there has been and continues to be a very large constituency again of practicing engaged Catholics who want a different direction a more liberal turn within the church and of course this constituency and this conservatives have always known has the advantage of having many many lapsed Catholics and non-catholics on its side particularly non Catholics and lapsed Catholics in the commanding heights of Western culture the media the film industry television places where I work and so on who expect sincerely and they think reasonably that the church will eventually inevitably imitate Episcopalian ISM and who stand ready to celebrate the triumph of capital H history whenever it seems poised to finally arrive now what has been striking though and genuinely revelatory about the Frances era is two things and the first this may be my own sort of mistaken impression but it had struck me as someone engaged with inter Catholic arguments for 10 or 15 years now that there was a real sort of Catholic Center left in American life which I thought of as basically dissenting on contraception and Humana V tie thinking that the church needed to be more welcoming to gay Catholics more welcoming in general wanting the church to be more focused on social justice and so on clearly a constituency for the Pope Francis approach but I also thought that this constituency was center-left I guess and not left that it had a basically Orthodox view of the sacraments overall that it had you know that it didn't want to go as far as a lot of liberal Catholics in 1975 wanted to go and just from arguing myself with people over the course of Francis's pontificate I'm no longer sure that there is quite so large a Catholic center left and I think a lot of the voices on the Catholic Center left were and are actually more radical in their ultimate assumptions about where the church would go and where the church should go and that I think is something that has been clarified in interesting ways over the course of the last year or two and then I think in particular in this point this these two points sort of overlap because some of the people who have made this clear are themselves priests and bishops and archbishops it is striking how strong the constituency for a liberal turn remains within the priesthood and the hierarchy the places where thirty years of conservative restoration whatever you want to call it to have left their strongest impact and that impact was real seminaries really have changed dramatically since the 70s there really is more of a John Paul the second and Benedict generation of younger priests the hierarchy is more conservative than it was in the last years of Paul to 6th and to be clear I don't think that most of the Cardinals voting for Jorge bergoglio thought they were voting to reopen the communion and remarriage debate let alone that their votes were any kind of deliberate rejection of the Magisterium of the previous two popes but the fact remains that a College of Cardinals that was theoretically stacked in ways that liberal Catholics bolon Dan despaired over for many years and decades by John Paul the second and Benedict the sixteenth did elect as Pope a candidate who had been championed across two conclaves by the most liberal Cardinals within the church the fact remains that all of the German Italian French Swiss Latin American and so on bishops who have advocated for changing the Church's doctrine or as they insist the discipline just the discipline not the doctrine on marriage and the sacrament sacraments were appointed and elevated by the last two popes and the fact remains that while the majority of bishops do seem loyal in principle to the Magisterium of john paul ii there has been no shortage of episcopal enthusiasm for and essentially I think Hegelian understanding of the Holy Spirit's work and the development of doctrine yes Pope Francis did have to reach down to Spokane Washington to find the poor-man's Joseph Bernhard and currently serving as Archbishop of Chicago but the view that history will have its way in the church is not just a province of European liberals that quote comes from an Australian the Archbishop of Brisbane during the course of the Synod responding to critics of his comments that stable second marriages shouldn't ever be called adultery and a similar perspective has emanated from geographic regions that conservative Catholics have sometimes liked to contrast with decadent Europe like Latin America and South Asia the current liberal hope for the next Conclave as far as I can tell is not a Belgian or a German but Cardinal Tagle of the Philippines so even in the hierarchy that the last two popes themselves appointed there is no full consensus about John Paul the seconds teachings or about the post 1970s conservative restoration writ large and of course the last two popes are no longer appointing bishops and archbishops should pope francis live another five years he will probably have appointed half the Cardinals in the Conclave that elects his successors and while not all of his appointments will be transparently liberal it would be foolish to expect that a more conservative Conclave will assemble when the current pontiff passes to his reward so what conclusions my conservative Catholics draw from all these developments and revelations to begin with I think they should recognize that the future of Catholicism is still deeply contested a spirit of vatican ii hermeneutic of rupture catholicism does indeed have many of the weaknesses that conservatives have spent the last few decades pointing out and the fate of the protestant mainline does indeed suggest that the kind of full hog alien ism is the Royal Road to institutional suicide but the promise of some kind of reconciliation between Catholicism or Christianity writ large and modernity sexual modernity especially also has a persistent and let's be frank entirely understandable appeal which is why theological liberalism tends to be rediscovered as often as it seems to wane and the church exists within a larger cultural matrix that will always or at least for as far into the future as I can see regard a liberalized Protestant eyes Christianity as the coming thing the inevitable next step for the church and that prophecy need not be fulfilled to shape the way that millions of Catholics think about their faith so those conservative Catholics you may know if you're one of them who have expected a kind of biological solution to post Vatican 2 divisions in the church in which more liberal Catholics have small families don't successfully raise them in the faith and gradually go extinct you know you know how you've made arguments like this I've heard them need to recalibrate their expectations and recognize that liberal Catholicism will probably be with us for generations and generations yet to come and with that recognition there needs to be a deeper process of discernment because what I've been describing so far in the talk as liberal Catholicism is of course far more multifarious and complicated than that politicized label conveys there is a form of what people call liberal Catholicism that's simply a Catholicism that doesn't really want to vote Republican or outside the American context that's skeptical of the excesses of late modern global capitalism and that doesn't see the Social Doctrine of the church fully embodied in political conservatism this sort of liberal Catholicism is entirely compatible with Catholic orthodoxy and indeed it's flourishing or revival should be regarded even by those who differ with its politics as a sign of a healthy Catholicism one not imprisoned by partisanship and ideology then there's a form of liberal Catholicism that doesn't have a sweeping program of change for the church but just find certain teachings either too challenging to live by or too difficult to fully understand and this form is less a threat to Catholic orthodoxy than a necessary challenge to conservative Catholics a challenge to their charity and generosity of spirit and also an intellectual and theological challenge both because some teachings fail to persuade and resonate because of how the case for them is made and because sometimes the liberal difficulties do point the way either towards an authentic development of doctrine or a genuinely pastoral change in how the church approaches an issue a group or a situation and I will say that there are issues in situations where I myself would probably count as a liberal Catholic in this category at some times and places at least but then finally there's a form of liberal Catholicism and again it is I think larger and more powerful and influential than I myself understood a little while ago that imagines the Catholicism that to my mind is too much like the Protestant mainline to be recognized as Catholic that has essentially revolutionary ambitions for the church you know we'll go slow but in the end the revolution will be accomplished that proceeds from premises that owe more to a few twentieth-century theologians than to the full inheritance of the church and this vision and Catholic orthodoxy are not ultimately compatible indeed they are locked in a conflict that's as serious the church's struggle with Arianism or Gnosticism and resembles those controversies on specific theological points as well it may be that this conflict far from winding down is only just begun it may be that it will eventually be serious enough to end in a real schism of the kind the church has experienced before and ultimately a parting of the ways now my hope for this pontificate and I'm not just saying this I wrote columns so you can look them up initially was that it would successfully separate the first two forms of liberal Catholicism from the third offering outreach engagement and a sense of the Catholic Church as something bigger than a partisan conservatism without handing territory to a theological liberalism that seeks at some level a radically different Church and obviously I'm not so hopeful anymore I think that Pope Francis is risking far too much that's essential in his quest for new directions and this brings me to the second conclusion conservatives should draw from this particular moment the papacy is not always the first bulwark of Catholic orthodoxy note that this is not the same as saying that the Pope can actually fall into heresy or let alone teach it ex cathedra as doctrine I'm not going to open that particular can of worms tonight in the event that Pope Francis blesses the Kasper proposal however st. Robert Bellarmine will be exhumed and reanimated to give next year's Erasmus lecture right first things as people they've got people working on that right now but a glance at Catholic history indicates that even if they are preserved from the gravest errors popes are not necessarily the heroic protagonists in many major theological conflicts we remember councils and saints Nicean Trent Athanasius and Ignatius in many cases more than Pope's Rome tends to move late and not always effectually at first and in some cases the unfortunate Pope Honorius being only the starkest example the papacy has conspicuously failed to be either wise or courageous when orthodoxy is on the line and of course occasionally we get Avignon as well all of this is something that became easy for conservative Catholics to forget across the last two pontificates when appealing to Rome meant appealing to one of the church's most subtle and sapient theological Minds first it's a head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and then as the Pope combined this sense of security with the natural and healthy Catholic affection for the Pope and then add in the larger role that the pontiff occupies in the Catholic imagination in an age of mass media and you have a recipe for a certain amount of conservative pay poetry and a certain overzealousness in how much weight was placed on each and every Vatican pronouncement the Magisterium has spoken the case is closed except that sometimes it isn't and sometimes it miss speaks or goes astray and over the long run as Pope Francis's rather more casual prolix and occasionally doctrinally ambiguous style is demonstrated there needs to be more discretion more conservative discretion in the claims made for papal authority more weight placed on the fullness of tradition rather than the words of just one Pope and lower expectations for how much any Pope can do alone in this sense this strange sort of liberal untrue ultra montón ism that is suddenly flourishing around Francis in which were informed that the Pope is single-handedly developing doctrine when he comments on the death penalty or we hear accounts from inside the Synod of Bishops of the church discussing how the Pope can allegedly twist the hands of God or show the mercy of Moses as opposed to Jesus on marriage and divorce or how we have certain prominent figures acting shocked shocked that conservative Cardinals would ever dare to differ with or argue with or even appeal to the Pope all of that is an inevitable attempt to petard hoist a conservative Catholicism that became too quick to play the Magisterium card as a substitute for sustained argument and without accepting those liberal ultra montanus arguments themselves conservative Catholics should accept the lesson and begin to think more deeply about the ways in which even Pope's can go astray and also about how orthodoxy might be defended even when Rome seems at the very least a little bit of sleep to switch and in thinking through these issues it seems to me that the revival of nineteen seventy zero debates is also evidence that conservative Catholics need a more robust theory of the development of doctrine or perhaps more aptly they need a clearer theory of how development of doctrine applies to well developments since John Henry Newman wrote his famous essay of which as liberal Catholics love to point out there have been a great many development that is not only the explicit shifts that came in with Vatican two on religious liberty especially but in the various theological and moral debates where the range of acceptable Catholic viewpoints has clearly shifted in one direction or another over the last century a few examples that have been argued over in the pages of first things might include the possibility of universal salvation the precise moral status of the death penalty whether slavery and torture are intrinsic evils the question of supersessionism and one could multiply examples when it comes to these changes in arguments Catholic traditionalists and theological liberals both have the advantage of a consistent view traditionalists think that almost everything I've just mentioned is creeping modernism in need of an eventual anathema while liberals tend to see it as evidence that the church can change almost anything accepting perhaps the creed so long as a sufficiently clever theologian can figure out a way to preface the change with as the church has always taught now against these two perspectives the conservative perspective has the virtue of nuance and complexity but also sometimes has the vices of ambiguity sophistry and special pleading and we have reached a point perhaps where Conservative Catholicism conservative Catholics need to step back and take stock to produce at the very least a sustained conservative answer to a book like john Noonan's a church that cannot that can and cannot change if not a new and doubtless very different Cardinal Newman to sift the developments of the last century and bring a clearer order and structure to what they mean for orthodoxy for what Catholics must believe as Catholics to bring things to a more personal and maybe finer point I am very comfortable saying have a had occasion to say quite often lately that the proposals to readmit marry remarried Catholics to communion without an annulment strike at the heart of how the church has traditionally understood the sacraments and threatened to unravel as for some supporters I think they're intended to unravel the church's entire teaching on sexual ethics but I feel more certain about this than I am about Humana Vita I feel more confident about Humana Vita than I am about whatever Catholics are currently permitted or supposed to believe about the death penalty I'm more confident about the state of the death penalty debate than I am about the question of whether Catholic the church could ordain women to the permanent diakonos and I could go on in sort of a personal in a year sink rata Quay now this is a journalist and a layman's perspective not a theologian saz again I've had occasion to be reminded of lately but I hope it's suggestive at least of the issues at play here since one of the arguments that the most liberal Synod fathers kept raising in the last few weeks when they weren't making what I think is a spurious distinction between the pastoral and the doctrinal is that of course some Catholic teachings can't be changed but there is a hierarchy of teachings some are essential some are more susceptible to development and so forth and with this perspective I agree I just think the liberal view the current liberal view at least is deeply mistaken about how much is essential how much is changeable and where the lines are drawn but I'm not sure conservative Catholicism has fully come to grips with the need to think through its own understanding of that hierarchy in the wake of vatican ii and in the wake of a longer period of catholic change the unsettling of the church's teaching requires more of a response more of a synthesis one that might conclude that traditionalists are correct about certain errors that have crept in over the last fifty or a hundred years or that liberals are right about certain innovations that really are possible but either way or both ways at once gives the Catholic faithful a clearer sense of how this hierarchy of teaching actually works and then to that challenge of looking back and synthesizing and taking stock I would add a second and related challenge conservative Catholics need to recognize some of the essential failures of Vatican 2 for two generations now conservatives in the church have felt a need to rescue the real counsel the Orthodox counsel from what Pope Benedict called the Council of the media this was and remains an important intellectual project but it needs to coexist with a recognition of two points first that the council as experienced by most Catholics was the Council of the media and the spirit the spirit of Vatican 2 council and that the faithfuls experience of a council and its aftermath and its changes in its reforms is its reality to some extent no matter how much we might point to the documents of the council and wish that it had been otherwise the last ecumenical council in whose shadow we've been living as Catholics for two generations simply did not effectively address the debates that came in immediately afterward and that have been dividing not just Catholicism but all of Christianity ever since and it would not surprise me in the long run the very long run perhaps if the crises of the post 1960s period did not end in the end bring us around to another council if that's what it would take to settle certain current debates permanently instead of just having the pendulum swing from Pope to Pope for now though that pendulum swing is what we're living with for as long as Pope Francis reigns and probably longer and it's folly to pretend otherwise and greater folly still to conceal that reality from our brethren in the hopes that it will simply disappear the Pope in a homily last week made much of the importance for Christians of reading the signs of the times and changing our approach when those signs seemed to demand it I can think of no better advice for conservative Catholics under this pontificate so my reading of those signs to conclude these remarks is this our victories were not as permanent to ease as we supposed our arguments were less persuasive than we'd hoped the Catholic Center is not quite where we believed it to be and our adversaries were not as foredoomed as we fondly wanted to believe which is not reason for pessimism but for thinking anew and acting anew our work is as ever only just begun thank you very much you

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Keywords: first things, ross douthat, crisis, conservative, catholicism, religion, liberal, liberalism, theology, john paul ii, pope, francis, vatican ii, counsel, reform, sex scandal, priest, faith, left, right, moral, relativism, secularism

Id: _VPO3xLbiL0

Length: 35min 11sec (2111 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 05 2018