Liberal Catholicism's Betrayal of Its Heritage

A fascinating piece by George Weigel.  Excerpts:

In throwing a robust concept of religious freedom over the side, liberal Catholics were betraying their own noblest heritage.



It took the Catholic Church the better part of the late 19th and early 20th centuries to develop a robust Catholic concept of religious freedom. In that process of doctrinal development, the key experience was that of the Church in the United States, and the key intellectual figure was an American Jesuit, Father John Courtney Murray. Murray embodied an older form of liberal Catholicism, and he deployed it with intellectual virtuosity to midwife a new Catholic understanding of the modern state and of the democratic project. which eventually reshaped the thinking and practices of the entire Church. At the intellectual center of that development was Murray's work on religious freedom. And at the empirical center of this evolution of Catholic self-understanding was the Catholic experience in the United States.

The American arrangement on church-and-state relations was a novelty for the Catholic Church. When it was deemed appropriate to appoint a bishop for the new republic after its founding, the Holy See sent a representative to learn the U.S. government's wishes through the American minister in Paris, Benjamin Franklin. Franklin replied that this was none of the government's business, and that the Church could appoint whomever it liked -- a response that caused astonishment along the Tiber, where the pope, in those days, had a free right of appointing bishops in, at best, 20 percent of the world's dioceses.

Beyond this freedom of appointment, however, was the undeniable fact that the institutional separation of church and state, and the Constitution's guarantee of the free exercise of religion, was good for Catholicism in America: an empirical refutation of the then-regnant assumption that religious freedom (meaning disentangling the church from "establishment" by the state or from some other form of state preference) would inevitably lead to religious indifferentism, and perhaps even to hostility to religious conviction. Yet here was this novus ordo seclorum, as America proclaimed itself, and unlike the Catholic Church in Europe, the Church in America was holding the loyalty of the working class and growing by leaps and bounds throughout the 19th century -- by the time a Catholic girl born in Detroit in 1880 became an adult, the number of parishes around her[PB1] had quintupled. Clearly, there was something here worth exploring.

Impressed by the American experience and tired of the ancient church-state quarrels of Europe, Pope Leo XIII began that exploration in the late 19th century. In a series of encyclicals on political modernity, Leo gingerly began to ease the Church away from its entanglement with the old regimes, and just as gingerly began to explore the foundations of a Catholic theory of religious freedom. Some 40 years after Leo's death, John Courtney Murray began to analyze Leo's writings with an eye to articulating a fully embodied Catholic theory of religious freedom.

When Murray began to work on the church-state problem in the mid-1940s, the regnant Roman theory -- which many simply identified with Catholic tradition tout court -- was that the preferred arrangement was state recognition of the prerogatives of the Catholic Church, and state support of the Church's work. In the Roman theological parlance of the time, this was the "thesis," and any other arrangement, like that in the United States, was a mere "hypothesis." This thesis/hypothesis schema was underwritten by another claim that many in Roman theological circles simply identified with Catholic "tradition": the claim that "error has no rights."

Unraveling this thick knot of seemingly settled "tradition" was no easy business, either intellectually or politically, in terms of stepping on ecclesiastical and theological toes. Murray's careful analysis of Leo XIII's texts suggested that the thesis/hypothesis business might not be as settled as it seemed. And, in a brilliant move, Murray reached beneath the thesis/hypothesis schema into a much older stratum of Catholic tradition, where he found, in the fifth-century writings of Pope Saint Gelasius I, a clear distinction between priestly authority and political authority -- which suggested that the conflation of those two authorities in the "thesis" was, in fact, not the Catholic tradition (a suggestion buttressed, of course, by reference to Christ's own distinction between what is Caesar's and what is God's in Matthew 22:21). Here was a true "liberal Catholicism" at work: a Catholicism that reached back into history to retrieve a long-forgotten element of the authentic tradition that, recovered, could be the engine of future development.

It's an excellent piece--read the whole thing.