Yesterday I posted some thoughts about a recently published history of the aftermath of the Second Vatican Council.
A friend chided me for ending my analysis with what he took to be a dismissive parting shot that does to progressive Catholic theology what the progressives tend to do to the pre-Vatican II theology.
I wrote: “By my reckoning, the most fascinating and remarkable aspect of recent American Catholic history was both the sudden and powerful emergence of a progressive Catholic vision after Vatican II, and its equally sudden (and largely unexpected) collapse only a decade or two later. Who, for example, reads David Tracy anymore? Or even Karl Rahner?”
My friends reaction gave me pause. I hadn’t meant to dismiss David Tracy, and certainly not Karl Rahner, arguably the most influential Catholic theologian of the twentieth century.
In my conclusion, I had hoped to point to a historical fact, not make a polemical point. That fact is as follows.
In the immediate aftermath of Vatican II, many in the Catholic Church in Europe and North America thought that vast and fundamental changes were both necessary and possible. The Dutch bishops, for example, put out a new catechism that, as I recall, was largely cribbed from Rahner’s theology.
Nearly everybody felt as though the Church was being carried forward on an unstoppable wave of change, so much so that plenty of bishops and priests—who often worry a great deal about their careers and want to be on the winning side—supported or acquiesced to calls for change that they may have privately rejected. The symbolic high water mark of this sentiment was, perhaps, the Call to Action Conference in Detroit in 1976.
And then? For reasons that the academic guild, which is so thoroughly invested in a progressive, whiggish view of history, seems unwilling or unable to identify and discuss, the Church drew back, and her future now seems far, far more conservative (at many different levels) than anyone could have imagined in 1976.
Thus my reference to Rahner. Who would have imagined that only two or three decades after his near dominance of the Catholic theological imagination, hardly any graduate students today seem interested in Rahner? They want to write dissertations on Balthasar, St. Thomas, and Gregory of Nyssa.
Progressives invariable conjure up images of a Vatican conspiracy, as if the only forces pushing the Church in a conservative direction were a few old men in Rome. That’s a hopelessly facile fantasy, one designed to reassure progressives that “the people” are still with them.
But I don’t have a better explanation, at least not one I can confidently support with good historical analysis. So I can just offer a few thoughts.
Undoubtedly the equally surprising and unexpected emergence of a politically powerful conservative movement in America in 1980 (Reagan) is related to the trajectory of theology and practice in the Catholic Church. (And I should add that this secular history, like the history of the Church, has been largely ignored and mishandled by secular historians, who, like so many church historians, have difficulty digesting the fact that the forward progress of history didn’t turn out to be “progressive.”)
Also, there was something intellectually flawed in progressive theology, or at least intellectually unsatisfying. To often liberal Catholic rhetoric goes “meta” too quickly. Massa provides a good example, using “history” as an almost magical incantation. But faith draws power from the concreteness of biblical and liturgical language, which the progressives tended to transcend in their theologies. As progressive removed themselves from biblical and liturgical concreteness, their capacity to fire the religious imaginations of ordinary Catholics—which for a decade or two was very real—seems to have diminished.
In any event, I hope there is a bright young graduate student out there who wants to tackle the twentieth-century Catholic Church with a fresh mind. What a remarkable century!
September 10th, 2010 | 2:02 pm
“What a remarkable century!”
The 20th century was remarkable in the same way that Katrina was a remarkable hurricane.
September 10th, 2010 | 3:34 pm
There are few truly liberal Catholics other than the following:
1. some elderly people still clinging
2. people that get a paycheck from the church
3. people who don’t actually go to mass but say they are Catholic, if pressed
September 10th, 2010 | 3:48 pm
@Ben H
You forgot:
4. Non-Catholics who wish ill of the Church.
Good luck finding a liberal newspaper that is tolerant of any traditional forms of Catholicism. The Latin mass is proof of Benedict’s reactionary nature, Nuns are basically abused prisoners of the cloister, etc.
The most fervent liberal Catholics are rarely catholic at all.
September 10th, 2010 | 5:37 pm
There does seem to be something in the idea of a Zeitgeist. More mysterious is the sudden lurch toward theological liberalism in the Catholic Church in the late 1960s? Has anyone really given a convincing explanation of it? And, for that matter, what caused “the sixties”? (One person speculated that the Catholic Church’s turmoil may have played a major role in producing “the sixties”. Is there any plausibility to that?) As far as the Church’s move away from the radical trajectory of the 60s and 70s, there some obvious contributing factors: (a) Some “progressives” were on a trajectory even swifter than the pace of change in the Church that led them right out of Catholicism. (b) The progressive’s were less successful in passing on the faith to their children than were the more traditional Catholics. (c) Demographics: the most rapidly growing parts of the Church have been the most traditional: Asia, Africa. (d) The fall of communism gave eastern Europeans a greater role in the wider Church. (e) As the Church has been seen to have held the line and not gone over the cliff — as it once seemed it might, and as so many other ecclesiastical bodies have, many non-Catholics of traditional tendency have been encouraged to seek higher ground in the Catholic Church.
As far as Rahner goes, I think his judgement was highly unreliable, to say the least, but he did try to engage the tradition and magisterial documents of the past, and he was a brilliant man. I have learned a lot from reading his Theological Investigations, even though his conclusions often seemed to me wrongheaded.
September 10th, 2010 | 11:17 pm
I think it is wrong-headed to divide Catholics into “conservative” and “liberal”. These are political designations used mostly by journalists. The true Catholic is doctrinally traditional, socially “liberal”, and theologically progressive. There is a broad “middle ground” that is never heard from since they are busy in a hundred ways to carry out the vision of Vatican II in ways that do not make the newspapers. Rahner was not “wrong-headed”, he was a theological and pastoral genius, as is the present pope and other giants of his generation. As Newman indicated, there will always be Traditional voices in the Church, Moderate voices and Progressive voices, but this does not mean there are parties in the Church. Unfortunately, all we hear are the extreme “conservative” voices and the extreme “liberal” voices. The large, broad middle is never heard from. They are too busy carrying out the vision of Vatican II in thousands of different ways. You cannot judge the state of the Catholic Church by journalism accounts. The truth is to be found elsewhere.
Father Clifford Stevens
Boys Town, Nebraska
September 11th, 2010 | 2:55 pm
As professor Barr notes, a lot of the decline of progressive Catholicism is a simple matter of sociology: as traditional mechanisms of transmitting the faith decline and whither (close-knit communities, strong families, strong ethnic identity), religion is increasingly becoming a matter of personal choice. Now this is not necessarily a bad thing. It does lead many to abandon religion altogether (witness the growth of those who identify as having “no religion”); but it also considerably strengthens orthodox, conservative Christianity and Judaism, because, when one’s faith is consciously chosen, in nine out of ten cases people will opt for the more traditional, orthodox version of any religion. The reason is simple: only orthodox Christianity (or Judaism) offers a clear alternative to the secular humanism that such people are fleeing. People truly commit to a religion only when they see that a) it is TRUE and that b) it changes or structures their lives in a meaningful way. The wishy-washy and muddle-headed secularized, liberal Christianity that we find in most Western European and North American countries provide neither and are thus, by their own internal logic, sinking into irrelevance.
September 12th, 2010 | 2:51 pm
Dear Fr. Stevens, There is something in what you say, but you are not being quite consistent. On the one hand you say that it is wrong to classify Catholics into liberal and conservative, and then you do it yourself. For your whole thesis is that there is a “broad middle” that lies between liberal and conservative extremes. The idea of the “middle” is also a political category.
Rahner took some positions that have been decisively rejected by the magisterium. E.g he favored ordaining women and he rejected the Church’s teaching on contraception. In that sense, he was wrong-headed. As I said, I greatly respect him, and have learned from him. I find his analyses interesting, his mind brilliant and deep, but his judgment unreliable.
As far as the “true Catholic” being socially liberal, that depends what you mean. If you mean caring about the poor and the suffering, yes. But why is that “liberal” rather than conservative? (Do you not betray a certain mind-set here that is perhaps not very understanding of conservatives?) Nowadays, when people use the term “socially liberal”, they usually mean someone who is “pro-choice” on abortion, favors gay marriage, and so on. You are a little behind the times. About fifty years ago “socially liberal” meant favoring racial equality and helping the poor. The “social issues” and social attitudes that define one as “progressive” today are far different: they have come to include a number of socially radical causes that were hardly on the radar screen fifty years ago. This is, in fact, why “liberal Catholicism” is in such a bad way. There is now a huge gap between what is required to be considered a social progressive in good standing, and what Catholic teaching requires one to believe.
But you are basically right, in the sense that there is developing a broad middle — call it Mere Catholicism — that is not caught up in the old battles of the post-Vatican II aftermath. They don’t have a chip on their shoulder when it comes to Catholic tradition.
They are comfortable with the teachings of Vatican II, but also see them as being in continuity with the previous tradition.
September 13th, 2010 | 6:39 am
I agree that there are problems assigning political labels to the different approaches to Catholocism.
One problem is that it casts those who call themselves Catholic into two categories which, by analogy with politics, are two more or less equal views on the world, which compete with each other for ascendancy.
So I would cast off the labels “liberal” and “conservative” applying to religious sentiment. The relevant categories are “orthodox” and “dissenting.” Or if you will, heretical.
Why did the dissenting faction ultimately start losing the battle over V II interpretation? Two good reasons: 1) the Holy Spirit continues to guide the Church, as promised; 2) dissenters devour their own young, as pointed out in different words by a prior commenter.
September 13th, 2010 | 10:50 am
As a 46-year-old lay graduate student in a Catholic seminary, I have never read Rahner nor do I have any desire to do so. Not that I wouldn’t ever read him, by any means. But he is not who younger people are reading and I have many, many other books on my “to read” list. My understanding is that he was ubiquitous for many years, and then suddenly… not. I have read Schillebeeckx, who was also a brilliant man with some very suspect conclusions.
I have been in this program for almost a decade (I can do only one class at a time, in the evenings) and over that time I have seen quite a shift in the seminarians, who are younger and more orthodox than when I started, and in the classes. But not in the lay students, many of whom are older (studying for second careers) and more “liberal.” I feel strangely half and half, but I can testify that the more “liberal” the student or teacher, the less he or she seems to be able (or to want) to understand the more orthodox or “traditional” students.
In one class I was the youngest student at 44 — and the most “traditional” or whatever term you want to use — and I sat through an anguished discussion about younger people wanting to revive devotions and Latin and kneeling for communion. The collective opinion was, what was the matter with all these people? How did we not communicate to them how wonderful everything is now? They were not at all open to the idea that anything might actually be wrong. And these were devout people paying for a Masters degree at a seminary, not Catholics United members. There is a real disconnect between the two groups.
How each of them arose so suddenly, and so completely at odds with the immediate past, is a fascinating question.
September 13th, 2010 | 12:06 pm
Dear Fr. Stevens,
Having obtained a Master’s degree in theology from a Catholic school in recent years, I have to disagree with your assessment that “liberal” and “conservative” are “political designations used mostly by journalists”. I have found them to be very accurate designations that most liberal Catholics use to describe themselves.
Furthermore, I don’t agree with the claim that “the true Catholic is doctrinally traditional, socially “liberal”, and theologically progressive”.
If by “socially liberal”, you mean 1) in favor of abortion and contraception and 2) in favor of homosexual marriage, it cannot follow that they are “doctrinally traditional”. Yet, a shocking number of my classmates at the Catholic school of theology were in favor of just those two things.
September 21st, 2010 | 7:05 am
Stephen M. Barr – You pegged it right: “They are comfortable with the teachings of Vatican II, but also seeing them in continuity with the previous tradition.” Thank your for putting my thinking into a concise description.”
Father Clifford Stevens
Boys Town, Nebraska
September 24th, 2010 | 10:26 pm
Dear Stephen Barr – I wrote an article on Karl Rahner some years ago in the journal “Listening” in which I tried to show something of his theological method. He was probably a little too influenced by Heidegger, although he denied it and was a little too immersed in the vocabulary of modern German philosophy. I have never been too taken with the Transcendental Thomists and find myself more at home theologically with Josef Ratzinger who touches every base in theology and doctrine with a clarity I find quite amazing. The article in “Listening” is called “The Rahner Equation”.
Father Clifford Stevens
Boys Town, Nebraska
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