Stuck in the Catholic Moment

Has the ‘Catholic moment’ passed? Rod Dreher worries it might have, in a recent post at The American Conservative examining Fr. Richard John Neuhaus’ thesis.

A quick primer for those unfamiliar with the term under consideration: In brief, Neuhaus argued that, as a result of both historical forces (the fall of communism), cultural ones (the decay of mainline Protestantism and the rise of a new enemy in the form of secular nihilism – the ‘culture of death’), and religious shifts (the energy of Vatican II, the growth of interreligious dialogue) the Roman Catholic Church had an unprecedented opportunity to evangelize and take up a position of moral leadership. Confessing that the Catholic Church had always been “the leading and indispensible community in advancing the Christian movement in world history,” Neuhaus believed that now, more than ever, our country and our world needed Rome at the helm. It’s worth noting that Neuhaus penned these words in 1987, before the fall of communism, and while he was still a Lutheran minister. The events of subsequent years, then, seemed to offer further confirmation of his thesis.

The idea has always faced serious objections, of course, and Neuhaus certainly never intended it to be a deterministic theory of historical inevitability. One of the most powerful criticisms of it is recapitulated by Dreher in his post—that, essentially, the theory is suspect or may fail due not to external pressure but to internal dissention. Arguing out that pointing to the sheer number of baptized Catholics is an inadequate way of counting the vitality of the Church, Dreher opines that, especially in America, “for all intents and purposes, American Catholicism is functionally Protestant — and not even Evangelical Protestant.” Well, perhaps, if one considers a random sample from a suburban church to be ‘American Catholicism’ in all its fullness. In the Church’s hierarchy and even in those ordinary parishes, though, there’s a lot of variation, with individual and group levels of orthodoxy, commitment, and style diverging rather wildly. These divisions in the Mystical Body of Christ are absolutely lamentable, but they are not fatal.

It seems like a stronger, and more specific, case against the ‘moment’ (and against those who strive to build a Catholic culture) can be made over the issue of birth control, now once again occupying the headlines. Yet even here, as Neuhaus wrote of what has most recently re-emerged as the “98 percent” objection to Humane Vitae , “it is true but entirely beside the point that most Catholics do not adhere to the teaching.” It should be noted, too, that Dreher’s critique focuses largely on American Catholicism, whereas Neuhaus mostly concentrated on a global, or at least Western, scale.

Beyond all the contemporary dissention and domestic turbulence, though, Neuhaus was speaking to a deeper level of theoretical conflict and opportunity, as Dreher acknowledges in his opening paragraph. Essentially, the real argument behind the ‘Catholic moment’ thesis is a quite familiar one: that the Catholic Church offers “the only substantial basis for a [ . . . ] retrenchment and renewal of our culture and civilization,” as it slides ever further into ‘modernity’ or ‘post-modernity.’ Versions of this have been offered by thinkers as diverse as de Maistre, Tocqueville, and John Courtney Murray, and I would submit that Neuhaus’ iteration, while possessing a distinctly late-twentieth-century American flair, is at bottom another articulation of this two-century-old insight.

Pope Pius X saw in the present age “the synthesis of all heresies.” That comment certainly carries a sour, pre-Vatican II tinge. But it is also, in its own way, bitingly perceptive, and it points to the need for a renewal of the Church’s cultural preeminence, as it now must fend off a cocktail of atomized individualism, abstraction from the flesh, general moral anarchy, and political and religious arguments that seek to slough off the “light burden” of legitimate authority. In that sense, the special opportunity afforded by the ‘Catholic moment’ has by no means “passed”—nor will it, until the long, strange project of modernity comes to its conclusion.