I know they speak the same language, but they don’t speak the same Roman Catholicism, which means I sense I could actually talk to Douthat about Rome and have a conversation that resulted in understanding as opposed to a lesson in logic or w-w. For instance, he admits that Roman Catholicism is not as hunky dory as the Callers siren songs suggest:
Ever since the Second Vatican Council, the church has (as most people know) been locked in a kind of low-grade institutional civil war, between a liberal/progressive/modernizing viewpoint that had its moment in the 1960s and 1970s, and the more neoconservative perspective that set the tone for John Paul II and Benedict’s papacies. (I say neoconservative because this was essentially a quarrel over the meaning and implications of Vatican II’s liberalizing reforms, between factions that had both supported them, with critics of Vatican II confined to the sidelines and the fringe.)
As the remarks on accommodation and dissolution above no doubt suggest, I have my own strongly-held views about which side had the better of that argument. But like most long, grinding civil wars it has ultimately left everyone a loser — for a host of reasons but most of all because it has divided a religious worldview that’s supposed to be integrated, and undermined that worldview’s ability to offer itself in fullness to people outside the church’s walls. In particular, instead of the capaciousness, the openness to paradox and mystery, the spirit of both/and rather than either/or that’s supposed to define Christian belief, the Catholic civil war has tended to elevate cruder binaries instead – implying that believers need to choose God’s love and God’s justice, between the immanent and the transcendent, between solidarity with the marginalized and doctrinal fidelity, between the church’s social teaching and its moral stance on issues like abortion, between the Christianity as a force for justice in this world and Christianity as a promise of salvation in the next.
Even so, Douthat is hopeful about Francis’ prospects, which seems to me to be what you expect a Roman Catholic to hope:
. . . for my generation of Catholics, wherever our specific sympathies lie, this inheritance of conflict has created a hunger for synthesis – for a way forward that doesn’t compromise Catholic doctrine or Catholic moral teaching or transform the Church into a secular N.G.O. with fancy vestments, but also succeeds in making it clear that the Catholic message is much bigger than the culture war, that theological correctness is not the only test of Christian faith, and that the church is not just an adjunct (or, worse, a needy client, seeking protection) of American right-wing politics. This desire has been palpable in the Catholic blogosphere for some time, and I think you can see it percolating in many of the publications in whose pages the old intra-Catholic battles were so often fought.
And yet, this is a realistic hope based on knowledge of the vicissitudes of Roman Catholic history (recent at least):
. . . for the moment I think conservatives do have legitimate reasons to be uncertain whether the new thing that Francis is aiming at will ultimately be a synthesis and a breakthrough for the church, or whether what we’re seeing is just the pendulum swinging back toward the progressive style in Catholic theology, in ways that may win the church a temporary wave of good publicity but ultimately just promise to sustain the long post-Vatican II civil war.
Douthat would seem to be able to understand that outsiders don’t see Roman Catholicism as necessarily superior to other Christian brands, even while he clearly sees the church as valuable. That is a long way from the Callers where logical certainty and denial of blemishes abide.
Don’t get me wrong. I think Douthat is himself prone to a kind of optimism that is unwarranted. This is because he does not seem to be aware of the power of liberal Christianity’s genie. For instance, he links to a talk by one of Pope Francis’ closest advisers and registers the kind of dissent that pre-Vatican II Roman Catholics and conservative Protestants shared, believers who thought Christianity was fundamentally a spiritual enterprise that worried more about eternal rather than temporal life:
It reads as a kind of sketch of an agenda for the church in the Francis era, and my reaction to it was not that different from some other conservative Catholic bloggers: It struck me as a sometimes-eloquent exposition of part of the church’s mission, part of the Catholic worldview, part of the church’s understanding of itself – but it seemed to stress those parts at the expense of other aspects, other elements, that are necessary for the whole. The Cardinal’s horizons seemed very worldly, his concerns were almost exclusively economic, his vision of the church’s mission in that arena had a political and left-wing and sometimes half-baked and conspiratorial flavor … and while some of his social-justice themes would have been at home in a document from either of the previous two papacies, he seemed to give short shrift to many of the issues and arenas – devotional and doctrinal, theological and liturgical, social and cultural – that lie close to the heart of Catholicism fully expressed and understood.
It felt like an address, in other words, that could have been delivered by a progressive prelate in 1965 or so, before subsequent developments exposed some of the problems with a Christianity focused too intently on the horizontal rather than the vertical, social injustice rather than personal sin, the secular rather than the transcendent. Even as Francis has been eloquently warning against seeing Catholicism as a worldly “ideology” or letting the church become an N.G.O., his friend and ally’s vision seems to risk falling into a version of exactly those traps.
The mainline Protestant churches have had a hard time walking away from the burdens of progressive Christianity. Perhaps Roman Catholic exceptionalism will allow Rome to escape that burden. But modernity is a demanding taskmaster and earlier papal condemnations of modernity, though too blunt for contexts outside Europe, may have had a better measure of the acids that have eroded Christian witness when churches embrace the “modern” world.
Even so, Douthat is a good example of how Roman Catholics might speak to a mixed audience. Jason and the Callers might even consider that Douthat is a convert from Protestantism. But then, perhaps their Roman Catholicism is not the one to which Douthat belongs.
Old Life 