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American Catholicism at the Crossroads: To Rome or Managua?
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14589 |
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BOOK WORLD
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5 / 1988 |
2,719 Words |
| Author
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Gary Bullert
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THE CATHOLIC MOMENT
Richard John Neuhaus
New York: Harper & Row, 1987
292 pp., $19.95
Richard John Neuhaus engagingly diagnoses the condition of American Catholicism in his most recent book, The Catholic Moment, in which he claims that a unique historical opportunity has emerged for the Catholic Church. According to Neuhaus, "this can and should be the moment in which the Roman Catholic Church in the United States assumes its rightful role in the culture-forming task of constructing a religiously informed public philosophy for the American experiment in ordered liberty." Catholics could assume the leadership in channeling the burgeoning religious revival in America toward the twin goals of political responsibility and ecumenical dialogue. The resurgence of fundamentalist-evangelical religion converges with orthodox Catholicism on several moral issues: sexual mores, family life, abortion, and educational choice. Neuhaus extends the ecumenical invitation to the fundamentalist community as well. For the Catholic intellectual elite, this proposed cooperative relationship represents the political-moral equivalent of "the last days."
A veritable class struggle has fermented within the American Catholic Church. The dominant institutionalized organs of modernist opinion, led by the bishops in league with the academic-journalistic opinion makers, are poised against Pope John Paul II and the practicing laity. The spirit of the new clericalism was epitomized by Richard McBrien's book, Catholicism. Neuhaus refers to it as "catechism for the theological professoriat," and "a catalogue of uncertainties designed to nurture the continued allegiance of Catholics whose main dogma is the rejection of dogma." On this desiccated thread of fidelity, a near total collapse of a sense of the supernatural has transpired among new class circles.
Modernist Catholics and political immersion
Neuhaus argues that a pervasive conceptual turn from Christian truths to "religious values" occurred as theology was reduced to an anthropological exercise in minting new human values and accompanying life-styles. The religious knowledge industry caters to cultural consumers, who might experiment with avant garde theology as an optional therapy in the quest for self-actualization. The dominant anxiety for such individuals consists of wrestling with the fact that they happened to be born Catholics. The resolution of this identity crisis usually results in exorcising Catholicism of any inhibiting religious doctrines that would distance the practitioner from prevailing cultural trends.
In the vacuum of traditional transcendent beliefs, modernist Catholics have regenerated a sense of mission through immersion in various political causes. Nuclear war, economic injustice, and Third World revolutions head the current list. The Catholic bishops' "Pastoral Letter on Nuclear War" exuded an apocalyptic tone and prophesied that the world had reached an unprecedented "new moment" in history. Summarily dismissing prior strategic approaches, the bishops emasculated the traditional Catholic "just-war" theory in favor of an implicit appeal to nuclear pacifism and nonviolent civilian resistance to war. No discussion of Soviet strategic doctrine, Soviet policy, strategic defense, or Marxist-Leninism materialized in the pastoral
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