After liberal optimism, what?
Baum, Gregory
CHABTING A COURSE: FROM THE COUNCIL TO THE SYNOD After liberal optimism, what? GREGORY BAUM VATICAN n introduced the Catholic church to the liberal tradition. In the nineteenth century the...
...They were ready to listen to the voices of the third-world churches...
...The emerging liberation theology of Latin America and the United States and the European political theology made me understand that by opening itself to dialogue with modern, liberal society, Vatican II had paid insufficient attention to the limits and ambiguities of the liberal tradition...
...Commonweal: 370...
...Why did this come as a surprise to us...
...at the same time the church was also bound to listen to the world and learn from it...
...Our own history seemed inscribed in a divinely guided evolutionary thrust toward a higher form of life...
...Catholic thinkers who tried to reconcile Catholicism with modern intellectual, ethical, and political aspirations got into trouble with the ecclesiastical authorities...
...Here the church defined its relation to the world in dialogical fashion...
...The encyclicals of John Paul II have not only supported the movement, they have even given it a more radical edge through their critique of contemporary capitalism...
...They were afraid...
...The church wanted nothing to do with democracy, civil liberties, pluralism...
...Developments that looked promising from the middle-class perspective of the successful powers made them fear that the gap between rich and poor, between rich countries and poor countries, was becoming wider, and that the masses of people on their continent were being pushed into ever greater misery...
...Political theology had called for the "deprivatization" of theology...
...Against this weakening of identity we witnessed a reaction of Catholics who liked to call themselves conservative...
...They yearned for the Catholicism of yesterday...
...The American bishops have called for "a new American experiment," an order grounded in social solidarity, that will protect people's economic rights and dismantle the oppressive hegemony of the American economy in the world...
...and after the collectivist and authoritarian style we had inherited in the church, I thought the new openness to liberal ideas was a good thing...
...Holland was ahead of us in this...
...Paolo Ricca was puzzled by my enthusiasm for Gaudium et Spes...
...Since I was not familiar with political science at the time, I did not understand what he meant...
...They were not helped by the church's eccentric teaching on sexuality...
...Catholics enjoyed ecumenism, interreligious dialogue, and cooperation with secular men and women...
...We were grateful that the council saw in the ethical achievements of people, be they religious or secular, the hidden work of God's grace in history...
...The article taught me the limitations of Vatican II...
...All too often the church has found itself catching up with cultural developments...
...This was the issue raised by Paolo Ricca...
...They remembered that to be Catholic and Christian demanded a critical distance from society...
...Catholics in North America were increasingly willing to look at their society, not from the viewpoint of the middle class, but from the perspective of the people at the bottom...
...For many Catholics it was only as they stood with Jesus in solidarity with the poor and oppressed that their eyes were opened to the sinfulness of the world...
...They recognized that to understand North American reality we must look at the global society since the dominant North American economy is intertwined with the economies of other continents...
...Catholics in North America welcomed Vatican II...
...After the council, a growing number of Catholics uncomfortable with an assimilation to contemporary culture discovered a new distance from society through their emphasis on faith-and-justice...
...We cannot come to self-knowledge as a society unless we listen to the victims of society and analyze the social causes, including our own involvement, of their victimization...
...This cultural mood made Teilhard de Chardin appear attractive...
...The limits of liberalism must be overcome by moving forward, not backward...
...They welcomed Vatican II because it laid a spiritual and theological foundation for their involvement in the world...
...Thus Latin Americans had the courage of faith to look at their own continent from the perspective of the masses caught in poverty and exclusion...
...While this post-liberal pastoral proposal is grounded in the new approach of Vatican II, it also significantly transcends the council...
...It could affirm in dialectical fashion the critical tradition inherited from the Enlightenment: it could negate the positivism and utilitarianism that have become associated with the modern project, and foster ethical and religious values as the cultural context of the struggle for a more just and more humane society...
...It opens up the most promising elements of the modern project to ethical and religious resources that modernity had overlooked...
...It took me many years to understand Paolo Ricca's remark...
...In the nineteenth century the church had repudiated the liberal society then emerging in Europe and America...
...Phillip Berryman pointed out that the Latin American bishops at Medellin looked at the same world Vatican II had seen, but since they saw it from the periphery, the impoverished margin, they recognized few signs of encouragement...
...The authoritarianism, which lies like a curse on the Catholic tradition, has not been wholly overcome through the teaching of Vatican II on the dignity of the person nor its emphasis on the ideal of collegiality...
...But for the new generation, for young people who only knew the open, ecumenical, liberal form of Catholicism, it became more difficult to define the meaning of their Catholic identity...
...The open approach of the council reflected to a certain extent the cultural optimism of the sixties...
...They also found the council inspiration for joining the peace movement against military involvement in Southeast Asia...
...Inspired by the black movement and black theology, Mexican Americans and Puerto Ricans began to address their own Catholic church...
...Gone is the mood of liberal optimism...
...Michael's College, Toronto...
...The unforgettable monument to the new spirit was the conciliar document Gaudium et Spes...
...There is a danger that the post-liberal teaching, demanded by the world crisis and useful for a clearer sense of Catholic identity, will be used by Rome as an ideology to defend the return to authoritarianism...
...The church was GREGORY BAUM is professor of religious studies and sociology at St...
...The new orientation of Catholicism, defined by the preferential option for the poor, has brought the church into a new, critical relation to modern society...
...they were eager to participate actively in their society...
...We were happy with the new emphasis on personal conscience, religious liberty, religious ex* perience, and social responsibility...
...In Holland the Catholic population, at one time part of the lower classes, especially of farm communities in the south, with little influence on culture and society, had recently joined the middle class, entered the mainstream, and exercised power in their country...
...Gone is the emphasis on personal growth and development...
...The major intellectual influence had come from the bishops and theologians of the wealthy, capitalist democracies who shared the liberal confidence that the problems of the world could be gradually solved, that the economic and political development that had taken place in the successful Western democracies could be exported to the less developed parts of the world, and that greater generosity, sustained dialogue, and mutual understanding would be able to move the world to a higher stage of Commonweal: 368 participation and exchange...
...It combines bold rationality with religious compassion...
...During the council, I became friends with a young Italian, a Waldensian student of theology, then acting as a journalist...
...A similar situation existed in the United States...
...This new development put a question mark behind Catholic identity...
...They were willing to confront "the other America," the unemployed and poverty-stricken sector...
...This is a warning that applies to political as well as ecclesiastical policies...
...In few parts of the world were the conciliar documents read, studied and acted upon as vigorously as in the United States and Canada...
...Yet if this new movement can be sustained, the church may come to exercise critical and constructive leadership in modem society — in the capitalist West, the socialist East, and the struggling third-world nations...
...The social messages of the Canadian bishops since 1975 and the pastoral letters on peace and economic justice of the American bishops have endorsed the option for the poor...
...This rule has been verified in much of Christian history...
...When ethical people look at the world as a totality, they are deeply shocked by the brutally unjust distribution of wealth and power...
...One reason for the bishops' preferential option has to do, I think, with the recovery of a Catholic and Christian identity...
...Why had we not seen this before...
...Why then have the North American bishops become critics of the powerful...
...While Vatican II had very little to say about sin, episcopal and papal teaching over the last decade has tried to recover a biblical sense of sin, the sinfulness of the world, sin residing in the heart, and sin residing in structures of domination...
...The Syllabus of Errors (1864) remains the unforgettable monument to the church's rejection of modernity...
...In the Christian tradition, respect for persons is metaphysically grounded: the respect is related to the doctrine of creation, redemption, and sanctification...
...They listened to 21 June 1985: 369 progressive women who protested against the subjugation inflicted on them by church and society...
...Since Western and Eastern empires are trapped in death-dealing ideologies, since liberalism and Marxism are in a state of crisis, since the domination of scientism or positivism on the right and on the left have handed over society to value-free social engineering, the present age offers an unusual opportunity to Catholicism, present in West, East and South, to make a constructive contribution to an alternative world order...
...Liberalism to me meant the emphasis on the person, on personal vocation, personal growth, and personal responsibility...
...To protect a clearer sense of Catholic identity they advocated the return to pre-conciliar styles and attitudes...
...If the Catholic church can be faithful to the decentralizing collegial tradition affirmed at Vatican II, if it can give up its tragic, oppressive, self-defeating bureaucratic centralism, and if it can come to recognize the equality of men and women, Catholicism may come to exercise a liberating, healing effect on world society...
...Catholics, at one time largely working class and immigrants, had moved into the middle class...
...It has become unrealistic to expect solutions from the gradual evolution of the middle-class values and institutions we have inherited...
...God stood with the poor, the weak, the oppressed, the exploited...
...But such a return has become impossible...
...His books include Religion and Alienation , The Social Imperative, Sociology and Human Destiny, and The Priority of Labor...
...Sociologists have a hard time explaining this...
...It is important to emphasize that a post-liberal vision of society must save the great achievements of the liberal tradition, in particular the respect for personal conscience and personal freedom...
...This distance is then not defined by the sectarian aloofness of pre-conciliar times, but by the recognition of social sin and the ambiguity of the dominant culture...
...The option for the poor weds certain aspirations of the Enlightenment with an ancient biblical heritage...
...What is required is conversion, repentance, the turn to anew direction, even if this means opposing the powerful and opting for radical social and economic policies...
...Usually the officers of powerful religious organizations identify with the establishment...
...Catholics became increasingly willing to listen to the voices of those who had been pushed to the margin...
...History cannot be turned back...
...called to serve, and offer its truth, to the world...
...They did not worry about their Catholic identity because they had been deeply immersed in the Catholic tradition through their earlier, largely pre-conciliar Catholic education...
...The world system with its center in the North seemed to be pushing their continent into ever greater dependency...
...It wanted to recover the social message of God's revelation in Israel and Jesus Christ...
...It was only at Vatican Council II that the church as a whole opened itself, albeit in a critical manner, to modern society...
...The adoption of a postliberal, solidarity vision of society is dangerous unless it has passed through a liberal phase...
...For him the document reflected too much the spirit of liberalism...
...There are many signs that certain circles at the Vatican wish to enhance Catholic identity not by following the bishops of the Americas into a new pastoral project but by returning to old patterns of domination and the contempt of women...
...The power elite of the United States, indifferent to the renewal of Vatican II, now vigorously opposes the orientation of Catholicism as defined by the bishops' pastorals on peace and economic justice...
...In preparation for the "Theology in the Americas" Conference of 1975, Phillip Berryman wrote an important article on the background of the 1968 Medellin Conference in Latin America, and the liberation theology that had influenced it and which in turn was being inspired by it...
...We welcomed the permission to participate in our culture, join others in building a humane society, and enter into dialogue with other Christians, Jews, and members of other religions...
...While the new emphasis on personal conscience and personal development represented an undeniable progress, Catholics had not sufficiently thought through the problematic link of these ideas to individualism, the breakdown of social solidarity, the replacement of human values by the exchange value, the utilitarianism of public policies, and the cultural impact of capitalism...
...For many of us this was an occasion of joy...
...Mainstream culture with its built-in ideology had disguised the cruel reality from our eyes...
...The injustice cries to heaven...
...Catholics were glad that Vatican II had affirmed religious liberty and human rights...
...The emphasis on personal freedom and self-responsibility, the recognition of the diversity of religious experience, and a certain resentment against bearers of authority allowed Catholics to feel at home in the culture of the sixties...
...The bishops of Canada and the United States were willing to join this new movement of faith-and-justice...
...Many Catholics became increasingly suspicious in regard to mainstream culture, which had made these structures of exclusion invisible to them...
...If faith is inextricably linked to justice, Christians find themselves at a distance from culture and society...
...They now involved themselves in the civil rights movement of the sixties...
...How seriously Rome takes this in practice remains to be seen...
...In Rome the new emphasis on faith-and-justice has been welcomed, at least on paper...
...While social solidarity and the struggle for justice demand many sacrifices, historical experience has taught us that the repression of dissent has devastating consequences...
Vol. 112 • June 1985 • No. 12
