New Experiment in Democracy
McBrien, Richard P.
AMBIVALENCE & CONSENSUS NEW EXPERIMENT IN DEMOCRACY THE CHALLENGE FOR AMERICAN CATHOLICISM Dennis P. McCann Sheed & Ward, $8.95, 191 pp. Richard P. McBrien This book was originally intended as...
...Although he insists that this is not an original piece of historical scholarship nor a conventional tract in systematic theology, the book does have elements of originality and it is obviously the work of a theologically sophisticated writer...
...The "massive entry of Catholics into the mainstream of the American middle class" may explain the death of a significant portion of the immigrant church, with origins in white European society, but it does not take our large Hispanic Catholic community into account...
...However, the attention is excessive in so short a book...
...Consistently implemented, this process "could transform the Catholic church into a community of moral discourse...
...One would hope so...
...Catholic bishops' pastoral letter on the economy...
...Catholic bishops' pastoral letters on peace and (he economy...
...McCann indicates in his "Conclusion" that he has addressed his book to the American Catholic community, bishops and ordinary believers alike...
...Catholicism, I am in-clined to doubt that it will be read by more than a handful of bishops and ordinary Catholics...
...Cardinal Bernardin, in particular, might be put off...
...The 1976 Detroit "Call to Action" Conference, to which the author refers at some length, is much more directly an expression of the latter ecclesiological principle than of the former...
...Richard Niebuhr...
...Dennis McCann, a social ethicist in the department of religious studies at DePaul University, suggests that the process by which the bishops produced their pastoral letter is more important than the letter itself...
...His name is consistently rendered as "Bernadin" throughout...
...Catholic history...
...McCann, therefore, calls upon the bishops, and the U.S...
...Its central thesis is summarized in the last sentence of the final chapter:"If the church expects this nation's economic institutions to democratize themselves so that all may share in 'basic justice,' the church must lead the way by democratizing its own institutions...
...Others had made the same point about their 1983 letter on peace...
...Even if this book might not have so wide an audience as originally intended, it deserves a serious one...
...He traces this episcopal ambivalence back to a major trauma in U.S...
...It-became instead "a contextual reading of the pastoral letter process and its historic significance for American Catholicism...
...I would pose similar questions about the attention given Larry Rasmussen and Mary Daly...
...Even the keynote text from which the author draws his (modified) title has undergone a change from the first draft to the final one...
...That "preemptive strike" against a newly emerging form of Catholicism has made American church leaders ever since "unduly defensive in their approach to American institutions and cultural values...
...They are torn between institutional loyalty to Rome and their inescapable involvement in the American democratic experience...
...Catholicism which is Hispanic did not exist...
...Notwithstanding its undeniable merits, the book also raises some questions...
...75-87, 145-153...
...The church, therefore, must truly become a "community of moral discourse" (James Gustafson), affirming the presence of the Holy Spirit in the experiences of ordinary believers (Isaac Hecker) as it constantly strives to create the "kingdom on earth" (H...
...Catholic community generally, to "put aside the evasions of adolescence and face squarely the ambiguity of our past, present, and future...
...According to McCann, the bishops' principal contribution to the church and to "a sense of critical patriotism among the citizenry is a self-correcting process of mutual learning and teaching, which promises not only to strengthen our capacities for democratic consensus-making, but also to insure that whatever consensus we achieve will be informed by religious and ethical considerations...
...Daly, one might add, is no longer a Catholic, although her dissent from traditional Trinitarian dogma is portrayed here as a "Catholic" dissent, albeit "the most radical...
...Why, in chapter 3, does he talk about the death of the "immigrant church" as if the 25 percent of U.S...
...If this is supposed to be a commentary ("contextual'' or otherwise) of a major ecclesiastical document, why did they settle for an analysis of the penultimate draft...
...It's not that bishops are incapable of following a sustained theological argument, but they prefer that it terminate in specific and pastorally practical conclusions...
...We ought to call a halt, once and for all, to this careless practice of conferring theological degrees on people (mostly philosophers) who haven't earned them...
...Moreover, McCann refers incorrectly to Novak as a theologian...
...The bishops no longer speak of an "experiment in economic democracy," but of an "experiment in securing economic rights...
...But McCann also believes that the bishops are ambivalent about their achievement, and that so long as their ambivalence persists the Catholic church in America cannot be the kind of positive force for justice that it hopes to be...
...I should think that Dennis McCann will want to carry his argument forward, beyond this book, in lectures, articles, and perhaps another monograph...
...To be sure, Novak is not an insignificant dissenter from episcopal teaching and, in particular, from the U.S...
...namely, the condemnation of the so-called Americanist heresy by Pope Leo XIII at the turn of the century...
...Although I would agree with Charles Curran's jacket comment that the book merits"serious attention'' by all who are interested in U.S...
...Richard P. McBrien This book was originally intended as a conventional commentary on the U.S...
...Why, in chapter 2, does he root the principles of uncoerced participation, public discussion, and open consensus formation in Vatican II's doctrine of col-legiality rather than in the council's more fundamental doctrine of the church as the People of God...
...And why, in chapters 3 and 5, does the author spend so much space arguing with Michael Novak (pp...
...Indeed, he describes his book as "an attempt to dispel our collective amnesia," to force us all to look our Americanist past in the eye, and then boldly and fearlessly to re-ignite the engine of democracy in the church...
...Why, for example, did the author and his publisher not wait for the final draft of the bishops' pastoral letter...
...It may be too "highbrow" for the latter (Habermas's "truth-dependent mode of socialization" is not the clearest or most compelling way to get at the notion of participatory democracy in the church), and it may be too "academic" for the former...
Vol. 115 • January 1988 • No. 1
