Catholicism and the Renewal of American Democracy:

...Hence, the politics of peace inevitably includes not just consciousness-raising about economic development and human rights, but inevitably must consider constitutional questions regarding the kind of public order in which such development is likely to occur and in which such rights are routinely to be respected...

...Weigel has equally challenging points to make about the ideology and politics surrounding the morality of abortion...

...Murray sees this framework, not primarily in terms of its negative associations with the minutiae of post-Tridentine Catholic moral casuistry, but in terms of its convergences With certain basic assumptions regarding human nature and civil society governing the Founding Fathers' constitutional design for the American republic...

...Weigel has swallowed Peter Berger's analysis of the alleged ascendancy of the so-called "new class...

...Not only does he take a cheap shot at their declaring their mother house a "Nuclear Free Zone," but by contrasting them with the Lithuanian victims of religious persecution in the Gulag Archipelago, he would have us believe that they are a terminal embarrassment to all right-thinking Catholics...

...I wish I could be more enthusiastic about this book, for I find Weigel fundamentally sound on the points just discussed...

...Unlike other Catholic and Protestant theologians-Stanley Hauerwas being the most impressive among them-who have used Maclntyre as permission to abandon a "naked public square" in order to concentrate on defining and reinforcing the distinctively biblical identities of their own religious communities, Weigel pointedly refuses to give up on the possibility ofa truly civil society engaged in public moral discourse...

...But rather than healing polarizations within the community, Weigel's polemics tend to intensify them...

...He argues that Roe's lack of concern for the unborn halts, at least temporarily, the historic "expansion of the community of the commonly protected*-the communities for which we claim, as Americans, a common responsibility...

...Among them is his refusal to make common cause with Hauerwas and James T. Burtchaell, who would focus attention away from what's left of the public square toward intrinsically religious considerations...

...Dennis P. McCann Inside George Weigel's new book a formidable contribution to the tradition of Catholic social teaching is struggling to be born...

...So much for the promise of Weigel's attempt...

...Hauerwas and Burtchaell may be more successful in giving committed Christians good reasons for renouncing recourse to abortion, but their theological strategies will tend to disqualify them from having any effective impact on the legislative arguments that are likely to occur if Roe v. Wade is amended or overturned...

...Weigel rightly understands that the greatest single challenge facing the renewal of the Murray project is the apparent triumph in our public life of the "emotivism" so tellingly analyzed in Alasdair Maclntyre 's After Virtue (1981...

...If Weigel keeps on like this, he runs the risk of being dismissed as the Newt Gingrich of American Catholic theology...

...Of course, Weigel and Berger may be right...

...In which case, like others engaged in ideological combat Marxist style, they inevitably must break a few eggs in order to produce an omelet...

...It's worse...

...The brief statement given here is superior to Weigel's lengthier Tranquillitas Ordinis: The Present Failure and Future Promise of American Catholic Social Thought on War and Peace (1987), upon which it is based...

...Perhaps the least polemically encumbered is his analysis of "the quest for peace and freedom" after the bishops' pastoral letter, "The Challenge of Peace" (1983...

...This lack of consensus within the religious communities is mirrored by the even more disturbing levels of moral confusion and cultural illiteracy characteristic of American society...

...Whatever the partial illumination afforded by this perspective, what I find most disturbing is the way it gives permission to those who adopt it to engage in "class struggle," no-holds-barred...

...As I see it, then, the public theologian in George Weigel is still to emerge...

...Finally, one does not have to be a John Courtney Murray to recognize just how subversive of public moral discourse such a "class struggle" can be...

...Not surprisingly, Weigel employs some of the traditional methods of the Inquisitors, such as his ludicrous attempt in a pyramid of innuendo to discredit McBrien and the Catholic Theological Society of America through guilt by association with Mary Daly...

...Weigel notes that virtually all of them initially welcomed the opening of the new pontificate, but then he cleverly goes on to juxtapose recent comments, notably from Richard McBrien and William Shea, uttered at the height of controversies over Vatican interventions in, for example, the Seattle archdiocese and the Curran case at Catholic University, with George H. Wil-liaros's earlier and more appreciative analysis of The Mind of John Paul II (1981...

...The results of his demonstrations are mixed at best, but each of them is truly worth considering, if one can see beyond the polemics to the actual proposals...

...At its best, Catholicism and the Renewal of American Democracy seeks to walk the path marked out by John Courtney Murray, whose work is not as neglected by other American Catholic theologians as Weigel seems to think...

...The same kind of mean-spirited injustice he did to Dorothy Day in his previous book, he does this time to the Adrian Dominicans...

...Though his position on the morality of abortion is predictably close to that of the right-to-life movement, his attempt to renew the debate within the context of the Murray project yields fresh insights...

...Weigel's recovery of the Murray project self-consciously addresses a situation far more tempestuous than the one that Murray faced in the calm before the storm of Vatican II...

...Like Murray a generation ago, Weigel is disturbed by the low estate of public moral discourse, and wants to rehabilitate the Catholic natural law tradition as the appropriate "grammar" for framing social and political issues for debate in what he hopes will become a "civil public square...

...It's not just that Weigel self-righteously takes it upon himself to denounce the "cheap grace" of (mostly left-wing) Catholic social activists...

...Similarly, he attacks those American Catholic theologians who have voiced public criticism of Pope John Paul II...

...Berger writes of "the rising importance of the 'knowledge industry' in the developed world" by whidi-in what amounts to a caricature of Marxist dialectics-production has given rise to a class of communicators, educators, and government bureaucrats, whose self-interest is furthered by the expansion of governmental power in American life...

...But among the eggs to be broken will be resources, as yet unpolarized, that still exist within the community, resources that could have contributed to renewing or creating for the first time a civil public square...

...Weigel can't resist invoking Murray to justify his attacks upon Catholics who disagree with him...

...If Weigel really wants to advance Murray's legacy, he would do well to reconsider the ideological biases, as well as the sheer mischief, inherent in the "new class" hypothesis...

...He's just attacking a class that has entrenched itself within the church to maintain its own unjust domination...

...Though such intensive theological reflection may not be as emotionally rewarding as "class struggle!' appears to be, it provides a more secure foothold on Murray's path toward a truly civil society...

...Why does Weigel treat his fellow Catholics mis way-many of whom over the years have made at least as many important contributions to the development of Catholic social teaching as he...

...My point is not that McBrien and Shea are right about the pope or that Williams is wrong, but that in making the comparison without due regard to changed circumstances, Weigel's remarks tend not so much to invite us to public moral dialogue, as to a heresy trial...

...When Weigel attacks the Adrian Dominicans, or McBrien, or The National Catholic Reporter, there's nothing personal to it...

...The question of democratic governance is hardly peripheral to an authentically Catholic commitment to peacemaking...

...As Murray and Weigel persuasively argue, if it didn't already exist, we'd have to invent it...

...Weigel implies that because McBrien and "ideological feminists" like Daly tend to agree that "the single most serious issue facing the Catholic church today is that of sexual equality," they somehow must share a common agenda on other matters...

...But the labor is unusually protracted and difficult, because its author cannot resist engaging in a mean-spirited form of neOconservative polemics that entirely undermines the proposal he wishes to make for the renewal of American Catholicism...

...Though Weigel is often at his polemical worst in analyzing the causes of our current predicament, he is surely right in recognizing that "the fault lines in the current religious debate over the right ordering of American public life do not run along denominational lines...

...The Murray project, of course, does not simply insist upon religious liberty as the centerpiece to an authentically Catholic understanding of human rights, but also provides, especially in We Hold These Truths: Catholic Reflections on the American Proposition (1964), a powerful analysis of the current condition of public moral discourse in these United States...

...Among these are Weigel's analysis of the contemporary state of the question on church-state issues, his reformulation of the debate over abortion legislation, and his understanding of democratization within the struggle for third-world development...

...Moreover, Weigel launches a well-targeted challenge to the allegedly "liberal" character of the prochoice ideology...

...Weigel's plea on behalf of natural law, and his occasionally brilliant applications of his framework to a variety of social issues, should not be dismissed...

...Though Murray and Weigel may be guilty of wishful thinking in finding continuity between the political theologies of Thomas Aquinas and, say, James Madison, still there's enough of an affinity upon which to build a distinctively American Catholic appropriation of the natural law...

...d a truly civil society...

...Weigel would like to define a new "vital center" for the American Catholic community, beyond the current confusions and animosities generated by nearly a quarter century of severe stress, post-immigrant church and post-Vatican II...

...On the other hand, he warns prolife advocates not to hold out for "a publicly actionable consensus on an absolute proscription of abortion...

...Inamanner designed toevoke Murray's We Hold These Truths, Weigel tries to show the continued promise of the natural law tradition by suggesting how six public arguments might be reconstructed, each one currently stalled in a condition of ideological "gridlock" within both the church and the larger society...

...For it makes a case for the so-called "just war tradition," and points out-and this, I believe, is Weigel's most important substantive contribution to the debate-that this branch of the natural law tradition entails a distinctive theory of "peace as rightly ordered, dynamic political community...

...Weigel asserts that after Vatican II, American Catholicism fell victim to a "new class" of its own which controls the church, especially its postures toward public policy questions, through a network of newly formed diocesan and national "justice and peace" bureaucracies...

...Even significant progress in limiting abortion-on-demand, Weigel says, could help "recreate the cultural climate of public hospitality in which arguments against the 'hardcase'resortto abortion can be more effectively mounted...

...The religious and ideological differences are probably as wide and deep among American Catholics today as they are among American Protestants or Jews...

...I believe that there is a fundamental misperception at stake here...

...Then, he will find, as Murray's other admirers, including David Tracy, have discovered, that there's more man enough work to do simply on the philosophical foundations of public moral discourse, and their appropriation within the assumptions governing a public theology adequate to the challenges facing American Catholicism...

...The problem,is that his descriptions of the current predicament of American Catholicism are often so outrageously distorted and viscerally provocative as to make it almost impossible to keep one's mind firmly fixed upon the contribution he seems capable of making...

...With a heavy-handed irony that Murray himself would hardly have found congenial, Weigel implies that the "New Nativism" mat Murray vigorously opposed in Paul Blsnstiard's American Freedom and Catholic Power today finds its most insidious supporters in the editorial iyfficesof The NationalCatholic Reporter...

...Here, too, one discerns Weigel's Murray-like realism about how the cultural and political conditions necessary for authentically public moral discourse actually are secured...

...Consistent with the kind of selective quotation and slanted historical interpretation that all but disqualifies Tranquillitas Ordinis from serious consideration, Weigel seems to go out of his way to deny the moral standing and intellectual integrity of those with whom he disagrees...