Name your brand

...7...

...Hence this liberalism approves of abortion on demand, gay marnage, condoms in schools, the equality of all cultures, and the equality of all forms of "family" (whether marned or not, two parents or one, gay or straight...

...Head Start for the poor...

...it had no strong objections to Bntish liberalism (even though Gladstone wrote a book denouncing the dogma of papal infallibility), and it thought the United States was on the whole a fine place for Catholics In twentieth-century America there have been two main types of liberalism, one more compatible with Catholicism than any pnor form, the other thoroughly incompatible...

...Perhaps it even depends on what you mean by "be"—a question upon which much was said by Thomas Aquinas, who Acton said was the first Whig ) But space is short here...

...But there was nothing insincere about the religiosity of the Unitarians...

...2 A new kind of liberalism emerged from the great cultural upheavals of the late '60s and early '70s To this day it has no agreed-upon name let's call it the liberalism of the cultural Left This newer liberalism is highly seculanstic sometimes deliberately antirehgious, sometimes only nonrehgious...

...How can there be Catholics who endorse the agenda, or at least much of the agenda, of cultural left liberalism1...

...and, for the elderly, Medicare, Social Secunty COLAs, and subsidized housing...

...It goes without saying that this kind of liberalism is totally incompatible with Catholicism To put it in the language of logic textbooks to say in the old days that a person was a Catholic and a New Deal liberal was close to a tautology, whereas to say that one is a Catholic and a cultural left liberal is a contradiction in terms But if so, how come there are people who don't feel this contradiction...

...This liberalism believed in freedom of trade, press, religion, along with church-state and church-school separation Late-twentieth-century Catholics would find little to object to in such a program...

...All this was thoroughly in accord with the teachings of the social and political encyclicals...

...Was nineteenth-century Catholicism compatible with nineteenth-century liberalism9 In the case of continental liberalism, not at all, in the case of Bntish liberalism, pretty much so...

...and in the case of American liberalism, very much so In other words, the more Catholic the country, the more incompatible its liberalism with Catholicism...

...whereas the more Protestant the country, the more compatible...

...Let me save that question till another day...

...Respect was shown for the church, its doctnnes, its moral code Government was strong, but not excessively so Its power was used to assist the poor, the aged, the unemployed, to protect the nghts of labor unions...

...1 New Deal liberalism, which was dominant in the United States from the early 1930s through the mid-1960s, was close to perfect from a Catholic point of view...

...but nineteenth-century popes, above all Pius IX, were having none of it They viewed it, probably correctly, as the ideology of an aggressive and highly secularized elite bent on emasculating Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular 2 Bntish liberalism was a marriage of convenience between two quite opposite worldviews Utilitarianism, which was essentially atheistic or at least resolutely agnostic, and the Dissenting Protestantism of the pious middle classes The Utilitarians tended to be discreet about their infidelity, largely because they had no wish to antagonize their far more numerous Evangelical allies 3 Prior to the Civil War, American liberalism was almost purely religious in complexion, with hardly any admixture of secularism Of course much liberal leadership was provided by Unitarians, whom conservative Protestants of the time accused of having a religion that was nothing more than a way-station on the road to infidelity In retrospect it appears the critics were correct...

...So I'll go light on "Catholic" and concentrate today on "liberal," a term whose meaning has been far more mutable Dunng the first three quarters of the nineteenth century, liberalism came in three main vaneties: Continental, British, and American...

...they were honestly persuaded that theirs was the purest form of Christianity...

...The editors add that this question will be discussed further in the coming year...

...Its fundamental value is that society should have no fundamental values—except of course the value that holds all values to be as good as all other values Or to put this in other terms, it believes in unlimited personal autonomy, including above all the freedom to construct one's values and moral code, the freedom not to have these imposed on one by others Of course a minimal amount of law and order must be maintained...

...Can Catholics be liberals'7" It all depends on what you mean by "Catholic" and "liberal...

...1. Continental liberalism was strongly anticlerical, especially in Catholic countries such as France, Italy, and Spain ("Anticlerical" was a polite word for "anti-Catholic," much the way "prochoice" is today a polite word for "proabortion...

...In the mid-1960s, just before it went down in flames in Vietnam, New Deal liberalism had its final tnumphs: civil rights for blacks...

...but beyond that people should be free to do, say, think, and feel whatever they please...

...And of course this is exactly the way Rome responded in practice It detested continental liberalism...

...Drawing on our religious tradition, we Catholics can bnng to liberalism "an emphasis on the social nature of the human person and the social bonds that bind society together...

...NAME YOUR BRAND ALL LIBERALISMS AREN'T EQUAL In the November 18, 1994, issue of Commonweal, the editorial ("Liberals & Catholics") opened with the intriguing and highly pertinent question, "Can Catholics be liberals''" While granting that liberalism has its shortcomings, most notably its "agnosticism concerning the good" and its "tendency to foster extreme individualism," the editors concluded that there is no essential incompatibility Catholicism should not treat liberalism as an enemy but rather as a friend who has fallen on bad times, a friend in need...

...Since Commonweal has always had a dual identity as both Catholic and liberal, the editorial conclusion that Catholicism and liberalism are compatible probably did not surprise anyone Nor will it come as much of a surprise when one of the magazine's columnists agrees with the editors—not even when the writer in question has frequently used his column to indicate his profound unhappiness with contemporary liberalism...

...to check the economic freedom of capitalists In the postwar period the United States became the pnncipal opponent of Rome's old enemy, atheistic communism...