Catholicism and Liberalism, edited by R. Bruce Douglass and David Hollenbach
Noonan, John T.
Can this marriage be saved? In any actual war the persons easiest to kill are one's own allies; but killing of this kind occurs only by mistake. It is different in ideological warfare....
...A dedicated priest, whose apologia for Catholicism met a rousing success in a France recovering from the revolution, he dared, in a journal prophetically named L 'Avenir (The Future), to celebrate the union of Catholicism with democracy, including religious liberty...
...John T. Noonan such as Metternich, and partly under their influence, but partly for the three reasons already mentioned, his position was anathema to Pope Gregory XVI...
...But the world of The Future has not been fully realized yet...
...The triumph at Vatican II is celebrated by Joseph Komonchak...
...The real foe is too hard to reach and penetrate...
...Of course, as these authors are aware, there are many definitions of liberalism, and more aspects to it than the rights of conscience...
...This book eloquently points to the complements that liberals could find in Catholicism...
...Focused on autonomy, liberalism has difficulty dealing with the complex interrelationships of the family...
...20: 25 March 1994 BOOKS CATHOLICISM AND LIBERALISM Edited by R. Bruce Douglass and David Hollenbach Cambridge University Press, $59.95, 368 pp...
...The church "must always be reformed," said Tertullian...
...by Montalembert, the leader of enlightened Catholic politics in France...
...Third, their lack of logic translates into a lack of loyalty...
...The result was Mirari vos, an encyclical repudiating L 'Avenir's ideas and declaring liberty of conscience "a madness...
...but these at hand are vulnerable...
...Their existence certainly encourages the enemy...
...Felicite de Lamennais may be taken as the first and most unhappy example of this species...
...The ultimate triumph within the church of the most basic liberal idea makes all the sadder "the failed encounter" of nineteenth-century Catholicism and liberalism that Peter Steinfels feelingly describes in the opening essay of this book...
...These who question one aspect of your position may be shown to question one of your premises...
...We're the good guys," the Catholic liberals have been saying for about two hundred years...
...The Catholic liberals are utterly sincere, but they have as their companions in the faith those whose mental set is not so different from the inquisitors' . Headed by Newman, the liberals are not a small or marginal band...
...We're not the people who burned Savanarola, Hus, Joan, and Latimer...
...For all these reasons, better to shoot them now...
...His basic insights, however, were maintained by Lacordaire, the restorer of the Dominican order in France...
...Second, it is a matter of logic...
...Over a century later, Lamennais's proposition was revived by John Courtney For Catholicism to be attractive to those who see it from outside, it must conform its own practices to the commitment to conscience that in theory it has proclaimed...
...James Provost sets out the halting steps that have been taken and candidly observes that the church "has yet to come to grips" with the problem...
...The work of internal renovation remains...
...Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre could not believe what was happening...
...and above all by Alexis de Tocqueville, whose Democracy in America informed Americans about what they had but was primarily intended to instruct his own compatriots and coreligionists about what they should have...
...Liberalism, it has always seemed to its Catholic friends, needs a larger vision of human possibilities, a stronger social conscience, an awareness that truth and justice, essential as they are, do not exhaust the values required for communal life...
...Logically, they are suspect...
...If they were logical they would either abandon their difference with you or enlarge upon it, soon arriving by inexorable steps in the enemy camp...
...First, it relieves frustration...
...Lamennais, mortally wounded, left the church...
...Philosophically, as Paul Sigmund here points out, the major work had already been accomplished by Jacques Maritain...
...As a political doctrine it can degenerate into a selfish individualism inattentive to the common good...
...You can trust us...
...His views were politically objectionable to autocrats Murray and, although Murray was silenced at first, the church in the Second Vatican Council wholeheartedly embraced the right of every human person to the free exercise of religion...
...Vatican II was their council...
...If they were truly committed to your cause, they would not cultivate a slightly distinct position...
...There the easiest targets are those closest to one's own positions, and for three reasons they are the ones most often shot...
...At heart they must be traitorous...
...The corrective force of Catholic social doctrine in these areas is brought out by other essayists here, among them Louis Dupre, Jean Bethke Elshtain, and David Hollenbach...
...The triumph also removed the tension between the American ideal and the ideal Catholic state which Paul Blanshard exploited so successfully and whose course Philip Gleason perceptively portrays in the account that follows Steinfels's...
...As economic theory it encourages a laissez-faire that the church has never accepted...
...Their history and their reasoning are the subject of this valuable book...
...This dialectic, of which the course of the French Revolution and the Bolshevik movement are spectacular examples where the shooting was not metaphorical, has also been experienced analogously by those Catholics who, since the beginning of the nineteenth century, have sought to reconcile the authority of the church with the liberty of the individual conscience...
Vol. 121 • March 1994 • No. 6
