Notebook: "Simply Catholicism"

...The Vatican is right to remind the world that the church condemned the "idolatry of race and of the state...

...In short, liberalism has taught Catholicism that belief cannot be compelled and that pluralism has its place, even in the church...

...Liberal Catholicism is an exhausted project...

...Subsequently, at my request, he sent a copy of his notes, averring that although "I don't relish getting into a national debate at this time...

...SIMPLY CATHOLICISM' Please explain t a recent meeting of the National Center for the Laity in Chicago, Archbishop Francis George presided at a Saturday-evening liturgy...

...MARGARET O'BRIEN STEINFELS o sono il Papa feminista, "I am I the feminist pope," said John Paul 1I with a twinkle in his eye...

...If one "type" of conservative Catholicism cannot be a sign of unity, is another type implied...

...Although I hung back out of shyness, the rest of our group of participants in a Vatican-sponsored conference on women's health surged to get as close as possible to this stooped, frail figure in his dazzling white cassock...

...However, to argue that there was no connection between nearly 2,000 years of church-inspired anti-Semitism and the Nazi assault on European Jewry is utterly fallacious and offensive...

...He looked and sounded so weak that I began to doubt whether he would make it through our audience, much less last long enough to take part in his projected millennium celebrations...

...Does he mean an eternal, a conceptual and reified Catholicism, sailing above the incarnational, the embeddedness of Catholicism in time and place...

...But Nazism did not spring full grown from the atheistic brow of the modern world...

...Nazi totalitarianism was, as the document argues, an unprecedented modern horror whose unique evil was difficult for all but the most prescient to grasp at first...

...If not, what is exhausted and what remains vital...

...Well, he said something like that, but darn, I didn't have my tape recorder...

...No, said other observers, however much pain he appears to be in, he's too strong-willed to die...

...The newly renovated church glowed with its refurbished Celtic borders and symbols--a bit like being inside the Book of Kells...

...Agreed, all such expressions can only be partial, always needing to be tested by the whole church and corrected, if necessary, by tradition, by Scripture, by episcopal and papal scrutiny and judgment...

...Toward the end of his homily, Archbishop George (whose elevation to cardinal was announced on the following day, January 18) said that liberal Catholicism was exhausted, that conservative Catholicism was sectarian, and that, in any case, there was only one Catholicism...

...What is the Petrine ministry all about...

...When everyone in the audience room laughed, he repeated the statement...

...If over the course of centuries anti-Semitism was rarely if ever condemned but rather ignored, tolerated, even encouraged...

...Does he identify this Catholicism largely with the magisterium and with the teaching authority of pope and bishops...

...it is now part of the way Catholicism understands itself...

...if it infected not only the laity but priests and bishops...

...it is stabilized enough for him to keep going...

...Is it congruent with the centralization of church authority in the Vatican curia...

...This is the quote he sent from his homily: "We are at a turning point in the life of the church in this country...

...While the pope appears to be a prisoner of the Vatican routine, he is at least a prisoner of love...

...That is not simply an achievement of the past...

...This is brought home again when "We Remember" calls Western democracies to account for their failure to give refuge to Jews seeking asylum from the Nazis...

...Although it proved to be a woefully ineffective obstacle to the Nazis, and millions of Catholics rallied to the Nazi cause, the Catholic church did not in any sense perpetrate the Holocaust...

...whatever his disease (Parkinson's...

...With a specific approach to worship, to education, to spirituality, to social action...

...The answer, however, it not to be found in a type of conservative Catholicism obsessed with particular practices and so sectarian in its outlook that it cannot serve as a sign of unity of all peoples in Christ...

...Sad to say, "We Remember" is also tendentious and unpersuasive in its analysis of the nature of Nazi anti-Semitism and its relationship to what the document calls historic Christian anti-Judaism...

...Perhaps those questions are a place to continue the conversation...

...It has shown itself unable to pass on the faith in its integrity and inadequate, therefore, in fostering the joyful self-surrender called for in Christian marriage, in consecrated life, in ordained priesthood...

...he stopped to have his ring kissed, his picture taken, and tenderly blessed a retarded child...

...Why does John Paul consider himself a feminist...

...A big part of the pope's Commonweal 7 April I0, 1998...

...Various contemporary challenges to Catholic teaching seem to make the appeal to church inerrancy an increasing temptation on the part of the Vatican...

...How the church can repent or correct the manifest errors of its past if it cannot honestly admit to any errors at all is, to say the least, something of a problem...

...It was a prayerful and impressive Mass at Old Saint Patrick's on West Adams Street...

...And turning to Cardinal George's last paragraph: One hears faint echoes of De Lubac's The Splendor of the Church...

...It no lony, er gives us life...

...They are expressions integral to the experience and the practice of real members of the actual church living and working in the contexts of different cultures, here and now...

...if until very recent times anti-Semitism was given vivid expression in the Good Friday liturgy (the "perfidious Jews") and in religious art...

...Even the most cursory study points to equivalent phenomena from the earliest days of the church...

...is there anything else...

...Here are some other adjectives often found before Catholicism: charismatic, devotional, intellectual, Hispanic, Irish, Chicago, Boston, lukewarm, intense, traditionalist, and so on...

...Similarly, for "We Remember" to rehearse the political history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and not acknowledge how the church's opposition to liberalism and democracy weakened the forces best able to deter fascism is equally disingenuous...

...The Catholic faith shapes a church with a lot ~( room for differeuces in pastoral approach, for discussion and debate, for initiatives as various as the peoples whom God loves...

...Fair enough...

...The answer is simply Catholicism, in all its fullness and depth, a faith able to distinguish itself from any culture and yet able to Commonweal 6 April 10, 1998 engage and transform them all, a faith jo}fftd in all the gifts Christ wants to give us and open to the whole world he died to save...

...But is no similar burden to be placed on the shoulders of church authorities who failed to act in their own sphere...

...But in looking at the church in which we actually live, I cannot help but also think of De Lubac's likening the church to "a ship of unruly passengers who always seem to be on the brink of wrecking it...

...The document insists that the Holocaust had "its roots outside of Christianity" as the "work of a thoroughly modern neo-pagan regime...

...It is, in fact, hard to imagine a catholic church without some degree of diversity and pluriformity...

...But, ,tore profoundly, the faith shapes a church which knows her Lord and knows her own identity, a church able to distinguish between what fits into the tradition that unites her to Christ and what is a false start or a distorti~g thesis, a church malted hew and ~ww because she is always one with the church throughout the ages and with the saints in heaven...

...Or is Catholicism multifaceted, liberal and conservative being but two of many responses to living in this church in this culture at this time in history...

...If the Vatican statement means only that no pope or ecumenical council or curial body ever elevated anti-Semitism to the level of formal doctrine, that is not so large a claim and will not, in the eyes of most people of any faith or none, absolve "the church as such" of responsibility for policies, attitudes, and actions that taught as clearly as any encyclical...

...If that is the case, is "simply Catholicism" the trajectory toward which the church is turning...

...However, is the answer to this state of affairs singular-"simply Catholicism...

...But as "We Remember" exemplifies, the doctrine of inerrancy errantly applied is no real help to authority in the end...

...What then does CardiI~al George mean by "simply Catholicism...

...But it was and is more than that...

...access to religious truth, will certainly be lost on most readers of "We Remember.'" More likely, this assertion of the church's metaphysical reliability will be read, with reason, as the worst kind of this-worldly moral evasion...

...That failure to act placed a "heavy burden of conscience on the authorities in question," judges the Vatican...

...Nazi racial anti-Semitism is attributed to "a false and exacerbated nationalism....essentially more sociological and political than religious...

...Essentially a critique, even a necessary critique at one point in our history, it is now parasitical on a substance that no hmger exists...

...I have to take responsibility for what I said...

...Is liberal Catholicism an exhausted project in toto...

...But I did have a chance afterward to ask Archbishop George what he meant, and he started to tell me...

...it was a "necessary critique," as he says--offering an unusual if not unprecedented episcopal concession in saying so...

...Some journalist, she...

...After this merry addendum to his prepared remarks, the pope began his slow progress back to his study, smiling his greetings, patting and being patted...

...If so, how should it be defined...

...It had obvious roots in Europe's near and ancient Christian past...

...Whether or not Cardinal George is inclined to continue the conversation, those three paragraphs warrant the attention of those who sense that the Catholic church in the United States is, indeed, at a turning point...

...our conversation ended amicably but unsatisfyingly...

...Please note: these are not separate, plural entities, not Catholicisms...

...they are expressions of the same faith...

...i d o n ' t want to end without a comment on Cardinal George's brief characterization of "liberal Catholicism...

...How will "simply Catholicism" accommodate what the church has learned from liberalism...

...and if this led to pogroms, to the terrors of the Inquisition--if, in short, anti-Semitism suffused much of Catholic culture for nineteen centuries, it is hard to see how "the church as such" can be held guiltless...

...To be sure, there are important distinctions to be made between Christian anti-Semitism and Nazi race hatred...

...In particular, through proposing a new understanding about the meaning of human freedom, liberalism has challenged Catholicism to reexamine certain of its hermetically contained ideas about the person, about conscience, about the relation of the person to the state, and about relations between church and state...

...if church councils promulgated laws segregating and discriminating against Jews...

...I didn't even have pen and paper with me...

...Unfortunately, there wasn't enough time...

...However one wants to understand the relationship between the mystical and the visible elements of the church, the incontrovertible historical record attests to the fact that "the church," and not just its members, taught erroneously, even perniciously, about Judaism and the Jews...

...I saw the pope twice during our week's visit inside Vatican City and came away with questions...

...Presumably Cardinal George would not disagree...