THE CRISIS OF LIBERAL CATHOLICISM A Commonweal Forum: But liberals do
Noonan, John
• The Crisis of Liberal Catholicism • John Noonan Liberalism Doesn't Exist But liberals do I 'd like to begin with the proposition, error has no rights. That is a proposition...
...there's no point to the organization unless you have a task to perform...
...The church embraces all three in various degrees...
...And it is the major syllogism that sustained religious persecution from about 320 a.d...
...It's the beginning of a major syllogism...
...What's uniting them is a search for certainty...
...If you look at persons and don't try to personify an idea, you get people, as both speakers have suggested, like Lacor-daire and Lamennais...
...I feel the same way about liberalism...
...No respectable historian now believes there was such a times as when the lights went out and it was dark...
...That is a proposition I take to be indis putable...
...So you could divide the church that way, if you wanted to...
...That gives a whole agenda for the future of Catholic education, which I suspect has not been realized to any degree...
...Certainly for many of the people in Rome he was a dangerous liberal...
...It's an incoherent term...
...Newman, to his critics in England, to people like Ward and Manning, was a liberal...
...The liberals were in FDR's New Deal, so there had to be a great deal of government control...
...But you could divide the church by those categories...
...Quite a few Catholics are literalists about papal encyclicals...
...You find the Enlightenment embracing persons ranging from John Locke, a very pious Protestant theologian, to Voltaire, a totally irreverent and cynical ex-Catholic...
...You can't sum them up neatly and say that both were Catholic liberals in the nineteenth century...
...What gives me great support is the work of a careful American historian, Henry May, in a 1978 book called The Enlightenment in America...
...What's wrong with it...
...I think that the same thing is true when it's moved over to the religious sphere and Catholic liberalism is spoken about...
...But only a few years after, perCommonweal 4O November 19,1999 • A Commonweal Forum • haps only two years after Peter Steinfels's quotation from Pius IX on fighting liberalism, Leo XIII made Newman a cardinal, his first cardinal...
...The greatest paradox of all, I think, is someone that Cardinal George takes as a counselor and the present pope has spoken of in the highest terms, John Henry Newman...
...Now, if I may strike at a root conception, which I think may appear in various forms in both of the presenters' papers, I don't believe in the Enlightenment...
...May has great difficulty locating anybody in eighteenth-century America who can be genuinely put into the conventional caricature of the Enlightenment...
...They will take a single sentence, a single phrase, out of a papal encyclical, in a way that they would consider ridiculous if it were taken out of Holy Scripture...
...If those two propositions are all the Enlightenment boils down to, I would maintain that there is no enlightenment...
...It was pretty much tied to Victorian morals...
...Leo XIII did not see him as a liberal...
...I make the contrast between the spirit and the letter...
...It supposes there is such a thing, such a person, as error, who might go around having rights...
...It was somehow connected with the Whigs in England...
...I believe there are ideas, but the ideas reside in individual human beings...
...He was a dangerous liberal...
...It's an unstable concept and I think on the whole an unfortunate one...
...I believe the same fundamental fallacy that underlies that proposition underlies talk of liberalism...
...I think driving all people throughout is the search for certainty...
...I hope that that is an agenda we would all agree on...
...But the search for it is one we can all sympathize with because we all share it...
...You must be people-oriented...
...He defines the Enlightenment with great strain as embracing two propositions...
...There is a third element that can never be forgotten...
...I don't believe it exists...
...I think, myself, that the Enlightenment is a reified or personified concept that modern secularists love because they want some intellectual ancestry, and they've invented the Enlightenment as the period...
...It's an indisputable proposition...
...I end with the same thought that I think Cardinal George echoed and that Peter Steinfels referred to, the thought that Paul expresses in his first letter to the Corinthians, when he deplores the division of the church at Corinth into parties, the party of Paul, the party of Apollos, the party of Cephas...
...There are other ways you can look at people within the church...
...But they will use that single sentence as though it was determinative of an issue...
...These were two very different persons in their relations to the church...
...There isn't much repose to be achieved...
...If it is moved left, as Peter suggests, then you get people who are so ardent in their desire to help the poor that they favor a heavy amount of state action...
...Both task-oriented persons and organization-oriented persons will not do anything good unless they are also people-oriented...
...Now, that is one of the great lines of Dignitatis humanae, the teaching of the Second Vatican Council on religious freedom: that the truth which human beings must have about their relation to God cannot be achieved without immunity, as the council puts it, from psychological coercion...
...We have to balance that search for certainty with the necessity of freedom for attaining and continuing to adhere to the truth...
...What's wrong with it is: It personifies error...
...You are none of those, he says...
...Again the attempt to catalog, to produce an artificial synthesis, is a mistake...
...Very few Catholics are literalists the way biblical fundamentalists are literalists...
...If you read Ian Ker's remarkable biography of Newman, you can get that quotation about the bureaucrats in Rome...
...In the nineteenth century, secular liberalism put much stress on economic freedom...
...It stressed some government liberties but a lot of social repression...
...Then there are those who have slogans, and they use those slogans the way literalists, papal literalists, use a single sentence from a papal encyclical...
...We might say it personifies error...
...As the Marxists might have said, it reifies error, turning it into a thing...
...We all want the repose of the human mind in certainty...
...He was a liberal to them...
...He, himself, used that wonderfully modern term, bureaucrats, to describe the Roman curia...
...Another distinction is between the literalists and the non-literalists...
...But I don't feel it exists...
...If you draw on Alasdair Maclntyre, you can talk of people being organization-centered or task-centered...
...I believe that is the proper approach to the church...
...I think in time it will be seen that there's no such period as when the lights went on...
...The Enlightenment is a chronological era, quite comparable to the Dark Ages...
...That's just the opposite of earlier views...
...Lamennais, with his journal, L'Avenir (The Future), looked to a democratic society with a certain freedom of conscience, and left the church because his ideas were explicitly condemned by Gregory XVI...
...First, the present generation knows more than the past generation, and, second, human reason is a good thing...
...If you try to locate some set of ideas, they're pretty incoherent...
...into the twentieth century, or at least the Tightness of religious persecution...
...As the same word evolved in this century, it came to cover people who believe in active government...
...You have La-cordaire, his associate to some degree, going on to become a Dominican and restore the Dominican order in France...
...I heard a distinguished mathematician not so long ago begin the Enlightenment with Francis Bacon, in the age of Shakespeare...
...You are Christ's...
...It's reified, it's personified, it's given this or that virtue or vice...
...You absolutely won't get the task done unless you have an organization...
...John Noonan, Jr., judge of the United States Court of Appeals, Ninth Circuit, is the author of, most recently, The Lustre of Our Country (University of California Press...
...Eventually, as the term is used today, it applies mostly in secular terms to freedom from sexual restraints...
Vol. 126 • November 1999 • No. 20
