Book Review of Peter Steinfels, A People Adrift

A People Adrift
The Crisis of the Roman Catholic Church in America
Peter Steinfels; Simon & Schuster, 2003, 377 pp. $26.00

A “crisis” is a turning point. Peter Steinfels uses the word in that sense in the subtitle to this extraordinary book, for he believes that “the Roman Catholic Church in the United States is on the verge of either an irreversible decline or a thoroughgoing transformation.” Catholics of every stripe would agree with that proposition. Many, however, would disagree with each other (and Steinfels) about the nature of that crisis and its proper resolution. The profundity, and bitterness, of that disagreement is one of the reasons why Steinfels describes American Catholics as “a people adrift,” caught in many apparently irreconcilable differences, and struggling to produce the leadership and unity needed for a positive transformation. Steinfels argues, however, that there are paths through those differences, and that the American Church’s crisis need not resolve itself into a “soft slide” toward European-style irrelevance.

Steinfels is unusually qualified to make that argument. Trained as an historian, his distinguished journalistic career has included serving as editor of Commonweal and writing the “Beliefs” column in the New York Times. He is intimately familiar with every major development and dispute in American Catholicism since Vatican II, and has written about most of them. In this book, he surveys the climate of opinion on the most important and contested issues: the Church’s always-controversial role in the American democracy, the meaning of Catholic identity in Catholic higher education and health care, the post-Vatican II struggles over the liturgy and catechesis, the reasons for the shrinking number of priests and nuns, and the uncertainty over the role of the laity in Church leadership. His discussion of these issues is always precise and analytical. He presents concisely but thoroughly, and with an unremitting fairness, the key arguments from across the ideological spectrum.

Steinfels is not, however, a dispassionate analyst or a neutral observer. His chapter on “Sex and the Female Church” is a devastating critique of the Church’s failure to respond to what he sees as world-historical change in the understanding of sexuality and the status of women. This failure, exemplified by what he views as the tragic error of Humanae vitae on contraception, has not only prevented the Church from developing a theology of the body that resonates with most of the faithful, but has led to the alienation of many Catholic women. Inflexible opposition to contraception in marriage, justified by rigid deductions from natural law and highly abstract philosophical principles, has led not just to massive rejection of the Church’s position by most Catholics, but has damaged its authority to speak on family life and deeply compromised its ability to treat homosexuals with dignity. Perhaps most ominous, the Church’s theology of contraception and sexuality has diminished its prophetic voice where it is most needed: as an advocate for human dignity against the moral threats of unrestrained biotechnology. Steinfels is not convinced by the argument that the tensions within the Church over sexuality and the status of women should or could be resolved by simple obedience to the truth of the Magisterium and a Catholic tradition that sets itself apart from a wounded modern culture. Steinfels insists that much defined as essential to the tradition is actually inessential, out of touch with the core of Catholic spirituality, and a source of unnecessary conflict and alienation.

His prescriptions for change, however, are cautious, incremental and sensitive to the pain and spiritual uncertainty associated with change in an institution where tradition plays such an unusually important role. While repudiating the arguments against female ordination, for example, he suggests that female membership in the deaconate may be a prudent first step. He believes that none of the arguments asserted by the Vatican and its conservative supporters in support of mandatory priestly celibacy are compelling, and that the requirement eventually should be abandoned. But he understands that such a change would require a wrenching, difficult transition to new structures for clerical formation and new ways of organizing priestly life. He urges careful study of the experience of Eastern Orthodox and other denominations with married priests as a prelude to any change. His genuine appreciation of the insights of Catholic feminist theology is muted, furthermore, by his dismay with tendencies toward a New Age-ish syncretism that is essentially post-Christian.

For all of his “liberal” convictions, Steinfels does not see mainline liberal Protestantism as a model for a transformed American Church, because he understands how that tradition is virtually withering away, and he thinks the Church should take very seriously conservative anxieties about the loss of Catholic identity. He sees hope for a renewal of that identity in the burgeoning growth in lay leadership: “[n]ew circumstances, new religious needs, and new spiritual energies have fused into an extraordinary innovation in American Catholic life.” And he sees a model for inspired clerical leadership in Joseph Cardinal Bernardin, whose Common Ground Initiative and eloquent articulation of the “consistent ethic of life” offered a way out of the bitter culture wars that have divided American Catholics since Vatican II.

Even though his Common Ground Initiative was attacked by Cardinal Law and others, and many conservatives have been brutally dismissive of Cardinal Bernardin’s image of the “seamless garment” of life, Steinfels sees in him the type of episcopal leadership needed to channel the energies of the laity and to preserve the centrality of the priesthood and the episcopacy to Catholicism.. Despite its critical and often pessimistic tone, A People Adrift ends with the image of Mary as “a sign of certain hope and comfort to the Pilgrim People of God.” As Steinfels knows, however, American Catholics are still searching for the new Bernardin. If one emerges, furthermore, many will find in his call for the establishment of common ground a betrayal of what they regard as core principles. The ideological cleavage among Catholics, perhaps best evidenced by the radically different interpretations by left and right of the sexual abuse scandal, suggests that the future may not bring a “soft slide” into irrelevance, but the bitterness of factionalization.