A Response to Father Araujo Pt. I: Conservative Catholics, A Liberal God and Objective Truth

I want to respond in two parts to Father Araujo’s thoughtful post on what it means to be a Catholic and it’s importance to legal theory. He begins by noting that there are some issues upon which faithful Catholics can differ and gives the issue of capital punishment. He wonders if one who supports capital punishment is a progressive in my terms and one who opposes it is a conservative in my terms. I actually used this example in my first post on the issue. It is important to note that my use of the terms progressive and conservative is not political. Catholics who adhere to the Magisterium across the board hold some positions that are conservative in the political sphere and some that are liberal. In a political sense, they are neither political or liberal. Catholics who follow the Magisterium across the board might regularly support Democrats or Republicans or neither. If they support the Magisterium across the board, they are conservative Catholics in my sense – Catholics of this character theologically tend to congregate around First Things rather than Commonweal.  But in my opinion some of the conservative or First Things Catholics do not follow the Magisterium across the board. Some of them oppose capital punishment or tolerate instruments of war that inevitably kill civilians. In the eyes of these Catholics, they are not dissenting from the Magisterium, they are interpreting the Magisterium. In my taxonomy, these are still Catholic conservatives.
By contrast, I think progressive Catholics who dissent from, for example, the teachings of the institutional Church on many issues involving sexuality, the role of women and other such issues typically believe that they are exercising freedom of conscience in departing from the Magisterium though on some issues, they may think a teaching is insufficiently established to count as part of the Magisterium. As to the former, I think the teachings of the institutional Church on birth control and same sex relations are clearly part of the Magisterium; as to the latter, I think the recent teachings of Church leaders as to how much weight is to be afforded to non-infallible teachings of the Church is often rejected on the ground that it can not be counted as part of the Magisterium. On the whole, as I use the term, progressives regard it as their duty to depart from the Magisterium when their conscience requires it.

I asked if God is a liberal. Father Araujo agrees that we have to “discern to the best of [our] ability God’s vision of justice.” It seems to me we might decide that God is a liberal, a conservative, something in between, or something else. I do not understand if we settle on a vision of justice that is attributable to God, how that is different from saying that God is a liberal or a conservative etc. (with the obvious understanding that this does not exhaust our understanding of God). I agree, as Father Araujo has said, that we are mostly in agreement. I do not understand the nature of our disagreement on this point if we have one. We may disagree and, if so I am surprised, about how much we can know about the mystery of God. The institutional Church can teach us much about God and our own prayer can bring us closer to God, but mysteries remain. Who among us really understands the eternal God; and who really understands the Trinity or what it means to be fully human and fully Divine at the same time? I think Father Araujo would agree that mysteries remain though his literal words, as I read them, suggest otherwise.
 Father Araujo then proceeds with a familiar, but articulate defense, of why one should follow the teachings of the Magisterium suggesting that the Magisterium is objective and those who disagree are mired in subjectivism. We have been down this road before. The progressives concede the teaching role of the institutional Church and that God speaks through the institutional Church, but particularly with respect to moral teaching they deny that the institutional Church has always spoken with God’s authority. They argue that the institutional Church has made many mistakes and has changed its moral position on many important matters. If this is correct, the institutional Church is a pilgrim Church that has been mired in the same subjectivism Father Araujo criticizes.
As I understand it, most conservatives argue that the institutional Church has never made mistakes in its moral teachings, but some admit mistakes while arguing that it is nonetheless perilous to depart from the Magisterium. We, of course, have debated these matters at length, and I am not going down that road again. I would note that whether right or wrong, it would be the rare progressive who conducts his discernment alone or operates simply on the basis of feelings. Progressive theologians like Curran and McCormick have participated in a community of bounded discourse that is marked throughout by reasoned elaboration.