Wilson Carey McWilliams

MOJ readers will want to check out the newly published two volumes (here and here) of Wilson Carey McWilliams's collected essays edited by Patrick Deneen and McWilliams's daughter, Susan McWilliams. Patrick has posted a reflection on McWilliams and the introduction to one of the volumes here. The Democratic Soul: A Wilson Carey McWilliams Reader includes "Critical Rebound: Why America Needs a Catholic Recovery," which is based on a lecture McWilliams (who was a Protestant) delivered at Boston College in 2003:

Begin with the Augustinian truth: The Church, like its rivals, aspires to speak of and for the City of God, but it must speak in and to the City of Man. The transcendent is its reason for living, but it must live in order to fulfill that reason. Compelled to adapt to the temporalities, religion must also be watchful lest it become simply a function of time and place. If a church accommodates too much to society, it loses its distinctive character, and along with it any strong sense of community or claim on the identity of its members. But if it makes the social cost of membership too high, a church risks shrinking to the dimensions of a sect. At least implicitly, religion bargains with society, distinguishing between the first principles that are the perennial heart of its faith and the teachings and disciplines that it can de-emphasize or abandon in response to new circumstances.

The current clergy sex abuse scandals represent the most severe crisis in the history of the American Church, calling, in some measure, its bargains with society and with its own membership into question. American Catholics must hope for a season of atonement, knowing that this will bring turbulence and pain. Yet all Americans have a stake in the outcome: The Church’s future in this red-dawning century is inseparable from that of the republic.