Delahunty, "The Real Catholic Debate"

Here is a very interesting post about an interesting report on what sounds like an interesting event!  As between the "accommodationists" (Neuhaus, Murray, etc.) and the "radicals" (my colleague Patrick Deneen, Brad Gregory, etc.), I think I say, "well, some of both."  Is it alright to think that We Hold These Truths and After Virtue are both very important to the project of thinking about where we are and how we got here?  (Or . . . is it just that "I contain multitudes"?).  I think Prof. Delahunty is right about, inter alia, this:

The accommodationists can point to a period like the 1940s and 1950s to show that American society can be, not just tolerant, but even receptive, to Catholicism.  They would probably distinguish between two kinds of American liberalism – the classical liberalism of the Founders, and the liberalism of the present.  The former regarded government as, essentially, a scaffolding or a set of neutral procedures, allowing citizens to pursue their private projects peaceably within an agreed-upon framework.  The latter kind of liberalism posits that the State exists to pursue certain substantive goods.  Both forms of liberalism rest on a conception of the sovereignty of the individual, but the latter form assumes that the State must play a more active role in bringing about the conditions in which individual choice can flourish.  Since that form of liberalism regards the family and the Church as inimical to the sovereignty of the individual, it is inimical to Catholicism.  But the earlier, historic kind of liberalism is not hostile to such institutions, and indeed draws sustenance from them.  (This, of course, was Tocqueville’s argument.)  Thus, for the accommodationists, the task ahead for American Catholics seems to be to restore the pristine form of liberalism to American politics. . . .

. . . The radicals will have to explain more clearly how the liberalism of the present is continuous with, indeed grows out of, the classical liberalism of the early Republic. They will have to demonstrate the historical and conceptual linkages between the Calvinist and consumerist conceptions of human nature, and how the one eventually developed into the other. . . .