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.
Saturday, February 14, 2004
Over at the "Times and Seasons" blog ("Quite possibly the most methodologically individualist, yet vegetarian, onymous Mormon group blog in history"), Nate Oman has a post that might be of interest to "Mirror of Justice" participants and readers. The post is a reflection on, among other things, the Hart-Devlin debate about the relationship between a society's morality and its criminal code. Oman contrasts the Devlin view with the "classical natural law tradition."
Rick
Friday, February 13, 2004
Thanks, all, for the very stimulating beginning! Since this is my first post, I thought I’d start with a couple of words about what I think our “experiment” is about, really. At some level, I don’t like the subtitle of our forum – “dedicated to the development of Catholic legal theory.” What I understand this discussion, and my work as a Catholic legal scholar, to be about is not “Catholic legal theory” so much as “legal theory” tout court. The Catholicity of it lies first in a commitment to all that is good and right and true – or, put another way, an openness to reality in the totality of its elements. Second, it lies in a conviction that He who is the meaning of all things, as he continues to be present throughout history in His Body (that is, the Church), is the only way to maintain that openness and thus the most complete way for humanity to even glimpse the unity of meaning of all reality and to remain in relationship with it. From that perspective, it would be a fundamental mistake to suggest that “Catholic” legal theory stands (or even could stand) alongside other “forms” or “modes” of legal theory with which it competes. That would perpetuate an understanding of reality, including the meaning of our humanity and its destiny, as essentially fragmented rather than unitary, which basically sells the store for the intellectual currency of modernity right from the start. In other words, my desire is not to develop Catholic legal theory, but to explore how the encounter with Christ, as illumined by the teaching and tradition of the Church, can make our understandings of law more intelligible, our judgments about it more reasonable, and our actions through law more fully human.
That finally brings me to the ongoing discussion below about philosophical anthropology (I would drop the “moral” from the label, which seems to me both redundant and a temptation to reduce the problem of human nature and law to moral questions in a narrow sense – even though I understand that’s not at all your intent, Rick). If a legal theory aspires to do what I described in the preceding paragraph, it must be able to offer an understanding of law that corresponds more fully to the totality of our human experience. This is true whether we speak in the language of classical natural law or Catholic Social Thought (I do not mean to suggest a dichotomy between them – merely that the vocabulary can be different at times). So, yes, I agree that good legal theory has to be about anthropology. But many centuries of legal thought have been devoted to eliminating those fundamental questions of the meaning of humanity from the scope of law, or at least to radically reducing the “answer” to those questions. If we are to renew legal thought on those grounds, it will take a long process of educating ourselves to have a genuine interest in and affection for our humanity, one that in turn provokes a sincere and open asking of the question of its meaning – because, to paraphrase Reinhold Niebuhr, nothing makes less sense than the answer to a question that is not asked.
Thursday, February 12, 2004
Rob asks (below) whether the "divergence in emphases [suggested in Vince's and my earlier posts] also underlie the political split between left-leaning and right-leaning Catholics?" and also "does the Republican wing of the Catholic Church tend to emphasize anthropology first, action second, while the Democratic wing tends to emphasize action first, anthropology second?" I guess, for what it's worth, I'd say "no" to both questions.
I agree with Rob that President Bush often uses the language of subsidiarity, etc. And, this is good (I think). Still, each political "side" has -- as Vince pointed out -- "anthropological difficulties" (after all, both major parties inhabit our culture, and Catholic anthropology seems, increasingly, counter-cultural). Each party's platform arguably presents inviting targets for action (i.e., each party supports things we might oppose). And, each party's platform arguably contains or calls for some "actions" that a citizen hoping to act in a manner consistent with CST could support. For some of us, the sanctity of unborn life, or the fragility of religious freedom, might push in one direction; for others, questions about the use of military force or the just levels of social services and poverty relief might push in another. In any event, it is not at all clear that an emphasis on "action," or "confronting injustice," would necessarily push one to one party over another.
My original point about "moral anthropology" was certainly not to endorse navel-gazing quietism. Instead, the suggestion was (and is) simply that, if we are trying to think about a Catholic legal theory, as opposed to (for now) a program of political action, we might start with questions about what the person really is, and why it matters.
Rick
