Is the Catholic Left Radical?

It's been almost ten years now since the Second Vatican Council began. Ten years ago, the Church found itself in a fairly strong and hopeful position. Both traditionalists and liberals had hopes that the council would renew the Church.

It didn't quite happen that way. The reforms of the Council have unsettled conservatives. They see that many of the traditions they held most sacred have been thrown out the window. And liberals are not satisfied for the most part either. Although the reforms of the Council exceeded their wildest hopes, many of the liberals want much more. Furthermore, whereas Catholic liberals at the beginning of the 1960's, felt very much at home in the Church, many of them are increasingly doubtful that the Church is where they belong.

What has happened in the Church in the past decade to cause this dissatisfaction? Did aggiornamen to fail? If so, who or what is to blame?

James Hitchcock's The Decline and Fall of Radical Catholicism, in attempting to answer the first questions, replies with a loud "Yes!" to the second and (even louder) "Liberals!" to the third. For Hitchcock, many of the Catholic liberals of the early sixties were not primarily concerned with Church renewal and reform. They only thought they were. Their real crisis, he says, was a spiritual one which they were unable to face. What liberals thought were dissatisfactions about Church structure and liturgy were, in fact, much deeper doubts about religion and God Himself. (And indeed, even the idea of God as "Him" has been called into question by radical feminist Catholics like Rosemary Reuther.)

Although Hitchcock excludes some liberals from his invective, his critique is aimed broadly at most of the Church Left. This is, in fact, they key problem with the book. Hitchcock ends up using the words "liberal," "radical," "progressive" and "reformer" almost interchangeably. Despite this key weakness, many of Hitchcock's criticisms are very much to the point. Indeed, a truly "radical" critique of the Church reformist movement could be built quite easily upon Hitchcock's evidence.

His criticisms against the Catholic liberals are reminiscent of various revisionist critiques of the Progressive movement. Like the New Politics, the Catholic Left in America is primarily made up of the wealthy, well-educated and upwardly mobile. For Hitchcock, their revolt is in a very real sense a bid for power:

The "Catholic Revolution" has in reality been two pronged, with the prongs pointed in opposite directions. It is the revolt of the elite middle against the authoritarian hierarchy above and the ignorant masses below. As such, it follows a classic revolutionary pattern, including the fact that it masquerades as a spontaneous popular uprising, while concealing the fact that special groups will be its primary beneficiaries.

Hitchcock notes that many of the new positions of authority in the Church have been taken over by the liberals--they are writing the catechisms, controlling the publishing houses, preparing the curricula. Their fight against authority he says, is not a fight against authority itself, but only against those holding power. Their victory would represent not a real revolution, but only a palace coup.

The Decline and Fall attacks with considerable enthusiasm the ambivalence among the Catholic radicals concerning black nationalism and white ethnic power. While sympathetic to the demands by blacks for more control over their lives and more respect for black culture, the radical Catholic has systematically sought to destroy the traditions and culture of Polish, Italian, Lithuanian, Slovak, Irish and French Canadian Catholics. Somehow, these traditions and customs are basically "unprogressive." In place of the parish, the Catholic radical has sought small group liturgies which lend themselves more to suburban homes and college campuses than to the Italian ghetto in East Harlem.

Hitchcock perceives (very correctly, I think) that the liberals failed to realize that many of their reforms would lead not to a radicalization of the Church--that is, more power over the Church by individual Catholics and greater Church concern for problems of war, poverty and powerlessness--but rather to what Hitch cock tellingly calls "spiritual sub-urbanization." The radical spiritual ness of the Church is very much outside of the mainstream of American pragmatism with its emphasis on GNP and incentive systems. What liberal Catholics have failed to see--and what the Fathers Berrigan and Thomas Merton and the Catholic Worker movement have--is that orthodox belief can lead very easily to a radical critique. Like the Kennedy liberals (a term which is too broad but nonetheless descriptive), the Catholic liberals confused elitism with democracy. What they've found out is that real change simply cannot be handed down from the top, for the educated and wealthy.

And it is at precisely this point where Hitchcock's analysis stops. Although he concedes that Catholic radicals are now beginning to rediscover the working class (like their brethren in the New Politics movement), he dismisses this as the same sort of fadism which led his villains to endorse psychoanalysis and the Poverty Program in the middle sixties. In fact, Catholic liberals are going through a kind of radicalization, which may well force them to go beyond fadism. This summer, for example, Michael Novak, a radical Catholic journalist who is a key villain in Hitchcock's analysis, wrote an article for Harper's in which he lambasted American society for systematically excluding PIGS (Poles, Italians, Greeks and Slavs) from power. America, he said, has attempted to destroy the culture of the white ethnics. They are dissatisfied and are fighting back. The anger with which Novak wrote bespeaks a cathartic realization on his part that the elitist road to Christ was simply the wrong route. Similarly, Harvey Cox is moving away from a Secular City technocratic theology toward the idea of "people's religion." Radical theologians, Cox says, must look to the people and to popular piety for guidance. Hitchcock is very critical of the influence Cox has had on the Catholic Left, and yet it is possible, that he, too, will help move the reformers away from their elitist stance.

Above all, Hitchcock's analysis suffers from his failure to take a closer look at much of what is going on in radical theology. He looks instead at radical journalists like Novak and Daniel Callahan and magazines like Commonweal. These are, to be sure, good indicators of what radical Catholics are thinking about. They are not substitutes for analysis of theology itself. What is significant about radical theologians like Jurgen Motlmann (a Protestant) and Johannes Metz (a Catholic) is that they rely very heavily upon the Gospel in their analysis. Hitchcock simply dismisses their quest for a God of the future as an attempt to secularize the message of the New Testament as much as possible. In fact, however, their theology of hope embodies a belief in the future which is distinctly Christian. It is based not on a belief in the flow of history, but on a belief in God's promise. Such theology is laying the base for a kind of radicalism which is both left and Christian.

On the night before my cousin's graduation from High School, he and I stayed up all night. When 6 a.m. rolled around, we left for Mass at a poor Portuguese Church in the North End. Gathered there to hear Mass in Portuguese were strong women who appeared at peace; middle aged men with rough hewn hands and faces; tough and happy children. Many of those there that early probably came so they could get to their Sunday job on time.

If radical Catholicism is to have any future, these are the people who must make up its constituency. Religion, as Marx pointed out, is the cry of the oppressed creature. But it need not be a cry of powerlessness. Jesus' message was for the poor, and it was a call to strength. Hitchcock has correctly perceived the elitism which has characterized much of the activity and belief of the Catholic Left. This criticism, however, is not the type which will kill radicalism in the Church. In fact, an era of real Catholic radicalism may be just beginning.