An invitation to American Catholic history.

An Invitation to American Catholic History

THE LIBERAL Protestant churchman is an interesting amalgam of contradictory sentiments. His moderation and openness are his marks of distinction, and yet they never quite go so far as to cause him to shed his encrustations of good old-fashioned anti-Romanism. Take, for example, W. E. Gladstone, the Liberal Party leader of the late nineteenth century, who established a reputation as an advocate of religious toleration, constantly doing battle in Parliament to extend liberties to oppressed religious minorities--including Roman Catholics--within the British realm. Gladstone's various ministries are replete with land bills, disestablishment bills, even an early, though unsuccessful, Irish home-rule bill.

But let the Catholics of Ireland or England express a little too openly their adherence to the Pope of Rome, and Gladstone was immediately transformed into their most notorious ridiculer. For example, the proceedings of the Vatican Council of 1870 precipitated an astonishing eruption from the great statesman, who felt compelled to issue a pamphlet entitled The Vatican Decrees, in which he declared that Rome "has refurbished, and paraded anew, every rusty tool she was fondly thought to have disused" in promulgating the doctrine of papal infallibility, and that henceforth "no one can become her convert without renouncing his moral and mental freedom."

Now, it must be remembered that Gladstone was a nineteenth-century Liberal, and that it was not unusual for such Liberals to display their illiberal streaks in the most colorful phraseology. One hundred years later, were a mainstream churchman to speak similarly about Roman Catholicism, he would (one hopes) be branded an extremist. But that today's enlightened liberal pluralists use a different vocabulary does not mean that they are any less fearful of papal power and religious triumphalism.

Martin Marty, distinguished Professor of Modern Christianity at the University of Chicago, is one of America's best-known liberal Protestants, and he is interested enough in, and concerned enough about, Catholicism to write an extended essay called An Invitation to American Catholic History. Being an outsider to the tradition he examines, Professor Marty has assiduously adhered to the moderate-men-of-all-shades-of-opinion genre of writing. He is content to offer avuncular advice to his separated brethren, eschewing the fireworks of Mr. Gladstone and likewise taking a different approach from that of his former student Jay Dolan, whose considerably more detailed work on much the same topics (The American Catholic Experience, reviewed in these pages April 11) is laced with the bitterness only a disgruntled Catholic can bring to a study of the Church.

Granted, Marty is generous in his admiration of those people who have labored to sow the Catholic faith on American soil: the missionary priests Serra and Kino, Jogues and Marquette; the canonized saints Mrs. Seton and Bishop Neumann; the converts Bayley, Brownson, and Hecker; and many others. And he does not disparage Catholic devotions and symbols, nor does he regard the involvement of Catholics in public affairs as inherently threatening. But then, neither did Gladstone. And neither does the New York Times. In fact, there is virtually no opinion expressed in this book to which a thoroughly secularized agnostic could take exception, for the simple reason that the alpha and omega of Marty's religion is not God, but pluralism.

He can rejoice because, in 1984, "the obvious divisions within the Catholic political community and the equally obvious divisions outside it, in respect to legal abortion and other issues, showed that pluralism was healthy." Likewise, dissenters on moral issues are nearest the truth because they "keep the debates alive." And so on. He slides into feminist language to encourage his readers to sympathize with would-be women priests, and he decries any manifestation of papal authority as "old style."

He dismisses as simplistic the analyses of the two sanest chroniclers of modern American Catholicism (Monsignor George Kelly and Professor James Hitchcock) and relies instead on his own all too frail instincts to sort out the good from the bad in the roster of recent Catholic figures. The division is painfully predictable. Good Catholics include the Berrigans, Dorothy Day, Theodore Hesburgh, Monsignor George Higgins, Hans Kung, Rosemary Ruether, and Edward Schillebeeckx. Bad Catholics include Father Coughlin, Joe McCarthy, Pope Paul VI (after 1968), and Cardinal Spellman. And some people (one even a non-Catholic) are so bad they cannot even be named. Thus, Cardinal Ratzinger is only hinted at darkly as an oppressor of pluralism, and Ronald Reagan's name does not despoil this text: He is simply a "candidate" supported by "some bishops" because of "his anti-abortion stand."

What Professor Marty cannot seem to understand (and what therefore renders his effort ultimately valueless) is that his kind of pluralism can only lead to the propagation of that lukewarm sentimental religiosity which sees self-expression as the highest ideal and obedience to the dictates of the Living God as a quaint option for the few who choose it. In a genuinely pluralist society, religious men and women fight to overcome such spiritual lassitude and to secure as hospitable a climate as possible for their respective communions to flourish in their integrity, unadulterated by the secularist agenda. Thus, Catholic hierarchs of all political persuasions, whether a Manning or a Cullen, a Hughes or a Fitzpatrick, a Corrigan or an Ireland, have labored within the confines of predominantly non-Catholic environments to defend the wholeness of their faith and to act as a leaven for good in society at large.

The liberal churchman's anti-Romanism has not changed that much since Gladstone's day; it has suffered from a diminution in eloquence, while gaining only marginally in subtlety. Happily, The Vatican Decrees, though a best-seller in 1874, is only a curiosity today. Barring the utter debauchery of critical acumen in the forthcoming century, a similar fate will await Professor Marty's essay.