Being Right: Conservative Catholics in America.

Did Vatican II cheer up anybody in America? If so,they are keeping quiet about it. Catholic academics tend to grumble about continuing conservative rigidities in the postconciliar church but now two of them, Scott Appleby and Mary Jo Weaver, have gathered together the equally dissatisfied crowd that laments the council's radical outcome. In this collection ten authors, some of them mutually antagonistic and suspicious, describe and explain the ideas of the contemporary Catholic "right." The language of right and left, borrowed from secular politics, is not always suitable but it will have to do for lack of an alternative, especially now that "orthodox" and "traditionalist" have special meanings in the conservative camp.

Speaking for Catholic neoconservatives, the most influential of these groups, George Weigel defends the decrees of Vatican II but criticizes Catholics who justify their liturgical, theological, or political experiments in the name of the "spirit of the council." He sees Catholicism today beset by a crisis of faith and theologically adrift. Neoconservatives like himself, Michael Novak, and Richard John Neuhaus, he says, aim to write a theology which can take account of contemporary relativism without being paralyzed by it. They fight for a distinctive Catholic truth against the "proponents of debonair nihilism" and try to dislodge liberals from positions of authority. "In the name of an 'open church,"' he declares in one characteristic passage, "the liberal mainstream seem[s] to have effectively shut off critical debate within many of the key organizational structures of American Catholicism, imposing its own "correct" positions with a vigor, indeed ruthlessness, that would have been familiar to any gangster-prelate practitioner of the "old Romania." Weigel is confident that the Catholic neoconservatives' alliance with like-minded Protestants and Jews is profitable and religiously defensible. He affirms that John Courtney Murray, S.J., got it right when he argued that American democratic tradition depended on "religiously grounded public philosophy capable of disciplining the public moral argument."

Most anti-abortion Catholics are also willing to ally with conservative Protestants and Jews, as Michael Cuneo shows in an excellent chapter on prolife militants. Cuneo explores the paradox that many prolifers see their "rescues" as a symbolic, public affirmation of their Catholic faith even as they link hands with born-again Evangelicals. Leaders like Judie Brown and the Reverend Paul Marx told him that during the 1980s they had lost interest in political coalition-building because stopping abortion was for them a spiritual crusade.

In contrast to neocons and prolifers, the traditionalists studied by William Dinges want as little as possible to do with Protestants and Jews. A minority of this minority, he shows, has lost faith in America itself, such that Lefebvrist Bishop Richard Williamson describes the republic as resting on "freemasonic principles profoundly hostile to religion." Dinges describes the awkward bind for followers of Marcel Lefebvre's Society of Saint Pius X who are constantly on the brink of schism from a church they want to venerate more than its actual guardians. Least known to the American audience are the "sedevacantists," traditionalists who argue that "the See of Peter is vacant because the current pope and his conciliar predecessors have advanced doctrines ('heresies'). . . that are 'plainly contrary' to the church's solemn teachings (which he could not do were he a valid pope, since the charisma of the office preserves its occupant from promulgating error)." Dinges shows that more moderate conservatives fear this kind of nutty logic lest it discredit conservative Catholicism altogether. For moderates, John Paul II's Mass insult of 1984, which reinstated the Tridentine Latin Mass, was a timely concession designed to take the wind out of traditionalists' sails.

Are the traditionalists a dying remnant or will their convictions live on? A group of colleges and universities, surveyed here by Mary Jo Weaver, is working to keep the flame burning in new generations. When the mainstream Catholic colleges decided in 1967 to grant full academic freedom to their faculty they surrendered much of their Catholic distinctiveness. Warren Carroll, who founded Christendom College in Virginia in 1977, says that the Land O' Lakes conference at which that decision got made was a disastrous mistake. In his opinion "everything in a Catholic university should be taught from a Catholic perspective." Eager students agree, and vie with one another in pious learning. Their faculty members rarely attend conferences or publish in academic journals, with the result that, however pure their faith, they are unknown and uninfluential outside their own tight circle. By contrast James Hitchcock's Fellowship of Catholic Scholars, founded in 1977 and also described here, does engage in public intellectual controversy, staking out orthodox ground against academic historicists, theologians, and feminists.

Men dominate the collection, just as they dominate public Catholic life, but two chapters address women's concerns. In the first, Helen Hull Hitchcock explains her group, Women for Faith and Family. WFF's first job was to let the bishops know, as they drafted a pastoral letter on women in 1984, that some Catholic women love to be wives and mothers and deplore feminism. It has since grow to national dimensions and sprouted branches all round the world. In one nifty passage, Hull-Hitchcock shows that fax machines, modems, and conference-calls are all in effect "pro-family" technologies which can be used by the moms who run the group without leaving their homes. In another chapter, Sandra Zimdars-Swartz shows how a largely female Marian piety, which was displaced from the center of American Catholic devotional life after Vatican II, has enjoyed a conservative revival, especially since the Virgin spoke to a group of Medjugorje children in 1981.

For nearly everyone in this book, the opening of Vatican II in 1962 represents Year Zero, to which all things good or bad can be traced. No wonder the editors led off with Joseph Komonchak's article on competing interpretations of the council. Contributors' descriptions of preconciliar Catholicism tend to be hazy, exaggerating the degree of Catholic unity and harmony, as in Benedict Ashley's article on the recent decline of theological unity. Scott Appleby's fine chapter, "The Triumph of Americanism," is a useful corrective to this tendency. He shows that many of the tremors rattling church windows today can be traced back to the "modernist" and "Americanist" crises at the turn of this century, and that American Catholics of all stripes share the legacy of those seismic shocks. Allan Figueroa Deck, S.J., also contributes to a wider view by reminding readers that 35 percent of American Catholics today are Hispanic and that arguments about white Catholic liberalism and white Catholic conservatism look parochial when seen from such a vantage point. Together Appleby and Deck underline the very thing many conservatives fear: the increasing eclecticism of American Catholicism.

Patrick Allitt is the author of Catholic Intellectuals and Conservative Politics in America: 1950 85 (Cornell University Press). He teaches at Emory University in Atlanta.