Catholicism and Liberalism.

CATHOLICISM AND LIBERALISM

Edited by R. Bruce Douglass and David Hollenbach

Cambridge University Press, $59.95,368 pp.

In any actual war the persons easiest to kill are one's own allies; but killing of this kind occurs only by mistake. It is different in ideological warfare. There the easiest targets are those closest to one's own positions, and for three reasons they are the ones most often shot. First, it relieves frustration. The real foe is too hard to reach and penetrate; but these at hand are vulnerable. Second, it is a matter of logic. These who question one aspect of your position may be shown to question one of your premises. If they were logical they would either abandon their difference with you or enlarge upon it, soon arriving by inexorable steps in the enemy camp. Logically, they are suspect. Third, their lack of logic translates into a lack of loyalty. If they were truly committed to your cause, they would not cultivate a slightly distinct position. At heart they must be traitorous. Their existence certainly encourages the enemy. For all these reasons, better to shoot them now.

This dialectic, of which the course of the French Revolution and the Bolshevik movement are spectacular examples where the shooting was not metaphorical, has also been experienced analogously by those Catholics who, since the beginning of the nineteenth century, have sought to reconcile the authority of the church with the liberty of the individual conscience. Their history and their reasoning are the subject of this valuable book.

Felicite de Lamennais may be taken as the first and most unhappy example of this species. A dedicated priest, whose apologia for Catholicism met a rousing success in a France recovering from the revolution, he dared, in a journal prophetically named L 'A venir (The Future), to celebrate the union of Catholicism with democracy, including religious liberty. His views were politically objectionable to autocrats such as Mettemich, and partly under their influence, but partly for the three reasons already mentioned, his position was anathema to Pope Gregory XVI. The result was Mirari vos, an encyclical repudiating L 'Avenir's ideas and declaring liberty of conscience "a madness."

Lamennais, mortally wounded, left the church. His basic insights, however, were maintained by Lacordaire, the restorer of the Dominican order in France; by Montalembert, the leader of enlightened Catholic politics in France; and above all by Alexis de Tocqueville, whose Democracy in America informed Americans about what they had but was primarily intended to instruct his own compatriots and coreligionists about what they should have. Over a century later, Lamennais's proposition was revived by John Courtney Murray and, although Murray was silenced at first, the church in the Second Vatican Council wholehandly embraced the right of every human person to the free exercise of religion.

The ultimate triumph within the church of the most basic liberal idea makes all the sadder "the failed encounter" of nineteenth-century Catholicism and liberalism that Peter Steinfels feelingly describes in the opening essay of this book. The triumph also removed the tension between the American ideal and the ideal Catholic state which Paul Blanshard exploited so successfully and whose course Philip Gleason perceptively portrays in the account that follows Steinfels's. The triumph at Vatican II is celebrated by Joseph Komonchak. Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre could not believe what was happening. Philosophically, as Paul Sigmund here points out, the major work had already been accomplished by Jacques Maritain.

Of course, as these authors are aware, there are many definitions of liberalism, and more aspects to it than the rights of conscience. As economic theory it encourages a laissez-faire that the church has never accepted. As a political doctrine it can degenerate into a selfish individualism inattentive to the common good. Focused on autonomy, liberalism has difficulty dealing with the complex interrelationships of the family. The corrective force of Catholic social doctrine in these areas is brought out by other essayisis here, among them Louis Dupre, Jean Bethke Elshtain, and David Hollenbach. Liberalism, it has always seemed to its Catholic friends, needs a larger vision of human possibilities, a stronger social conscience, an awareness that truth and justice, essential as they are, do not exhaust the values required for communal life. This book eloquently points to the complements that liberals could find in Catholicism.

For Catholicism to be attractive to those who see it from outside, it must conform its own practices to the commitment to conscience that in theory it has proclaimed. James Provost sets out the halting steps that have been taken and candidly observes that the church "has yet to come to grips" with the problem. The church "must always be reformed," said Tertullian. The work of internal renovation remains.

"We're the good guys," the Catholic liberals have been saying for about two hundred years. "You can trust us. We're not the people who burned Savanarola, Hus, Joan, and Latimer." The Catholic liberals are utterly sincere, but they have as their companions in the faith those whose mental set is not so different from the inquisitors'. Headed by Newman, the liberals are not a small or marginal band. Vatican II was their council. But the world of The Future has not been fully realized yet.