JOE LIEBERMAN'S ORTHODOXY & OURS.

When news of Joe Lieberman's nomination came down last summer, I was at ground zero. OK, not quite ground zero. I was in a suburban bureau of the major newspaper of the vice-presidential candidate's home state. And, because I was supposed to know something about religion, I was asked to contribute to the myriad of stories being written about our famously religious junior senator. My assignment: a brief q and a on Lieberman's religion.

And so I cobbled together a story on "Modern Orthodoxy." I called friends with Jewish spouses, e-mailed a few of my old professors, and chatted with a couple of rabbis from my old neighborhood. The final result was not ground-breaking, but I hope somewhat illuminating.

Soon after finishing my story, I read Commonweal's editorial on Pius IX (August 11) and it occurred to me that Modern Orthodoxy has much in common with liberal Catholicism--at least as defined here last November 19 (see "Crisis of Liberal Catholicism"). While there are obviously substantial differences between the groups (politically, for example, they occupy different positions within their own traditions), there are some instructive similarities.

Allow me to elaborate. According to a recent article in the New Yorker, the Modern Orthodox movement was founded in the 1850s in Frankfurt, Germany by Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch. As Daphne Merkin, the author of the piece, points out, Hirsch was a theologian and leader who "admired Schiller almost as much as Maimonides, cautiously embracing modernity while insisting on the obligation to observe Jewish law." "His credo," she continues, "Torah im Derech Eretz--Torah Judaism in harmony with secular culture--was a bow in the direction of both God and Germany."

Sound familiar? Hirsch's struggle to "cautiously embrace modernity" and stay loyal to God and his country reminds me of Archbishop John Ireland, that nineteenth-century American prelate who argued that American democracy was compatible with the Catholic tradition. I'm also reminded of John Courtney Murray, the theologian who, of course, finally helped to incorporate the distinctly American notion of religious liberty into the Catholic tradition during Vatican II.

The similarities between the two movements don't end there. In his Jew vs. Jew: The Struggle for the Soul of American Jewry (Simon & Schuster), Samuel G. Freedman writes about the founding of Yeshiva University in 1928--a classic Modern Orthodox institution which, in the words of its first president, Bertrand Revel, was designed for two purposes: Torah Umaddah: "Torah and worldly studies." Slightly modified, that could be the slogan of any Catholic university.

Furthermore, Freedman writes that: "Four years after Yeshiva's founding, the personification of its precepts arrived in America" in the person of Joseph Dov Soloveitchik, a scholar who specialized in Plato and Aristotle in addition to the Talmud.

Soloveitchik made me think of the Jesuits I knew who complemented their rigorous theological training with a degree in computer science or German literature or any other "worldly study." (Think of Timothy Healy, S.J., the late president of the New York Public Library.)

My examples are, of course, drawn from the left end of the Catholic wading pool. There were--and are--Catholics hostile to modernity. But in this too, liberal Catholicism shares something with Modern Orthodoxy. As Freedman chronicles in his book, in recent years the Modern Orthodox movement which flourished with leaders like Soloveitchik has been dwarfed by a more conservative strain of Judaism known as the haredi. Many haredi immigrated to this country after the war. Their goal, in the words of the sociologist Samuel Heilman, was to "maintain tradition when all about you others do not, to define a world of sacred order when the profane is the order of the day, to assert that change need not occur when all around you has undeniably changed."

That's a familiar battle cry. Conservative Catholics are preaching against a culture of death, declaring that we have learned all there is to learn from modernity and now is the time to sever the connection. The term "liberal" Catholic has become disreputable in many circles, just as--Freedman reports--has the term "Modern Orthodox" in many Jewish circles.

These similarities notwithstanding, liberal Catholicism and Modern Orthodoxy seem to be currently facing two different fates. Despite the influence of the haredi, the Modern Orthodox movement has seen a bit of a renaissance with the nomination of Lieberman. (As Merkin put it in the now obligatory Yiddish, Lieberman has given them a "reason to kvell.") Liberal Catholics, meanwhile, are scratching their heads over the recent coupling (via beatification) of Pius IX and John XXIII: the pope who resisted modernity versus the one who made it a part of his legacy. But we can take solace in the fact that liberal religion is back in the discussion, thanks in no small part to my senator.

Maurice Timothy Reidy, former Commonweal editorial assistant, is a reporter for the Hartford Courant.