Liberal for the right reasons.

The antipathy which the Catholic and the liberal have felt for each other is real, and its causes are basic to the philosophy of each. When Pius IX solemnly condemned "Liberalism" and denied that the church could, or should, reconcile itself with "Progress," he pronounced the church's judgment, once and for all, on that doctrinaire rationalism, secularism, and anticlericalism which lay at the base of liberalism's spirit in the nineteenth century.

As a result of this, the Catholic who associates himself with some of the struggles which are properly identified as "liberal," and who, consequently, gains a reputation as a liberal Catholic, is apt to find himself suspect among large numbers of his co-religionists.

The beleaguered "liberal Catholic" thus stands between two worlds which view each other with mutual distrust, and which, according to their proper lights, exclude each other. Those whose theology he shares frequently distrust him because of his politics, and those with whom he feels at home politically may doubt him because of his theology.

The church condemned a philosophy of "Liberalism." But by extending this to a blanket condemnation of liberals and everything for which they stand, Catholics condemn much that is properly their own, and in reaction espouse things which should be as repugnant to the Christian as they are to the liberal himself.

The outlook frequently described as that of the "liberal Catholic" believes that one of the great hopes for the future lies in the recovery and restoration to a Christian context of all things valuable and true. This does not imply any compromise of the faith, any trafficking with the theological enemy. It does imply, however, that on many questions of political and social order the individual Catholic may find himself more in sympathy with the viewpoint commonly associated with liberalism than with the sterile reaction to liberalism common among many of his fellow Catholics.

What is called "liberal Catholicism" is for the most part an attempt to work toward a new synthesis of the church's unchanging truths with whatever good is to be found in the modern city of man. The "liberal Catholic" is, in the best instances, the twentieth-century Catholic synthesist. He remembers the admonition of Saint Paul: "And now, brethren, all that rings true, all that commands reverence, all that makes for right, all that is pure, all that is lovely, all that is gracious in the telling; virtue and merit, wherever virtue and merit are found - let this be the argument of your thoughts."

It has been the high mission of liberalism to fight for much of what is right and true in the modern world, while those who should have, aided, and even anticipated its battle, have stood aside, busy reviling "Liberalism" for its philosophical errors, and defending impossibly archaic political and social orders as a bulwark against its aberrations. "Liberalism," as its enemies point out, has indeed failed, and the future of our society will not be the easy utopia envisioned by its nineteenth-century prophets. But its failure has been as a philosophy, not as a vision, and although the future may not lie in the liberal dream, any attempt to build a civilization from which the best elements of that dream are absent is foredoomed to failure.

What the "liberal Catholic" pleads for is that Catholics should become as passionately dedicated to human dignity and freedom as the liberal has been. Liberalism may have fought its battles for the wrong reasons. The Catholic's mission should therefore be to redeem its struggle by supplying the right ones. The liberal may have advocated freedom of religion and the separation of civil and religious power because he is indifferent to absolute truth. Catholics should join him in advocating the same things because they insist on the absolute inviolability of the human conscience and the freedom of the act of faith. For the same reason they should share the liberal's aversion to censorship, suppression, and the arbitrary uses of temporal power in any effort to coerce the mind of man.

This demands no sacrifice of whatever is essential to the faith; it implies no surrender to relativism or secularism. Rather, it emphasizes what Cardinal Suhard pointed up as the church's genius for eternal renewal. In order to build what is essential so that the church may fulfil its mission in the modem world, there must exist a certain willingness to discard whatever of nonessential method and outlook has been carried over from a society which can never return. It is this affirmation, and this revaluation, always in the light of Catholic truth and subject to the guidance of the teaching church, which the "liberal Catholic" asks of his fellow Catholics in the modern world.

What he earnestly seeks is an increasing Christian charity and (in all which is nonessential) an abandonment of label-thinking. The world is not divided into the "liberals" and the orthodox, the bad guys and the good guys. Men of good will, and vision, and wisdom are not confined to "our" side. The "liberal Catholic," therefore, finally asks that the "liberal" label be dropped in the too easy categorizing of his quest. He would be more content to be thought of as a Catholic who tries to be catholic.