Name your brand: all liberalisms aren't equal.

In the November 18, 1994, issue of Commonweal, the editorial ("Liberals & Catholics") opened with the intriguing and highly pertinent question, "Can Catholics be liberals?" While granting that liberalism has its shortcomings, most notably its "agnosticism concerning the good" and its "tendency to foster extreme individualism," the editors concluded that there is no essential incompatibility. Catholicism should not treat liberalism as an enemy but rather as a friend who has fallen on bad times, a friend in need. Drawing on our religious tradition, we Catholics can bring to liberalism "an emphasis on the social nature of the human person and the social bonds that bind society together." The editors add that this question will be discussed further in the coming year.

Since Commonweal has always had a dual identity as both Catholic and liberal, the editorial conclusion that Catholicism and liberalism are compatible probably did not surprise anyone. Nor will it come as much of a surprise when one of the magazine's columnists agrees with the editors--not even when the writer in question has frequently used his column to indicate his profound unhappiness with contemporary liberalism.

"Can Catholics be liberals?" It all depends on what you mean by "Catholic" and "liberal." (Perhaps it even depends on what you mean by "be"--a question upon which much was said by Thomas Aquinas, who Acton said was the first Whig.) But space is short here. So I'll go light on "Catholic" and concentrate today on "liberal," a term whose meaning has been far more mutable.

During the first three quarters of the nineteenth century, liberalism came in three main varieties: Continental, British, and American.

1. Continental liberalism was strongly anticlerical, especially in Catholic countries such as France, Italy, and Spain. ("Anticlerical" was a polite word for "anti-Catholic," much the way "prochoice" is today a polite word for "proabortion.") This liberalism believed in freedom of trade, press, religion, along with church-state and church-school separation. Late-twentieth-century Catholics would find little to object to in such a program; but nineteenth-century popes, above all Pius IX, were having none of it. They viewed it, probably correctly, as the ideology of an aggressive and highly secularized elite bent on emasculating Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular.

2. British liberalism was a marriage of convenience between two quite opposite worldviews: Utilitarianism, which was essentially atheistic or at least resolutely agnostic; and the Dissenting Protestantism of the pious middle classes. The Utilitarians tended to be discreet about their infidelity, largely because they had no wish to antagonize their far more numerous Evangelical allies.

3. Prior to the Civil War, American liberalism was almost purely religious in complexion, with hardly any admixture of secularism. Of course much liberal leadership was provided by Unitarians, whom conservative Protestants of the time accused of having a religion that was nothing more than a way-station on the road to infidelity. In retrospect it appears the critics were correct. But there was nothing insincere about the religiosity of the Unitarians; they were honestly persuaded that theirs was the purest form of Christianity.

Was nineteenth-century Catholicism compatible with nineteenth-century liberalism? In the case of continental liberalism, not at all; in the case of British liberalism, pretty much so; and in the case of American liberalism, very much so. In other words, the more Catholic the country, the more incompatible its liberalism with Catholicism; whereas the more Protestant the country, the more compatible. And of course this is exactly the way Rome responded in practice. It detested continental liberalism; it had no strong objections to British liberalism (even though Gladstone wrote a book denouncing the dogma of papal infallibility); and it thought the United States was on the whole a fine place for Catholics.

In twentieth-century America there have been two main types of liberalism, one more compatible with Catholicism than any prior form, the other thoroughly incompatible.

1. New Deal liberalism, which was dominant in the United States from the early 1930s through the mid-1960s, was close to perfect from a Catholic point of view. Respect was shown for the church, its doctrines, its moral code. Government was strong, but not excessively so. Its power was used to assist the poor, the aged, the unemployed; to protect the rights of labor unions; to check the economic freedom of capitalists. In the postwar period the United States became the principal opponent of Rome's old enemy, atheistic communism. In the mid-1960s, just before it went down in flames in Vietnam, New Deal liberalism had its final triumphs: civil rights for blacks; Head Start for the poor; and, for the elderly, Medicare, Social Security COLAs, and subsidized housing. All this was thoroughly in accord with the teachings of the social and political encyclicals.

2. A new kind of liberalism emerged from the great cultural upheavals of the late '60s and early '70s. To this day it has no agreed-upon name: let's call it the liberalism of the cultural Left. This newer liberalism is highly secularistic: sometimes deliberately antireligious, sometimes only nonreligious. Its fundamental value is that society should have no fundamental values--except of course the value that holds all values to be as good as all other values. Or to put this in other terms, it believes in unlimited personal autonomy, including above all the freedom to construct one's values and moral code, the freedom not to have these imposed on one by others. Of course a minimal amount of law and order must be maintained; but beyond that people should be free to do, say, think, and feel whatever they please. Hence this liberalism approves of abortion on demand, gay marriage, condoms in schools, the equality of all cultures, and the equality of all forms of "family" (whether married or not, two parents or one, gay or straight). It goes without saying that this kind of liberalism is totally incompatible with Catholicism.

To put it in the language of logic textbooks: to say in the old days that a person was a Catholic and a New Deal liberal was close to a tautology; whereas to say that one is a Catholic and a cultural left liberal is a contradiction in terms.

But if so, how come there are people who don't feel this contradiction? How can there be Catholics who endorse the agenda, or at least much of the agenda, of cultural left liberalism? Let me save that question till another day.