Shifting the center: a Catholic shell game.

A few weeks ago, in America magazine (August 22), the Reverend Richard McBrien, distinguished theologian and outspoken columnist, sounded an alarm. An effort is underway, he complains, to redefine the "center" in the Catholic church.

In his view, the center belongs to adherents of the majority views at Vatican II, a "broad and diverse" group including "most of those Catholics who do the day-to-day work of the church--liturgically, educationally, pastorally." Some of them may press harder for change; he calls them "the center-left." Some of them, for example, bishops like Cardinal Joseph Bernardin, he describes as more cautious--"the center-right." But, in fact, all are agreed on "the ecclesiological shift the council ratified" and "differ only on the pace of change and the details of implementation."

The present papacy, however, has tried to foster a different constellation of forces. For them the center consists of people like Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, Opus Dei, the theological journal Communio, and the many bishops John Paul II has appointed. The right consists of the followers and sympathizers of the late Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, whether they are in or out of the church. By deduction, therefore, the left, which would presumably be equally "out of the doctrinal mainstream," must include Archbishop Rembert Weakland, the Catholic Theological Society, and Commonweal among others. Of course, anyone still further to the left would fall off the map.

This attempt to redefine the center is "unfair and inaccurate," McBrien says. It is a maneuver to recast the heirs of the council's majority as marginal while usurping their rightful place for those who are the heirs of the council's defeated minority.

Not to be coy about it: it turns out that I am myself guilty of "unwitting complicity" in this process, having criticized both left and right in the church in a manner that does not meet McBrien's specifications. Without claiming to be objective in my own case, I believe that McBrien has misperceived what I was saying, but that is a matter to be taken up in a letter to the editor of America.

For the moment my concern is the redefining of the center. First, I believe that McBrien makes a valid point. Second, I believe that point is narrower and far more limited than he acknowledges.

That those who sympathize with the Wojtyla-Ratzinger vision of restoring a discipline and militancy characteristic of pre-Vatican II Catholicism present themselves as occupying the true center in the church is clear--and hardly surprising. As McBrien himself says, quoting the Scholastic maxim, "in medio stat virtus" "virtue stands in the middle"); hence, there is a rhetorical advantage to claiming the center.

In fact, such positioning--which can be highly calculated or entirely sincere--is a staple of ideological jousting. Aren't the various American Catholic reform lobbies (Catholics Speak Out, the Association for the Rights of Catholics in the Church, the Women's Ordination Conference, Call to Action, CORPUS, Dignity/USA, etc.) doing the same when they commission--and interpret--a Gallup Poll to demonstrate that they, and not the bishops, are in "the mainstream"? (See Dennis Doyle's excellent and apposite letter on that subject, Commonweal, August 14, 1992.) And to be fair, aren't they doing that to rebut prior conservative claims that "real Catholics" are some updated version of the simple peasant, still yearning for novenas, the Legion of Decency, and nuns in habits?

But laying claim to the center is not the only move contending parties make. Some go in the opposite direction, promoting themselves as "the cutting edge," the avant-garde, the experimenters and innovators. Some people--including conservatives who shrewdly appropriate terms like "countercultural" or "postmodern" for their own purposes--would like to appear "mainstream" and "prophetic" at the same time. This posturing can seem childish, although in American politics it has become the cynical work of master manipulators. But whether in the church or in presidential campaigns, the stakes can be high. McBrien is right about that.

He is not fight, however, when he seems to reduce the conflicts in today's church to this political jostling. His notion of the center is essentially spatial or statistical: "The center is the largest segment of the Catholic church, as any teacher who has marked on a curve would expect." Absent from his essay is any acknowledgment that serious intellectual differences might be involved in today's conflicts, except for an undifferentiated attitude for or against the council.

At one point McBrien says that, in place of my "ambiguous left-right categories" for describing contending perspectives in the church, he prefers the four-category grid that Avery Dulles, S.J., has proposed (traditionalists, neoconservatives, liberals, and radicals). Fair enough. But each of these camps, according to Dulles, is governed by a distinct vision and agenda. By contrast, McBrien immediately relabels the four categories ("I prefer the more neutral |right, center-right, center-left, left'"), reducing them to points along a spectrum and eviscerating them of Dulles's, or any other, specific content, except perhaps an overall attitude toward the council.

It is a telling move. For it implies that conflict in the church is not about important questions of substance that remain genuinely open or troubling. Those were all settled at Vatican II. Today, apart from differences over the pace and details of change, it is all politics.

But if McBrien's essay on conflict in the church brackets issues of substance, it also ignores issues of style. In fact, these were the burden of my two speeches (see America, May 2, 1992, and Origins, July 18, 199 1) that McBrien finds distressing. They were pleas that contending groups and individuals in the church exercise the capacity to be self-critical, strive to discern the valid fears of adversaries, avoid the self-exculpatory pathos of imagining oneself the martyred underdog confronting an all-powerful oppressor, reject the smug assumption that one's own views are necessarily the wave of the future, refrain from excommunicating critics or stigmatizing ideas, pay attention to whole generations of new questions and new Catholics arrived on the scene since Vatican II. In this regard, both left and right in the church, and center-left (where McBrien and I both place ourselves) and center-right too, have developed bad habits.

I appreciate McBrien's realistic reminder of the rhetorical maneuvering that is very much at work in today's church--and probably inevitable in any day's church. But if the price of avoiding "unwitting complicity" in such maneuvering is to remain silent or selective about destructive matters of style, it is too high a price to pay.