The Catholic Movement.

The Catholic Moment, by Richard John Newhaus (Harper & Row, 292 pp., $19.95)

POPE-SYMP Joseph Sobran 

The Catholic Moment, by Richard John Neuhaus (Harper & Row, 292 pp., $19.95)

'THIS," ARGUES Richard John Neuhaus, Lutheran pastor, "is the moment in which the Roman Catholic Church in the world can and should be the lead church in proclaiming and exemplifying the Gospel." Moreover, although this is secondary, "This can and should also be the moment in which the Roman Catholic Church in the United States assumes its rightful role in the culture-forming task of constructing a religiously informed public philosophy for the American experiment in ordered liberty."

Neuhaus thinks the Catholic window of opportunity has been opened by Pope John Paul II, whom he sees, disagreeing with both Catholic liberals and Catholic traditionalists, as passionately extending the project of the Second Vatican Council, not curtailing or reversing it. The Pope is stealing the Council from the progressives.

Just when nearly everyone has quietly dropped the idea of ecumenism as a Sixties fad, Neuhaus celebrates it -- at least as implemented by John Paul. It needn't mean a watering down of doctrine: it can mean a special emphasis on those doctrines, dogmatic and moral, that unite Catholics and other Christians.

Neuhaus sees the key change of the Council not in the Church's opening to the modern secular world but in its opening to other branches of Christianity. What had been armed borders became meeting places. Thanks to the Council, Rome is now in a position to offer worldwide leadership to "mere" Christianity.

Meanwhile, Catholicism has suffered a new kind of internal defection that has undermined the old lines of definition. Many nominal Catholics, especially of the "New Class," say the old words but subtly invest them with radically new content. Neuhaus keenly catches Richard McBrien of Notre Dame in the act, when the wily theologian piously speaks of preserving "the historic Catholic values of community, tradition, grace, and sacrament." Says Neuhaus:

The use of the distinctly contemporary word "values" is noteworthy. Values are, of course, quite different from truths. Truths, like facts, are there quite apart from ourselves; they are there to be acknowledged as true but are not true by virtue of our acknowledgment. "Values," on the other hand, is a term derived from economics and market theory; values are the creation of human valuing. What we deem valuable is, by definition, a value. A great "geological shift" has indeed taken place when our attention is turned from Christian truths to religious values.

Pow.

(This book teems with sharp asides: "Beginning in 1984, the (New York) Times became the promoter, announcer, referee, and judge of the long-running O'Connor-versus-Cuomo fight, marking the end of each round with a magisterial editorial that declares Cuomo the winner.")

Neuhaus scores Catholic progressives for confusing "transcendence" with the future, especially the imagined future (which never arrives) of secular progressive ideology -- though he admits that many of the Council texts abet their interpretation. On the other hand, he calls for "a more discriminating conservatism ... that does not confuse the defense of the familiar with the defense of what Russell Kirk calls "the permanent things.'" Conservatives fall into a trap when they accept the liberals' premise that the opposite of the cause of the future is the cause of the past; but John Paul has completely avoided this pitfall, for which Neuhaus deeply admires him.

Longish stretches of The Catholic Moment are heavy going. Dealing as he does with the New Class, Neuhaus also addresses them, and too often in their own dialect of fussbudget abstraction, sparing few qualifiers. True, it's easy to get nailed on minor overstatements and ambiguities, but I think we can afford to relax and speak elliptically now. And yet, time and again a subtle argument is rounded off with a nice epigram, or even a good laugh. The author's native incisiveness always triumphs.

The book ends with a series of intellectual depth charges. Liberation theology may not survive Neuhaus's discussion of it, charitable though he is. He caps it with a "cautionary tale": the story of Emmanuel Hirsch. Born in 1888, Hirsch is his day was among the giants of German theology, of the stature of Tillich, Bultmann, and Barth. Like his friend Tillich, he was a socialist. Like today's liberation theologians, he bet his chips on "the future," in the form of a contemporary political movement. His early support for the Hitler movement made Tillich break bitterly with him, though to Tillich's embarrassment Hirsch justified his decision on Tillich's principles. Not that Hirsch would have been anything but horrified by what German National Socialism came to. And Neuhaus, while not exculpating him, notes that Nazism had no historical track record at the time, so that Hirsch had more excuse than today's radical Catholics who embrace Communist movements in the name of humanitarian hope.

Even so, Neuhaus doesn't leave the point there. He notes that Tillich, expostulating with Hirsch in 1934, went to the heart of the matter: that even if Hitler had delivered on his promises without mayhem, no Christian could be justified in assenting to boundless political power. Hirsch's essential error wasn't merely prudential: he had been willing to place the church in the state's yoke.

Neuhaus's real forte is a fine sense of what needs saying. He has a wonderful knack for being the first to express what the rest of us vaguely feel awaits utterance. His discussion of what's wrong with the American bishops' recent collective pronouncements is stimulating, satisfying, exact; once said, it seems obvious, but it hadn't quite been said before. The same is true of his defense of Cardinal Ratzinger, who tends to be praised for not quite the right reasons (when he is praised at all).

Is this really "the Catholic moment"? It could be; but somehow I doubt that the opportunity will be realized. Even so, it's good to close a book feeling that John Paul II has finally found the appreciation he deserves.