The very liberal John Paul II.

In the battle for the soul of American liberalism, a pope widely considered very conservative has taken a leading role.

Father Neuhaus is editor-in-chief of First Things, where an earlier version of this article appeared.

WHEN the encyclical Centesimus Annus (The Hundredth Year) appeared in 1991, some of us viewed it as a vindication of our understanding of Catholic social doctrine. Since then, there have been differences over the encyclical -- not so much between liberals (who mostly regarded it as a non-event) and conservatives, as between certain conservatives and those called neoconservatives, the former accusing the latter of hijacking this pontificate, and Centesimus Annus in particular, in order to gain magisterial legitimation for what is called democratic capitalism or liberal democracy. The neoconservatives are described as advancing "The Murray Project," referring to the effort of the late Father John Courtney Murray to square Catholic teaching with the American democratic experiment. The conservative critics claim that those of us who are in the Murray tradition are selling out authentic Catholic teaching to a desiccated and desiccating liberalism.

There is a real disagreement here. It is not, or at least not chiefly, a disagreement over Catholic theology. The difference, rather, is that our critics tend to put the worst possible construction upon the liberal tradition, and on the American cultural, legal, and political expression of that tradition. In doing so, I believe they hand an undeserved victory to those who interpret the liberal tradition in ways that we all deplore. With John Courtney Murray, I suggest that our task is to contend for an interpretation of liberalism that is compatible with the fullness of Catholic truth.

There is no doubt that the American experiment is constituted in the liberal tradition. Since we cannot go back to the eighteenth century and reconstitute it on different foundations, we must hope that the foundations on which it is constituted are not those described by Ronald Dworkin, John Rawls, Richard Rorty -- and some conservative Catholic thinkers.

Liberalism, needless to say, is a wondrously pliable term. There is the laissez-faire economic liberalism condemned by Leo XIII in Rerum Novarum in 1891, and also by John Paul II. In America that liberalism goes by the name of libertarianism, and, despite its many talented apologists, it has never acquired many adherents beyond what Russell Kirk called its "chirping sectaries."

The liberalism so fiercely criticized today is not limited to libertarianism. At the hands of the critics, the republican liberalism of virtue and the communitarian liberalism of Tocquevillian civil society come off little better than libertarianism. We can summarize some of the salient points in the indictment offered by the Christian critics of liberalism and modernity (the two terms usually being more or less interchangeable). Whether it be the enchanted G. K. Chesterton, the near-magisterial Alasdair MacIntyre, the caustic George Grant, the swashbuckling Stanley Hauerwas, the daring Oliver O'Donovan, or the melancholic David Schindler, the indictment tends to be much the same.

The first charge is that Christian thinkers have been too ready to trim the Christian message in order to accommodate the ruling cultural paradigm of liberalism. I strongly agree. That, however, is more accurately seen as an indictment of Christian thinkers, not of liberalism. If we are hesitant to assert the fullness of Christian truth in public, the fault is in ourselves. The strident voices of secularized liberalism may have intimidated us, but the fault is with our timidity.

Other points in the indictment of liberalism are variously expressed. It is charged that liberalism is purely procedural. Excluding the consideration of ends, liberalism claims to be only about means, but in fact disguises its ends in its means. In other words, the claimed "neutrality" of liberalism is anything but neutral. Moreover, it is charged, liberalism is premised upon the fiction of a "social contract" that is, in turn, premised exclusively upon self-interest. Liberalism denies, or at least requires agnosticism about, transcendent truth or divine law, recognizing no higher rule than the self-interested human will.

These liberal dogmas, it is further charged, are inextricably tied to the dynamics of capitalism. Liberal dogma and market dynamics are the mutually reinforcing foundation and end of a social order that is entirely and without remainder in the service of individualistic choices by the sovereign, autonomous, and unencumbered Self.

It is an impressive indictment, and it is supported by impressive evidence. But I would argue that the indictment is an indictment of the distortions of liberalism. If that is the case, we are contending for the soul of the liberal tradition.

A PERSONAL word might be in order. In the 1960s I was very much a man of the Left. Not the Left of countercultural drug tripping and generalized hedonism, but the Left exemplified by, for instance, the civil-rights movement led by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. In the latter half of the 1960s this began to change with the advent of the debate over what was then called "liberalized" abortion law. By 1967, I was writing about the "two liberalisms" -- one, like that earlier civil-rights movement, inclusive of the vulnerable and driven by a transcendent order of justice, the other exclusive and recognizing no law higher than individual willfulness. My argument was that, by embracing the cause of abortion, liberals were abandoning the first liberalism, which has sustained all that is hopeful in the American experiment.

A great chasm has opened between that liberal tradition and what today is called liberalism. That is why some of us are called conservatives. Conservatism that is authentically and constructively American conservatism is conservatism in the cause of reappropriating and revitalizing the liberal tradition.

Toward that end, Centesimus Annus is an invaluable guide. The document is often described as an encyclical on economics, but it is much more than that. Centesimus Annus is about the free society, including economic freedom. While the encyclical must be situated within the larger context of Catholic social teaching, one cannot help being struck by how much it is a reading of "the signs of the time" with specific reference to the world-historical experiences of this century. And, although it is written to and for the universal Church, the Church in each place is invited and obliged to read the encyclical as if it were addressed to its own specific circumstance.

We Americans make no mistake when we think that the American experiment is a major presence in Centesimus Annus. After all, the Western democracies, and the United States most particularly, are the historically available alternatives to the socialism that has so miserably failed. More than that, in this pontificate, for the first time, magisterial teaching about modernity, democracy, and human freedom has a stronger reference to the Revolution of 1776 than to the French Revolution of 1789. It is neither chauvinistic nor parochial to read Centesimus Annus with particular reference to the American experiment. On the contrary, it is the course of fidelity.

There is no more common criticism of the liberal tradition than that it is premised upon unbridled "individualism." Centesimus Annus speaks of the "individual" and even of the "autonomous subject," but most typically refers to the "person." Citing an earlier encyclical, Redemptor Hominis (Redeemer of Mankind), John Paul writes that "this human person is the primary route that the Church must travel in fulfilling her mission . . . the way traced out by Christ himself, the way that leads invariably through the mystery of the Incarnation and Redemption." He then adds the remarkable statement, "This, and this alone, is the principle which inspires the Church's social doctrine."

This, and this alone. He then writes, "The Church has gradually developed that doctrine in a systematic way," above all in the past century. Very gradually, we might add without disrespect. In a later encyclical, Veritatis Splendor (The Splendor of Truth), John Paul pays fulsome tribute to modernity and its development of the understanding of the dignity of the individual and of individual freedom. Individualism is one of the signal achievements of modernity or, if you will, of the liberal tradition. Nor should we deny that this achievement was effected in frequent tension with the Catholic Church. One important reason for such conflict, of course, was that the cause of freedom was perceived as marching under the radically anti-clerical and anti-Christian banners of 1789. It is a signal achievement of this pontificate that it has so clearly replanted the idea of the individual and of freedom in the rich soil of Christian truth from which it had been uprooted.

It is a mistake to pit, as some do pit, modern individualism against a more "organic" Catholic understanding of community. Rather should we enter into a sympathetic liaison with the modern achievement of the idea of the individual, grounding it more firmly in the understanding of the person destined from eternity to eternity for communion with God. The danger of rejecting individualism is that the real-world alternative to individualism is not a Catholic understanding of communio -- of persons rightly ordered in relation to God and one another -- but a falling back into the collectivisms that are the great enemy of the freedom to which we are called. The problem with the present-day distortion of the individual as the autonomous, unencumbered, sovereign Self is not that it is wrong about the awesome dignity of the individual, but that it cuts the self off from the source of that dignity. The first cause of this error, says Centesimus Annus, is atheism.

"It is by responding to the call of God contained in the being of things that man becomes aware of his transcendent dignity. Every individual must give this response, which constitutes the apex of his humanity, and no social mechanism or collective subject can substitute for it." The great error both of collectivist determinism and of individualistic license is that their understanding of human freedom is detached from obedience to the truth. In one of the most suggestive passages of the encyclical, John Paul writes, "At the heart of every culture lies the attitude a person takes to the greatest mystery: the mystery of God. Different cultures are basically different ways of facing the question of the meaning of personal existence."

This idea is not individualism in the pejorative sense, but it is commensurable with the modern achievement of the idea of the individual. It is commensurable with the constituting ideas of the American experiment, in which the state is understood to be in the service of freedom, and freedom is understood as what the Founders called "ordered liberty" -- liberty ordered to the truth. And there are, as the Declaration of Independence declares, "self-evident truths" that ground such freedom and direct it to the transcendent ends of "nature and nature's God."

The theistic references of the Declaration are not, as some present-day commentators claim, simply crowd-pleasing asides but are integral to the moral argument of the document. The American experiment is constituted by a Puritan - Lockean synthesis that in recent decades has been bowdlerized to fit the secularist prejudices of our academic elites. It is imperative that we challenge this version of the founding and take our American history straight.

It will be protested by some that this is mere "civic religion." But we have missed the point of Centesimus Annus if we think there is anything "mere" about sustaining a public order that acknowledges the transcendent source and end of human existence. Of course such formal acknowledgment provides only a very thin and attenuated theology, but it creates the condition within which Christians can propose a rich and adequate account of the human story. But that, it is objected, is just the problem: In a liberal society the Church can only propose its truth, putting the gospel in the marketplace as one item among others.

This is a frequently heard objection, and we have to wonder what people mean by it. Are they suggesting that the Church should coerce people to obey the truth? In the encyclical on evangelization, Redemptoris Missio (The Mission of the Redeemer), the Pope says, "The Church imposes nothing, she only proposes." She would not impose if she could. Authentic faith is of necessity an act of freedom. The Church is to propose -- relentlessly, boldly, persuasively, winsomely. If we who are the Church are not doing that, the fault is not with liberalism but with ourselves. Although the Church's message provides a secure grounding for liberalism, liberalism is not the content of the Church's message. It is simply the condition for the Church to invite free persons to live in the communio of Christ and His Church, which communion is infinitely deeper, richer, and fuller than the liberal social order -- or, for that matter, any social order short of the right ordering of all things in the Kingdom of God.

Few things are more important to the free society than the idea and reality of the limited state. However much the courts and secular intellectuals may have denied it in recent decades, the American order is inexplicable apart from the acknowledgment of a sovereignty higher than the state. As in "one nation under God," meaning a nation under judgment. Christians understand and publicly declare that higher sovereignty in the simple proposition, "Jesus Christ is Lord." It is not necessary for the state to declare that Jesus Christ is Lord. Nor, at least in the American circumstance or in any foreseeable reconfiguration of that circumstance, is it desirable that the state declare that Jesus Christ is Lord. The role of the limited state is to respect the political sovereignty of the people who acknowledge a sovereignty higher than their own. The lordship of Christ denotes the highest sovereignty by which the state is limited, and the proclamation of that lordship is the most important political contribution of the Church. In a democratic society that has been effectively evangelized, citizens do not ask the state to confess the lordship of Christ. Their only demand is that the state be respectful of the fact that a majority of its citizens confess the lordship of Christ.

The Church also makes an invaluable political contribution by insisting upon the limits of politics. The great danger, says Centesimus Annus, is that "politics becomes a 'secular religion' which operates under the illusion of creating paradise in this world. But no political society . . . can ever be confused with the Kingdom of God." The power of grace "penetrates" the political order, especially as the laity take the lead in the exercise of Christian public responsibility, but there can be no pretensions that earthly politics will create the final right order for which our hearts yearn.

As in the liberal order the ambitions of the state are checked by the democratic assertion of a higher sovereignty and by the limits of politics itself, so those ambitions are checked by diverse "sovereignties" within society. With Leo XIII, John Paul II declares that "the individual, the family, and society are prior to the State." The state exists to serve and protect individuals and institutions that have priority. Human persons and what I have elsewhere described as the mediating institutions of society "enjoy their own spheres of autonomy and sovereignty," according to Centesimus Annus. These spheres of sovereignty are smaller than the state, but they are not lower than the state.

THE striking modernity of the encyclical's argument is evident also in its understanding of the state. Unlike the case of earlier formulations, the state is not situated within a hierarchy of authorities, descending from the rule of God to the rule of the lord of the manor. The argument of Centesimus Annus is profoundly democratic. Christ is sovereign over all, and that sovereignty is asserted by those who acknowledge the sovereignty of Christ. The unlimited state, whether based on Marxist atheism or the engineering designs of Enlightenment rationalism, aspires to totalitarian control. "Thus there is a denial of the supreme insight concerning man's true greatness, his transcendence in respect to earthly realities, the contradiction in his heart between the desire for the fullness of what is good and his own inability to attain it, and, above all, the need for salvation which results from this situation." The limited state is kept limited by the democratic assertion of the transcendent aspiration of the human heart.

In this connection, John Paul infuses the doctrine of "subsidiarity" with new vitality by the use of a most suggestive phrase, "the subjectivity of society." "The social nature of man . . . is realized in various intermediary groups, beginning with the family and including economic, social, political, and cultural groups which stem from human nature itself and have their own autonomy, always with a view to the common good." In the free society, the state is one institution, one player, among others. It is an indispensable player in its service to all the other players, but it is subject to the subjectivity of society, and the subjectivity of society consists in free persons and in free persons in community living in obedience to God and solidarity with one another. There is in Centesimus Annus and in other writings of this pontificate, I believe, a fresh and compelling theory of democracy that awaits systematic development by the next generation.

There must be a cultivated skepticism about the state if it is to be kept limited. "To that end, it is preferable that each power be balanced by other powers and by other spheres of responsibility which keep it within proper bounds." Skepticism regarding the power of the state does not mean, however, skepticism about the purposes that the state is to serve. Quite the opposite is the case. Only when those purposes are clearly and unambiguously asserted can the state be held accountable. Section 45 of Centesimus Annus clearly and unambiguously challenges the point at which present-day liberalism has most severely distorted the meaning of democracy in the liberal tradition. Here is the crucial paragraph:

Nowadays there is a tendency to claim that agnosticism and skeptical relativism are the philosophy and the basic attitude which correspond to democratic forms of political life. Those who are convinced that they know the truth and firmly adhere to it are considered unreliable from a democratic point of view, since they do not accept that the truth is determined by the majority, or that it is subject to variation according to different political trends. It must be observed in this regard that if there is no ultimate truth to guide and direct political activity, then ideas and convictions can easily be manipulated for reasons of power. As history demonstrates, a democracy without values easily turns into open or thinly disguised totalitarianism.

Liberalism's dogmatic insistence upon agnosticism in public discourse and decision-making has created what I have called "the naked public square." People who, like the Founders, hold certain truths to be self-evident are today "considered unreliable from a democratic point of view." In a usurpation of power that indeed threatens a "thinly disguised totalitarianism," the courts have presumed to declare that the separation of church and state means the separation of religion and religiously grounded morality from public life, which means the separation of the deepest convictions of the people from politics, which means the end of democracy and, in fact, the end of politics. Thank God, we are not there yet. But it is the direction in which the United States has been moving these last several decades, and it is the real and present danger requiring those of us called conservatives to rally to the defense of the liberal tradition.

In contending for the soul of liberalism, we must be sympathetically alert to some of our fellow citizens who honestly believe that any appeal to transcendent truth poses the threat of theocracy. Centesimus Annus again:

Nor does the Church close her eyes to the danger of fanaticism or fundamentalism among those who, in the name of an ideology which purports to be scientific or religious, claim the right to impose on others their own concept of what is true and good. Christian truth is not of this kind. Since it is not an ideology, the Christian faith does not presume to imprison changing sociopolitical realities in a rigid schema, and it recognizes that human life is realized in history in conditions that are diverse and imperfect. Furthermore, in constantly reaffirming the transcendent dignity of the person, the Church's method is always that of respect for freedom.

Let it be candidly admitted that that has not always appeared to be the Church's method. In Tertio Millennio Adveniente (As the Third Millennium Nears) and on many other occasions, the Pope has repeatedly called upon Christians to acknowledge the ways in which, individually and corporately, they have failed to respect the dignity and freedom of others. That acknowledgment must, however, be joined to two other propositions. First: When, in the name of democracy, transcendent truth is excluded from the public square, the result is "open or thinly disguised totalitarianism." Second: Democratic totalitarianism, which recognizes no higher truth than majority rule, creates a treacherously dangerous circumstance for minorities.

I BEGAN with some comments on Centesimus Annus and what some call "The Murray Project." Nobody should try to usurp the authority of magisterial documents in order to advance his own partisan arguments. In no way should the encyclical be interpreted as an unqualified affirmation of the American experiment. In many ways, it is a searing criticism of what that experiment has become under the influence of present-day liberalisms. Yet I do believe Centesimus Annus is commensurate with the American liberal tradition, and in critical continuity with the great work of John Courtney Murray. And I hope, too, that that is the case, for we have not the luxury of imagining the reconstitution of this social and political order on foundations other than the liberal tradition.

As sympathetic as we may be to some of the determined critics of liberalism, we do well to remind ourselves that all temporal orders short of the Kingdom of God are profoundly unsatisfactory. When we survey the depredations and ravages of our social, political, and religious circumstance, it is tempting to look for someone or something to blame. It is easy to say, "Liberalism made us do it." But liberalism is freedom, and what we do with freedom is charged to our account. For American Christians, and for Catholics in particular, nothing has been done wrong that could not have been done differently. Amidst the depredations and ravages of an American experiment that once exalted the human spirit, and may do so again, Centesimus Annus invites us to reappropriate and rebuild the liberal tradition.