What we have been witnessing over the past two and a half decades is a concerted (and increasingly successful) effort to redefine the doctrinal, theological, and pastoral center of Catholicism, and in the process to redefine its extremes. In this scheme, the old center becomes the left, and the old right becomes the center.
However, if the old right (which includes most members of today's College of Cardinals and U.S. hierarchy, Crisis, Communio and First Things magazines, and the so-called new movements, such as Opus Dei and the Legionaries of Christ) is the new center, who or what constitutes Catholicism's right wing?
In an interview with an Italian journalist in 1989, Pope John Paul II gave only one specific example of right-wing Catholics, namely, the schismatic Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre and his followers in the Society of St. Pius X.
A year earlier, however, Archbishop Lefebvre had been automatically excommunicated from the Church, in accordance with canon 1382, for having ordained bishops "without a pontifical mandate."
If we are to take the late pope's rendering as our guide, for all practical purposes there is no right wing any longer in the Catholic Church. There is only a minority group of new "centrists" (formerly the Catholic right) who happen to hold most of the levers of ecclesiastical power, and a very large "left wing," which includes most of those who serve the Church in various parish, diocesan, and institutional ministries.
This newly constituted "left wing" also includes most Catholic theologians and biblical scholars who are members of the Catholic Theological Society of America and the Catholic Biblical Association; most of the officers and faculty of our Catholic colleges and universities; the great majority of religious women; most middle-aged and older priests; most liturgists, religious educators, social service ministers and chaplains of every kind; and --- the largest constituency of all --- active parishioners who have been educated in Catholic institutions of higher education and who have a built-in aversion to extremism of any kind, including its manifestations at official levels.
Such Catholics are products, directly or indirectly, of the Second Vatican Council --- but of the council as shaped and fashioned, not by its defeated minority, but by its working majority of bishops and by the two popes, John XXIII and Paul VI, who presided over it.
These true centrists expressed themselves most emphatically when the sordid details of the Church's sexual-abuse scandal began to surface in 2002. On survey after survey that year and thereafter, Catholic laity directed their anger and frustration more toward the bishops who had covered up the behavior of the predatory priests, transferring them from place to place, than toward the predatory priests themselves.
These Catholics constitute the broad center of the Church --- some moderately liberal, others moderately conservative. But for them the key line of division is not ideological, between liberals and conservatives, but psychological, between the healthy and the unhealthy.
As healthy people themselves they have an instinctive awareness of pathological or dysfunctional behavior when they experience it. Without benefit of advanced degrees in psychology, they recognize individuals who lack a healthy self-image, who are defensive and self-righteous, who are rigid and judgmental toward others, and who place undue emphasis on rules narrowly applied and on "orthodoxies" simplistically interpreted.
I had suggested in my America article, "Conflict in the Church: Redefining the Center" (8/22/92), that the ongoing effort to redefine the center, that is, to place all the people mentioned above into some huge "left-wing" box, is unfair, inaccurate and injurious to the Church.
It is unfair because it places the catholicity of too many faithful Catholics under a cloud. These Catholics are even being told now by some of the more militant members of the old right that they should leave the Church, to which they have belonged all of their lives, because they are no longer "wanted" there.
This redefinition of the center is also inaccurate because it assumes that the fundamental conflict in the Church today is between the left and the right, when it is in fact between the center and the right --- the traditional center and the old right.
This redefinition of the center is, finally, injurious to the Church because it deprives the Church of the ministerial gifts of so many highly qualified and deeply motivated lay persons, not to say also of hundreds of excellent candidates for the episcopate --- pastorally sensitive and effective priests who are written off as "left wing" or as "dissenters."
This effort to usurp and redefine Catholicism's traditional center needs to be named for what it is and openly resisted. |