The Catholic Right's Art of Constructive Schism -- Part 1

Originally posted at Talk to Action.

Many years ago when I was in law school I was taught the concept of constructive eviction. It is a process whereby a landlord wanting to evict tenants from one of his properties - say for converting the premises into a condo or a coop or to sell it - makes living conditions so unlivable that the tenants leave on their own volition.

I think something like this is going on in American, and even world Catholicism -- since elements of the Catholic Right seem to be hell bent on driving out moderate and liberal Catholics.

The Vatican has been moving to the right since the ascendancy of Pope John Paul II in 1978. During this time open-mind bishops and cardinals have been replaced by increasingly strident confrontational conservatives and traditionalists. Independent-mind clergy such as the former Bishop Francis Mugavero  are replaced by dogmatists such as Archbishop Raymond Burke and Archbishop Charles J. Chaput of Denver who do not hesitate to use the sacrament of Communion as a divisive political weapon.

The church that has emerged from this era is more authoritarian, treating new ideas or fresh insights as inherently threatening to faith itself.  For example such matters as women's ordination, embryonic stem cell research or the inclusion of the LGBT faithful, are likely to lead to charges of heresy and may lead to excommunication. Even if you write an academic thesis wherein you dare suggest Scripture has a more feminine view of God, you can be fired from your parish job.

This era of constructive schism is the reverse of the great schisms of the Protestant Reformation -- where the reformers willfully left and set up their own denomination. Today, the self-appointed landlords of the Catholic Right are attempting to evict those who disagree with them by treating them like unruly tenants.

This is mainly being carried out by two factions of right-wing Catholics, one neo-conservative and the other a more traditional group commonly known as "paleos."  And while they both seek to move the Catholic Church rightward, their political goals significantly differ.

Both factions tend to comprise traditionalists who frequently bemoan the reforms of Vatican II in the 1960s, (and especially pine for the return of the Latin Mass.) They also agree on biological issues: abortion, euthanasia, homosexuality and stem cell research. They derive their views from natural law -- but with a slight difference: While Catholic Paleos draw upon certain Enlightenment-era thinkers (Edmund Burke, for example), the Neos will reach further back to the Classic Greek teachings of Plato and others for prescribing societal order.

"Shrinking" the Church

"Shrinking" the Church to accomplish a "purer" following is a repeated theme of key players of the Catholic Right. One of those is Opus Dei's Rev. C. John McCloskey.

An August 2002 Salon.com piece by Chris Suellentrop described John McCloskey as "...an Ivy Leaguer who graduated from Columbia and a former Wall Streeter who worked at Citibank and Merrill Lynch." Suellentrop further observed, "The self-described supply-sider has a top-down strategy to transform the culture, too. He wants to turn Blue America into Red."

A few years ago, McCloskey wrote about his dream Church of 2030, free of moderates and dissenters:

As you may have learned, there were approximately 60 million nominal Catholics at the beginning of the Great Jubilee at the turn of the century. You might ask how we went from that number down to our current 40 million. I guess the answer could be, to put it delicately, consolidation. It is not as bad as it looks. In retrospect it can be seen that only approximately 10% of the sixty or so were "with the program." (Please excuse the anachronism, but I am 77 years old!) I mean to say only 10% that base assented wholeheartedly to the teaching of the Church and practiced the sacraments in the minimal sense of Sunday Mass and at least yearly confession. The rest, as was inevitable, either left the Church, defected to the culture of death, passed away, or in some cases at least for a couple of decades, went to various Christian sects, what remained of mainstream Protestantism or Bible Christianity.

Continuing, McCloskey writes of a future Church in which the "Catholics we do have are better formed, practice their Faith in the traditional sense at a much higher level than ever." He also gleefully notes:  "Dissent has disappeared from the theological vocabulary." And he sees the remaining faithful's numbers enhanced by "the influx of hundreds of thousands of Evangelical Protestants."

It is no accident that those who advocate a smaller more orthodox church are closely aligned with movement conservatism.  For example, Catholic League President William Donohue is an adjunct scholar with the Heritage Foundation; pizza-franchise magnet Tom Monaghan bankrolls the laissez-faire inspired Acton Institute as well as orthodox Catholic GOP candidates for public office; Catholic neoconservatives Michael Novak; and the late Richard John Neuhaus co-founded the Institute for Religion and Democracy ("IRD") and McCloskey has served on the IRD's Board of Advisors.

The role of McCloskey and other prominent conservative Catholics in this anti-liberal Protestant agency deeply troubled the late Rev. Dr. Andrew Weaver, a prominent Methodist writer, who called it "the most grievous breach in ecumenical good will between Roman Catholics and Protestants since the changes initiated by Vatican II."   Frederick Clarkson aptly described the central tenet leading to the IRD's formation as one "...intended to divide and conquer-and diminish the capacity of churches to carry forward their idea of a just society in the United States-and the world."  In this way, Catholic elements involved in IRD not only sought to hobble the politically and socially more liberal Protestant Churches, but also to divide what they saw as their main competitors for influence and the direction of the culture.

But while Clarkson and Weaver say that the role of these (and other) Catholic Right leaders in disrupting and dividing mainline Protestantism has been overlooked, we could also say that their role in the constructive schism of Catholicism has been overlooked as well.

Neocons Versus Paleocons

The Paleos are essentially the pre-World War II version of conservatism: Isolationist, anti-immigrant and at times, Confederate apologists such as Buchanan and Thomas DiLorenzo. These are the advocates of a small inward looking government, one that adheres to the old John Quincy Adams adage that "America does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy."

The Catholic Neocons are different. They are internationalist, very pro-Israel and are open to somewhat larger government, including certain - albeit limited - social programs such as affirmative action. They are the (relatively) new kids on the block, and are part of the wider neoconservative movement. This evident in their many writings adopting much of the neoconservatives favorite philosopher Leo Strauss's desire for the need for benign tyrants to rule over a general population, which they believe cannot always handle the truth. They employ many of Strauss's terms of art such as "nihilism" and "moral relativism" while impugning modernity.

But whereas the paleos will eschew the international view, neos embrace it full tilt -- and view institutions with global reach as vehicles to export their political agenda. The Catholic Church is one such institution and the significance of its global reach has not been lost on neos such as George Weigel or Michael Novak -- a point we will discuss in part 2.