A Schism Deferred

At the Convention for the Common Good in Philadelphia this July, Catholics and other “people of good will” gathered together to discuss the decrepit state of our union. Oblates of St. Francis De Sales intermingled with dozens of other Catholic organizations dedicated to social justice to discover what it was “to be ‘Church’” in the midst of a backlash against immigrants, the human cost of a corporatist economy, and the violence and degradation of an unjust war. Maryknoll sisters sported purple t-shirts. The liberal Catholic columnist E.J. Dionne spoke. Pennsylvania’s new Senator, Bob Casey Jr., made an appearance. Franco doesn’t make the list of heroes for these Catholics. Instead, they honor liberation theologians and priests like Oscar Romero, who fought human rights abuses and was gunned down by a right-wing militia.

The Convention issued a statement that could have topped off four days of solidarity at Netroots Nation:

We believe in a global economic system that truly recognizes all people as equal partners; where civil society, governments, and corporations collaborate and are held accountable in creating healthy and sustainable communities where each person’s basic rights are met and protected.

Catholics constitute the largest single religious affiliation in America — yet remain a political mystery. Despite the rise of more liberal personalities like Jim Wallis, evangelicals lean reliably to the political right, whereas the older, mainline Protestant denominations have moved progressively in a more, well, progressive direction. These simple categories, in which religious disposition translates easily into political identity, are by no means fixed. Consider, as a prime example, the travails of the Episcopal Church, which continues to splinter along both theological and political lines.

But Catholics are far more difficult to peg to specific political positions. While the Catholic Church remains the top enemy of abortion rights activists, it is also the greatest friend of recent immigrants, including illegal immigrants — providing them shelter, comfort and even paying their legal fees. It opposes the expansion of marriage to include homosexuals, yet also opposes in Iraq a war that has won deep and consistent support from the right. Big-name Catholics like William F. Buckley, Russell Kirk, and Patrick Buchanan have dominated the conservative movement — and even admired, or at least defended, Francoist Spain. But the loud left chamber in the Church is only growing bolder. What should we make of this tension? Is the Catholic Church, like the Anglican and Episcopalian Church, facing a brewing schism?

Remarkably, liberal Catholics — such as those who descended on the Convention for the Common Good — find their most powerful allies in the hierarchy of the Church. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has established itself as perhaps the loudest voice speaking out against Lou Dobbs, working up greater energy in condemning the backlash against illegal immigration and the war in Iraq than in condemning abortion or euthanasia. Church hierarchy has expanded in tandem; the New York archdiocese alone has over 110 different offices, with some organs of Church bureaucracy dedicated to immigrants, others to diversity, and others still to the promotion of social justice. Many other dioceses have maintained a long and steady period of bureaucratic growth as well.

Indeed, the entire mid-century Catholic establishment seems to congregate on the left. Notre Dame’s most famous theologian, Richard McBrien, is under suspicion of heresy for supporting (at least in principle) the concept of female priests. Other august Catholic universities, including Fordham and Georgetown, maintain their Catholic identity in large part by cultivating a well-managed but often symbolic and vestigial attachment to their resident religious orders.

Conservatives, political and theological, tend to be an insurgent force in the Church, establishing new institutions rather than occupying old ones. Since the Second Vatican council, several small liberal arts schools that adhere rigorously to a classical liberal model of education and turn out hard-core conservatives have been founded by Catholics. Among these are St. Thomas Aquinas, Magdalen College, and Christendom College. Another, Ave Maria, is typical: the university, which started as a college of 18 students in 1998 in Yisplanti Michigan, has doubled its student population many times over, relocating to a sprawling campus with its own town in southwestern Florida. Nearly half of its students are daily communicants, and about ten percent of them assemble each evening to walk the campus while reciting the rosary. The two largest groups on campus are a pro-life group and a chastity group, which trains its members to give talks at area public schools. You may see a Toyota Prius in Ave Maria, but it is likely to be filled with nuns in their habits.

Yet only one Catholic University has been founded since the Second Vatican Council, and Ave Maria is it. Priestly orders, on the other hand, have multiplied far more rapidly — while perhaps even actively diminishing the public profile and political participation of conservative Catholics across America. New and quickly growing priestly orders, like the Fraternity of St. Peter, are dedicated to the Church’s old Latin Liturgy. Clear Creek priory, a Benedictine monastery in Hulbert, Oklahoma founded in 1999, is rapidly approaching full capacity — 70 monks. That is as many vocations as some dioceses will achieve in a generation at their current rate of growth. Nationwide, insurgent conservative Catholicism may be potent, but it is not widespread, and its centers of power are just as often disparate and insular as not.

Yet the unity of the Catholic Church persists. In some ways this is surprising. The differences between liberal and conservative Catholics are ideological, theological and generational. Almost every general council of the Church seems to threaten to beget a schism. Vatican II, however, despite ushering revolutionary change into the Church, resulted in but one small break in unity — the separation of the Archbishop Marcel Lefevbre and his Society of St. Pius X (a priestly fraternity made up of nearly five hundred priests and four bishops). The Society, moreover, is dedicated to the Latin liturgy that Pope Benedict XVI seems to be reviving. In the past decade, Vatican authorities have referred to the group as in ‘an irregular status’, not in schism. Pope Benedict has tried to reconcile them with the Church at large. At the top — predictably enough, from an institutional perspective — there is no eagerness to prompt a schism.

In the end, in spite of their steady progressiveness, liberals seem unlikely to break the unity of the Catholic Church. Bishops and priests who may privately dissent from official Church teaching on contraception, or its prohibition of women priests, tend to remain quiet; they have yet to formalize their dissent with a public movement, content to cultivate a tendency that expresses itself only at the margins. Perhaps this is proof that no principle is so important to liberal Church factions that they would willingly surrender the status, authority, and comfort of the offices within it that they enjoy today.

Michael Brendan Dougherty is a contributing editor at Culture11.

Photo Credit: Uploaded by Flickr user Lucid Nightmare.