Liberal Catholicism Resurgent: The Return of the Innocents

Pope Francis is leading a resurgent liberalism within the Church: Jesuit Tom Reese said that if John Paul or Benedict had so relentlessly installed prelates in their own image, he would have been furious. Indeed, those conservative popes, liberally, elevated liberals like Tobin and Bergoglio! Our new Cardinal Archbishop Tobin here in Newark seems to be a classic: leans left on political issues like refugees but soft-peddals the cultural issues. I know the type! Most of my family and friends are such. (I am talking here about my generation: baby boomers.) Generally they embrace and live our faith with marriages that are faithful and fruitful. But they loyally vote Democrat for lots of good Catholic reasons: the poor, refugees, the environment and so forth. They ignore the moral issues of abortion, marriage, and religious liberty. I have long marveled at the political passivity and indifference in which they have allowed the sexual liberals to take over the major institutions including the Democratic Party and the labor movement. One cause for this passivity is a positive legacy from their parents, the Great Generation: the conviction that sexuality is private, sacred and best not discussed. In a way this is a good attitude. Our parents taught us chastity and fidelity by their lives but were mostly inarticulate about it. That worked at the time: up until about 1965. This week my wife and Cardinal Tobin enlightened me to another cause. We read that one of the Cardinal's favorite movies is The Big Chill so we watched it out of curiosity. Fifteen years after college, a group of boomers gather to grieve the suicide of a dear friend. They share deep affection for each other and nostalgia about the idealism and joy of their shared youth as adulthood has brought lots of disappointment in  marriage and career. They profess their love for each other, grieve, argue, smoke pot, and fall into adultery together. The movie is saturated with sentimentality, melancholy, and a quiet nihilism. The adultery is notably given a sweet taste. So we wondered: Why is this our Cardinal's favorite? My wife offered: he is probably innocent; he ignores the adultery and sees the affection, sensitivity, grief and mourned idealism. Exactly! The liberal Catholics I know are innocent! They live wholesome, faithful, chaste lives apparently with little effort. My guess is that Tobin and Francis are happily, naturally free of sexual torment and temptation. The same seems to apply to my liberal friends. And so they are sanguine about the sexual issues: pornography is weird but no big problem; masturbation is more or less normal; cohabitation is fine if they love each other; and of course contraception is just swell! Homosexuality is wonderful too and gay couples will live happily ever after if everyone stops bullying them! We might distinguish here between "hard" and "soft" cultural liberals: perhaps 10% of the population have embraced sexual sin as a way of life (pornographers, abortionists, gay militants, Holywood) and militantly advocate while 40% or so are my friends who dislike such sin but refuse to publically resist and so accept it. And so the liberal Catholic seems to live a serene chaste private life and ignore the culture war. Liberals are good people. Us conservatives not so good: more tormented by concupiscence! And therefore more vigilant about the culture as well. The problem with liberalism, however, is that it cannot protect the young: our culture has become so perverse that innocence must be protected and cannot be assumed. The following generations will not inherit so placidly the innocence that the Great Generation gave some of us. There seems to be a naivete about liberalism. The paradigm is Chamberlain meeting Hitler at Munich. Obama assumed office with a happy, polyannish certainty: with Cheny and Bush out of the way, he would restore peace to the earth as he dialogued rationally and respectfully with Islam. I am sure events in Iraq, Iran, Syria, Libya, and Palestine have disabused him of this innocence. Merkle in Germany is another example as she opens her borders, generously, to refugees but fails to protect her own civilization in its fragility. Francis himself pontificated early on that "violence is not part of genuine Islam" and so raised the question about his authority as pope to define "genuine Islam" as well as his own experience as a prelate from Latin America. And so we see that an easy-going attitude towards sexual licence is strangely wed to the same attitude towards Islamic radicalism. And so my conclusion is that liberals are good people who seem blissfully flee of disordered libidinal or aggressive urges and so worry little about sexual disorder or aggressors like ISIS or Iran. They are more likely once-born rather than twice-born in the William James sense that they have not greatly felt their own sin and so are not running to the confessional line. They are able to concentrate their energies on social justice and care for the poor. God bless them! But their naivete will not serve the young as they defer passively to the sexual and Islamic revolutions! We are at war for the hearts, minds and souls of our youth! Francis is, in his blissful innocence, a disappointment! He has brought the Church in to a winter: hopefully it will not be too dark, too cold, and too long!