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U p F r o n t
By Karl Keating
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FR. Richard McBrien just doesn't get it. I'm beginning to think he never will.
The Notre Dame theology professor and syndicated columnist (who is a little less syndicated now that his own diocese's newspaper, the Hartford Catholic Transcript, has dropped his column, forcing him into self-syndication-other diocesan newspapers are dropping him also) bemoaned the polarization within the Church, especially in America.
His comments were made while considering the merits of Cardinal Joseph Bernardin's Common Ground Project. McBrien thought that Bernardin, a quondam ally whom he calls "wise and saintly," erred in inviting so many "conservative or moderately conservative" bishops, priests, and laymen onto his advisory committee. McBrien thinks there are "too few members who can accurately and forcefully give voice to the view of the Church's more liberal and moderately progressive constituencies." Perhaps he had himself in mind.
However that may be, McBrien notes that "Called to Be Catholic," the public relations statement accompanying the establishment of the Common Ground Project, emphasizes that younger Catholics feel "disenfranchised," "confused," and "adrift."
Little wonder, opines McBrien. "The thousands of young people who flocked to Denver in 1993 [for World Youth Day] to see the pope are massively outnumbered by the many more thousands who aren't involved at all. On a given Sunday morning one has only to scan the congregation to see how few college-age and young adults are present in comparison with young children and middle-aged and senior adults."
(True, so far as the observation goes, though it should be noted that this is nothing new: Young adults always have had a tendency to drop away from the faith. In the old days they usually returned; today many don't.)
McBrien quotes the statement further: "Yet in almost every case, the necessary conversation [between factions] runs up against polarized positions that have so magnified fears and so strained sensitivities that even the simplest lines of inquiry are often fiercely resisted."
McBrien says, "The analysis begs the question: Why is there such polarization in the first place? How did we get into this state, given the high promise of Vatican II and the new spirit of energy and hope it released?"
The columnist thinks he knows: "There is an elephant in the living room that the statement pretends isn't there. Not once in 'Called to Be Catholic' is the pope mentioned nor the manner in which authority is exercised in this pontificate."
The fault is the Pope's, you see. The polarization that prevents the "necessary conversation" between opposing factions has come from John Paul II's misuse of his office. "The process began early on in the censuring of theologians like Hans Küng, Charles Curran, and Leonardo Boff and the disciplining of bishops like Seattle's Archbishop Raymond Hunthausen."
Yeah, sure.
You have heard this tattered line many times: "He isn't part of the solution. He's part of the problem." Usually it is applied inaptly. In this case it really fits-except that the problem isn't the Pope, but McBrien. And McBrien just doesn't get it.
There is polarization within the Church not because of anything John Paul II or his immediate predecessors have done, but because of the actions of McBrien and those in his pantheon. Even the errors at the other end of the spectrum can be seen as (wrong) reactions to liberal dissent.
Are there too few young adults at Mass? It isn't because the Pope has waved his stick at half a dozen men in eighteen years. (If anything, he has been overindulgent.) The Pope, quite demonstrably, is loved by young people; World Youth Day was just one proof among many. (Do any young people show similar adulation toward McBrien or Archbishop Hunthausen or the leaders of Call to Action?)
McBrien is blindly wrong. The Pope is part of (really, the chief theoretician of) the solution. It is McBrien who is part of the problem.
Orthodox Catholics can take a cue from that goofy-faced icon of teenaged boys, Alfred E. Neuman: We can say, "What, me worry?"
After all, things are looking up.
First, Richard McBrien's Catholicism was censured by the bishops for false advertising-it held up an ersatz Catholicism as the real thing-and now his column is heading south. He always will have a page in the National Catholic Reporter, no doubt, but he is facing a diminishing presence in the newspapers that Catholic lay people actually read, if they read any Catholic newspapers at all.
There will be much progressivist handwringing about the polarization supposedly fostered by The Powers That Be, but it will pass. So will the polarization, if Richard McBrien and his friends decide to accept the Catholic faith whole and entire.
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