UNITED STATES
National Review
By Michael Potemra
May 20, 2012
Maureen Dowd’s column today expresses the by now well-known disappointment of Catholic liberals at the conservatizing trend within official Catholicism. It contains all of today’s Top 40 hits of how the libs think the right-wingers are wrong: Sebelius is getting protested at Georgetown; Father Williams has fathered a child; there’s a “bizarre inquisition of self-sacrificing American nuns pushed by the disgraced Cardinal Bernard Law.” But what I find striking about her column is that it offers a classic example of how the Catholic liberals can be as guilty of Catholic triumphalism as the conservatives they so intensely dislike. Here’s how she starts the column:
I always liked that the name of my religion was also an adjective meaning all-embracing.
I was a Catholic and I wanted to be catholic, someone engaged in a wide variety of things. As James Joyce wrote in “Finnegans Wake:” “Catholic means ‘Here comes everybody.’ ”
So it makes me sad to see the Catholic Church grow so uncatholic, intent on loyalty testing, mind control and heresy hunting. Rather than all-embracing, the church hierarchy has become all-constricting.
It is true that the word Catholic has at least two different meanings, one referring to a particular group of religious believers, the other to an attitude of universal openness. But Dowd doesn’t explain why, specifically, the church group in question has to embrace, in its entirety, the other meaning of the word. I share her notion that pluralism in religious belief is a good thing, a human right, and worthy of defense. But it’s not clear why any particular organization has to harbor all possible pluralism within itself. Surely, if we prize diversity, we should not insist that Catholics be Protestants as well, or that Hindus be Buddhists, or that Sunnis be Shia? The only reason I can think of for insisting that one’s own religion embrace all other views is a sense that one’s religion is a unique public good, serving a higher religio-political purpose than other religions, and therefore subsuming them — which is rather hard to distinguish, as an attitude, from the one that liberals mean when they refer, pejoratively, to conservatives as “triumphalistic.”
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