I guess at one time or another most of us have used the term “building a straw man” to describe a dishonest debating technique. We know how it is done. You first ascribe a series of deplorable beliefs to your opponent; and then cut them apart.
Discussion: What exactly are progressives trying to make progress toward and how will they know they are reaching their goal? Sort out conservatives, progressives and fundamentalists at the CE Roundtable.
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It doesn’t matter if your opponent actually holds these beliefs. The audience thinks he does, because you said he does: guilt by association. There are many historical examples. The way Marxist revolutionaries and anti-Catholic bigots fanned a hatred for the Church by spreading false rumors about priests and nuns and Vatican conspiracies is as good as any.
Please don’t misread what I am about to say: I don’t put Fr. Richard McBrien, a professor of theology at Notre Dame University and a syndicated columnist, in the same category as the Bolsheviks and the Know-Nothings. Not even remotely. I don’t know the man, but, judging from his television appearances, he seems a likeable enough fellow.
He reminds me of many priests and religious of his generation that I have known, men and women who cut their theological teeth in the counterculture hothouse of the 1960s and who now function as what could be called the ecclesiastical wing of the Democratic Party. Call me naïve, if you wish, but I remain convinced that many of them mean well, including McBrien. I have known too many priests and religious brothers who take positions identical to his who are committed to serving the Lord, for me to think otherwise.
That said, McBrien resorted to a classic straw man argument in one of his recent columns. His objective in the column was to distinguish between what he calls healthy conservatism and dangerous fundamentalism. (McBrien informs us that he bases much of his case on the work of Fr. Patrick M. Arnold and Fr. John Coleman, Jesuit theologians who wrote on this theme in the late 1980s.) Conservatism, McBrien argues, is a good thing, because it “fulfills a necessary and constructive role in the Church and society alike. It is concerned with preserving a community’s historical heritage, especially in times of cultural change. It urges a cautious approach, as captured, for example, in the familiar saying: ‘Look before you leap.’”
In contrast, he says, fundamentalism is “neither necessary nor constructive. Working out of an absolutist perspective, it sees the world as filled with evil forces conspiring against everything it regards — with unquestioned certitude — as true and good.”
How do we tell when an individual crosses the line from conservatism into fundamentalism? McBrien offers benchmarks. The Catholic fundamentalist is “marked by paranoia and self-righteousness. There is always some terrible enemy out there that has to be fought and ultimately destroyed.” That enemy is likely to include many “bishops, priests, sisters, and theologians,” whom the fundamentalist is likely to “spend an inordinate amount of time and energy trying to purge.”
He adds that the Catholic fundamentalist is captivated by the “myth of the Golden Age,” which he believes existed “in the decades just before Vatican II,” when the Church was in a “pristine and ideal state, exactly as God intended it to be.” In addition, the fundamentalist believes that “all truth is to be found in a single source,” specifically in the “pronouncements of the pope and the Roman Curia.”
Then the coup de grace: McBrien tells us “fundamentalists tend to link themselves with right-wing political regimes and movements in the hope of advancing their own theocratic theories. Accordingly, Catholic fundamentalists are unenthusiastic about Catholic social teaching. They tend instead to emphasize a limited range of other issues as if they were primary.”
Where to begin? Obviously there are some extremist on the Right in the Church. I have been at meetings and conferences where wild-eyed people leap to their feet shouting about “Zwinglian heresiarchs” and “Marxist infiltrators” in the clergy. But McBrien does not limit his criticism to people of this sort. He tells us “Opus Dei, the Wanderer Forum and Catholics United for the Faith” are examples of the unhealthy fundamentalism he finds troubling. That is painting with a pretty wide brush. You could even say it reveals an “absolutist” frame of mind “marked by paranoia and self-righteousness.”
We could answer McBrien by pointing out that there is nothing inherently irrational or hysterical about taking the positions he attacks as fundamentalist. It is hard, for example, to see why it would be paranoid and self-righteous to be alert to “terrible enemies” within the Church when so many of the prominent Catholic “progressives” of the last quarter of the 20th century ended up in open rebellion against Catholicism. I don’t think there is any need to rattle off the names, but Rosemary Reuther, Gregory Baum and Edward Schillebeeckx come to mind.
Moreover, what is over-the-top about harboring affection for a “Catholic Golden Age in the decades before Vatican II”? Fr. McBrien might not have any fond memories of a world filled with schools staffed by vigorous orders of priests, brothers and nuns and Catholic universities dedicated to preserving the heritage of the Christian West, but many intelligent and thoughtful Catholics who were alive at the time do. It does not make sense to brush aside the phenomenon of seminaries and novitiates filled with the best and brightest of a generation of young Catholics, as they were in the 1940s and 1950s. Nor of Hollywood cranking out movies glamorizing priests played by Bing Crosby and Spencer Tracy. It may not have been a “Golden Age,” but the prima facie evidence is that Church was doing something right back then. It is anti-intellectual to maintain otherwise.
We could go on in this vein. But let’s not. Let’s do something else. Let’s apply McBrien’s benchmarks. Look around. Isn’t it Catholics on the Left who spend most of their time these days wringing their hands over “some terrible enemy out there” among the clergy? Consider the way McBrien frets over the influence of Opus Dei and the Wanderer Forum. And aren’t Catholic leftists the ones who keep pointing to a Golden Age before the popes “sold out to the Emperor Constantine” in return for political power?
The conflation of religion and politics? It is the Catholic Left that linked itself to Marxist movements in Latin America and pacifist movements in Europe and the United States during the Cold War. Anyone still think it was wise and balanced for Catholic “progressives” to have made excuses for Fidel Castro and Mao and to have confronted Josef Stalin’s Soviet Union with placards reading “Better Red than Dead”?
Isn’t it the Catholic Left that seizes passages of the social encyclicals to make the case for the welfare state policies of the Democratic Party, while at the same time openly dissenting from the Church’s teachings on birth control, women priests, and biblical inerrancy? That looks like “emphasizing a limited range” of Catholic issues to me.
My point? The attitudes that McBrien deplores as a “dangerous fundamentalism” are present among his own allies on the Catholic Left as much as anywhere on the right. I think it was William F. Buckley who once said that “selective indignation” is a dominant characteristic of the political and religious Left. Exhibit A: Fr. Richard McBrien.
