Is Catholicism Becoming More Liberal, Or Not


I look forward to reading columns in the New York Times by Ross Douthat. He is a converted Catholic. He writes a lot about the Catholic Church and, to me at least, sees the Catholic Church as an outsider sees it. Today's column speculates on whether the future Catholic Church will be more liberal or less. 

Douthat notes the Catholic Church has been going through cycles that mimic France of the 1700's. France went through revolutions followed by counter revolutions. People became uncertain what was coming next. None of those revolutions or counter revolutions, however, predicted the France of today. Today's France came from events of the more recent history.

Douthat reviews the past few decades of his church. There was a Pope in the 1960's who was determined to modernize it. Out went many traditions including Latin Mass. In came guitars. Then a couple of recent Popes, one was the previous Benedict, dumped the modern and tried to bring back the old. Now Francis sees these traditions as a place to assert himself and Latin Mass has been again ruled out.

There is, of course, the on going tension of whether the denomination is mostly about helping the poor or controlling women by stopping abortions and keeping them out of the priesthood. Pope Francis is about the former, his enemies about the latter.

The competing narratives inside Catholicism are not unlike competing narratives in politics. An importance difference is the religious narrative was supposed to be given by God, not just more political ideas floated as tests. Would not it be more logical for a god to make known his wishes and all followers get on board? This is not what is going on in the Catholic Church. Of course, it is not going in Protestantism or in any other major religion of the world either. 

One pundit in the link said the majority of Catholics are much closer to the thinking of Pope Francis than they ever were to Benedict. Evidence of this is the Latin mass drove home by Benedict was dismissed with a wave of the hand by Francis. 

Though the conservative part of the Catholic denomination thinks if it can just get one more of its own for the next Pope it will prevail. Douthat concludes conservatives can never put the genie back in the bottle.

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