Mary Daly, a retired professor at Boston College who was probably the most outré of all the dissident theologians who came to the fore of Catholic intellectual life in the years right after the Second Vatican Council, died on Jan. 3 at age 81. Back in the 1960s and 1970s, which might be called the golden age of Catholic dissidence, theologians who took positions challenging traditional church teachings””ranging from the authority of the pope to bans on birth control, premarital sex, and women’s ordination””dominated Catholic intellectual life in America and Europe. They seemed to represent a tide that would overwhelm the old restrictions and their hidebound adherents.
Now, 45 years after Vatican II concluded in 1965, most of those bright lights of dissident Catholicism””from the theologian Hans Küng of the University of Tübingen to Charles Curran, the priest dismissed from the Catholic University of America’s theology faculty in 1987 for his advocacy of contraception and acceptance of homosexual relationships””seem dimmed with advanced age, if not extinguished. They have left no coherent second generation of dissident Catholic intellectuals to follow them.
Deo Gratias.
Boomers are finally getting off the stage… Good riddance.
The question asked by the writer of the article is why there are no successors to the radical theologians. The answer, surely, is that there is an inbuilt dilemma in radical theology. If you build a career on becoming more and more questioning, if you cast radical doubt on more and more of the basis of your faith, you are like the proverbial man sawing off the branch on which you are sitting. Or, to change the metaphor, you have painted yourself into a corner. There is also the sheer oddity of liberalism and for that matter post-modernism becoming orthodoxies in their own right. Savvy students spot at once the contradiction of saying, ‘You must question everything …’ and then allow no questioning of yourself.
They were dissidents in the same sense that Judas Iscariot was a
dissident.
A succesful virus never kills its host. Just saying.
I think there are still “dissidents,” as the article discusses, and theologians within the Catholic Church that disagree with some or most of the church’s teachings, but I think such people have learned the life lessons of the 1960’s radicals: you are more effective in bringing about change if you work from within the system and not stand up against and bad mouth the system at every opportunity. Eventually the system will show you the door in that instance.
Good riddance indeed, Brian.
I am not sure I agree with the out come of the gallup polls…it seems from my own person discussions and interactions with many Roman Catholics, that women’s ordination is something that is not wanted and that abortion is looked at as a sin by more than 60% of Catholics (as the article states). Now, to clarify…if the article is speaking about European Catholics, then yes I could possibly believe it; but not even here in America (and definitely not in the global south or asia) would those numbers be that high. I call BS…clearly a scam that inflates numbers in order to promote an agenda.
I emphatically agree with the general thrust of the remarks above, but I’d like to add that there are indeed some outstanding lay theologians out there besides the two mentioned by Charlotte Allen (Robert George and Mary Ann Glendon), of whom my personal favorite is George Weigel. Just look at all the fine Catholic thinkers who write so articulately for [b]First Things.[/b] That marvelous conservative journal seems to have eclipsed the more liberal rags [b]Commonweal[/b] or [b]America.[/b]
Also, FWIW, I myself think it’s misleading and unfair to lump Sister Sandra Schneider with the likes of Mary Daly, Charles Curran, or Hans Kung, etc. She is no Sister Joan Chittister (IMHO). I would consider her a centrist NT scholar, perhaps a little left of center, but not at all in the same ultra-leftist league as the others alluded to in this article.
One final comment. There was a certain adolescent quality to much of the protest literature produced by dissidents like Kung or Schillebeex. They were almost like teenagers in their proud rebellion against the parental authority they were so eager to cast off. But you hope that teenagers will grow out of that rather immature (if partly necessary stage). Alas, some, like Mary Daly and Hans Kung, never did grow up.
Maybe the lack of any cohesive “dissident” wing within contemporary Catholic intellectual life (popular writers like Garry Wills notwithstanding) indicates that the post-Vatican II Church has matured somewhat.
David Handy+
Wojtyla and Ratzinger, both by virtue of their intellects and office, played and continue to play a significant role in wresting the spotlight from the dissidents. Wojtyla’s theology of the body has created a virtual cottage industry in books on sexuality and marriage; while Ratzinger’s thoughts on the liturgy has spurred a vigorous reform of the reform movement in Catholic circles.
It would be uncharitable of me to say that the dissidents can’t die off fast enough. It would be more accurate, I think, to instead state the dissident’s dissonant theology cannot disappear from the face of the earth at too rapid a pace.
If I may add to David Handy’s excellent post;
I think there was/is an “adult in the home” in the the Catholic Church. The RCC had/has “adults” in charge of the “home.” Pope John Paul dealt squarely with the “Liberation Theology” crowd, for example. As a Cardinal, Ratzinger made his mark as an orthodox theology with sound reasoning and theology. Today, as Pope Benedict, he is surely an “adult in the home.”
Compare that with the Anglican Communion in the past several decades and continuing.
Same approach to dissent and competing ideologie? Certainly NO.
Therein lies the difference. As long as there is an “adult in the home”, teenagers and disfunctionally children may come and go, but the family business always remains sound and firm, for the most part.
Fr. Kingsley Jon-Ubabuco
Arlington, TExas
…orthodox theologian….
….disfunctional children….
I think I need to take a vacation – Spiro
Phil Swain (#10) — beat me to it.
JP II and Benedict XVI both qualify as traditional minded theologians, who will have a profound impact on the future of the Church (both those under the direct jurisdiction of Rome, and Christianity as a whole).
One shouldn’t be overly optimistic here. Roman Catholic liturgy, particularly the music, is still a mess. If there aren’t a lot of liberal loudmouths (and I agree: good riddence to them), there are plenty of sloppy and ill-trained street-level lay theologians, not to mention revisionist clergy.
The trends seem to be good, though. In general, growth is taking place at the more confidently Roman Catholic colleges and the sex scandal has had the result of winnowing out many of the more theologically questionable liberals from the seminaries. One anecdote: a young conservative seminarian noted that when his uncle left for seminary in the 60’s he was feted constantly the summer prior to starting his studies. My aquaintance’s only acknowledgement of his vocation as he similarly prepared to set off was a stern warning from a father that he was a target if it came to light that he was molesting children. One has to be dedicated to enter the Roman priesthood these days.
A note of caution with respect to more confident Roman Catholicism: there seems a hefty dose of incomprehension, misinformation, and head-patting with respect to Protestantism, including, according to this branch of the Church, Anglicanism. I am working on a master’s, via distance learning (correspondence courses), at Franciscan of Steubenville and I am often amazed at the apparent disinterest in and antipathy toward other Christian bodies expressed by both professors and students in the recorded lectures that make up the bulk of my studies. This does not, to these eyes, bode well for the future of ecumenism. But admittedly, this is not a representative sample.
I agree with the article for the most part. But I feel there is a generation of theologians and scholars replacing the dissidents as they die off. And these are all the high caliber Christian scholars converting to Catholicism over the past few years that has even elicited a few groans from some Protestant publications. (And at each conversion I can hear the Kungites moaning and wailing.)
And so, you see, it would appear that Rome is, after all, the (or at least ‘a’) True Church. I am actually sorry to say that I guess I was wrong about the Anglican ‘experiment’ after all.
Our Lord called a broad diversity of folk to be His original disciples. Included among this group were many who would have been excluded from the theological conversations of the day. It is unlikely that they shared a common opinion about most topics; yet, they did share a common love for their Lord.
If we are to err, perhaps it is best to err in the direction of allowing more voices to take part in the conversation.
Daniel – No. 15 – I listen quite often to EWTN Network programs. There is there, on the Martinoni show, the Fr. Mitch Paqua show, and the Colin Donovan show not only a disdain for other denominations including we “Protestant Anglicans” , but also occsional things said that result from either dumb ignorance or intentional bearing of false witness. On the other had, I think you will find that a lot of the intellectual liberalism the leadership of which is thinner has permeated the American laity as well as that of Europe. A lot of people believe that our eucharists have the same validity and effect, for example, even if technically they should not believe that. Many believe in WO, or don’t “see anything wrong with it”. This includes many priests as well as laymen. Attitudes toward homosexuality reflect the general area in which people live, not whether or not they are Catholic(big cities, east & west coasts etc.)
Forgot to add – Portugal now the sixth country to endorse gay marriage on a nationwide basis, as has Spain and one other RC nation, I believe. Also it is now legal in Mexico City, the largest Catholic city in the world. I don’t think that the Church will remain unaffected by this.
I agree with the “adults in the house” notion, i.e., no matter what shenanigans the young’uns were up to, the church could rely on elders to keep the church’s thinking mainstream. Not so the Anglicans, at least in what I saw in seminary in the early 80’s in Canada. In fact, Daly and Kung and so on were heroes to Anglican students, some of whom were feminists, some of whom were Maxists, all of whom were liberal. As a young conservative, I was once described by fellow students as being to the right of Attilla the hun.
The state of play 30 yrs later is that many of the liberals who imbibed Daly and Kung, along with their homegrown radicals, have been in leadership positions for a while. And the Anglican Church of Canada is noted by the recent visit of the ABC’s representatives to the ACC’s house of bishops as lacking theological acumen. I am not surprised. Where were the elders of thh church when we were in formation? And who speaks clearly and consistently for the mainstream (and not just lip service) in the ACC today?
I have absolutely no problem with permitting same-sex unions in the civil realm. If two people are allowed to adopt non-related children, it seems absurd that they should not be able to make a legally permanent liaison. On the other hand, if we’re a theocracy, it’s ok for specific religious principles to guide legislation.
#22: There are perfectly good, non-theocratic reasons for opposing same-sex “marriage”. For instance, I should think it a matter of stating the obvious to note that it is a bad idea to extend benefits intended for families to groups of people that are not families.
#19: Good points all. Progressivism remains a threat to Christianity in all of its Western manifestations. It continues to be humbling to contrast the situations in this regard of the Roman and Anglican churches (I was raised to specify “Roman” Catholicism as my Episcopal priest father insisted that we are as catholic as they are – I’ve never thought of myself as a Protestant and still don’t). We Anglicans effectively have no magisterium to speak of – and yes, I know about the formularies, etc. The fact is, or so it seems to these eyes, that the informality of Anglican organization, the doctrinal capaciousness of the BCP (particularly in its 1979 manifestation), and the lack of defining documents and/or curial officials leaves us particularly vulnerable to the progressive malady.
There is little doubt that both Benedict and John Paul are first rate theologians and scholars. By all accounts, so is Rowan Williams. I cannot help wondering if the general low esteem in which he seems unfairly held (at least to judge by the blogosphere) vis-a-vis his Roman counterparts is not a result of inherent structural weaknesses in Anglicanism. And I cannot help hoping that the covenant will at least aid in supplying the lack.
One history professor (a non-Christian) I had for a course years ago used to say that the most important traditions for a society to keep and protect are the ones that at first glance don’t seem dangerous to tamper with, weaken, or destroy.
If he were still alive today I would love to ask him about the gradual homosexualization of Western Society and the whole business of “civil unions” and the slow destruction of the traditional primacy heterosexual unions have had for millenia.
Daniel – I agree with you. All Anglicans, whether they think of themselves as “Catholics” or “Protestants” are, in fact, members of a Catholic church. I hope that any new covenant will relect this.
Daniel @23,
You query why +++Rowan Williams is unfairly held in “general low esteem” in spite of his ability as a theologian and scholar. I suggest that his shortcomings as a leader have far outshadowed his abilities in other areas, unfairly or no.
Similarly, I suggest the reason that Pope John Paul II is held in much higher esteem than +++Williams (in a general sense) is because of his firm and decisive leadership – even though I would disagree with JPII on many points of theology, I can still recognise worthy leadership when I see it!
I am not getting into the whole issue of how theology gives a foundation for leadership etc, just that you can be the most wonderful scholar and yet a poor ecclesiastical leader, and I suggest +++Williams is the epitome of that conundrum.
Disclaimer: I’m a calvinist Sydney Anglican, but I trust not taking any cheap shots here at anyone, just calling it like it is!
#26 Michael A
Not just ecclesiastical leaders. While not making a comment on ABC Williams, this is an interesting observation on the academic and the political that brings to mind the 19th Century philosopher John Stuart Mill. An outstanding intellect, writer, and economist, yet when he entered parliament and started to get involved in practical issues, making speeches and engaging in debate he was embarrassingly hopeless.
He left his mark in the rationalism and utilitarianism which underlies our laws and institutions along with their Christian roots and through his writings on extending the franchise to women, but as a politician he was ineffective on his feet in the House of Commons.
Most political decisions do not come down to which philosophy will we follow, but to for example, shall we build a road or a railway, and in each case through whose land? We need both sorts of people, but the skill set is not always transferable. Rare is the person who can combine them.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Stuart_Mill
#26 Michael – Understood. Still, both of the last two popes have been consistently able to marshall a rather formidable army of scholars, canon lawyers, theologians, etc. to aid them both in their decisionmaking and its enforcement. +++Williams gets, well, what? ++Durham, my buds at The Living Church, the Anglican Communion Institute, and not much else – at least here in the states. Oh, and he has a website. And a staff. Look, I agree that Mr. Robinson and his “consecrators” should all have been subjected to the same treatment. Either invite them all or reject them all (I think the latter course unquestionably the most appropriate). They’re all guilty of the same thing. Yet I’m loath to condemn a man for being generous with his invitations to a once-a-decade event.
I think it an organizational weakness that the ABC is so inherently isolated. Is some of this, in +++Williams’ case, self-inflicted? Surely. As, by all accounts, an academician’s academician, the good archishop seems to have isolated himself in ways that I can’t imagine his predecessor would. Yet I can’t help feeling that, given the size and scope of the crisis, the intransigence of the Progressives, their utter alienation from the Christian intellectual tradition and apparent inability to conceive of things in recognizably Christian terms, no amount of collegiality would have helped. The structures of the Anglican Church are not sufficient to matter at hand. A covenant that at least moves in the direction of functioning as a magisterium can only help.
Daniel,
No question that the ABC’s position has been a very difficult one over the last 5-10 years, but I think your comment re self-inflcted problems is right on the money. He seems to want to avoid public confrontation at any cost, and it usually produces the result he was trying to avoid in the first place.
Allowing Lambeth 08 to be stage-managed to avoid discussion of the most pressing issues; and neglecting to call a Primates Council meeting in 2009 (when it was due and when he said in 2008 that he would call it) are typical: trying to avoid discussion of pressing issues. In the long run, it doesn’t work (truth be told, I don’t think it works in the long run in Rome either, but it certainly doesn’t work in Anglicanism).
In view of all this, I am not sure how to take the article above: if the “bright lights of dissent” that are dying out in the RC church are actually liberals who don’t accept the very fundamentals of the faith, then I can’t see how Rome is any worse off without them.
Nos 26-27-2829 – Good points all. There is often not an apparent match in intellectual ability or attainment and the ability to lead or to get the (right) things done. I think Williams places great stock in assuming good faith on the part of all, even though he surely knows that this assumption is not well placed. Do you all think that a covenant can really encompass fairly the Catholic and Protestant (esp. Calvinist) emphases in Anglicanism? As an aside, by the way, I shouldn’t be totally shocked if Williams went RC after he retires.
IC Daniel – Do your connections at Steubenville ever acknowledge or even purport to know of the great areas of agreement and near agreement reached in the ARCIC consultations on such subjects as authority, the mass, and the BVM? There is certainly no such mention of that by the know-nothings at ewtn. Thx.
At the practical level, hasn’t there always been dissent in all churches ever since their beginning? There will always be dissent, and a lot of it will be a force for change, whether we like it or not.
rob k
I think those are very astute observations, especially #32.
Re #30, after the Jerusalem Declaration, I do believe that a Covenant is *capable* of encompassing far more of the catholic and protestant streams than I would ever have thought possible – It was a real eye-opener to me that bishops of dioceses as diverse as Fort Worth, Sydney, Holy Cross and Uganda could assemble in such fellowship and common purpose.
But I don’t think a wishy-washy covenant will get anywhere. It would have to be strong on the fundamentals and a clear rejection of liberalism.
MichaelA (#33),
Since we recently sparred over at SF about biblical interpretation, it gives me pleasure to note that I quite agree with your #33. The GAFCON/FCA movement is showing much promise in reuniting different streams of Anglicanism that have been separated and bitterly divided for far too long. I put much more stock and hope in it than in the new Anglican Covenant.
And that’s because it seems to me that as an attempt as a consensus document that would hold orthodox and liberal Anglicans together, the Covenant unfortunately does tend to gloss over the key areas of implacable conflict and deliberately avoids what I think is most important: namely, “a clear rejection of liberalism,” as you put it. The Jerusalem Declaration is much better at that crucial, all-important point.
Not all liberal tendencies, mind you (such as a full acceptance of centrist biblical scholarship, wink), but Liberalism as an ism, as an ideology and alternative worldview to biblical, orthodox Christianity.
David Handy+
#31 rob k – The Steubenville boys are a bright, albeit unsurprisingly insular bunch. Remember, Scott Hahn teaches there, so they have some connection, albeit a rather triumphalist one, with Reformation Christianity. Anglicanism usually gets acknowledged as a somewhat different beastie, yet our eucharistic sacramental theology was termed, along with the Lutherans, as “consubstantiation”. I have gotten consistently high marks from citing ARCIC documents to note the consistency of Anglican sacramental thsology with that of at least post-Vatican II Rome. But no, Anglicanism doesn’t seem to get much attention either way.
Interestingly, with respect to the sorts of folks being lamented in this article, they the Steubenville profs to be rather refreshingly dismissive. Rather than take on Progressivism, they simply note its obvious lack of recognizable Christianity, tell their students why they consider the movement and its avatars’ claims contemptable, and move on to more serious theological disagreements with Luther, Calvin, et. al., who, not surprisingly, are not portrayed particularly fairly. I should also note that, since my background is technical (Nuclear Engineering) vice in the humanities, I have been taking mostly undergraduate “catch-up” courses, which are pitched to conservative Roman Catholic 20-year-olds, and so I suppose shouldn’t be expected to capture every nuance. My Anglo-Catholic perspective gets consistently fair treatment.
David Handy+,
Hi, and yes I agree. I do think there are some times when its better to grasp a nettle firmly – it may or may not solve the disagreement, but often real respect can be generated between the people involved.
In Sydney, the Anglican and Roman Catholic ordinaries (++Jensen and Cardinal Pell) are very strong on calvinist and RC doctrine respectively. Knowing that their theological differences will never be reconciled, they don’t discuss them but co-operate well on the things that they agree on, e.g. issues like castigating government corruption, public funding for abortion etc. Its an excellent joint witness to the secular humanists.
MichaelA (#36),
Thanks for a cordial response. Much appreciated. It’s always good to be clear and unambiguous on vital issues of core theology, even when it’s divisive. I’d heartily agree with you and both archbishops in Sydney on that crucial point.
In that regard I’m prone to allude favorably to Rev. 3 and the risen Lord’s rather stern words to the lukewarm church of Laodicea. [i]”Would that you were either hot or cold!”[/i] Either one would be better than the lukewarm, “moderate” water that I also find makes me want to vomit.
Personally, I have much more respect for the kind of hardcore, ultra-Protestant Anglicanism of you Sydney guys than my many colleagues and friends in TEC who pride themselves on being “non-dogmatic,” “open-minded,” and/or “broad church.”
How many bones are there in the human body? Some 206 or so, right? (It’s been a long, long time since college biology classes). Anyway, there are certainly a great many of them.
Well, as a proud alumnus of Wheaton College, I still have lots and lots of conservative evangelical bones in me. After all, as the saying goes, [i]”You can take the boy out of Wheaton, but you can’t take the Wheaton out of the boy.”[/i] I gladly paid the tuition for both of my kids to attend Wheaton, and I continue to donate what I can to what I still think is the finest Christian college in the world (whereas I haven’t given a dime to either Yale Divinity School or Union-PSCE, my other alma maters, in many years).
But I also have maybe a hundred Anglo-Catholic bones in my body, as an equally proud and loyal son of the Diocese of Albany, one of the most catholic (and conservative) dioceses in TEC.
I like to say that John Henry Newman is my greatest theological hero, followed closely however by John Wesley and Martin Luther (Sydney hero figures like John Calvin or Hugh Latimer would be far, far behind, but also regarded positively on the whole). I admire all three of those powerful reformers and theological giants, and I refuse to regard the admiration of such very different men as mutually exclusive. I guess I’m drawn to radical figures, in a very American (and not at all British) way.
But I freely admit that I probably don’t have a single, broad church or latitudinarian bone in my body. Not one. I simply have NO sympathy whatsoever for that whole anti-dogmatic wing of Anglicanism. The vaunted Via Media as a moderate, middle of the road approach leaves me cold and has no appeal for me whatsoever. Rather, as Charles Simeon of blessed memory once said about the intractable dispute between Calvinists and Arminians in his day, the truth lies in holding to BOTH extremes simultaneously, not in trying to shun extremism of any sort, as so many Anglicans are prone to suppose.
The difference between me and you, Michael, is that I earnestly try to be both extremely evangelical and extremely catholic at the same time. And I prize the 17th century Caroline Divines above the 16th century English Reformers, and I generally rely on the early church Fathers rather than the Protestant Reformers for my basic theological stance, instead of vice versa.
In all my frequent sparring with Matt Kennedy, carl, and other conservative Reformed types over at Stand Firm over matters of biblical interpretation, where I’ve constantly stood up for the valid and proper place of centrist biblical scholarship (of a firmly non-inerrantist variety) within orthodox Anglicanism, I’ve repeatedly tried to make the essential point that the real root difference between them and me is NOT so much that they are considerably more than conservative than I am on the liberal to conservative spectrum, but rather that they are so very much more Protestant than I am on the Protestant to Catholic spectrum in Anglicanism. They are deeply committed to the classic Protestant principle of [b]sola scriptura[/b], which I have explictly and emphatically repudiated. But we can and do make common cause on many vital aspects of the great Culture War of our time, fighting shoulder to shoulder for the essentials of orthodox Christianity, as best we all can understand them. I fully expect that you and I can do the same. Like the two archbishops in Sydney do in their own way, only we’d do it both as Anglicans.
But latitudinarian Anglicanism makes me want to puke. Sorry for that graphic and perhaps inappropriate image, Elves. But it’s true.
David Handy+
3-D Anglican: evangelical, catholic, and charismatic
No 35 – Daniel – Thanks for your feedback on your experiences with the people at Steubenville. It’s St. Francis U, isn’t it, run by the Franciscan Order? By the way, I have also read with interest your articles in Living Church. It would be rewarding to discuss issues with you. Thx. for getting back.