November 1989 Print

 

Hold firm that our faith is identical with that of the ancients. Deny this and you dissolve the unity of the church. —Saint Thomas Aquinas

Latin American "theologians of liberation theology supplied the structural framework for the beginnings of black theology and feminist theology in the United States." So said Archbishop Rembert Weakland, OSB, of Milwaukee at a conference held at Notre Dame University in March.

One might be excused for judging the Archbishop to be rather rude to thus accuse his audience, which included a number of our brethren from Central and South America. They had assembled to assess the impact of two Latin American bishops' conferences, one at Medellin, Colombia, in 1968, and one at Puebla, Mexico, in 1979.

But Weakland was not being rude. He was praising liberation theology, which he said these two bishops' conferences had sanctioned, by connecting it with the glories of feminist theology and black theology. For those who are not sure just what liberation theology, black theology, and feminist theology are, Weakland explained that they are the theologies whose distinctive features are the concepts of suppression, captivity, marginalization, and powerlessness.

And these theologies just about exclude, he might have added, traditional concepts like grace, sanctification, sin (but not 'structures of sin'), redemption, penitence, sacrament, and the like. If these theologies' lingo sounds suspiciously like a Marxist description of class warfare, it is no accident.

Archbishop Weakland's flattery went further. Liberation theology's tactical device of communidades de base is the model for an important part of Renew in the U.S.—"the perfect answer in the middle-class, large suburban parishes for a needed buffer zone between family life and the impersonalization of the large conglomerate parish." (Incidentally, there are dioceses in the U.S. where parishes are shut down for being less than large conglomerates.)

Actually, Archbishop Weakland's address to the Notre Dame conference is a very sloppy piece of work with little intellectual merit. It is vague where it needs to be precise, it employs slogans in place of exact formulations, it contradicts itself over and over on major points, its modest little disclaimers are in fact evasions of responsibility for what the Archbishop says, and it leaps with abandon from one sweeping generalization to another.

Then why bother with it?

Because it is soaked with the errors that plague the Church in the U.S., and it apparently represents, due to the Archbishop's eminent position in the hierarchy, the firmly fixed official policies of the Church in our country—or at least some basic attitudes behind those policies. And, saddest of all, such wacky policies seem to be substantially in accord with the policies which prevail in Rome.

There is hardly space to examine the Archbishop's talk in great detail, but at least three major assumptions are found to lie behind many of his remarks. These premises or principles stand in stark contrast to Catholic belief about dogma, about faith, and about tradition.

 

Experience instead of Dogma

Archbishop Weakland's attitude toward dogma is close to that of a nineteenth century positivist's. That is, he prefers to deal with material, concrete, discrete facts, and he distrusts attempts to find general or abstract statements that relate such facts together or to other realities. He praises liberation theology for drawing on "lived experience" instead of "deductive logical applications of preconceived theories." He grudgingly admits that we must acknowledge "our creedal tradition," but he is "leery of formulations... into abstract truths."

This belittling attitude toward the Church's creeds and doctrines and dogmas is shown also in Weakland's attitude toward Sacred Scripture. We study Scriptural events—for example, the cross and resurrection—in their historical context, he says, then we make "an analysis of the paschal mystery lived out here and now by God's faithful." This preoccupation with Scriptural events as they happened then-and-there, and the here-and-now analysis of the faithful, opens a chasm between our lives and the life of Our Lord, a chasm 2,000 years wide. And it leaves out one important thing: Jesus Christ Himself, who is the same yesterday, today, and forever.

 

Theology instead of Faith

This aversion to what is permanent, fixed, and unchanging is also apparent in Weakland's attitude toward faith. Faith, it seems, is not an unreserved assent to what God has revealed to be true; it is more like a complex array of attitudes towards what one considers to be important. Weakland's condescending reference to the Church's "creedal tradition" is one sign of this new understanding of faith, which is the first of the theological virtues and the indispensable foundation for hope and charity. Another sign is the cavalier way in which he throws together patchworks of Church traditions, Scriptural allusions, sociopolitical concepts like solidarity and 'preferential option for the poor,' and racial and national and gender dispositions. When academic people juggle these various elements, you have a theology, like liberation theology or feminist theology. Or rather, you have "theological evolution"—for we don't want to be boxed into a permanent set of principles such as the word theology implies, do we?

Incidentally, for one who puts himself forward as knowledgeable about the evolution of ideas, he advances some strange notions about the eighteenth century enlightenment and nineteenth century reactions against it. But that's another story.

 

Traditions instead of Tradition

In addition to this divorce of faith from dogma, and this identification of faith with evolving theologies, is another desecration of things Catholic, sacred tradition.

Have you noticed that progressive Catholics avoid talking about 'tradition,' or 'the tradition,' or 'sacred tradition'? They prefer to speak of 'a tradition' or of 'traditions.' And they like to throw traditionalists off balance by misusing the word, for example, by speaking of the Catholic tradition of priests wearing the Roman collar (where 'custom' would be a better term), or the traditional belief in Jesus' compassion (instead of the biblical belief).

Here is a place where Archbishop Weakland gives the word still another twist: The Second Vatican Council's "Declaration on Religious Freedom... means that the Catholic tradition is one of many and must be willing to enter the public square without preferential place in order to persuade others of the rightness of its position." Tradition in this case obviously means church, that is, 'the one, true Church, outside of which there is no salvation.' So that what the Archbishop is saying is that the one true Church is one of many one true churches. Well, don't expect logic where truth is so far distant.

There are those who insist that the Vatican II idea of religious liberty can be construed in a Catholic sense, if interpreted according to tradition, but as a matter of fact the usual understanding is exactly this protestant, non-denominational, free-market-place-of-ideas, non-sectarian, freedom-of-choice, personal-individual-rights understanding that Weakland proposes here. It is about as easy to make religious freedom Catholic as it is to put a camel through the eye of a needle.

Incidentally, it is not Weakland's habit to interpret new ideas like liberation theology in the light of tradition but rather to re-interpret tradition in the light of the hottest new ideas. Thus he looked at Church creeds in the light of liberation theology's experiential proclivities, and found creeds wanting.

In this talk, Archbishop Weakland does not use 'living tradition,' although it is a buzz word among his faction. And since we are in the neighborhood where sacred tradition is often mugged, let's pause and toss a couple of bricks through the windows of this 'living tradition.' Now this term can only mean either: 1) a thing from the past which is handed on alive to the present generation (in which case it is just plain tradition, and 'living' is some kind of smokescreen), or 2) a thing from the past which has been altered into something new, a novelty made out of history's refuse—as you might mount a stereo inside an old-fashioned ice box. But a novelty is the opposite of a tradition.

Furthermore, 'living' traditions imply that there are dead traditions. But a dead tradition is a non-entity: a thing handed down (tradere, to hand down) which has not been handed down. Such a thing is not a tradition at all, dead or alive, but history. 'Living tradition' is always used to insinuate that somebody (a traditionalist) is trying to live dead traditions, or to imply that a belief or practice of former believers (the ancients that St. Thomas spoke of) is not really Catholic unless it has been renewed or modernized by the spirit of Vatican II.

Alas, I have used up my space, and a dozen juicy targets still remain in the Archbishop's talk.

I hope at least to have shown some of the ways in which the faith of our fathers is being gutted by our shepherds. Nor do they attack just a few articles of the faith but the very possibility of faith, as St. Pius X frequently observed about modernists. For how can the Catholic faith be in a person who has an aversion to dogma, who believes faith to be evolving theological opinions, and who despises history and tradition?

—Malcolm Brennan