NY Times Op-Ed: Can Conservative And Liberal Catholics Coexist?

New York Times Op-Ed:  Can Conservative and Liberal Catholics Coexist?, by Ross Douthat:

Before Pope Francis was elected, conservative Catholics had fallen into a habit of dismissing the more liberal form of Catholicism as an old and faded thing, a vision of the future that belonged to the church’s past, a relic of the 1970s that had little purchase among younger Catholics seriously practicing their faith.

The last 10 years have been hard on this kind of confidence. A college of supposedly conservative cardinals elected a surprisingly liberal pope. Moral and theological debates supposedly settled by Pope John Paul II were conspicuously reopened. The Latin Mass, rehabilitated under Pope Benedict XVI, was partially suppressed. Progressive theologians found themselves back in favor; formerly conservative bishops suddenly evolved. It seemed as though liberal Catholicism had been merely hibernating, awaiting a new pope, a new spring.

But lately, in both Rome and the United States, I’ve had conversations with well-informed Catholics in which the old conservative confidence has made a comeback. The idea of the Francis era as a “last gasp” for the Catholicism of the boomer era has figured prominently. The assumption that progressive Catholicism has no real long-term viability has returned. The fear that the next pope might be another liberalizer, younger and more ambitious than Francis, has largely receded.

This new confidence reflects a specific reading of the waning years (or what are probably the waning years) of the Francis pontificate. ... [T]here’s a sense that the current pope’s liberalizing program has reached its limits: The Vatican’s halfway-opening to blessings for same-sex couples was essentially rejected by many of the church’s bishops, and the subsequent papal document reiterating church teaching on gender identity felt like an acknowledgment that the space for innovation had (for now) run out.

The basic reality is that as long as the ambient culture is broadly liberal, any Catholics trying to live in the world as well as in the church will find themselves cross-pressured, and there will be enduring incentives to find a middle ground between traditional teachings and contemporary mores.

Some of these incentives will be institutional — if you run a Catholic university or hospital, a somewhat liberal Catholicism will seem like a natural harbor for as long as medicine and academia are mostly secular and liberal. Some will be personal — a matter of trying to accommodate yourself to friends and family members whose personal lives depart significantly from Catholic teaching. And some will be sincerely religious, especially to the extent that a conservative Catholicism finds itself in alliances with un-Catholic forces on the political right, and more left-leaning forms of faith seem to manifest Catholic virtues neglected on the right.

Crucially, the more successful and influential any neo-traditionalism, the more Catholics who will find themselves in these kind of cross-pressured conditions. A conservative Catholicism that retreated into an Amish-like separation might see its liberal wing extinguished, but only because it would have become too marginal to really matter. Actual conservative vibrancy, actual cultural influence, makes liberalizing impulses inevitable, by creating strong incentives to remain with the institution even if you take a posture of critique. ...

[T]he entanglements between American Catholicism and American culture writ large all but guarantee that conservative and liberal forms of Catholic faith will persist together — undoubtedly in tension and conflict, but ideally in charity as well.

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Other New York Times op-eds by Ross Douthat:

• What Will American Religion Look Like On Easter 2050? (Mar. 31, 2024)
• There's No Better Time To Be A Catholic Than Christmas 2023 (Dec. 25, 2023)
• Conservative Church Critics Of Pope Francis Get Fired, While Progressive Critics Get Sternly Worded Letters (Dec. 3, 2023)
• Where Should Agnostics Go On Sundays? (Sept. 2, 2023)
• Does God Control History? (Aug. 20, 2023)
• What Has Trump Cost American Christianity? (May 28, 2023)
• Pope Francis’ Decade Of Division (Mar. 19, 2023)
• The Rationality And Danger Of Spiritual Experimentation (Feb. 5, 2023)
• The Americanization Of Religion (Jan. 29, 2023)
• In The Modern Era, The Idea Of God Is More Plausible Than Ever (Aug. 22, 2021)
• The Overstated Collapse Of American Christianity (Nov. 9, 2019)