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Does the Church want a liberal crowd-pleaser, or a conservative rock?
In a hopeful but somewhat delusional column, Peggy Noonan suggests that the mass outpouring of grief and admiration for John Paul II was inspired by his being a man of stern principle standing against the tide of the modern relativistic world. She argues that the well-publicized demands of grass-roots Catholics for a more liberalized Church are contradicted by those same Catholics’ effusion of love for a strictly conservative Pope, a “hero of truth.” The latter is what they really want in their next Pope, she says, and he doesn’t have to be a rock star like JPII to carry out the task, for the Holy Spirit will lead him. The main thing is that he stand for the truth. The problem with all this, of course, is that Noonan has defined the late Pope as a conservative on the basis of his conservative stand against three or four hot-button sex and death issues: abortion, ordination of women, homosexuality, and so on, positions that are properly not even considered “conservative,” but simply Catholic. At the same time, she ignores the late Pope’s liberalism, namely his ecumenical opening to non-Christian and Moslems and his relativization of Christian truth; his elevation of the “rights of the human person” over traditional and cultural goods; his promiscuous creation of saints (more than all his predecessors combined, as hard as that is to believe); his tolerance of the rampant leftist and heretical activities in the American Church; his view of mankind as a bunch of victims to be shielded from oppression; and his making the preservation of physical life rather than the attainment of eternal life the central moral aim of Christianity, literally a new Gospel of his own creation, the “Gospel of Life.” All these things marked John Paul II as a modern, liberal man, not a stern exponent of traditional Christianity. And therefore, as Catholic traditionalist Christopher Ferrara suggests, what people adored in the Pope was not his resistance to the modern world, but his embrace of it. Noonan, like most conservatives and liberals today, is deluded in considering John Paul a conservative, even as she and they are deluded in considering President Bush a conservative. The delusion is a symptom of the one-drop rule of conservatism, which in turn is a result of the ascendancy of the left: in a world dominated by leftism, in a world that demands adherence to leftism in every particular, a man with even a single drop of conservatism will seem like a conservative, even a reactionary. Thus what conservatives and liberals see as a rise of conservatism is in fact a last pitiful hold-out against an overwhelming liberal tide.
But, now that I’ve said all that, is it possible that Noonan is onto something? Is it possible that what drew millions of people to the Pope was not his crowd-pleasing ways and his other liberal traits, but his firm conservative stand on a handful of issues, notwithstanding his general liberalism? And therefore what people want, even if they don’t realize it, is a Pope who would be much more thoroughly conservative than this late Pope whom they revere? Could it be therefore that what Catholics (and non-Catholics) really long for is not John Paul III, but Pius XIII? Email entry |