The Frontiers of Catholicism: The Politics of Ideology in a Liberal World. - book reviews

Sociology of Religion, Summer, 1996 by Jean-Guy Vaillancourt

Gene Burns's book is an impressive piece of work which deserves to be read not only by scholars in the field of the sociology of Catholicism, but also by a wide range of people interested in the contemporary relevance of religion. The interest of this book lies not only in its rich contents but also in its beautiful structural form. Its eight chapters are dialectically related to each other. Chapter one, the introduction which presents the major concepts and the theoretical approach used throughout the book, and looks at the recent history of the papacy in an original way, is related to the final chapter 8, which concludes with theoretical considerations on ideological change and is resolutely turned towards the future. Chapters 2 and 3 focus on the papacy, before and after Vatican II Council. Chapters 4 and 5 are about the episcopate in the U.S.A., before and after Vatican II. In chapter 6, Burns turns his attention to the situation of Catholic nuns in the U.S.A., while chapter 7 discusses the Latin-American theology of liberation.

The first three chapters are centered around the relationships among social structures, power, and ideology at the level of the papacy. Burns starts off by proposing some novel and interesting hypotheses in order to be able to explain later the conflicts and the contradictions in the development of international Catholic organizations, particularly the Vatican, and in the ideology of various Catholic elites in North and South America. Burns centers his attention on Church and State relations, on questions of power and ideology, before going on to study the struggles between the pope and the bishops, and between them and theologians and sisters. There is an interesting interplay here between biography, social structure, and history. An historical and institutional approach is adopted in order to understand and explain ideological differences, as well as doctrinal and socio-political changes occurring in the Church, and to explain the conservatism of the hierarchy on questions of faith and morals, and its occasional liberalism on certain social and political issues. Burns's interpretations are largely Weberian and even partly neo-Marxist, tempered also in part by a hint of De Tocqueville's and Durkheim's ideas. He insists on the relative autonomy of the social and cultural spheres, on the interaction between power and ideology inside social structures, and on the independent role of religion in social and political change. According to Burns, the various actors develop ideological positions and adopt strategies of action that they are able to mobilize inside the Church and inside society. He sees ideology as a social construct that can constrain people, as a system of belief that exists through social interaction. He is interested in the way papal power and more generally hierarchical power are exercised in the Church and in society, how they struggle and cooperate with each other, and how less powerful elites like liberation theologians and U.S. nuns cope with those eminently influential figures of authority.

Burns's thesis is that the loss of their temporal power has led recent popes to minimize the importance of public life, and to insist on the primacy of private moral and religious values, on which they now exercise a stronger control. Since Pius IX, the popes have tightened the screws on questions of authority and dogma and loosened up on issues of social and politics import. Socioeconomic teachings (the famous social doctrine of the Church) have gradually emerged as non-obligatory, and as subordinate in importance to the sphere of individual and especially sexual morality. As the popes lost their secular political power, they compensated by increasing their power ad intra at the level of morality. Thus they succeeded in gradually patching up their difficult relations with an ascendant liberal world which had at first been hostile to the Church, by giving the laity more leeway on political and socioeconomic issues but less freedom on issues of faith and morals. In other words, the papacy during the past century or so, has developed a sophisticated strategy of internal intransigence on the one hand, and of careful compromise with liberalism and modernity on the other. It has re-evaluated some of its traditional teachings in order to adapt the Church to the modern world but it has done so without abandoning its historical heritage.

I found chapters 2 and 3 most fascinating because of my own enduring interest in the study of papal power. Burns reconstructs a history of the papacy from the reactionary interventions of Pius IX to the tensions that followed in the wake of Vatican II. He shows us how and why the Church has changed during that period. He indicates the differences between the various popes - the more conservative Pius popes and the others - at the religious and socio-political levels. Unfortunately, he does not seem to perceive that some of the popes whose reign lasted very long, like Pius IX, Pius XI, and Paul VI, sometimes changed their ideological orientation in the course of their long pontificates.