Calling error `conservative' is an insult to conservatives - examples of false conservatism in the Catholic Church - Brief Article - Column

National Catholic Reporter, July 2, 1999 by Richard P. McBRIEN

Paul Wilkes, author of several books about Catholicism and such key Catholic personalities as Thomas Merton and Archbishop Rembert Weakland, spent the recent spring semester at the University of Notre Dame as the Visiting Welch Professor in American Studies. His reflections appeared in the May 1 issue of America magazine, "Catholic Spoken Here: A Report from the Academic Front."

Notre Dame's Office of Public Relations and Information could not have asked for a more loving portrait of the place not a more forceful testimony to its thoroughly Catholic character. The article ought to be used as a "stocking-stuffer" in replies to every letter of complaint about the alleged erosion of Notre Dame's Catholicity.

This week's column is not about Paul Wilkes, however. It concerns instead a friendly suggestion he made following a late April lunch. He asked that I not use the word conservative in my next four columns. Since I had just written more than half a dozen in anticipation of a projected absence from the university, I wondered if I had, in fact, already used the dreaded "c" word in any of those pieces.

I had, but in a very meager fashion. There was a reference in a column on an internal dispute between moderates and conservatives in the North American Sikh community (the term had been used in the press reports), and there was one other reference, repeated in a second column, to an organization known as Legatus headed by the former pizza king Thomas Monaghan.

I was intrigued by Wilkes' suggestion because it was not the first time I had received it. Dominican Fr. Thomas O'Meara, a friend and colleague, had also urged me to stop using the word. It is too often misapplied, he said, to people, viewpoints and organizations whose agenda is not the conserving of what is truly traditional and essential in Catholicism -- a 2,000-year-old religious tradition that is itself inevitably conservative.

He pointed out that those who are most frequently referred to as conservative are, for the most part, fundamentalists or restorationists. (O'Meara is the author of Fundamentalism: A Catholic Perspective, published by Paulist Press in 1990.) They are Catholics who have not had the advantage of any advanced training in the study of sacred scripture or Catholic doctrine. Their knowledge of the history of the church is spotty at best. For them, the process of "conserving" is actually one of "restoring" something from a very thin slice of Catholic history, usually from the baroque period of the 17th and 18th centuries, or something out of the devotional life of 19th and early-20th-century Catholicism.

For example, many Catholics who claim to prefer the Tridentine Latin Mass of Pius V to the so-called "new Mass" of Paul VI and Vatican II do not realize that the latter is actually more traditional than the former. The reforms approved by the Second Vatican Council are more deeply rooted in the worship of the early church than are the reforms mandated by the Council of Trent and Pius V.

The Tridentine Mass owed less to the church of the first four centuries than to late medieval eucharistic theology and devotional practices. By the time the Tridentine Mass was set in place, the Eucharist was seen more as an unbloody sacrifice than as an act of thanksgiving (the literal meaning of the word Eucharist) and a communal meal.

Holy Communion became for many Catholics primarily an object of adoration (via Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament) and an occasion for processions (on the feast of Corpus Christi). Actual reception of Communion declined precipitously as more and more lay people saw themselves as unworthy to consume the Lord's body into their own.

In formally approving what was for the 16th century a "new Mass," Pius V imposed the Roman usage on the whole church and essentially cast aside the richly diverse, local liturgical heritages that had been flourishing for centuries throughout the rest of the church, in both East and West.

To be sure, there are other examples of false conservatism beyond the liturgy.

Some think it "conservative" to hold that the pope is, in effect, an absolute monarch over the whole church, that he alone is a vicar of Christ, that everything he says or writes pertaining to faith and morals must be received as if it were infallible, that he has always had the exclusive authority to appoint bishops and that such powers as these belong to the papacy by divine right, that is, because Christ so willed it.

These are not "conservative" views; they are doctrinally and historically erroneous views. Is it not an injustice to conservatism to call error "conservative"?

Fr. Richard McBrien teaches theology at Notre Dame University.