The very liberal John Paul II

National Review, August 11, 1997 by Richard Neuhaus

In the battle for the soul of American liberalism, a pope widely considered very conservative has taken a leading role.

Father Neuhaus is editor-in-chief of First Things, where an earlier version of this article appeared.

WHEN the encyclical Centesimus Annus (The Hundredth Year) appeared in 1991, some of us viewed it as a vindication of our understanding of Catholic social doctrine. Since then, there have been differences over the encyclical -- not so much between liberals (who mostly regarded it as a non-event) and conservatives, as between certain conservatives and those called neoconservatives, the former accusing the latter of hijacking this pontificate, and Centesimus Annus in particular, in order to gain magisterial legitimation for what is called democratic capitalism or liberal democracy. The neoconservatives are described as advancing "The Murray Project," referring to the effort of the late Father John Courtney Murray to square Catholic teaching with the American democratic experiment. The conservative critics claim that those of us who are in the Murray tradition are selling out authentic Catholic teaching to a desiccated and desiccating liberalism.

There is a real disagreement here. It is not, or at least not chiefly, a disagreement over Catholic theology. The difference, rather, is that our critics tend to put the worst possible construction upon the liberal tradition, and on the American cultural, legal, and political expression of that tradition. In doing so, I believe they hand an undeserved victory to those who interpret the liberal tradition in ways that we all deplore. With John Courtney Murray, I suggest that our task is to contend for an interpretation of liberalism that is compatible with the fullness of Catholic truth.

There is no doubt that the American experiment is constituted in the liberal tradition. Since we cannot go back to the eighteenth century and reconstitute it on different foundations, we must hope that the foundations on which it is constituted are not those described by Ronald Dworkin, John Rawls, Richard Rorty -- and some conservative Catholic thinkers.

Liberalism, needless to say, is a wondrously pliable term. There is the laissez-faire economic liberalism condemned by Leo XIII in Rerum Novarum in 1891, and also by John Paul II. In America that liberalism goes by the name of libertarianism, and, despite its many talented apologists, it has never acquired many adherents beyond what Russell Kirk called its "chirping sectaries."

The liberalism so fiercely criticized today is not limited to libertarianism. At the hands of the critics, the republican liberalism of virtue and the communitarian liberalism of Tocquevillian civil society come off little better than libertarianism. We can summarize some of the salient points in the indictment offered by the Christian critics of liberalism and modernity (the two terms usually being more or less interchangeable). Whether it be the enchanted G. K. Chesterton, the near-magisterial Alasdair MacIntyre, the caustic George Grant, the swashbuckling Stanley Hauerwas, the daring Oliver O'Donovan, or the melancholic David Schindler, the indictment tends to be much the same.

The first charge is that Christian thinkers have been too ready to trim the Christian message in order to accommodate the ruling cultural paradigm of liberalism. I strongly agree. That, however, is more accurately seen as an indictment of Christian thinkers, not of liberalism. If we are hesitant to assert the fullness of Christian truth in public, the fault is in ourselves. The strident voices of secularized liberalism may have intimidated us, but the fault is with our timidity.

Other points in the indictment of liberalism are variously expressed. It is charged that liberalism is purely procedural. Excluding the consideration of ends, liberalism claims to be only about means, but in fact disguises its ends in its means. In other words, the claimed "neutrality" of liberalism is anything but neutral. Moreover, it is charged, liberalism is premised upon the fiction of a "social contract" that is, in turn, premised exclusively upon self-interest. Liberalism denies, or at least requires agnosticism about, transcendent truth or divine law, recognizing no higher rule than the self-interested human will.

These liberal dogmas, it is further charged, are inextricably tied to the dynamics of capitalism. Liberal dogma and market dynamics are the mutually reinforcing foundation and end of a social order that is entirely and without remainder in the service of individualistic choices by the sovereign, autonomous, and unencumbered Self.

It is an impressive indictment, and it is supported by impressive evidence. But I would argue that the indictment is an indictment of the distortions of liberalism. If that is the case, we are contending for the soul of the liberal tradition.

A PERSONAL word might be in order. In the 1960s I was very much a man of the Left. Not the Left of countercultural drug tripping and generalized hedonism, but the Left exemplified by, for instance, the civil-rights movement led by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. In the latter half of the 1960s this began to change with the advent of the debate over what was then called "liberalized" abortion law. By 1967, I was writing about the "two liberalisms" -- one, like that earlier civil-rights movement, inclusive of the vulnerable and driven by a transcendent order of justice, the other exclusive and recognizing no law higher than individual willfulness. My argument was that, by embracing the cause of abortion, liberals were abandoning the first liberalism, which has sustained all that is hopeful in the American experiment.