President Obama goes to Notre Dame University this Sunday to deliver the
commencement address and receive an honorary degree, the ninth U.S. president
to be so honored. The event has stirred up a hornet's nest of conservative
Catholics, with more than 40 bishops objecting, and hundreds of thousands of
Catholics signing petitions in protest. In the words of South Bend's Bishop
John M. D'Arcy, the complaint boils down to President Obama's
"long-stated unwillingness to hold human life as sacred." Notre
Dame, the bishop charged, has chosen "prestige over truth."
Not even most Catholics agree with such criticism. A recent Pew poll, for
instance, shows that 50% of Catholics support Notre Dame's decision to honor
Obama; little more than one-quarter oppose. It is, after all, possible to
acknowledge the subtle complexities of "life" questions -- When
actually does human life begin? How is stem cell research to be ethically
carried out? -- and even to suggest that they are more complex than most Catholic
bishops think, without thereby "refusing to hold human life as
sacred."
For many outside the ranks of conservative religious belief, this dispute
may seem arcane indeed. Since it's more than likely that the anti-Obama
complainers were once John McCain supporters, many observers see the Notre
Dame flap as little more than mischief by Republicans who still deplore the
Democratic victory in November. Given the ways in which the dispute can be
reduced to the merely parochial, why should Americans care?
Medievalism in Our Future?
In fact, the crucial question that underlies the flap at Notre Dame has
enormous importance for the unfolding twenty-first century: Will Roman
Catholicism, with its global reach, including more than a billion people
crossing every boundary of race, class, education, geography, and culture, be
swept into the rising tide of religious fundamentalism?
Those Catholics who regard a moderate progressive like Barack Obama as the
enemy -- despite the fact that his already unfolding social and health
programs, including support for impoverished women, will do more to reduce
the number of abortions in America than the glibly pro-life George W. Bush
ever did -- have so purged ethical thought of any capacity to draw meaningful
distinctions as to reduce religious faith to blind irrationality. They have
so embraced a spirit of sectarian intolerance as to undercut the Church's
traditional catholicity, adding fuel to the spreading fire of religious
contempt for those who depart from rigidly defined orthodoxies. They are
resurrecting the lost cause of religion's war against modernity -- a war of
words that folds neatly into the new century's war of weapons.
If
the Catholic reactionaries succeed in dominating their church, a heretofore
unfundamentalist tradition, what would follow? The triumph of a strain of
contemporary Roman Catholicism that rejects pluralism, feminism, clerical
reform, religious self-criticism, historically-minded theology, and the
scientific method as applied to sacred texts would only exacerbate alarming
trends in world Christianity as a whole, and at the worst of times. This may
especially be so in the nations of the southern hemisphere where Catholicism
sees its future. It's there that proselytizing evangelical belief, Protestant
and Catholic both, is spreading rapidly. Between 1985 and 2001, for example,
Catholic membership increased in Africa by 87%, in Europe by 1%.
In their shared determination to restore the medieval European Catholicism
into which they were born, Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI became
inadvertent avatars of the new Catholic fundamentalism, a fact reflected in
the character of the bishops they appointed to run the Church, so many of
whom now find President Obama to be a threat to virtue. The great question
now is whether this defensive, pre-Enlightenment view of the faith will
maintain a permanent grip on the Catholic imagination. John Paul II and
Benedict XVI may be self-described apostles of peace, yet if this narrow
aspect of their legacy takes hold, they will have helped to undermine global
peace, not through political intention, but deeply felt religious conviction.
Something to Cheer
No one can today doubt that the phenomenon of "fundamentalism"
is having an extraordinary impact on our world. But what precisely is it?
Some fundamentalists pursue openly political agendas in, for instance,
Northern Ireland, Israel, and Iran. Some like Latin American Pentecostals are
apolitical. In war zones like Sudan, Afghanistan, Palestine, and Sri Lanka,
fundamentalism is energizing conflict. Most notably, after the Bush
administration's invasion of Iraq in 2003, the insurgent groups there jelled
around fundamentalist religion, and their co-extremists are now carrying the
fight, terrifyingly, in the direction of the nuclear arsenal of Pakistan.
Catholic fundamentalists in the U.S. are far from being terrorists, but an
exclusionary, intolerant, militant true belief is on display this week in their
rallying to denounce President Obama in Indiana.
Obviously, these manifestations are so varied as to resist being defined
by one word in the singular, which is why scholars of religion prefer to
speak of "fundamentalisms." But they all do have something in
common, and it is dangerous. The impulse toward fundamentalism may
begin with fine intentions: the wish to affirm basic values and sources of
meaning which seem threatened. Rejecting any secular claims to replace the
sacred as the chief source of meaning, all fundamentalisms are skeptical of
Enlightenment values, even as the Enlightenment project has developed its own
mechanisms of self-criticism. But the discontents of modernity are only the
beginning of the problem.
Now "old time religion" of whatever stripe faces a plethora of
threats: new technologies, a shaken world economy, rampant individualism,
diversity, pluralism, mobility -- all that makes for twenty-first century
life. The shock of the unprecedented can involve not only difficulty, but
disaster. And fundamentalisms will especially thrive wherever there is
violent conflict, and wherever there is stark poverty. This is so simply
because these religiously absolute movements promise meaning where there is
no meaning. For all these reasons, fundamentalisms are everywhere.
In contemporary Roman Catholicism, whose deep traditions include the very
intellectual innovations that gave rise to modernity -- Copernicus, after
all, was a priest -- Catholic fundamentalists are more likely to be called
"traditionalists." They are galvanized now around the moral
complexities of "life," at a time when the very meaning of human
reproduction is being upended by technical innovation, and once-unthinkable
medical and genetic breakthroughs are transforming the meaning of death as
well.
Like other fundamentalists, they are attuned to the dark consequences of
the Enlightenment assumptions implied in such developments, from the
Pandora's Box opened by science unconnected to morality to the grotesque
inequities that follow from industrialization and, more recently, globalization.
Where others celebrate new information technologies, traditionalists, even
while using those technologies, warn of the coarsening of culture, the
destruction of privacy, and, especially, threats to the family. In nothing
more than its emphasis on a rigorous and comprehensive sexual ethic --
anti-feminist, radically pro-life, contemptuous of homosexuality -- does this
brand of Catholicism echo a broader fundamentalism.
In the immediate aftermath of the liberalizing Second Vatican Council
(1962-1965), Catholic traditionalists, with their attachment to the Latin
Mass, fiddle-back vestments, clerical supremacy, and the entire culture of
the Counter-Reformation, were rebels. That was why the anti-Council sect, the
Lefebrites, including the notorious Holocaust denier Bishop Richard
Williamson, was excommunicated in 1988.
Today, as indicated by Pope Benedict's lifting of that excommunication,
the Vatican is the sponsor of such anti-liberal rebels. Instead of reading
the Bible uncritically, as Protestant fundamentalists do, Catholic
traditionalists read Papal statements that way. To affirm the eternal
validity of prior Papal statements, as in the case of the on-going Papal
condemnation of "artificial birth control," traditionalists
willingly sacrifice common sense and honesty.
If the Catholic Church is as opposed to abortion as it claims, why has it
not embraced the single most effective means of reducing abortion rates,
which is birth control? The answer, alas, is evident: the overriding issue
for Catholic fundamentalists is not sexual morality, or even
"life," but papal authority. As Protestant fundamentalists
effectively make an idol of biblical texts, Catholic fundamentalists, in
obedience to the Vatican, make an idol of the papacy.
When it comes to Notre Dame, ironically, American Catholic
fundamentalists, including the bishops leading the charge against Obama's
appearance, are not going to be backed up by the Vatican. In Rome, a
tradition of realpolitik tempers the fundamentalist urge of the
current establishment. The highest Church authorities have long been
accustomed to putting issues of theological purity second to the exigencies
of state power.
So, no insults of the American president will be coming from the Vatican
this weekend, and its silence on the Notre Dame controversy will speak more
clearly than any official statement on the subject might. Indeed, the long
history of Roman Catholicism, where Puritanism has steadily lost out to
robust earthiness, and doctrinal rigidity has regularly bent before the
pressures of lived experience, is itself reason to think that Notre Dame
University has found the truest Catholic response to the world's present
moment: its brave decision to honor President Barack Obama.
James Carroll is a scholar-in-residence at Suffolk University,
columnist for the Boston Globe, and author of the bestselling Constantine's
Sword. His most recent book is Practicing
Catholic, from which this essay draws.
