COMMENTARY: Can Catholicism change?

c. 1998 Religion News Service (Andrew M. Greeley is a Roman Catholic priest, best-selling novelist and a sociologist at the University of Chicago National Opinion Research Center. Check out his home page at http://www.agreeley.com or contact him via e-mail at agreel(at)aol.com.) UNDATED _ Everyone knows the Roman Catholic Church can’t change. Right? It doesn’t change, […]

c. 1998 Religion News Service

(Andrew M. Greeley is a Roman Catholic priest, best-selling novelist and a sociologist at the University of Chicago National Opinion Research Center. Check out his home page at http://www.agreeley.com or contact him via e-mail at agreel(at)aol.com.)

UNDATED _ Everyone knows the Roman Catholic Church can’t change. Right? It doesn’t change, it can’t change, it won’t change. Right?


But consider the question of religious liberty.

In 1864 Pius IX wrote in his encyclical”Quanta Cura”(With Great Care) that freedom of religion was”madness.”One hundred and one years later, to the day, the Second Vatican Council voted, in”Dignitatis Humanae,”in favor of freedom of religion.

The vote of the council fathers was 2,308 to 70. In a century the church did a 180-degree turn on the issue of freedom of religion.

The change, however, was more abrupt than that, as John Noonan shows in his brilliant new book,”The Lustre of Our Country.” In the decade before the council, the”official”teaching in this country was that religious freedom was tolerable as long as Catholics were a minority, but once they became a majority they would have to impose their religion on others. The great Jesuit theologian John Courtney Murray, who had argued that the dignity of the human person demands the right of religious freedom, was silenced by church authorities. He was, as he put it,”disinvited”from the first session of the council.

At the final Mass of the council he was one of the concelebrants with Pope Paul VI. In the space of less than a decade the church had reversed itself on what everyone thought was a key teaching.

Those Catholics _ very much in power these days _ seeking to reject the Second Vatican Council conveniently ignore the fact that its documents were voted by huge majorities and proclaimed by the pope. To resist its decisions is patently to resist the Holy Spirit.

Pius IX’s position was understandable.

In his day religious freedom was proposed in a context which meant the murder of priests, bishops, and nuns; the closing of monasteries and convents; the expropriation of Church lands; and state control of the church. As Owen Chadwick says in his history of the papacy of the 19th century, it is understandable that a pope stops being a”liberal”when”liberalism”means the murder of his prime minister and the shooting of a papal secretary who was standing next to the pope.

Noonan’s thesis is that religious freedom, as Americans understand it, became common in Europe only in the 20th century. By the time of the Second Vatican Council, Europe finally understood that religious freedom did not mean discrimination against Catholics, though even today a Catholic can’t be sovereign of England – assuming a Catholic would want the job.


I have often thought”Dignitatis Humanae”may be the most important document to have come out of the Council _ and the one which most destabilized the so-called”confident”church of the 1950s.

While in principle it applied only to the freedom of choice among religions, the logic of its arguments could easily be seen to extend to freedom of religious choice within Catholicism _ freedom to choose the way one would be a Catholic.

Whether it was”Dignitatis Humanae”or the whole revolutionary event of the Second Vatican Council that caused the present situation, it is nonetheless clear that at least nine out of 10 American Catholics believe that they have such freedom. There is no sign they intend to give it up, no matter how often they are told they must abandon such freedom if they are to be full-fledged members of the Catholic community.

How long can this situation last, I am often asked.

It has already lasted for almost 30 years. There are no signs of a change. The laity and the clergy are alienated from the higher levels of the church on matters of sex and gender _ though not on key doctrinal issues such as the Incarnation, the Resurrection, life after death, the real presence of Jesus in the Eucharist, or angels and saints.

Yet there has been no increase in defections. Nor is there the slightest hint of schism. Proposals to reduce the church to a”saving remnant,”such as those put forward by Jesuit theologian Avery Dulles, are no more likely to change the situation than was the publication of the new catechism, which some bishops foolishly expected to turn the laity around.

In this country, it is now apparent, even devout and active Catholics insist on being Catholic on their own terms.


Freedom is a dangerous thing. Those who have it, or think they have it, will not easily give it up.

DEA END GREELEY

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