c. 1999 Religion News Service

(Eugene Kennedy, a longtime observer of the Roman Catholic Church, is professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago and author most recently of”My Brother Joseph,”published by St. Martin’s Press.)

UNDATED _ The secular and the religious imaginations overlap in characterizing conservative and liberal Roman Catholics.

They are often and unfortunately viewed as the Hatfields and the McCoys or other riven and feuding families. The clans cannot quite remember from what wound the bad blood first spurted but their members keep sniping at each other anyway.

Such a characterization serves everybody poorly, including the Catholic Church both groups claim to love.

What exactly do the designations liberal and conservative mean as applied to Catholics in America today?

The dictionary tells us that, among other things, liberals follow”policies that favor non-revolutionary progress and reform.”They support”the freedom of individuals to express themselves in a manner of their own choosing”and are”tolerant of the ideas or behavior of others.” That doesn’t really sound so bad.

Conservatives tend to”the preservation of the existing order and to regard proposals for change with distrust.”The label can also mean”moderate, prudent, cautious”and to conserve may mean”to protect from loss.” And that doesn’t seem bad either.

These are not necessarily mutually exclusive notions and many Catholic liberals and Catholic conservatives would view themselves as more subtle in their outlook, with each possessing some of the qualities attributed to the other.

Most American Catholics, like most Americans, are moderates, favoring a middle ground attitude that makes room for the future without disowning the achievements of the past.

Indeed, the fact that so-called liberal and conservative Catholics actually hold the same firm middle ground on certain questions dismays and puzzles America’s mainstream media.

Its editors are surprised, for example, that these Catholics stand together as pro-life. Liberal Catholics, with very few exceptions, oppose abortion as much as conservative Catholics do.

Like liberals, most conservative Catholics want peace and oppose bombing or starving the innocent in faraway places.

Despite the tags often pinned on them _”Hi, I’m Pat, your Left Winger for tonight”_ they mingle regularly and comfortably together, even as they do at the Eucharistic liturgy, without paying any attention to distinctions made about them.

The strange thing is that these ultra-liberals and ultra-conservatives are practically mirror images of each other. Their authoritarianism makes comrades of them all.

Let us think of a liberal Catholic, as in liberals in general, as one who understands, as in using upbringing to excuse murderers whose lives they would spare from the executioner’s hand.

A conservative Catholic, as in conservatives in general, is one who judges, as in declaring that murder is not essentially ambiguous and that capital punishment fits the crime.

The extremist liberal understands endlessly, so finely sub-distinguishing circumstances that the obligation to make a moral judgment unravels. The extremist conservative forfeits understanding in order to judge decisively black and white issues.

Their intolerance of views opposed to their own melds these people into one group of authoritarian controllers who cannot and will not compromise their views.

Liberals betray themselves when they exaggerate their understanding to such an extent that they refuse ever to make a judgment about people and events. Conservatives do likewise when they are so willing to judge that they exclude even the possibility of being understanding of these same people and events.

These incomplete liberals and unfinished conservatives _ each missing a key dimension _ currently dominate the reported conversations among and between Catholics. It is easy to identify them. Extremists make personal attacks and seem to take pleasure in demeaning those with whom they take issue.

Liberals are often caricatured by the extreme right as undisciplined anarchists who are”soft on abortion”because they support the other pro-life issues that the late Cardinal Joseph Bernardin identified as part of the”consistent ethic of life.” Bernardin is himself reviled unjustly as a disloyal prelate. Distinguished theologians like Richard McBrien and Richard McCormick are routinely savaged by some who have apparently never read their work.

Conservatives are sometimes bitterly lampooned, as in painting the German Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger as a modern day Bismarck or worse for his administration of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, once known, as every far left liberal automatically reminds us, as the scene of the Inquisition, the not so Holy Office.

The tragedy is that this hotbed of controversy is not the church experienced by most average Catholics who are trying to meet their obligations and lead good lives. Far more moderate in their views, they do not identify with these extremists whose fulminations now give such a colorful but false picture of American Catholicism.

DEA END KENNEDY