Among contemporary writers it was Thomas Cahill who pioneered the coffee table (as opposed to sectarian, scholarly, or fire-breathing) defense of Catholicism by arguing in 1996 that newly Catholic monks of medieval Ireland saved life as we know it by preserving ancient manuscripts from the barbarians then pillaging most of Europe. By that reading, modern notions of human dignity and limited government owe as much to Saint Patrick (who brought Christianity to the Irish) as to the Roman Republic.
Whether you agree with Cahill or get behind the wheel of the more common thesis that the Catholic Church is and has been a spark plug for the engine of western civilization, you don't have to buy the car to conclude that people who criticize the church should do so charitably, if for no other reason than because much of what we think about truth and freedom has a conspicuously Catholic parentage. Benedictine physicist and historian Stanley L. Jaki has been making this point for years, and accessible treatments of the same theme are now in print from Philip J. Sampson, Dave Shiflett, and Vince Carroll. Think through the implications of what any of these authors say and it follows that Catholic priests who complain frequently about the shortcomings of their own church ought to be excused from public ministry. What they call "tough love" looks a lot more like sabotage.
With that in mind, no priest in America today deserves involuntary retirement more than Father Richard P. McBrien, the former chairman of the theology department at the University of Notre Dame. McBrien is a prolific writer with more than twenty books to his credit. Religion reporters at major newspapers call him whenever they want a churlish Catholic reaction to papal pronouncements, and his self-syndicated column appears wherever bishops who pride themselves on "balanced" presentation of church teaching farm the editorial jobs on diocesan newspapers out to like-minded priests. The problem is that within the pit crew of spiritual mechanics who minister to faithful Catholics on the road to eternal life, McBrien is the mechanic most likely to confuse motor oil with radiator coolant.
When Pope John Paul II decided to publish an official catechism for the first time since the Council of Trent in 1566 (!), McBrien joined a chorus of naysayers in the religious education establishment to tell the Philadelphia Inquirer that the project should be abandoned. Brisk sales of the new catechism worldwide have since vindicated the pope's instinct.
As general editor for a one-volume encyclopedia of Catholicism published by Harper Collins in 1995, McBrien resorted almost literally to smoke and mirrors: By blowing smoke on what John Henry Newman and others meant by development of doctrine he implied that the past is inferior to the present, and by exaggerating the plurality of opinion within authentically Catholic theology he advanced the cause of relativism in the same way that funhouse mirrors distort torso lengths. The encyclopedia became such an exercise in wish-fulfillment that even American bishops took public notice of its shortcomings and were forced to conclude that McBrien's work posed "serious difficulties" if used as intended by non-theologians. The rebuke was significant, coming as it did from people whom McBrien usually supports in their periodic quarrels with the Vatican.
As you might expect from someone with an underdeveloped sense of truth in labeling, McBrien thinks Catholic colleges and universities ought not to emphasize their religious affiliation. In 1986, a reporter for the New York Times recalled him declaring, "It is clear that the Vatican does not know what a theologian is and what a university is." Ten years later when McBrien wrote an essay for the Chronicles of Higher Education, his trademark condescension was still in full flower: "Bishops should be welcome on a Catholic university campus," he wrote. "Give them tickets to ball games. Let them say mass, bring them to graduation. Let them sit on the stage. But there should be nothing beyond that. They should have nothing to say about the internal academic affairs of the university or any faculty member thereof."
Well-versed in gamesmanship of this kind after two thousand years of putting out fires lit by more imaginative dissenters, Rome quickly recognized that McBrien wanted Catholic theologians to pay no more attention to their bishops than a distracted man might pay to his daft old grandmother.
Like many modern liberals, McBrien thinks highly of one-way tolerance. Conservative seminarians annoy him, as do many people who take religion seriously enough to share it with others. When Avery Cardinal Dulles applauded evangelical Christians for preaching the gospel in public, McBrien harrumphed that prayer at public events should be "inclusive rather than exclusive."
In a July, 1998 column ridiculing Christian morality, McBrien wondered whether God had "ever had anything relevant to say about a city council ordinance granting certain legal rights to same-sex couples." That flippant remark was an offshoot of his argument that the church should concern itself with "big sinners who injure the weak and the vulnerable," rather than "small sinners who violate the conventional codes of sexual and reproductive behavior."
Note his choice of adjectives. By calling it "conventional," McBrien reduced the practice of centuries to small print on the menu of lifestyle choice. Per the terms of his setup, we can be tolerant and Christ-like or judgmental and wrong (Never mind what the gospel says will happen to those who corrupt children, or the cursing of a barren fig tree, or the can of whup-ass that a certain Jewish carpenter opened on money changers in the temple: to McBrien these New Testament episodes and others like them are not as judgmental as they seem to be).
McBrien's logic also flunks the reality check offered by current events:
John Geoghan is an evil man and a defrocked priest whose recent indictment for child rape threatens to bankrupt the Archdiocese of Boston. Had Geoghan paid more attention to what McBrien lampoons as conventional codes of sexual behavior, he might not have become a big sinner who injured the weak and vulnerable.
Ever willing to pounce on alleged papal indifference to the spiritual lives of ordinary people, McBrien used several recent columns to fault John Paul II for recognizing too many martyrs and too few married people as saints. McBrien implies that the Vatican is guilty of spiritual profiling, an exercise as fraught with negative pastoral implications as its presumptive secular counterpart, racial profiling. But there is nothing wrong with profiling per se. Cops profile criminals, not races. Similarly, the church, from long experience, profiles saints. And yet McBrien does not want the pope to discomfit his co-religionists by presenting us with "unrealistic" examples of Christian heroism, or acknowledging that there are more martyrs these days than when Nero turned the early Christians into lion kibble (Robert Royal wrote a 400-page book on Catholic martyrs of the twentieth century. If that's not a strong argument for the contemporary relevance of martyrdom, I don't know what is).
Sadly for a man in his position, McBrien seems not to realize that people tend to be inspired rather than insulted by role models. Capuchin Franciscan Padre Pio, for example, is one of the recently recognized saints whom McBrien actively dislikes, apparently on the grounds that most Christians do not bear the wounds of Christ in their bodies, as Padre Pio apparently did. Even worse, to McBrien, the beloved Italian could not have been a genuinely holy priest because he heard too many confessions (!).
In the thirty or so years that McBrien has been an influential theologian carping about the church and a polarizing figure in disputes between modernist and traditionalist Catholics, he has influenced the views of other people in ways we may never know. Nevertheless, it is no great leap to read a cover story about declining numbers of Catholic nuns in the current issue of The Atlantic Monthly and find his influence in a nun named Beth, who says she wanted to be a tugboat captain as a child and now sees herself as "a tug pulling along the old bark of Saint Peter." If Beth has ever thought about whether her nautical imaginings put her in a role better filled by the Holy Spirit, she gives no hint of it.
Given the anti-papal template from which McBrien writes, his hostility to Catholic tradition, and his malign influence on the faith of millions, one might wonder why the man is so seldom criticized by other priests. The truth is that most priests are reluctant to criticize each other. Some Catholic clerics with friends and reputations enough to challenge McBrien agree with him; others consider him a canary in the coal mine who absorbs conservative vapors that they might otherwise have to breathe themselves.
In fact, Fr. Richard John Neuhaus of First Things is perhaps the only nationally known American priest who keeps a jaundiced eye on McBrien. The Public Square column through which Neuhaus rambles every month is one of the few places where McBrien is likely to get a public drubbing from someone else in a roman collar.
To McBrien's complaint that the present pontiff is "dedicated to the containment of progressive ideas," Neuhaus makes the point that the pope's humanism and social encyclicals "militate against [McBrien's] point of view." (In a different world, Neuhaus would concede McBrien's argument and cap it by saying "hooray for the pope!" but Neuhaus is a neocon, and we all do what we can with what we have).
Fr. Phil Bloom of Holy Family parish in Seattle, WA points in fine libertarian fashion to the fallacy in a McBrien column comparing dissenters in the church to dissidents in oppressive societies. "Such a comparison ignores the distinction between persuasive power (based on freely given trust) and coercive power (based on the ability to put people in jail – or worse)," he writes. Unfortunately, while Bloom has a useful web site, he does not have a syndicated column or a national reputation.
It falls to ordinary Catholics in the pews to defuse the landmines in McBrien's work, and in this we have some valuable non-Catholic allies. Self-described agnostic George Jonas makes the case for the prosecution very well: "The trick about being a Catholic, as I understand it, is that you don't quite have the burden of figuring out right and wrong for yourself. The Church does not discourage you to think about these matters if you are so inclined, but just in case you get lost in the complexity of spiritual and metaphysical affairs, it offers you some signposts." In other words, Jonas continues, "The Catholic Church is there to mediate between your conscience and God. It is, I suppose, a kind of compulsory arbitration. When you become a member of the faith you undertake to abide by it. If you don't go for that kind of stuff; if you'd rather have your conscience plugged in directly to God, what you do is become a Protestant."
In a paragraph not aimed at McBrien that nevertheless describes him perfectly, Jonas observes that some Catholics would prefer to hijack the church. "They can't credit the Holy Spirit talking to the Pope, but for some reason have no trouble crediting that the Holy Spirit talks to them. They want to convert the Vatican to their own views…not caring that in the process they might destroy the Church they profess to love."
