Sort of political Monday

The Catholic need to control the culture
One of the funny things about Catholicism is that it still struggles with liberalism even now. That is a good thing and a bad thing.

I don't mean liberalism in whatever sense people who call themselves "liberals" mean. That sort of liberalism has made being liberal into a matter of acceptance into a belief group. As my Oxford dictionary puts it that sort of liberal seeks to be "respectful and accepting of behaviour or opinions different from one's own." Except that they don't. They are, for example, neither respectful nor accepting of Sarah Palin's behaviour and opinions. Modern liberals are defined by the way they very strongly favour some kinds of behaviour and opinions and very strongly oppose others (and oppose to a point that can sometimes reach incandescent hate).

This isn't a matter of partisan hypocrisy but a fundamental flaw in that definition. There is no reason to respect or accept behaviours or opinions different from ours. You want to respect and accept female circumcision?

But there was an older definition of liberalism and it derived from from a sense of "liberal" more closely related to generosity. A liberal host will refill your glass and plate but she won't hand you a box and tell you to take home anything you want from the wine cellar or pantry. Real liberalism always comes from a firm belief in the soundness ofour own views and from that derives a generosity towards different views.

Ultimately, it seems to me, real liberalism comes from a sense that God is outside of us. He is a separate being over and against us and not defined by our dogma. But that is a separate issue and too big to go into now.

The proximate cause of liberalism was the medieval city. "City air makes us free," said the serfs. The Catholic church in the English-speaking world has never accomodated itself to the city. It is more of a village religion and it became a neighbourhood religion in the cities. If you really want to see what has driven the big chnages in Catholic culture in America over the last hundred years, you need look no further than the church parking lot. When mass is over Catholics walk out the door, get in their cars and drive away. They don't stay in a particular neighbourhood where they can see the steeple of the church where they just prayed and where the people who were in the pews can see them.

Churches, and not just Catholic churches, just don't seem to be able to get this. I visit a very liberal non-Catholic church now and then and everything that church does is about community. And you get a some of that in the Catholic church as well. But what Catholics have started to do to a greater degree than any other church is obsess about the culture. Catholics have pushed more and more to try and control the culture.

The Serpentine One and I saw a fascinating example of this a few years ago at a discussion group with some non-Catholic christains. The discussion was about culture and teh Sepentine had the bad luck to be leading. Bad luck because none of the young Christians in the group new or cared much about culture. They'd solved the problem of modern culture by creating a ghetto for themselves. They lived in a world where they walled off popular music, books and movies. You couldn't even interest them in what was going on.

Catholics aren't like that. They are like modern liberals, and unlike real liberalism, in that they feel the need to encourage a certain kind of culture and to discourage other kinds. Traditionalist Catholics and feminists, as I have been noting recently, have a lot in common whether they like to admit this or not.

That's a funny reversal by the way. Tolerance of cultural and sexual deviance was historically higher in Catholic cultures than elsewhere. No matter how rigid the piety of Italian Catholics, for example, the variety of practices in Italian cities was always more tolerated than in a city like London or Boston, a fact noted by English and American tourists of the 19th century. The recent intolerance seems to come from the Irish church in America.