This post was inspired by a question in the comments. It will probably be more meandering and vague than even my normal posts are because this is not a subject I have attempted to set out my views on in any ordered way before.
It's also a subject I don't really know the history of terribly well. I know some.
The question of word order here—American Catholic instead of Catholic American—is a lot trickier than you first might guess. A big part of this is history. Anyone smarter than a journalist knows that when Vatican 1 endorsed papal infallibility it was not saying the Pope was incapable of making a mistake. However, a lot of people have failed to grasp the second and more important point that the council was declaring in an absolutely unmistakable way that the Catholic Church was not and never could be a liberal democracy.
You could say a lot about that but the point I want to highlight is that it initially made life very difficult for Catholics living in English-speaking liberal countries. In response the idea of what it is to be a American Catholic has evolved over the years but I think it all comes down to individualism. One is required to define oneself as an individual who either does and not does join social groups first. We are to have an identity separate from all the groups we belong to.
It has slowly become the defining question of Catholicism as this idea of individualism has slowly been exported all over the world. And that has changed the way we think about some kinds of moral questions. What kinds of questions? Questions that ask why we do or don't do some kinds of things or do or don't support some kinds of positions. No one is allowed to say, I do or don't do such and such a thing because I am a Catholic. We aren't even allowed to say the church teaches this and I agree anymore.
Of course, we can literally say that and no one will object but we know we won't be taken seriously as full members of liberal democratic culture if we do so. To be treated as full members of that culture we are now required to come up with an explanation of how we as individuals came to the view that such and such a thing is right or wrong by ourselves. We can end that explanation witha tag line that says, "And that is why I think the Catholic Church is right" but it has to be clear that this is a view we could continue to hold this position even if we didn't have the church.
So why The American Catholic?
The question I was originally asked is why I read the website of that name and list it on my news feed in the left-hand column.
Well, I don't think I'll surprise anyone by saying that the two areas of morality where this individualism I describe above causes the most tension are sexuality and social policy. The thing that may raise an eyebrow or two is that I think the struggle over sexual teachings of the Catholic Church is largely over. There are still a few people fighting to have Catholics follow the letter of the law on matters such as birth control or sex before marriage but I think even the majority of them recognize that no one is listening.
The big struggle facing those who would try and return to a world where most Catholics did follow church teachings on sexuality to the letter (and I'm not convinced such a world ever existed) is that most Catholics agree with them. They agree with the church as to the fundamental points about dignity of the person, sanctity of marriage and so on. They are a little hazy about application and they often aren't interested in knowing the details of how the general concepts get translated into specific rules but they get the general concepts. And they get them more and more as time goes on.
As a consequence, no one is going to change anyone's behaviour by explaining the logic and philosophy of Catholic teaching on sexuality to them. People already get that and they have chosen to apply it the way they do. And the most important aspect of this application is that it is private.
On social teachings it's almost the opposite. Catholics largely get the church teaching that says that a social morality must restrain economic markets. They also believe that this is a public matter when it comes to application. What we increasingly don't get is the logic and philosophy underlying these matters. Only a tiny number of Catholics could tell us anything at all about Catholic social teaching. It's not that they disagree it's more that the arguments in question just don't seem to have anything to do with anything.
For me that is the major attraction of Catholic sites such as The American Catholic and others that often bring up economic issues and try to connect these issues to arguments found in Catholic social teaching. I think they mostly fail and I think they mostly fail because Catholic social teachings have failed to keep up with the times. I believe these teachings are based on economic and moral ideas that are confused at best and just deeply wrong at worst. But I think the writers at the site make an honest attempt top try and connect the dots and that always interests me. Ultimately I'm pretty certain that these dots simply cannot be connected but I'm willing to remain open.
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