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Under Francis, the Vatican has been more transparent on a number of issues, including its own finances. But this has also opened an ugly chapter in the history of the “temporal” justice administered in the name of the pope, who is the absolute sovereign of Vatican City State. In July, the Vatican trial of ten people involved in a money-losing investment in a controversial London real-estate deal began. Among those being tried is Cardinal Giovanni Angelo Becciu, who is the first cardinal ever to be indicted by Vatican criminal prosecutors, and whom Francis stripped of the rights and duties of the cardinalate in September 2020. Becciu was not just the prefect of the Vatican Congregation for the Saints, but also, as the sostituto (or Number 2) to the Secretariat of State between 2011 and 2018, a key figure in navigating relations between the Vatican and Italy. It is hard to say what the consequences of his trial will be for the Vatican, the Italian Church, and Pope Francis.

The Church also faces challenges over how to deal with the Zan bill, anti-homophobia legislation sponsored by LGBT activist Alessandro Zan, who was elected to Parliament with the Democratic Party. Debate over the bill has led to a level of tension between Church and state not seen in years. In June, the Vatican Secretariat of State sent a diplomatic note to Italy’s ambassador to the Holy See raising concerns that the bill, if approved in its present form, could limit freedom of expression of Catholics and Catholic institutions and thus breach guarantees granted to the Church in Italy in the revised Concordat of 1984. Despite clarifying that the Vatican’s goal is not to stop the bill but to reformulate some passages, this rare diplomatic step raised alarms among progressives in Italy over the secularity (laicità) of the Republic. The majority of Italians seem to support the bill, but Catholics are divided—not on the need for a law protecting LGBTQ people from discrimination and violence, but on the possibility that it would introduce American-style “culture wars.” In its present form, the bill contains sometimes moralistic phrasing not just defining what would be illegal, but also what would be socially acceptable to say.

There’s also the issue of how the Church can be involved in Italy’s continued recovery from the pandemic. As the crisis ebbs and restrictions are lifted, Italy may be poised for a level of economic growth not seen in decades. The question is whether it will benefit all of Italian society: economically, there is a huge gap between rich and poor, and between the north and the south. The social safety net provided by the Catholic Church remains strong, but even though it’s the most important provider of social services in Italy, the Church has lost much of its cultural and political cachet, and the ability of Italian Catholics to win over legislators and entrepreneurs with the wisdom of the Catholic social doctrine has weakened. Criticizing the hierarchy has become the norm across the political spectrum: the left on gay rights, the right on immigration, the populists on the very idea of religious institutions. Old-time Italian secularism was nothing compared to the rise of new media and social-media influencers, some of them turned politicians, many turned political mischief-makers. Given this reality, it makes less sense than it ever did to envision some sort of intellectually elite grounding for a new Catholic party: it would have no electoral viability. Almost thirty years after the dissolution of the Democrazia Cristiana, very few Italian Catholics (and even fewer non-Catholics) seek a new Catholic party; even Francis himself says that he does not believe in confessional political parties.

But what this really demonstrates is the practical disappearance of the Catholic laity from political life. Lay associations (Catholic Action, Catholic boy and girls scouts, the new ecclesial movements) have lost their clout not just because of secularization, but also because of the clericalist policies of the Italian bishops during the pontificates of John Paul II and Benedict XVI. The bishops conference under the leadership of Cardinal Camillo Ruini (1991–2007) became something like a political action committee. The result has been a disaster both politically and ecclesially—the dissolution of the tradition of independence of lay Catholics in the public square. Try as he might, Francis has not been able to revive the Italian laity.

Or, at least not yet. The best thing the Catholic Church in Italy could do to address these challenges would be to hold a national synod. The most recent comparable event was in 1976. While the Italian bishops refused Francis’s 2015 invitation to begin the synodal process, they gave in after his more forceful request earlier this year. Finally, preparations are underway, in conjunction with the global Catholic synodal process taking place between now and 2023. And yet it is hard not to think we have entered the declining phase of this pontificate. Francis, who invested so heavily in shaping the social and political role of the Church, lacks allies and partners both inside and beyond Italy. And if there remains the belief that Catholicism in Italy still has something to say (and a way to act) on immigration, poverty, and marginalization, there is no common movement or organizational energy to realize it. As the authors of a new book on the Italian Church and the pandemic (Il gregge smarrito, or The Lost Flock) put it: the Church “speaks but is not able to count, and when it acts it is not able to speak.” Francis’s pontificate liberated Italian Catholicism from the right-wing, culture-war inclinations of the clerical elites in the early 2000s, but it has not generated anything new in its wake. A national synod could lead to a movement that would benefit the Church and Italy both, even if it might not be as big a unifying event as beating England on penalty kicks.

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The PD presents this, using Scripture, as the interconnectedness of Jesus, the crowd, and the apostles. Jesus, who takes the initiative, is constantly open to the people, recognizing them as interlocutors in ways that shock and scandalize. At the same time, he calls some to follow him, and entrusts them with special responsibility for helping others to encounter him. All three actors, says the PD, are essential: without Jesus (the Spirit) as the protagonist, the synod descends into a political game between the apostles and the crowd, a churchy parliament. Without the crowd, it becomes sectarian and self-referential, an exclusive, inward-looking sect. Without the apostles instructed by the Spirit, the crowd risks falling prey to myth and ideology. The PD adds that it is the role of a fourth actor, the diabolos, to try to separate these three actors. Without all three—the People of God, the Holy Spirit, and the bishops—it is not a real synod.

This is what is so hard. We have no model for this; and, as we look around us, in the pews and at our clergy, it seems unrealistic. A synod calls for attitudes and mindsets that seem almost the opposite of what we’re used to in our daily life and in our Church. The synod documents ask us to speak boldly and honestly (with parrhesia), and to create space for those who seldom speak to do the same. Yet the documents also ask us to be humble in listening, to be open to changing our minds in light of what we hear, and to accept that we don’t so much possess the truth as come to be possessed by it. We must let go of the myth of our self-sufficiency, give up prejudices and stereotypes, surrender our rigidity, and learn to recognize the Spirit moving where we least expect it. We must abandon, too, the lure of clericalism, to see that true power lies in service, that the voices of all the baptized must be heard. And while we must be bold in giving our views, we must resist the temptation of sterile polarization, for where two views are in opposition, a third may yet present itself, transcending both. To enter into synodality is to embrace an alchemy in which the Spirit acts as a complexio oppositorum, in which what is good and valid on all sides in preserved in a new vision.

While acknowledging that “the synodal process will naturally call for a renewal of structures at various levels of the Church in order to foster deeper communion, fuller participation, and more fruitful mission,” the Vademecum adds that this renewal flows from that of the members of the Body. This renewal can only come about by “doing” synodality: spending time in human encounter, in the company of our fellow faithful in parish meetings and “synodal consultation meetings,” but also informally: sharing a meal, walking together, and so on. This informal synodality—“renewing the Church,” as the Vademecum puts it, “through new experiences of fraternity with each other”—helps those intimidated by more formal meetings to open up, which is one of the core challenges. How to hear the Spirit speak through those who do not usually speak? How to avoid the process being hijacked by the articulate and educated? And then, as the PD notes, the Church must deal with the weight of its own clericalist inheritance, “with those forms of exercising authority on which the different types of abuse (power, economic, conscience, sexual) are grafted.” But it must also cope with the impact of a culture that swings between secularist intolerance of religion and fundamentalist religious intolerance.

All these attitudes can be transcended only by a synodal conversion. In the words of the PD, “The ability to imagine a different future for the Church and her institutions, in keeping with the mission she has received, depends largely on the decision to initiate processes of listening, dialogue, and community discernment, in which each and every person can participate and contribute.” It means being “educated by the Spirit to a truly synodal mentality”—a “conversion process” on which the mission of the Church now hangs.

From where we stand now, this looks like a fearsome challenge: in just five months, each “particular Church”—usually, a bishops’ conference—must organize a consultation of the whole people of God across its dioceses and religious communities that turns on one or two key questions: “A synodal Church, in announcing the Gospel, ‘journeys together.’ How is this ‘journeying together’ happening today in your particular Church?’ What steps does the Spirit invite us to take in order to grow in our ‘journeying together’?” Each particular Church must synthesize its blizzard of answers into no more than ten pages. From these syntheses the synod secretariat in Rome will create the first “working document,” which will be pondered and worked on by bishops’ bodies at a continental or regional level before March 2023. The synthesis of their syntheses will then produce a second working document by June 2023, to be refined and finally voted on by a three-week synod of bishops in Rome in October of that year. Their final report will be given to the pope.

Too much, too soon? Of course. That is the point. The genius of the process is that it will starkly reveal just how little traveled is the road to the synodal Church of which Francis dreams, how anti-synodal is the culture of a command-and-control Church. And that is good, for no conversion happens without a first, chilly confrontation with the truth of who we are, followed by a realization of how much the Spirit’s help is required to get us to where we are called to be. If such humility and openness to grace should prove the synod’s main fruit, it will yield a rich harvest indeed.

Commonweal Magazine

Commonweal Magazine

Better to speak of the Massacre of the Innocents. For that, all the evidence suggests, is what it was. A powerful man ordered the deaths of thousands of innocent people to further his own ends, just as King Herod did after the Christ child was born.

The Catholic faith is oriented around the notion that death ultimately makes sense. Death is not the end of life. Death is the way each of us shares the experience of God, the way God shared our experience in dying for us. Death for the sake of another is the most complete self-sacrifice this life has to offer.

That seems to me to be a reason why the deaths of several hundred firefighters and police officers brought such an outpouring of emotion in the days after the catastrophe. Those deaths conformed to the Christian pattern of supreme self-sacrifice. The firefighters, as they hastened toward the flames, were ready to give their lives for others.

But what of the thousands of ordinary people who died in the explosions, the flames, the abrupt collapsing of the towers? No religious person, it seems to me, would presume to say that those deaths made sense or served any higher purpose.

Better to speak of the massacre of the innocents. The Gospels, biblical scholars say, communicate through the arrangement and juxtaposition of texts as much as through the texts themselves. So it is in this episode. On page two of the New Testament we encounter swift and pointless mass death. No sooner is a child born than a thousand others are murdered. One has only to imagine the pain of those first-born male children as they were killed or the anguish their families felt to know that there is no way to say such deaths make sense.

Matthew’s Gospel, thankfully, does not ascribe the massacre to any divine plan. Rather, it places those deaths in a kind of counterpoint with Christ’s death. The implication, theologically, is that only through a death like Christ’s can such deaths be avenged, such wrongs set right. But the implication for our lives, it seems to me, is that only through a life like Christ’s can such wrongs be righted, such senseless deaths set in counterpoint.

The biblical massacre of the innocents now has a new set of references. Last month, the innocents were office workers in Manhattan; this month, they are people ruled by despots in Afghanistan and elsewhere. The character of the “war on terrorism” will likely depend on how far our president is allowed to stretch the notions of “combatants” and “intention” and “collateral damage,” indeed of “innocent” and “guilty,” so as to avoid having to bear responsibility for the taking of innocent lives. Will he, will we, be more like Christ, or more like Herod? He, and we, will have to decide. The fate of the innocents, those still alive and those already dead, depends on it.

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The small Orthodox church I serve as pastor is usually full on Sundays. The Sunday following the horror it was packed. We were lucky, in a way; no one in our congregation was lost. But we do have members who know people who were. Almost any words said in the face of this sort of evil sound pale and trivial. All I could think to say was that while we can’t help being obsessed by this mystery of evil, by the hardness of the hearts behind it, there are also mysteries of goodness. There was the heroism of the firefighters and rescue workers; there were the people who lined up to donate blood in such numbers that the system could not accommodate them; there was the fact that so many of those final phone calls, from the towers and from the planes, were not calls for vengeance, but final declarations of love; and while there are nervousness and anxiety on the streets, there is also a tenderness I have never seen. Gandhi said somewhere that what we usually regard as history is a history of failures, a history of human beings behaving in disastrous ways; but the truer history of the human race is the daily fact of cooperation, help, and even love. That was apparent in many ways after the attack.

The Sunday following the disaster was, on the Orthodox calendar, the Afterfeast of the Elevation of the Cross. It occurred to me that on this side of the grave the cross is the most obvious fact: human beings suffer and die. It is not a small thing that while all the Gospels describe the crucifixion of Jesus, not one describes the Resurrection. This must be understood by faith. We are shown the empty tomb; we do not see him rising in glory. When he appears to the disciples at Emmaus the risen Lord appears as a stranger. There is nothing obvious about the Resurrection, nothing easily seen or grasped; the cross is all too obvious, and we can be stopped by it, we can think that this is all there is to life. Faith in the Resurrection does not cancel out what happens on the cross; the cross is its beginning. Archbishop Anastasios of Albania has said that the Resurrection begins in the cross, and this is where our faith must be, especially in a time when we are confronted with evil and hatred on such a massive level.

It is not, however, a faith that on this side of death everything will be all right. We know more than ever how small and vulnerable we are. And while the vulnerability can make us more tender, it can also make us want to strike out. While some response is clearly called for, if it involves innocent civilians it will harden not only the hearts of our enemies, but our own. As I drove to church toward the end of the week I saw a few planes in the sky and had two emotions at once: things are returning to some sort of normality; and I felt a deep foreboding, one I feel every time I see an airplane now. One woman in our congregation told me that she found it hard to pray after this horror. I thought of St. Paul’s words about the truest prayer: the Holy Spirit prays in us, with groans too deep for utterance. That’s how we are praying now.

Commonweal Magazine

The Eucharist as a Matter of Life and Death

Americans might be able to comprehend the great importance of worship, but to characterize the Eucharist as a matter of life and death may seem to be an excessively dramatic description. In fact, the words of Jesus support this vital sense of the Eucharist and Eucharistic worship: “Jesus said to them, ‘Amen, amen, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you do not have life within you. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him on the last day’” (John 6:53–54).

We need to take Jesus at his word. Any Eucharistic formation, catechesis, and revival must have a strong biblical base in the words and actions of Jesus. This passage from John 6 illustrates the importance of staying close to the Word as a means of staying close to the Eucharist. And the words of Jesus about the bread of life clearly resonate in these trying days when death-dealing forces appear to have the upper hand. Think of the pandemic, the street violence and killing that plagues our cities, the disrespect for human life in its most vulnerable stages and conditions, the lethal degradation of the environment, and the specter of war that haunts the world. An essential catechetical task today is to draw a line from the deadly challenges we face today to the Eucharist as the bread of life. If we do so, then it is no exaggeration to say that the Eucharist is a matter of life and death.

The Eucharist as Summons to Participation

The heart of the Eucharistic prayers we hear at Mass includes four actions that we are to perform in memory of Jesus: he took bread, blessed it, broke it and gave it. The Eucharist is not fundamentally a static reality. In a primary sense, the Eucharist is action or an event, the Lord’s action in his Paschal Mystery, that summons our participation.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Pope St. Pius X identified the essential nature of liturgical participation. He said that the first and foremost source of the Christian life is active participation (actuosa participatio) in the liturgy. This summons to active participation developed across the twentieth century and culminated in the directions offered in the Second Vatican Council’s Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy (SC). The Council identified the internal and external aspects of participation and its dimensions as active, conscious, full, and fruitful (actuosa, conscia, plena, fructuosa).

Some sixty years after the promulgation of SC, many Catholics neither know their call to active participation in the eucharistic mysteries nor have they made an intentional commitment to it. At best, active participation seems to mean having a particular role to play in the liturgy (greeter, server, lector, Communion minister). The full and conscious participation that means internally joining ourselves to the death and resurrection of the Lord celebrated in the Eucharist seems to have eluded many Catholics.

In place of active participation, some seem to view their engagement with Eucharistic worship in a number of other ways: the fulfillment of an obligation, a meditative moment in their otherwise busy lives, or as an opportunity to receive inspiration or encouragement. How many of our Catholic brothers and sisters seem to conceive of the liturgy as a spectator sport? How often do we hear, “But I don’t get anything out of it”? The passivity suggested by such an approach is the opposite of active participation.

Any effective Eucharistic catechesis, formation, or revival must take into account not only the Eucharist in itself but also our response to the Eucharist. That means focusing on the understanding of active participation in the Eucharist.

From the Sacrifice of Jesus to Our Sacrificial Living

Active participation (participatio actuosa) must also be fruitful participation (participatio fructuosa). As we join ourselves to the self-sacrificing love of Jesus manifested on the Cross, we are called to replicate his sacrifice in our daily lives. When we do that, we live out his mission through our decisions, actions, and relationships. The sacrifice of Jesus encountered in the Eucharist is both the model for our lives and what enables our self-sacrificing love.

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Heft welcomes into the open circle university scholars and theologians of other religious traditions as well as the natural sciences and professional studies. Aquinas provides historical warrant to Heft’s “open circle” by having included the Muslim Avicenna and the Jewish Maimonides in the circle of his own theoretical discussions—all of them indebted to the natural philosophy of Aristotle.

Heft devotes four very important chapters to “the University and the Church.” They again express his basic picture of the future of Catholic higher education from realities on the ground. Catholic higher education is not, he insists, a timeless and isolated study of a theological idea. It is intimately linked to an extant worshiping community that stretches from Pauline home churches to Vatican baroque. Too many discussions of Catholic academia brush by hierarchical pronouncements like Ex corde ecclesiae and the vexing issue of a mandatum for Catholic scholarship. Not this one: Heft addresses these ecclesiastical dicta head-on, with appreciation but also a certain degree of apprehension. Issuing a mandatum is the prerogative of a bishop. So Heft offers a careful discussion of the relationship between bishops and scholars. He notes valuable possibilities arising from closer contact between these two groups as well as notable failures, such as the ill-advised and irregular censure of the theologian Elizabeth Johnson by the USCCB’s doctrinal office.

The most intriguing chapter by far is a discussion of the role of Mary in the life of Catholic higher education. The historical Mary was the first teacher of Jesus. She is not associated with prophetic denunciation, but with Biblical Wisdom literature. Heft cites Walter Ong, SJ, on how the entrance of women to colleges and universities could blunt the “agonistic” spirit of male argument. (To this day PhD candidates must defend their theses.) A bit of wise “motherly” concern to resolve academic and theological issues without disputatio would be welcome.

Heft’s first and last “north star” is Jesus. He argues that Jesus and the Catholic tradition bring to higher education a “community ethic, sacramentality, and the dignity of the human person.” Anyone familiar with the rancor of academic arguments will appreciate a dose of community and respect for persons. As for “sacramentality,” here it relates to the daily life on campus, from dining hall to soccer field to lab. In all these places Catholicism finds “images and reflections of the divine.”

Will faculty really come to see Jesus in their work? In chapter one Heft poses that challenge. “Christian philosophers would be puzzled, I think, if they were asked how the person of Jesus should influence their work.” (This sentence is followed by a footnote: “George Dennis O’Brien is an exception.” Many years ago Heft reviewed my book, The Idea of a Catholic University, for Commonweal. He suggested that my treatment of Jesus was on a “somewhat abstract level.” The time has come to repay the compliment.)

A chapter titled “Humility and Courage” is devoted to a lecture given by the philosopher Charles Taylor at the University of Dayton and later published—along with essays by four commentators—as A Catholic Modernity. The final commentary is offered by Rosemary Haughton, who suggests that Taylor’s use of the word “transcendence” should be avoided because “it allows spirituality to escape the messiness of individual existence.”  Agreeing with Haughton, Taylor admits that such grand words are bound to seem “abstract and evasive.” There is much “transcendence-talk” in Heft’s book, along with a host of other Catholic tropes like “faith and reason” and “sacramentality.”  Anyone who writes a book on Catholic higher education like mine or Heft’s falls under Haughton’s critique. We both know the fault line. Taylor’s “excuse” will have to do. “You end up using [transcendence]…with a sense of defeat on the grounds that it is not as catastrophically misleading as its rivals.” Perhaps it is appropriate that the most telling critique of Taylor’s work—a critique one might extend to Heft’s work (or mine)—was made by a woman. Speaking in the spirit of Mary, Haughton reminds us that the Word is made flesh before and beyond commentary or philosophy.

The Future of Catholic Higher Education
The Open Circle
James L. Heft, SM
Oxford University Press
$29.25 | 285 pp.

Commonweal Magazine

Heft welcomes into the open circle university scholars and theologians of other religious traditions as well as the natural sciences and professional studies. Aquinas provides historical warrant to Heft’s “open circle” by having included the Muslim Avicenna and the Jewish Maimonides in the circle of his own theoretical discussions—all of them indebted to the natural philosophy of Aristotle.

Heft devotes four very important chapters to “the University and the Church.” They again express his basic picture of the future of Catholic higher education from realities on the ground. Catholic higher education is not, he insists, a timeless and isolated study of a theological idea. It is intimately linked to an extant worshiping community that stretches from Pauline home churches to Vatican baroque. Too many discussions of Catholic academia brush by hierarchical pronouncements like Ex corde ecclesiae and the vexing issue of a mandatum for Catholic scholarship. Not this one: Heft addresses these ecclesiastical dicta head-on, with appreciation but also a certain degree of apprehension. Issuing a mandatum is the prerogative of a bishop. So Heft offers a careful discussion of the relationship between bishops and scholars. He notes valuable possibilities arising from closer contact between these two groups as well as notable failures, such as the ill-advised and irregular censure of the theologian Elizabeth Johnson by the USCCB’s doctrinal office.

The most intriguing chapter by far is a discussion of the role of Mary in the life of Catholic higher education. The historical Mary was the first teacher of Jesus. She is not associated with prophetic denunciation, but with Biblical Wisdom literature. Heft cites Walter Ong, SJ, on how the entrance of women to colleges and universities could blunt the “agonistic” spirit of male argument. (To this day PhD candidates must defend their theses.) A bit of wise “motherly” concern to resolve academic and theological issues without disputatio would be welcome.

Heft’s first and last “north star” is Jesus. He argues that Jesus and the Catholic tradition bring to higher education a “community ethic, sacramentality, and the dignity of the human person.” Anyone familiar with the rancor of academic arguments will appreciate a dose of community and respect for persons. As for “sacramentality,” here it relates to the daily life on campus, from dining hall to soccer field to lab. In all these places Catholicism finds “images and reflections of the divine.”

Will faculty really come to see Jesus in their work? In chapter one Heft poses that challenge. “Christian philosophers would be puzzled, I think, if they were asked how the person of Jesus should influence their work.” (This sentence is followed by a footnote: “George Dennis O’Brien is an exception.” Many years ago Heft reviewed my book, The Idea of a Catholic University, for Commonweal. He suggested that my treatment of Jesus was on a “somewhat abstract level.” The time has come to repay the compliment.)

A chapter titled “Humility and Courage” is devoted to a lecture given by the philosopher Charles Taylor at the University of Dayton and later published—along with essays by four commentators—as A Catholic Modernity. The final commentary is offered by Rosemary Haughton, who suggests that Taylor’s use of the word “transcendence” should be avoided because “it allows spirituality to escape the messiness of individual existence.”  Agreeing with Haughton, Taylor admits that such grand words are bound to seem “abstract and evasive.” There is much “transcendence-talk” in Heft’s book, along with a host of other Catholic tropes like “faith and reason” and “sacramentality.”  Anyone who writes a book on Catholic higher education like mine or Heft’s falls under Haughton’s critique. We both know the fault line. Taylor’s “excuse” will have to do. “You end up using [transcendence]…with a sense of defeat on the grounds that it is not as catastrophically misleading as its rivals.” Perhaps it is appropriate that the most telling critique of Taylor’s work—a critique one might extend to Heft’s work (or mine)—was made by a woman. Speaking in the spirit of Mary, Haughton reminds us that the Word is made flesh before and beyond commentary or philosophy.

The Future of Catholic Higher Education
The Open Circle
James L. Heft, SM
Oxford University Press
$29.25 | 285 pp.

Commonweal Magazine

The third step of Friedman’s argument focuses on a transformation of Scottish Calvinism. British Protestantism generated the Westminster Confession (1646), which affirmed the basics of classic Calvinist theology: the total depravity of human nature after the Fall and God’s predestination of each individual, such that a life of sin could not cause the damnation of one who before birth was chosen for salvation, nor could a life of virtue save another who was not.

The late seventeenth-century Dutch theologian Jacob Arminius began a shift within Calvinism by proposing that an act of human will was involved in receiving God’s undeserved grace: one of the elect could reject God’s plan for his salvation. Friedman precisely traces these debates, interwoven with irruptions in British political history. The upshot was that eighteenth-century Scottish Calvinist intellectuals came to endorse three new ideas: the natural goodness of man, the efficacy of human freedom, and human happiness as a goal of creation, along with the glorification of God.

The final step of this argument is that Adam Smith was influenced by this neo-Calvinist worldview even though he didn’t share it. Smith said almost nothing about his own religious beliefs. The few scattered references to a higher being in his writings indicate that he was at most a Deist. His best friend, David Hume, was openly disdainful of religious faith, a fact that kept him from ever holding a faculty appointment.

The influence of neo-Calvinism on Smith’s worldview occurred, Friedman argues, because of the integration in Smith’s day of all the strands of intellectual life that are now kept separate in the various disciplinary departments of a modern university. Educated men from all walks of life used to meet together weekly over early afternoon “dinner” in social clubs. Smith was a founding member of the most prestigious of these in Edinburgh, the Select Society, which included Hume, but also five Church of Scotland ministers. Conversations at such dining clubs were wide-ranging and, Friedman argues, Smith would undoubtedly have been part of the lively discussions going on about shifts in the prevailing theology. Religious confidence in the effects of human efforts for self-improvement was in the air. As Friedman puts it, “Smith and his contemporaries were secularizing the essential substance of their clerical friends’ theological principles.”

The remainder of Religion and the Rise of Capitalism focuses on issues in the United States, tracing similar trends in Calvinist thinking and the influence of religion on economics. It is well known to historians but not to many others (including economists) that most of the founders of the American Economic Association were committed Christians aiming to implement the Social Gospel in economic life. Today, the 23,000-member AEA is thoroughly secular. As Thomas Kuhn pointed out, mature sciences have well-developed paradigms and are rarely influenced substantially by outside intellectual forces. Friedman recounts a fascinating history of the American debate on the economic implications of Christian faith that I don’t have the space to summarize here.

Friedman concludes with the shift in the United States from a nineteenth-century identification of much of Christianity with progressive economic policies to the post–World War II alliance between conservative Christianity and conservative economic policies. He explains how, for example, so many ordinary citizens today with no hope of leaving a bequest to their own children nevertheless oppose inheritance taxes on the wealthy.

This is an excellent book, destined to be discussed widely. Friedman’s claim about Adam Smith is that “the time was ripe for new thinking on self-interest,” and religious developments were part of that ripening. The evidence for this influence of religion on the father of modern economics is, admittedly, circumstantial. But, of course, this is what makes Freidman’s claim so impressive. If there were textual evidence for it, someone would have made the argument a century ago.

The synthesis that Friedman attributes to Smith may be grander than Smith himself was aware of. In the chapter where Smith argues that self-love motivates the daily economic services offered by butchers and bakers, he does not claim that competition will protect the consumer from their greed. Friedman makes this claim for him—as I do each time I teach the history of economics—and the claim is central to any moral approval of the market system. But we do need to ask why Smith doesn’t bother to say this.

Three hundred pages later, Smith observes that “the freer and more general the competition,” the greater will be “the advantage to the public.” But this occurs as the final sentence of a forty-page chapter on money and banking, which isn’t the place to catch the reader’s attention concerning the larger question. We may have to admit that despite our interest in the moral legitimation of the market system, and the importance of competition for that purpose, it just wasn’t a significant concern for Smith himself.

Friedman’s account of developments in Protestant theology is deft and precise. Catholic readers will recognize in it a move away from some of the fundamentals of the Protestant Reformation back toward a Catholic view of creation, personhood, and grace. Those familiar with Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age will enjoy Friedman’s analysis of the shifts in Calvinism as part of the long road to today’s secular individualism that Taylor outlines from the twelfth century onward.

This is a pathbreaking book. It will satisfy those interested in the role of religion in the modern world as well as those who simply want to better understand the history of ideas that have brought us to where we are today. Friedman has done both religion and economics a great service.

Religion and the Rise of Capitalism
Benjamen M. Friedman
Knopf
$37.50 | 560 pp.

Commonweal Magazine

But perhaps the biggest factor in making a return to the pre-2007 situation impossible is the weakened authority of Vatican II in today’s Church. Pope Francis’s move against anti–Vatican II traditionalism is a test for his pontificate. It comes as something like a referendum on which bishops are forced to take a stand, since the document gives local bishops the responsibility to reign in traditionalist Catholics in their local churches. And so far, the response to this referendum has been mixed, not only in the United States, but also in places where traditionalism is much more marginal, such as Italy. Some bishops may be driven by pastoral sensitivity, while others may be motivated by the chance to defy Francis again and to solidify the traditionalist movement.

In short, anti–Vatican II traditionalism (liturgical and theological) will not disappear by papal fiat. It was kept at bay in first few decades following Vatican II, even during the papacy of John Paul II, who with a doctrinal policy inimical to theological progressivism nonetheless maintained the authority of the council. But Benedict, citing a “hermeneutic of continuity and reform” meant to prevent SSPX-like rejections of Vatican II, instead helped foster a rehabilitation of traditionalism that reinforced his anti-progressive positions. This is the most important and lasting legacy of Joseph Ratzinger’s pontificate. Anti–Vatican II liturgical and theological traditionalism is not only present, but in some local churches in the U.S. and in Europe is here to stay. It’s evident in the fervor of monasteries that are seeing an increase in vocations, which suggests a rise in presbyteral ordinations and the growth of monastic commitments. More importantly, there is reason to believe that anti–Vatican II traditionalism is not a minority position among young clergy. It’s also hard to deny that Catholic traditionalism sometimes expresses exclusivist, sexist, and racist worldviews, and that the “old Mass” leaves the door open for a pre–Vatican II theology of the relationship between the Church and Judaism that resurfaces old anti-Semitic tropes.

This problem is particularly acute in the United States, where liturgical traditionalism is a misguided response to a crisis of liturgy more than to a crisis of faith. Catholics didn’t stop going to Mass simply because of institutional disaffiliation or to protest the corruption and detachment of the clergy. Catholics’ relationship to the liturgy also changed, influenced by cultural emphasis on the evolutionary and linear and a rejection of the cyclical dimension of religious experience. This is a phenomenon that long predates Vatican II (by at least two centuries), and one that the liturgical reform efforts of the late nineteenth century (which were not “liberal” or “Protestantizing”) were intended to counteract. Today’s traditionalism is thus in some ways a response to the extinction of the understanding of tradition as a fundamental node of knowledge.

And yet, the reception of Vatican II and its liturgical reforms is at the center of the current crisis. Part of the problem is the marginal place that the theology of the liturgy has, compared to other fields, in Catholic academia, college curricula, and the annual conferences of professional theologians. In the early 2000s, progressive Catholics said that the crisis in the reception of the council was the fault of John Paul II and Benedict XVI. That may have been true then, but at this point they alone can’t be blamed. Though it’s clear now who’s attacking Vatican II, it’s not clear who is defending it, or “which” Vatican II should be defended. The teaching of the council was once the vanguard—the future of Catholicism. I believe this is still true for global Catholicism, but I’m not so sure about North America. There has been an “interruption” not just in the scholarly tradition of examining Vatican II, but also in our ecclesial conscience. Vatican II Catholicism went dormant while the anti–Vatican II and reductionist voices came to be the most vocal in the hierarchy. Instead of the vanguard, Vatican II has become something like a rearguard position to be defended both from traditionalists and radical progressives—not just on particularly sensitive points (e.g., the apostolicity of the Church and the role of the bishops, the role of women, gender, and sexuality), but on Vatican II as an example of the tradition in its dynamic and normative dimensions.

Vatican II needs an interpretation that speaks to the receivers of that tradition today. We can’t ask Pope Francis to do it alone while we let his opponents aggressively work to abrogate it. Simply countering or reacting to right-wing traditionalists isn’t a defense; it just won’t work. Rather, it’s time to take up the theological meaning of the documents of Vatican II and the magisterial significance of the conciliar event. The Catholic Church is called to begin again, especially in the United States—in the seminaries, in the parishes, in academia—to undertake a process of the reception of the theology of Vatican II that puts aside generational rifts and fills the gaps in conciliar teaching. We can do that by building on the very basis of the tradition dynamically understood, as opposed to “tradition” that emphasizes contrast, conflict, and conquest.

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My purpose here is not to try to survey the history of Lumen Christi and the great debt it owes to Thomas Levergood, but to offer some reflections on Thomas the person. Of course, it is not fully possible to separate Thomas the person from Thomas the leader of the institute. This is the case, I believe, because Thomas looked on his work for the Lumen Christi Institute not as a job, but as a vocation in the old sense of a calling from God. As some of you may know, after his conversion to Catholicism Thomas several times experimented with the possibility of living a religious life. But he learned that religious life was not his vocation. I do not know when he may have come to see his work at Lumen Christi as a real vocation, but this is how I always perceived the dedication and single-mindedness he brought to all he did for Lumen Christi. When someone gives his all for a cause I think we are dealing with a vocation, especially when the cause is fundamentally religious.

The work of directing the institute called on many of the talents that Thomas possessed in an unusual degree. Of course, it demanded organizational skill—the ability to get things done. Thomas was, indeed, an organizer, especially in the early days of Lumen Christi, when there was a smaller staff. Nonetheless, I don’t think that the ability to organize was the greatest asset that Thomas brought to his unusual vocation. I would say that two qualities of Thomas that were far more important were, first, his talent as what we might call a “networker” and, second, a kind of visionary quality, an uncanny ability to discern issues, questions, and themes that intelligent Catholics needed to address. These issues were myriad, ranging across many disciplines: history, philosophy, theology, ethics, public policy, cultural issues, and so on. Thomas had some knowledge of many of these disciplines, not as an expert, but as a visionary “idea-man” who could spot things that needed to be addressed, whether in lectures, courses, conferences, panels, or whatever. Let me say a bit more about these two aspects of Thomas’s character.   

I have described Thomas as a “networker,” by which I mean someone who knows lots of people, who know other people, who know other people, so that a kind of network of human potential and interaction is established that can greatly assist in fostering the success of complex programs and initiatives. Successful networking demands not only accessibility and friendliness, but also skill at putting people at ease—talents that Thomas had in abundance. He could get things done because he knew the people who could do them, and he had the ability to convince those people to take up the task, even when they were perhaps initially hesitant. I think this is one of the sources of his noted success as a fundraiser, as well as his ability to find out what was going on in the often opaque circles of clerical politics. He did, I must say, often take delight in conveying to me tasty bits of clerical gossip.

I have used the word “visionary.” What I mean is a kind of discernment, a special insight into trends and issues in Catholic thought that need greater visibility, re-affirmation, and even reconsideration. Thomas had this ability to a truly remarkable degree. How often over the years I would get a call from him, outlining his plans for coming programs for Lumen Christi and asking me what I thought about them and who might be good people to contact to help in their implementation. Sometimes I was initially surprised by some of these endeavors, but on thinking about them, I almost always agreed that “this is, indeed, a good idea.” Often, of course, Thomas asked me to get involved and I think I almost always said yes with the conviction that I would be helping to spread Catholic wisdom in the academy and in the Church. It was also very hard to say no to Thomas. He was a great optimist, someone who conveyed a sense of benevolent conviction about the future that dragged along even pessimists like me.

I had a few personal talks with Thomas over the years, including one after his operation, when he spoke directly and candidly about the death he knew was approaching. Naturally, I can’t talk about these conversations in detail or with specificity. But there are two things that I believe I can say something about. Thomas, as I knew him, always displayed a sense of imperturbability and equanimity. He was not easily upset. This surface sense of untroubled calm, however, coexisted with some real interior trials, sufferings, and even crosses that he rarely talked about. Fortitude is one of the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit, and I think that Thomas had a great measure of the gift of fortitude that enabled him carry on his work in what must have often been trying moments. The last thing I would like to mention is Thomas’s conversion, which he once told me about. I do not mean his conversion to Catholicism, but the prior conversion that eventually led him to Catholicism. This first conversion was his turning to God. He described it as a sudden awareness that descended on him out of the blue while he was walking down a street in New York one day. This awareness, he told me, was the conviction that “it was all true,” and that therefore God was the most important thing in his life. As he recounted the story, I was reminded of the famous account of C. S. Lewis in his autobiography Surprised by Joy of his own unlikely and unexpected conversion, the sudden influx of grace that happened to him while seated on a bus in Oxford. Grace comes when least expected.

We are all deeply saddened by the loss of this dear man and good friend. But we are not without hope, as Paul tells us. From that perspective it seems to me very fitting that Thomas died on the Feast of the Transfiguration, the day that reminds us that we too are being transformed from glory to glory after the image of Jesus. Thomas’s transformation is now complete, so that despite our sorrow we can rejoice with him, as he hears said to him, “Well done, good and faithful servant.”

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My purpose here is not to try to survey the history of Lumen Christi and the great debt it owes to Thomas Levergood, but to offer some reflections on Thomas the person. Of course, it is not fully possible to separate Thomas the person from Thomas the leader of the institute. This is the case, I believe, because Thomas looked on his work for the Lumen Christi Institute not as a job, but as a vocation in the old sense of a calling from God. As some of you may know, after his conversion to Catholicism Thomas several times experimented with the possibility of living a religious life. But he learned that religious life was not his vocation. I do not know when he may have come to see his work at Lumen Christi as a real vocation, but this is how I always perceived the dedication and single-mindedness he brought to all he did for Lumen Christi. When someone gives his all for a cause I think we are dealing with a vocation, especially when the cause is fundamentally religious.

The work of directing the institute called on many of the talents that Thomas possessed in an unusual degree. Of course, it demanded organizational skill—the ability to get things done. Thomas was, indeed, an organizer, especially in the early days of Lumen Christi, when there was a smaller staff. Nonetheless, I don’t think that the ability to organize was the greatest asset that Thomas brought to his unusual vocation. I would say that two qualities of Thomas that were far more important were, first, his talent as what we might call a “networker” and, second, a kind of visionary quality, an uncanny ability to discern issues, questions, and themes that intelligent Catholics needed to address. These issues were myriad, ranging across many disciplines: history, philosophy, theology, ethics, public policy, cultural issues, and so on. Thomas had some knowledge of many of these disciplines, not as an expert, but as a visionary “idea-man” who could spot things that needed to be addressed, whether in lectures, courses, conferences, panels, or whatever. Let me say a bit more about these two aspects of Thomas’s character.   

I have described Thomas as a “networker,” by which I mean someone who knows lots of people, who know other people, who know other people, so that a kind of network of human potential and interaction is established that can greatly assist in fostering the success of complex programs and initiatives. Successful networking demands not only accessibility and friendliness, but also skill at putting people at ease—talents that Thomas had in abundance. He could get things done because he knew the people who could do them, and he had the ability to convince those people to take up the task, even when they were perhaps initially hesitant. I think this is one of the sources of his noted success as a fundraiser, as well as his ability to find out what was going on in the often opaque circles of clerical politics. He did, I must say, often take delight in conveying to me tasty bits of clerical gossip.

I have used the word “visionary.” What I mean is a kind of discernment, a special insight into trends and issues in Catholic thought that need greater visibility, re-affirmation, and even reconsideration. Thomas had this ability to a truly remarkable degree. How often over the years I would get a call from him, outlining his plans for coming programs for Lumen Christi and asking me what I thought about them and who might be good people to contact to help in their implementation. Sometimes I was initially surprised by some of these endeavors, but on thinking about them, I almost always agreed that “this is, indeed, a good idea.” Often, of course, Thomas asked me to get involved and I think I almost always said yes with the conviction that I would be helping to spread Catholic wisdom in the academy and in the Church. It was also very hard to say no to Thomas. He was a great optimist, someone who conveyed a sense of benevolent conviction about the future that dragged along even pessimists like me.

I had a few personal talks with Thomas over the years, including one after his operation, when he spoke directly and candidly about the death he knew was approaching. Naturally, I can’t talk about these conversations in detail or with specificity. But there are two things that I believe I can say something about. Thomas, as I knew him, always displayed a sense of imperturbability and equanimity. He was not easily upset. This surface sense of untroubled calm, however, coexisted with some real interior trials, sufferings, and even crosses that he rarely talked about. Fortitude is one of the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit, and I think that Thomas had a great measure of the gift of fortitude that enabled him carry on his work in what must have often been trying moments. The last thing I would like to mention is Thomas’s conversion, which he once told me about. I do not mean his conversion to Catholicism, but the prior conversion that eventually led him to Catholicism. This first conversion was his turning to God. He described it as a sudden awareness that descended on him out of the blue while he was walking down a street in New York one day. This awareness, he told me, was the conviction that “it was all true,” and that therefore God was the most important thing in his life. As he recounted the story, I was reminded of the famous account of C. S. Lewis in his autobiography Surprised by Joy of his own unlikely and unexpected conversion, the sudden influx of grace that happened to him while seated on a bus in Oxford. Grace comes when least expected.

We are all deeply saddened by the loss of this dear man and good friend. But we are not without hope, as Paul tells us. From that perspective it seems to me very fitting that Thomas died on the Feast of the Transfiguration, the day that reminds us that we too are being transformed from glory to glory after the image of Jesus. Thomas’s transformation is now complete, so that despite our sorrow we can rejoice with him, as he hears said to him, “Well done, good and faithful servant.”

Commonweal Magazine

O’Neill integrates a legitimate role for religious discourse in public reasoning and rights rhetoric, moving beyond incommensurability battles of the recent past. He argues that well-formed religious narratives can ground respect and fund adherents’ moral imagination in applying and mobilizing to protect rights. He elaborates how his own Christian tradition’s contributions consist in calls to prophecy, forgiveness, and martyrdom. Countering tendencies to oppose secular and religious approaches, he demonstrates how religion can ground and interpret public reason. For example, he emphasizes how forgiveness is compatible with redress and reparations, rather than a form of “cheap forgetting,” for “mercy is not less than just.” He carefully yet unapologetically intertwines civic and religious narratives with the integrity of civil-rights era rhetoric. Bringing together religious discourse’s presumption of rights rhetoric with ethical discourse’s systemic imperatives for juridical protection, he reminds us that “public reason is thick before it is thin.” Whereas their compatibility is convincingly established, political co-optation of religious claims and the construal of rights-bearers in certain religious traditions may pose challenges to his inclusive vision that warrant further consideration.

Practical payoffs of O’Neill’s threefold framework of rights as narrative grammar emerge in his incisive applications to mass incarceration, the politics of immigration and refugee policy, and intergenerational responsibilities to the nonhuman world. There it becomes clear how victims’ own articulation of their rights can help redress the inadequacies of formal procedural reciprocity amid not only disparities in agency, but also distortions of social truth and ostensible consensus. Centering collective memory illuminates how rights play not only regulative roles, but also constructive and reconstructive ones, helping incorporate formerly excluded groups. O’Neill identifies enslaved, female, transgendered, and disabled voices among those “sidelined” who must redress our “moral myopia.” Too often, prevailing rights regimes have masked exclusionary dynamics, rationalized by beliefs about inherent difference or the criminalization of Black bodies and “illegal aliens.” As O’Neill puts it, in both instances the will to punish

remains a potent force in polities wherein social bonds are already frayed and violence is naturalized. In a perverse dialectic, vindictive resentment, especially against frightening symbols of difference, seems to have its own cathartic rationale: difference is feared and punished, reproducing (essentializing) the very difference we fear and consequently punish.

His own approach interrupts these cycles and offers structural remedies. For example, if forced migration is not a crisis to “manage” but a longer-term consequence of systemic rights denial, an internal rights regime must address its complex push factors beyond the well-founded fear of persecution, such as generalized violence, famine, and disease, as in Syria and Yemen. Its “perpetrators” bear correlative duties of making restitution and reparation, whether through resettlement quotas, more equitable sharing of responsibility, or juridical redress of gender-based violence. These welcome shifts reflect not only the broader perspectives signaled by the 2020 protests, but also attention in the social sciences, ethics, and the current papacy to influential structures, ideologies, and incentives. Emphases on the links between exploitative structures and rights violations in Evangelii gaudium and Fratelli tutti are ecclesial advances in this vein; in a sense, the foundations of the intergenerational solidarity that Pope Francis calls for in Laudato si’ are theorized in O’Neill’s applications as well.

Throughout his analysis, O’Neill regularly turns readers’ attention to concrete voices and faces. Reflecting upon the Lucan parable of the forgiven woman, O’Neill contrasts the Pharisee’s retributive “moral squint” with Jesus’s restorative one by attending to her in her concrete particularity as the genuine host: “‘Do you see this woman?’ She is not a figure or cipher of transgression in this house of murmuring men, but this woman, who loves so richly, whose faith is saving, who leaves with the blessing of divine šālôm.” Taken together, O’Neill’s emphases on testimonies as constitutive of rights talk, and on unexpected voices (the woman who “loves enough to brave the censoring gaze, to see only Jesus,” the Samaritan who invites us to “take the victim’s side” as our own) as constitutive of solidarity provide an illuminating “pedagogy of seeing,” à la the Cameroonian sociologist and theologian Jean-Marc Éla.

Emerging threats to the rhetorical practices he prioritizes—whether from surveillance capitalism, “post-truth” epistemic entitlement claims, or the distractions and distortions of social media— remain troublesome. Yet O’Neill advances tools to expose and counter new risks. Prioritizing marginalized voices and truth-telling may be more important than ever, given the current landscape. O’Neill sounds a characteristic note of humility as he wraps up his book, suggesting it offers but a “flawed, humble beginning, more abandoned than finished.” Nevertheless, this ambitious and generative work is likely to shape human-rights discourse and practice for many years to come.

Reimagining Human Rights
Religion and the Common Good
William O’Neill, SJ
Georgetown University Press
$44.95 | 264 pp.

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As for critics of Douthat’s column, they were impatient with his uncertainties about the Church’s future. He needs to “read the room,” wrote one. “Like it or not, the young people will ultimately lead.” Christ “broke all the rules,” and so—when it comes to the Church’s traditional teachings and organization—should Pope Francis. The answer to the Church’s problems is to “truly modernize.” That perspective was echoed by another letter writer, who praised the pope for “returning the church to a proper imitation of the Jesus of the New Testament Scriptures and to His simple, yet profound message of faith and forgiveness of all.” Somehow, this letter writer lamented, that message “has morphed over time into a deeply flawed institution weaned on formalism, ideological rigidity and careerism.” With the exception of one Latin Mass enthusiast and another writer who was piously confident of the Church’s future, the consensus was that the Church needs to be simplified and modernized. “There should no longer be a privileged class of male-only celibate priesthood,” wrote a former priest. “Such a class is too susceptible to self-deception and hubris.”

Bare ruined choirs indeed. There was, alas, nothing surprising in these letters to the editor. It is increasingly the conviction of many Catholics and non-Catholics alike that the Church is a seriously and perhaps irredeemably flawed institution. The ugly reality of clerical sex abuse understandably influences that judgment. But this critique of the Church’s “message” is much older than the abuse scandals. The Church’s hierarchical structure, teachings on sexual morality, and its supposed “magical thinking” have long placed Catholicism at odds with some elements of modernity and the so-called scientific age. What is usually neglected in these critiques is how the Church’s quarrels with science and democracy have been, for the most part, fruitfully resolved. More theological questions remain unresolved. For example, is Jesus’s “message” really as simple as many now seem to believe? Is it really only about forgiveness? What about Jesus’s “hard sayings” and the seemingly impossible demands he placed on his disciples? “But Jesus looked at them and said to them, ‘With men this is impossible, but with God all things are possible’” (Matthew 19:26). Jesus also claimed to be the Son of God; that proclamation hardly seems simple to me. Has the Church been wrong in its interpretation of the meaning of those words in its Creeds and Trinitarian theology? Jesus’s disciples claimed that he rose from the dead, and that those who believe in him will do so as well. That promise certainly breaks all the rules, but probably not the rules the Times’s letter writer had in mind. Yet that promise—what some would call “magical thinking”—has given the Church its purpose and distinctive character since its improbable founding.

If the Church’s critics, or even its defenders, remain focused on its putative usefulness only in the here and now, they’ve missed the point, as Douthat explained in a subsequent column (“A Guide to Finding Faith”). Our secular, materialistic, and utilitarian assumptions about what is real and what is useful blind us to other possible realities, and leave many unbelievers alienated and mistrustful. Those assumptions are “like a spell that’s been cast over modern minds, and the fastest way to become religious is to break it,” Douthat wrote. Breaking this spell isn’t easy—as the letters to the Times demonstrate. But there is a rich and varied universe of religious experience available, if we are willing to look at the world with that exemplary modern attitude: an open mind.

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All well and good. Who can say with certainty what will rekindle Eucharistic faith? Or, in O’Malley’s terms, what will create “Eucharistic cultures”? He too speaks of a needed “revival,” but one that will “assess, promote, and develop” such cultures within existing structures rather than by adding a movement or grand event. (Aren’t the “cultures” of successful marriages based on patterns of daily living rather than periodic anniversary celebrations?)

My own view is that we should just begin with O’Malley’s first verb in that series: “assess.” The bishops should focus their intelligence and energy on undertaking “a process of self-examination” and outlining ways and standards by which parishes, dioceses, and, I would add, other Catholic organizations might assess their existing Eucharistic cultures. I can imagine all sorts of ways: surveys of pastors and parishioners, focus groups, visiting diocesan teams that actually observed Sunday liturgies and inquired into their impact on other parish and parishioner activities. It would be closer to what was sketched in the strategic plan’s run-up to a Eucharistic Congress: the thorough-going reevaluation of all “activities from the celebration of the Mass and the preaching of a homily to its ministries, social programs, evangelization of the unaffiliated, and advocacy in the public square.” The bishops could create a menu of possibilities for identifying strengths (“best practices for parish renewal”) and weaknesses, especially in regard to disaffiliation. That would be the initial step toward a multi-faceted, multi-year pastoral strategy. 

As for the separate task of addressing abortion, the bishops very much need a guiding document—for themselves, for the Church, for the public. It is not something they can accomplish, as the present timeline proposes, in five months. No need to rush. The moral, legal, political, and ecclesiastical issues surrounding abortion are not going away. They will not be resolved by a possible Supreme Court decision reversing or modifying Roe v. Wade or Planned Parenthood v. Casey. That will merely initiate a new chapter of public conflict. Nor will these issues be resolved by the current occupant of the White House or his successors. If they will be resolved at all, it will be only by a shift in the culture, which suggests the importance of what the bishops might say—and why they should take time and care in saying it. 

The bishops’ model should be their drafting of pastoral letters in the 1980s, written in the spirit of being both a learning Church and a teaching Church. Choosing that model demands a prior decision. Do the bishops want to make a lasting contribution to moral and social struggles over abortion? Do they want to persuade and not just (futilely) command? Do they want truly to teach and not simply display their credentials to appease the current watchdogs of orthodoxy? 

To prepare their pastoral letters on nuclear defense (1983) and economic justice (1986) and the abandoned letter on women’s issues (1988–92), the bishops invited representatives from a wide range of perspectives, as well as from the pews, to testify before their drafting committees. Today, for example, no bishop—certainly no bishop involved in drafting a document—should imagine addressing abortion effectively without having his beliefs tested against the reasoning of the most thoughtful leading exponents of pro-choice positions. 

Likewise, no bishop should hope to contribute constructively without familiarizing himself with “How Americans Understand Abortion,” a Notre Dame–sponsored sociological study (again by the McGrath Institute) that conducted in-depth interviews with a representative microcosm of 217 ordinary Americans (21 percent Catholic). This study shows how poorly served we are by opinion surveys and political labels—and how distant the thinking of ordinary people about abortion is from the disciplined reasoning of thoughtful exponents on either side of the debate. Most Americans, the study found, avoid talking or thinking much about abortion. Their views on it are largely personal rather than political, often emotional, often inconsistent, frequently poorly informed, even about biology, and generally shaped more by the context of the pregnancy than the question of fetal life. The study provides valuable insights into how moral reasoning occurs in the minds of ordinary people rather than in seminary texts and philosophical classics, insights that could help the bishops frame the Church’s teaching in an effective manner. “How Americans Understand Abortion” suggests the need for what would be considered pre-theological or pre-philosophical discussion. Given the contextual character of much thinking about abortion, the study also suggests how disastrous it would be to mix anything that could be perceived as partisan politics with a moral argument.

A drafting committee of bishops determined to learn as well as teach could hear and question the sociologists who conducted this study, encouraging other bishops to read it themselves. Out of curiosity, I sent emails to the communications offices of nine out of the ten bishops on the USCCB’s Pro-Life Activities Committee explaining that I was interested in the study and asking if they were familiar with it and might have observations on it. Two replied through their communications directors. They were not familiar with the study and did not want to comment until seeing the draft of the letter planned for the conference’s November meeting. The others did not reply. I did not attempt the same inquiry with the members of the Doctrinal Committee, who will be writing the draft. 

Would such “hearings,” like those conducted for the pastoral letters in the 1980s, be irrelevant to what is a clear Church teaching about abortion and possibly even erode it? No more than the testimony solicited by the bishops who drafted the pastoral letter on nuclear defense was irrelevant to the Church’s just-war theory or undermined it. On the contrary, such hearings would make clear what questions the Church’s case for the sacredness of all human life had to answer and where that case can and cannot find support in ordinary Americans’ profound ambivalence about abortion.   

Such a drafting process would also make clear the dangers of a document like the recent pastoral letter on abortion from Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone of San Francisco. That letter begins with brief assertions of principle capped by an illustration of “what really happens in the ‘termination of a pregnancy,’ how violent it is.” There follows a gruesomely detailed description of the dismembering of “a 24-week old unborn baby.” Give the letter credit for acknowledging the late stage of this abortion, but not for neglecting to mention that most abortions take place at a much earlier point and are nothing at all like this. One can be morally horrified by the deliberate destruction of an unborn life at any stage and still feel emotionally manipulated and deceived by this grisly illustration. One wants to ascribe the choice to ignorance rather than dishonesty, but it would not go unnoticed in any document from the bishops.        

The bishops’ objective, obviously, would be to make as clear and convincing a case as possible for the protection of unborn human lives. Their hope would be not only to reinforce this conviction among Catholics but also to persuade all Americans. Of course, that is not about to happen in the near future, and it is hard to believe the bishops don’t recognize that. If Roe and Casey were reversed, the backlash would simply move to states and localities. So while the Church strives to make its case by word and witness, what do the bishops urge for the meantime? 

The question has three dimensions. What should the Church do within its own ranks? What should the Church ask of public policy? What should the Church seek by way of legal prohibition? 

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All well and good. Who can say with certainty what will rekindle Eucharistic faith? Or, in O’Malley’s terms, what will create “Eucharistic cultures”? He too speaks of a needed “revival,” but one that will “assess, promote, and develop” such cultures within existing structures rather than by adding a movement or grand event. (Aren’t the “cultures” of successful marriages based on patterns of daily living rather than periodic anniversary celebrations?)

My own view is that we should just begin with O’Malley’s first verb in that series: “assess.” The bishops should focus their intelligence and energy on undertaking “a process of self-examination” and outlining ways and standards by which parishes, dioceses, and, I would add, other Catholic organizations might assess their existing Eucharistic cultures. I can imagine all sorts of ways: surveys of pastors and parishioners, focus groups, visiting diocesan teams that actually observed Sunday liturgies and inquired into their impact on other parish and parishioner activities. It would be closer to what was sketched in the strategic plan’s run-up to a Eucharistic Congress: the thorough-going reevaluation of all “activities from the celebration of the Mass and the preaching of a homily to its ministries, social programs, evangelization of the unaffiliated, and advocacy in the public square.” The bishops could create a menu of possibilities for identifying strengths (“best practices for parish renewal”) and weaknesses, especially in regard to disaffiliation. That would be the initial step toward a multi-faceted, multi-year pastoral strategy. 

As for the separate task of addressing abortion, the bishops very much need a guiding document—for themselves, for the Church, for the public. It is not something they can accomplish, as the present timeline proposes, in five months. No need to rush. The moral, legal, political, and ecclesiastical issues surrounding abortion are not going away. They will not be resolved by a possible Supreme Court decision reversing or modifying Roe v. Wade or Planned Parenthood v. Casey. That will merely initiate a new chapter of public conflict. Nor will these issues be resolved by the current occupant of the White House or his successors. If they will be resolved at all, it will be only by a shift in the culture, which suggests the importance of what the bishops might say—and why they should take time and care in saying it. 

The bishops’ model should be their drafting of pastoral letters in the 1980s, written in the spirit of being both a learning Church and a teaching Church. Choosing that model demands a prior decision. Do the bishops want to make a lasting contribution to moral and social struggles over abortion? Do they want to persuade and not just (futilely) command? Do they want truly to teach and not simply display their credentials to appease the current watchdogs of orthodoxy? 

To prepare their pastoral letters on nuclear defense (1983) and economic justice (1986) and the abandoned letter on women’s issues (1988–92), the bishops invited representatives from a wide range of perspectives, as well as from the pews, to testify before their drafting committees. Today, for example, no bishop—certainly no bishop involved in drafting a document—should imagine addressing abortion effectively without having his beliefs tested against the reasoning of the most thoughtful leading exponents of pro-choice positions. 

Likewise, no bishop should hope to contribute constructively without familiarizing himself with “How Americans Understand Abortion,” a sociological study also sponsored by Notre Dame’s McGrath Institute. A team of researchers led by Tricia Bruce conducted in-depth interviews with a representative microcosm of 217 ordinary Americans (21 percent Catholic). This study shows how poorly served we are by opinion surveys and political labels—and how distant the thinking of ordinary people about abortion is from the disciplined reasoning of thoughtful exponents on either side of the debate. Most Americans, the study found, avoid talking or thinking much about abortion. Their views on it are largely personal rather than political, often emotional, often inconsistent, frequently poorly informed, even about biology, and generally shaped more by the context of the pregnancy than the question of fetal life. The study provides valuable insights into how moral reasoning occurs in the minds of ordinary people rather than in seminary texts and philosophical classics, insights that could help the bishops frame the Church’s teaching in an effective manner. “How Americans Understand Abortion” suggests the need for what would be considered pre-theological or pre-philosophical discussion. Given the contextual character of much thinking about abortion, the study also suggests how disastrous it would be to mix anything that could be perceived as partisan politics with a moral argument.

A drafting committee of bishops determined to learn as well as teach could hear and question the sociologists who conducted this study, encouraging other bishops to read it themselves. Out of curiosity, I sent emails to the communications offices of nine out of the ten bishops on the USCCB’s Pro-Life Activities Committee explaining that I was interested in the study and asking if they were familiar with it and might have observations on it. Two replied through their communications directors. They were not familiar with the study and did not want to comment until seeing the draft of the letter planned for the conference’s November meeting. The others did not reply. I did not attempt the same inquiry with the members of the Doctrinal Committee, who will be writing the draft. 

Would such “hearings,” like those conducted for the pastoral letters in the 1980s, be irrelevant to what is a clear Church teaching about abortion and possibly even erode it? No more than the testimony solicited by the bishops who drafted the pastoral letter on nuclear defense was irrelevant to the Church’s just-war theory or undermined it. On the contrary, such hearings would make clear what questions the Church’s case for the sacredness of all human life had to answer and where that case can and cannot find support in ordinary Americans’ profound ambivalence about abortion.   

Such a drafting process would also make clear the dangers of a document like the recent pastoral letter on abortion from Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone of San Francisco. That letter begins with brief assertions of principle capped by an illustration of “what really happens in the ‘termination of a pregnancy,’ how violent it is.” There follows a gruesomely detailed description of the dismembering of “a 24-week old unborn baby.” Give the letter credit for acknowledging the late stage of this abortion, but not for neglecting to mention that most abortions take place at a much earlier point and are nothing at all like this. One can be morally horrified by the deliberate destruction of an unborn life at any stage and still feel emotionally manipulated and deceived by this grisly illustration. One wants to ascribe the choice to ignorance rather than dishonesty, but it would not go unnoticed in any document from the bishops.        

The bishops’ objective, obviously, would be to make as clear and convincing a case as possible for the protection of unborn human lives. Their hope would be not only to reinforce this conviction among Catholics but also to persuade all Americans. Of course, that is not about to happen in the near future, and it is hard to believe the bishops don’t recognize that. If Roe and Casey were reversed, the backlash would simply move to states and localities. So while the Church strives to make its case by word and witness, what do the bishops urge for the meantime? 

The question has three dimensions. What should the Church do within its own ranks? What should the Church ask of public policy? What should the Church seek by way of legal prohibition? 

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But the inadequacies of Latin were just the tip of the iceberg. The anonymous priest devoted an entire essay to the inadequacy of Catholic school education at precisely the time there was a great boom in the building of new Catholic schools and churches. “Indeed the sisters, who are ninety percent of the Catholic teachers, are devoted and zealous in their work,” Anonymous writes. “There is nothing else but goodness and virtue in their penitential lives. Freely and gladly they expend themselves for the little ones of Christ. The more the pity, since they are unfitted for the work.”

Even in the 1920s, it was obvious that the nuns were charged with preparing children for a life with which the nuns themselves were unfamiliar because of their rule of life. “Those who have renounced all family ties would teach the young to become the fathers and mothers of future generations,” he writes. And the system of education they imposed “tends to depersonize [sic] the pupils—to create revulsion for religion within them.” The end result was a people self-ostracized. “Our children may not sit in the classroom with the children of the unorthodox. We must have our own schools, our own charities, our own graveyards. We are the modern Pharisees who will not sit with the publicans. We may thank our own aloofness for it. The spirit of segregation is diametrically opposed to the spirit of Christ. It was His aim to eliminate the narrowness from His people.”

He attributes much of this narrowness to the clericalism fostered by the mandatory celibacy of the clergy. Priestly celibacy is the great paradox of Catholicism, he laments. “The Church insists upon the supreme importance of family life. Her priests are exhorted to be moral patterns for the people. It is not, then, a question why priests do not marry. The great problem is, Does a bachelor priesthood fit into the scheme of the modern world? Not only the lay mind, but that of many a cleric, pauses to reflect upon this grave issue.” While pointing out how little support for mandatory celibacy is actually found in the Gospels or the early Church, he notes, “Be that as it may, the rule of celibacy is taught in all its force today.”

The roots of clericalism are planted deep in the training seminarians receive. “Always the priesthood is glorified. The students must listen daily to pious discourses on the high dignity to which they aspire. From this continual preachment a peculiar psychology is developed in them. They become jealous of the high honors for which they are being groomed. They feel constrained to become champions of the priestly dignity. They grow impatient when confronted with the opinions of those who have not been trained in the sacred science. In this frame of mind they go out into the modern world to become leaders of men.”

Nowhere is the inadequacy of seminary training more pronounced, he believes, than in the confessional when the priest is faced with the struggles of married couples. There he is expected to pass judgment on the most intimate relations of connubial life. “Of this he knows nothing save that which he has read in his ancient textbooks. He, a celibate, must solve the intricate problems of sex.”

Even if he wants to, a priest cannot recommend to his parishioners that they think for themselves about what the Pope John XXIII would later call “the signs of the times.” “Though a heart of gold beat in his bosom, [the priest] must still stand before his people in the guise of a medieval pedagogue. To be true to his trust he must be a reactionary. He must preach and interpret the teachings of Christ according to the minds of men who never dreamed of an age or a country like this in which we live. His every public expression must conform to the minds of those savants, mostly Italian, who have grouped themselves about the Vatican.”

According to Anonymous, the utter lack of participation or engagement on the part of the people in the pews inevitably leads to moral and spiritual ossification. “Self delusion is pathetic in its relation to the individual and tragic when it entails such consequences to the human race. The fact is that the Catholic Church has never sought to develop intelligent faith. The Church has never encouraged religious thought in the individual Catholic. She demands abject intellectual submission to her teachings. Alleged explanations of doctrine are nothing else than controversial arguments. These too are to be accepted in the humility of obedience due to authority. The intellectual coercion practiced in the Church today is just as debasing to human dignity as was the physical coercion which the Church practiced in the Middle Ages.”

In the end, the priest warns, if the bishops are to “convert America to the faith,” they must first return to the ancient Christian emphasis on virtuous behavior rather than adherence to ritual formalism. “They must rear a people distinguished by the virtue of their lives. Attendance at Mass and reception of the Sacraments are salutary practices, according to our belief. Yet they do not impress the outside world. Men to-day are not deceived by the crowds that frequent our churches. There is but one quality that proves the excellence of a religion. It is the excellence of the lives lived by its devotees. When the American bishops cease their school-building crusade and begin the work of developing Christian character, there will be hope for the Church in America.”

As bleak as things looked to the good father back in 1928, I find his words now inspiring, precisely because they come from an era that today’s reactionaries yearn to return to, blind as they are to the deficiencies of the religious formalism they idolize. This contemporaneous account of that era reminds us just how important the reforms of the past hundred years have been to ordinary Catholics.

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The Archdiocese of Atlanta officially welcomed the faithful back to Mass for the Feast of Pentecost on May 22. The Catholic Conference of Ohio declared that “the general obligation to attend Mass on Sundays and Holy Days of Obligation” would resume throughout the state the weekend of June 6. Pennsylvania’s dioceses announced in July that the general dispensation would expire in time for the Feast of the Assumption on August 15.

Meanwhile, on June 30, New York’s Cardinal Timothy Dolan wrote a letter to his own flock explaining why no similar announcement was forthcoming: “Here in the Archdiocese of New York, there has never been a dispensation from Sunday Mass, because no man can ‘dispense’ or set aside a Divine (as opposed to man-made) law.” He explained that the Third Commandment, which requires believers to keep the Sabbath holy, makes it impossible for him to dispense with the Sunday obligation, adding, “to deliberately miss Mass is a sin.”

Dolan’s claim that a bishop is never able to issue a dispensation from the obligation to attend Mass is difficult to reconcile with the fact that bishops across the country, and in dioceses neighboring New York, did exactly that in March 2020. Cardinal Dolan surely knows this; in fact, as the metropolitan archbishop of the region, he has a responsibility to know it. What must those other bishops think of his accusing them of disregard for the Commandments? What are we lay people to think?

“Of course,” Dolan goes on, “the Church has always held that there may be some justifiable reasons why a person can miss Mass, including old age, illness, and infirmity; this is still the case.” Yes, and the point of issuing a general dispensation is to confirm that such a justification exists for everyone in a given diocese. It is a pastoral response to an acute threat to the well-being of a community, like a blizzard, a hurricane, or a deadly communicable disease.

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The third step of Friedman’s argument focuses on a transformation of Scottish Calvinism. British Protestantism generated the Westminster Confession (1646), which affirmed the basics of classic Calvinist theology: the total depravity of human nature after the Fall and God’s predestination of each individual, such that a life of sin could not cause the damnation of one who before birth was chosen for salvation, nor could a life of virtue save another who was not.

The late seventeenth-century Dutch theologian Jacob Arminius began a shift within Calvinism by proposing that an act of human will was involved in receiving God’s undeserved grace: one of the elect could reject God’s plan for his salvation. Friedman precisely traces these debates, interwoven with irruptions in British political history. The upshot was that eighteenth-century Scottish Calvinist intellectuals came to endorse three new ideas: the natural goodness of man, the efficacy of human freedom, and human happiness as a goal of creation, along with the glorification of God.

The final step of this argument is that Adam Smith was influenced by this neo-Calvinist worldview even though he didn’t share it. Smith said almost nothing about his own religious beliefs. The few scattered references to a higher being in his writings indicate that he was at most a Deist. His best friend, David Hume, was openly disdainful of religious faith, a fact that kept him from ever holding a faculty appointment.

The influence of neo-Calvinism on Smith’s worldview occurred, Friedman argues, because of the integration in Smith’s day of all the strands of intellectual life that are now kept separate in the various disciplinary departments of a modern university. Educated men from all walks of life used to meet together weekly over early afternoon “dinner” in social clubs. Smith was a founding member of the most prestigious of these in Edinburgh, the Select Society, which included Hume, but also five Church of Scotland ministers. Conversations at such dining clubs were wide-ranging and, Friedman argues, Smith would undoubtedly have been part of the lively discussions going on about shifts in the prevailing theology. Religious confidence in the effects of human efforts for self-improvement was in the air. As Friedman puts it, “Smith and his contemporaries were secularizing the essential substance of their clerical friends’ theological principles.”

The remainder of Religion and the Rise of Capitalism focuses on issues in the United States, tracing similar trends in Calvinist thinking and the influence of religion on economics. It is well known to historians but not to many others (including economists) that most of the founders of the American Economic Association were committed Christians aiming to implement the Social Gospel in economic life. Today, the 23,000-member AEA is thoroughly secular. As Thomas Kuhn pointed out, mature sciences have well-developed paradigms and are rarely influenced substantially by outside intellectual forces. Friedman recounts a fascinating history of the American debate on the economic implications of Christian faith that I don’t have the space to summarize here.

Friedman concludes with the shift in the United States from a nineteenth-century identification of much of Christianity with progressive economic policies to the post–World War II alliance between conservative Christianity and conservative economic policies. He explains how, for example, so many ordinary citizens today with no hope of leaving a bequest to their own children nevertheless oppose inheritance taxes on the wealthy.

This is an excellent book, destined to be discussed widely. Friedman’s claim about Adam Smith is that “the time was ripe for new thinking on self-interest,” and religious developments were part of that ripening. The evidence for this influence of religion on the father of modern economics is, admittedly, circumstantial. But, of course, this is what makes Freidman’s claim so impressive. If there were textual evidence for it, someone would have made the argument a century ago.

The synthesis that Friedman attributes to Smith may be grander than Smith himself was aware of. In the chapter where Smith argues that self-love motivates the daily economic services offered by butchers and bakers, he does not claim that competition will protect the consumer from their greed. Friedman makes this claim for him—as I do each time I teach the history of economics—and the claim is central to any moral approval of the market system. But we do need to ask why Smith doesn’t bother to say this.

Three hundred pages later, Smith observes that “the freer and more general the competition,” the greater will be “the advantage to the public.” But this occurs as the final sentence of a forty-page chapter on money and banking, which isn’t the place to catch the reader’s attention concerning the larger question. We may have to admit that despite our interest in the moral legitimation of the market system, and the importance of competition for that purpose, it just wasn’t a significant concern for Smith himself.

Friedman’s account of developments in Protestant theology is deft and precise. Catholic readers will recognize in it a move away from some of the fundamentals of the Protestant Reformation back toward a Catholic view of creation, personhood, and grace. Those familiar with Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age will enjoy Friedman’s analysis of the shifts in Calvinism as part of the long road to today’s secular individualism that Taylor outlines from the twelfth century onward.

This is a pathbreaking book. It will satisfy those interested in the role of religion in the modern world as well as those who simply want to better understand the history of ideas that have brought us to where we are today. Friedman has done both religion and economics a great service.

Religion and the Rise of Capitalism
Benjamen M. Friedman
Knopf
$37.50 | 560 pp.

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Rebel Hearts portrays the community pitted against McIntyre, who was a runner on the New York Stock exchange before he entered the priesthood and brought Wall Street savvy with him to Los Angeles, overseeing unprecedented growth in Catholic parochial and high-school enrollment. The IHMs provided the greater portion of his teachers. A cheap and, McIntyre must have supposed, docile workforce, they frequently taught seventy or eighty children in each classroom. The majority of women had neither training nor experience. Says one sister, all they felt was defeat. “I think Cardinal McIntyre saw women, at least nuns, as coolie labor for his schools,” one sister remarks, as a cartoon image of nuns placed on a conveyor belt, like so many mass-produced dolls, takes over the screen. “We realized that our labor problem was at the root of everything else…. I can hear the cardinal telling us you aren’t going to tell me how to run my schools,” another remembers. The women stood firm for better working conditions, including smaller class sizes and greater institutional support, feeding the anger of their boss.

A different spirit, one of mutual support and open inquiry, reigned at the sisters’ Immaculate Heart College, whose all-female professoriate had more degrees than all the priests in the diocese of Los Angeles, and who took up their task as researchers and educators with a confidence and ambition that threatened the clergy. Photographs and film capture classrooms crammed with tools of investigation and creation—scientific apparatuses, books, musical instruments, paintbrushes—conveying the exuberance that accompanies the love of learning, which the sisters cultivated and which fed the community’s devotional life. Students and teachers collaborated to replace staid Mary’s Day processions with a boisterous paean to her role in recreation. “God Likes Me,” a hot-pink lettered sign proclaims. “Peace, Peace, Peace,” reads another, as women in full habit and crowned with wreaths of flowers strum guitars alongside their students, dressed in bursting purples, blues, and yellows and waving giant paper sunflowers, all jostling for our attention against a southern California landscape of palms and pines, together proclaiming the grandeur of creation and celebrating human creativity.

“In those days, I was surrounded by some of the best women you could ever meet…. I’m sure if I had been a nice proper housewife I would not have bumped into any of these ideas,” says Corita Kent, Caspary’s contemporary and the community’s most well-known member, who taught her students to scout supermarkets for source material, to mine for meaning in everyday banality, and to wonder at the hidden gems of L.A.’s landscape, littered with gas stations and garages. Although the Los Angeles Times hailed Kent as one of its 1966 “Women of the Year,” and Newsweek featured her on its cover—“the nun going modern”—in 1967, she was overshadowed in art by big boys such as Andy Warhol and Robert Indiana. “Mary Mother is the juiciest tomato of all,” her take on the Del Monte slogan, is a one-upping of Warhol’s Campbell Soup canvasses, a text-heavy offering for ecclesial renewal, a silkscreen in red, yellow, orange, and white. The piece was a breaking point for McIntyre, its mingling of the mundane and the holy an affront to his more tidily organized sensibility. “You will suffer” for this, he promises the congregation, one of the several hold-your-breath moments this film provides. 

Energized by a growing attentiveness to the world around them, the sisters took their enthusiasm for engaging with it outside the college. A clip captures them dancing with their students among the stars on Hollywood Boulevard. “Perhaps everything terrible,” one of Kent’s silkscreens reads, quoting Rilke, “is in its deepest being something that wants help from us.” She and her sisters responded to contemporary demands for justice by marching in Selma in 1965, protesting the war in Vietnam, and linking arms with California farmworkers. The “college always provided an alternative education,” we hear one sister say, “but it was the years ’63 to ’70 where everything was popping.” Catholics more tightly bound to the trappings of tradition began keeping their daughters away from the college. The film only hints at the larger Los Angeles Catholic context of the sisters’ activism and the political engagement the IHMs inspired. A National Catholic Reporter article suggests the power of the sisters’ words and example. Sue Welsh, a graduate of the Immaculate Heart College and one of many who decried McIntyre’s racist disregard for his Black parishioners, recalls her involvement with Catholics for Racial Equality: “We had marches, sit-ins, and even a torch-light procession in front of the cardinal’s home.… After I appeared on the NBC news that night, they sent two priests to my house looking for me. It was crazy. They called us communists and outside agitators from their pulpits. We were just putting into action what we learned from Catholic schools.”

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Rebel Hearts portrays the community pitted against McIntyre, who was a runner on the New York Stock exchange before he entered the priesthood and brought Wall Street savvy with him to Los Angeles, overseeing unprecedented growth in Catholic parochial and high-school enrollment. The IHMs provided the greater portion of his teachers. A cheap and, McIntyre must have supposed, docile workforce, they frequently taught seventy or eighty children in each classroom. The majority of women had neither training nor experience. Says one sister, all they felt was defeat. “I think Cardinal McIntyre saw women, at least nuns, as coolie labor for his schools,” one sister remarks, as a cartoon image of nuns placed on a conveyor belt, like so many mass-produced dolls, takes over the screen. “We realized that our labor problem was at the root of everything else…. I can hear the cardinal telling us you aren’t going to tell me how to run my schools,” another remembers. The women stood firm for better working conditions, including smaller class sizes and greater institutional support, feeding the anger of their boss.

A different spirit, one of mutual support and open inquiry, reigned at the sisters’ Immaculate Heart College, whose all-female professoriate had more degrees than all the priests in the diocese of Los Angeles, and who took up their task as researchers and educators with a confidence and ambition that threatened the clergy. Photographs and film capture classrooms crammed with tools of investigation and creation—scientific apparatuses, books, musical instruments, paintbrushes—conveying the exuberance that accompanies the love of learning, which the sisters cultivated and which fed the community’s devotional life. Students and teachers collaborated to replace staid Mary’s Day processions with a boisterous paean to her role in recreation. “God Likes Me,” a hot-pink lettered sign proclaims. “Peace, Peace, Peace,” reads another, as women in full habit and crowned with wreaths of flowers strum guitars alongside their students, dressed in bursting purples, blues, and yellows and waving giant paper sunflowers, all jostling for our attention against a southern California landscape of palms and pines, together proclaiming the grandeur of creation and celebrating human creativity.

“In those days, I was surrounded by some of the best women you could ever meet…. I’m sure if I had been a nice proper housewife I would not have bumped into any of these ideas,” says Corita Kent, Caspary’s contemporary and the community’s most well-known member, who taught her students to scout supermarkets for source material, to mine for meaning in everyday banality, and to wonder at the hidden gems of L.A.’s landscape, littered with gas stations and garages. Although the Los Angeles Times hailed Kent as one of its 1966 “Women of the Year,” and Newsweek featured her on its cover—“the nun going modern”—in 1967, she was overshadowed in art by big boys such as Andy Warhol and Robert Indiana. “Mary Mother is the juiciest tomato of all,” her take on the Del Monte slogan, is a one-upping of Warhol’s Campbell Soup canvasses, a text-heavy offering for ecclesial renewal, a silkscreen in red, yellow, orange, and white. The piece was a breaking point for McIntyre, its mingling of the mundane and the holy an affront to his more tidily organized sensibility. “You will suffer” for this, he promises the congregation, one of the several hold-your-breath moments this film provides. 

Energized by a growing attentiveness to the world around them, the sisters took their enthusiasm for engaging with it outside the college. A clip captures them dancing with their students among the stars on Hollywood Boulevard. “Perhaps everything terrible,” one of Kent’s silkscreens reads, quoting Rilke, “is in its deepest being something that wants help from us.” She and her sisters responded to contemporary demands for justice by marching in Selma in 1965, protesting the war in Vietnam, and linking arms with California farmworkers. The “college always provided an alternative education,” we hear one sister say, “but it was the years ’63 to ’70 where everything was popping.” Catholics more tightly bound to the trappings of tradition began keeping their daughters away from the college. The film only hints at the larger Los Angeles Catholic context of the sisters’ activism and the political engagement the IHMs inspired. A National Catholic Reporter article suggests the power of the sisters’ words and example. Sue Walsh, a graduate of the Immaculate Heart College and one of many who decried McIntyre’s racist disregard for his Black parishioners, recalls her involvement with Catholics for Racial Equality: “We had marches, sit-ins, and even a torch-light procession in front of the cardinal’s home.… After I appeared on the NBC news that night, they sent two priests to my house looking for me. It was crazy. They called us communists and outside agitators from their pulpits. We were just putting into action what we learned from Catholic schools.”

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Indeed, the real question is who will lead Italy once the Right presumably recaptures power: Matteo Salvini’s League (formerly the Northern League), a local autonomist party that has adopted nationalism, or Giorgia Meloni’s Fratelli d’Italia, which gathers former fascists, nationalists, clericalists, small-business owners, and rentiers. Both Meloni and Salvini compete for the approval of figures like Hungary’s Viktor Orbán and other neo-nationalist Europeans. Both are sympathetic to anti-vaxxers and have long stoked fears over immigration, Islam, and European elites. But Meloni is a more disciplined politician than Salvini, and would be Italy’s first female national leader if victorious. She cultivates the sympathies of Italian clericalists, but without Salvini’s crass displays of devotion (crucifixes, rosaries, and a well-publicized trip to Fatima in May 2021); she is also less coarse than Salvini in her criticism of Pope Francis’s position on immigration. Meloni’s platform can be summed up as “God, fatherland, family”: Italians-first nationalism and culture-war Catholicism, aligned not just with Orbán, but also with the anti-liberal parties in Poland and other European countries, the Likud in Israel, and Trumpism in the United States. She is better equipped than Salvini to bring Italy into the global neo-nationalist community.

What all Italians seem to agree on is that the country needs to rethink its economy and address a host of pressing financial challenges, including a staggering national debt and the future of social security. It can no longer be so dependent on tourism—the pandemic proved that—and it must make wiser use of EU grants and subsidies. Far less clear is what the country should do in terms of foreign policy. In seeking to distance Italy from the EU, the Conte government made haphazard overtures to Russia and China, but its actual strategy (to the extent there was one) was never clear. Draghi has returned Italy to alignment with the EU and alliance with the United States but the uncertainty of traditional American hegemony and questions over NATO’s mission have still left Italy somewhat at sea.

“Italy was one of the founders of the European Union ‘club,’ and this, in addition to an international situation different from the current one, guaranteed us respect that was greater than our economic, political, and military weight,” Mario Ricciardi, editor-in-chief of the political journal Il Mulino told me. “Today things have changed a lot, there are so many new members who no longer have any awe of older members, and this doesn’t always work to our advantage.”

At the same time, the Catholic Church in Italy continues to face uncertainty about its role in the nation’s political and everyday life. More than a year since the worst of the pandemic, its influence is questionable, the bishops’ conference has sunk further into irrelevance, and many Italians feel free to criticize it in ways that might have been unimaginable just a few years ago. The Vatican itself seems less able to exert the kind of political influence on national politics than it once did.

Under Francis, the Vatican has been more transparent on a number of issues, including its own finances. But this has also opened an ugly chapter in the history of the “temporal” justice administered in the name of the pope, who is the absolute sovereign of Vatican City State. On July 27, the Vatican trial of ten people involved in a money-losing investment in a controversial London real-estate deal began. Among those being tried is Cardinal Giovanni Angelo Becciu, who is the first cardinal ever to be indicted by Vatican criminal prosecutors, and whom Francis stripped of the rights and duties of the cardinalate in September 2020. Becciu was not just the prefect of the Vatican Congregation for the Saints, but also, as the sostituto (or No. 2) to the Secretariat of State between 2011 and 2018, a key figure in navigating relations between the Vatican and Italy. It is hard to say what the consequences of his trial will be for the Vatican and for the Italian Church.

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Cajka presents Thomas Aquinas’s theory of conscience at the crux of all this action. “Thomas Aquinas,” he writes, “placed a conceptual bomb in Catholic thought in the thirteenth century that went off in the second half of the twentieth century.” For Aquinas, conscience is not a special faculty or power, but instead a function of practical reason. In conscience, I apply the precepts of the natural law to me in my circumstances. So-called cases of conscience are occasions when it is difficult to know how some precept applies, or whether it does at all. For example, if I am starving, is it licit for me to steal the bread I need to survive? Would taking the bread in those circumstances even be “stealing”? Aquinas says it would not be. If I can reason my way to that conclusion, I can take the bread in good conscience, so to speak.

Until the middle of the twentieth century, however, it was understood that the good Catholic wasn’t supposed to be a morally autonomous agent. Instead, he or she was supposed to work through cases of conscience under the guidance of the Church. As Cajka notes, the practice of confession was supposed to bring the “law and conscience into the proper relationship between input (law) and output (correct action).” A Catholic with a badly formed conscience might be in error about, say, contraception. In that case, the Catholic was to “put away” his or her badly formed conscience and allow it to be conformed to the law as explicated by a priest in the confessional. “The system,” Cajka remarks, “flowed from top to bottom, from law to conscience.”

What upended this system? And why, in the late 1960s, did many, if not most, Catholics stop going to confession? In her book Catholics and Contraception, the historian Leslie Woodcock Tentler cites a long backdrop of anguish and resentment over the Church’s teaching on family limitation, an “increasingly permeable Catholic subculture,” “the period’s increasingly radical individualism,” a growing sense of moral autonomy among increasingly well-educated Catholic laypeople, and finally a perception that Humanae vitae amounted to a raw exercise in authority, without adequate rational support. Cajka adds that, in the middle of the twentieth century, priests discovered and promoted the emancipatory side of Aquinas’s theory of conscience. If, as Vatican II’s Gaudium et spes proclaimed in 1965, “conscience is the most secret core and sanctuary of man,” where “he is alone with God, Whose voice echoes in his depths,” then it seems an individual’s decisions made in conscience should not be countermanded, lest God’s will for that individual be overturned. Catholics thereby had both a right and an obligation to stand up both to the state and to the institutional Church.

Cajka’s history has one major flaw: his highlighting, time and again, the “medieval roots” of modern Catholic conscience language obscures what is distinctively modern about it. It is true that Aquinas holds that even a conscience in error ought to be heeded: one would do wrong to act against one’s conscience, even if it is wrong. But the reason for this is not that, as Cajka claims, even the erroneous conscience “generated an objectively true reality for the individual.” Conscience, at least on Aquinas’s theory, is not “the individual’s own truth creator.” Instead, one would do wrong to act against one’s conscience because, in doing so, one would be choosing to do what one takes to be wrong, and that can never be right—even if one is wrong about what is right or wrong. The classic literary example is Mark Twain’s Huck Finn. To simplify the story, let’s say that Huck believes it is wrong to help the runaway slave Jim escape down the Mississippi. Huck is wrong about that, but if Huck truly believes it is wrong for him to help Jim escape, then Huck would be wrong to help Jim escape, because Huck would thereby be choosing to do what he takes to be wrong. In scholastic terminology, there are two ways to evaluate Huck’s action: “formally” and “materially”—terminology that Cajka mentions but doesn’t explain. When we evaluate Huck’s action formally, we consider it under the description that he gave it: stealing property. That is wrong for Huck to choose to do. When we evaluate Huck’s action materially, we consider it under the description that someone who knows better would give it: liberating a human being. That is right to do, but until Huck is able to “put away” his erroneous conscience, he shouldn’t act against it.

In fact, Gaudium et spes’s account of conscience owes much more to John Henry Newman—whom Cajka does not cite—than to Aquinas. At least in some of his writings, Newman seems to treat conscience as a distinct faculty or power whereby we can apprehend what is right for us to do in our circumstances, so long as we can cut through the noise and corruptions of our culture (that is why, for Newman, listening to the Church is crucial). Ignatius of Loyola’s sixteenth-century method for the discernment of spirits also must figure in this genealogy. For Aquinas, we encounter God’s law in conscience. It is a modern innovation—though maybe one with Augustinian roots—that we can encounter God’s will for us amid our limitations and in our complex situations, to speak of conscience as Pope Francis does in Amoris laetitia. (Francis is a Jesuit, after all.)

Despite this flaw, Cajka’s book makes a persuasive case that Catholics, with priests leading the way, did indeed “change the terms of American freedom”—though not always for the best. As Cajka comments, his is not simply “a story of progress.” Conscience clauses now protect doctors, nurses, and Catholic hospitals from having to participate in abortions, but should provision also be made for employers, like Hobby Lobby, that object to coverage for contraception under health-insurance plans, or for bakers, florists, and the like who object to selling services for gay marriages? The proliferation in recent years of so-called conscience wars within our culture wars suggests a nation that is loath to seek middle ground. Invoking conscience can be a way of not having to engage one another. Similarly, as a Church, we don’t really talk about contraception any longer. Nowadays, few U.S. Catholics, including those who regularly attend Mass, agree that contraception is morally wrong or even a moral issue. Our consciences have spoken. But the bishops don’t really want to hear from laypeople, and laypeople don’t want to hear from them. “Conscience” has become a pact of silence.

Follow Your Conscience
The Catholic Church and the Spirit of the Sixties
Peter Cajka
University of Chicago Press
$45 | 232 pp.

Commonweal Magazine

Cajka presents Thomas Aquinas’s theory of conscience at the crux of all this action. “Thomas Aquinas,” he writes, “placed a conceptual bomb in Catholic thought in the thirteenth century that went off in the second half of the twentieth century.” For Aquinas, conscience is not a special faculty or power, but instead a function of practical reason. In conscience, I apply the precepts of the natural law to me in my circumstances. So-called cases of conscience are occasions when it is difficult to know how some precept applies, or whether it does at all. For example, if I am starving, is it licit for me to steal the bread I need to survive? Would taking the bread in those circumstances even be “stealing”? Aquinas says it would not be. If I can reason my way to that conclusion, I can take the bread in good conscience, so to speak.

Until the middle of the twentieth century, however, it was understood that the good Catholic wasn’t supposed to be a morally autonomous agent. Instead, he or she was supposed to work through cases of conscience under the guidance of the Church. As Cajka notes, the practice of confession was supposed to bring the “law and conscience into the proper relationship between input (law) and output (correct action).” A Catholic with a badly formed conscience might be in error about, say, contraception. In that case, the Catholic was to “put away” his or her badly formed conscience and allow it to be conformed to the law as explicated by a priest in the confessional. “The system,” Cajka remarks, “flowed from top to bottom, from law to conscience.”

What upended this system? And why, in the late 1960s, did many, if not most, Catholics stop going to confession? In her book Catholics and Contraception, the historian Leslie Woodcock Tentler cites a long backdrop of anguish and resentment over the Church’s teaching on family limitation, an “increasingly permeable Catholic subculture,” “the period’s increasingly radical individualism,” a growing sense of moral autonomy among increasingly well-educated Catholic laypeople, and finally a perception that Humanae vitae amounted to a raw exercise in authority, without adequate rational support. Cajka adds that, in the middle of the twentieth century, priests discovered and promoted the emancipatory side of Aquinas’s theory of conscience. If, as Vatican II’s Gaudium et spes proclaimed in 1965, “conscience is the most secret core and sanctuary of man,” where “he is alone with God, Whose voice echoes in his depths,” then it seems an individual’s decisions made in conscience should not be countermanded, lest God’s will for that individual be overturned. Catholics thereby had both a right and an obligation to stand up both to the state and to the institutional Church.

Cajka’s history has one major flaw: his highlighting, time and again, the “medieval roots” of modern Catholic conscience language obscures what is distinctively modern about it. It is true that Aquinas holds that even a conscience in error ought to be heeded: one would do wrong to act against one’s conscience, even if it is wrong. But the reason for this is not that, as Cajka claims, even the erroneous conscience “generated an objectively true reality for the individual.” Conscience, at least on Aquinas’s theory, is not “the individual’s own truth creator.” Instead, one would do wrong to act against one’s conscience because, in doing so, one would be choosing to do what one takes to be wrong, and that can never be right—even if one is wrong about what is right or wrong. The classic literary example is Mark Twain’s Huck Finn. To simplify the story, let’s say that Huck believes it is wrong to help the runaway slave Jim escape down the Mississippi. Huck is wrong about that, but if Huck truly believes it is wrong for him to help Jim escape, then Huck would be wrong to help Jim escape, because Huck would thereby be choosing to do what he takes to be wrong. In scholastic terminology, there are two ways to evaluate Huck’s action: “formally” and “materially”—terminology that Cajka mentions but doesn’t explain. When we evaluate Huck’s action formally, we consider it under the description that he gave it: stealing property. That is wrong for Huck to choose to do. When we evaluate Huck’s action materially, we consider it under the description that someone who knows better would give it: liberating a human being. That is right to do, but until Huck is able to “put away” his erroneous conscience, he shouldn’t act against it.

In fact, Gaudium et spes’s account of conscience owes much more to John Henry Newman—whom Cajka does not mention—than to Aquinas. At least in some of his writings, Newman seems to treat conscience as a distinct faculty or power whereby we can apprehend what is right for us to do in our circumstances, so long as we can cut through the noise and corruptions of our culture (that is why, for Newman, listening to the Church is crucial). Ignatius of Loyola’s sixteenth-century method for the discernment of spirits also must figure in this genealogy. For Aquinas, we encounter God’s law in conscience. It is a modern innovation—though maybe one with Augustinian roots—that we can encounter God’s will for us amid our limitations and in our complex situations, to speak of conscience as Pope Francis does in Amoris laetitia. (Francis is a Jesuit, after all.)

Despite this flaw, Cajka’s book makes a persuasive case that Catholics, with priests leading the way, did indeed “change the terms of American freedom”—though not always for the best. As Cajka comments, his is not simply “a story of progress.” Conscience clauses now protect doctors, nurses, and Catholic hospitals from having to participate in abortions, but should provision also be made for employers, like Hobby Lobby, that object to coverage for contraception under health-insurance plans, or for bakers, florists, and the like who object to selling services for gay marriages? The proliferation in recent years of so-called conscience wars within our culture wars suggests a nation that is loath to seek middle ground. Invoking conscience can be a way of not having to engage one another. Similarly, as a Church, we don’t really talk about contraception any longer. Nowadays, few U.S. Catholics, including those who regularly attend Mass, agree that contraception is morally wrong or even a moral issue. Our consciences have spoken. But the bishops don’t really want to hear from laypeople, and laypeople don’t want to hear from them. “Conscience” has become a pact of silence.

Follow Your Conscience
The Catholic Church and the Spirit of the Sixties
Peter Cajka
University of Chicago Press
$45 | 232 pp.

Commonweal Magazine