Subject: [votf-li] Article by Richard McBrien - "Redefining the Center"

I published an article almost 13 years ago in America magazine (8/22/92) entitled, “Conflict in the Church: Redefining the Center.” I may be presumptuous in saying so, but I believe that the article is even more relevant today.

It began with a reference to a familiar Scholastic axiom that truth is found in the middle, somewhere between two extremes. Many Catholics in the middle-aged and senior generations heard that axiom frequently repeated in their seminary, college, and university classes, where they were admonished to always look for truth and virtue in the center, while avoiding the extremes.

But, of course, a crucial question was begged: Who defines the center? The question is crucial because those who define the center also define the extremes. And in defining the extremes, they also marginalize them. Such views are ruled out-of-bounds, and their proponents are written off as “dissidents” or worse.

Humanly speaking, the definition of the center is always a judgment call. Only God knows where the center is exactly, because God alone is the absolute norm of truth and virtue.

As early as June 1, 1980, a year and a half after his election to the papacy, John Paul II addressed the bishops of France on the subject of polarization in the Church. He spoke of tensions between progressives and traditionalists.

By his choice of terms, however, the pope seemed to have contrasted the moderate left (what I prefer to call the center-left) and the extreme right, that is, traditionalists. He implied that conservatives beyond the broad center play no part in the polarization. On the contrary, the pope seemed to regard them as centrists rather than protagonists.

In a later interview with an Italian journalist in 1989, John Paul II returned to the topic of polarization, insisting that his many trips around the world were designed in part to prevent a “confrontation” between the two wings of the Church.

Significantly, the pope identified the right wing with the schismatic (and subsequently excommunicated) Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre and those who are “afraid of change as repre-sented by the council.” On the left wing he placed those who “already hoped for a Third Vatican Council or who are guilty of reducing everything to the particular [that is, local] church.”

The pope offered no examples of left-wing Catholics, but if the late Archbishop Lefebvre and his followers constitute the right wing of the Church, would that not mean that Opus Dei, the Legionaries of Christ, Crisis, Communio, and First Things magazines, as well as most of the bishops appointed and/or promoted by John Paul II occupy the center?

And if such individuals, groups, and publications are in the center of the Catholic Church, it would also follow that the late Cardinals Joseph Bernardin and John Dearden and such bishops as John Quinn and the late James Malone–all former presidents of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops--as well as the Catholic Theological Society of America, the drafters and supporters of the U.S. Catholic bishops’ pastoral letters on peace and the economy, and Commonweal and America magazines are left-wing and, therefore, out of the Catholic main-stream.

One of the biggest unreported stories in contemporary Catholicism is the redefinition and displacement of the historic Catholic center by newly-powerful forces on the right.

The real center, however, is the largest segment of the Catholic Church, as any teacher who has marked on a curve would expect. That center includes most of those Catholics who do the day-to-day work of the Church–liturgically, educationally, and pastorally–in parishes, dioceses, and other church-related agencies and institutions. This Catholic center is broad and diverse; indeed, it is “catholic” in the fullest sense of the word, upper- and lower-case alike.

Some genuine centrists are more liberal than conservative. Others are more conservative than liberal. But both centrist groups--the center-left and the center-right–are basically suppor-tive of Vatican II. They understand and accept its main teachings as the council’s majority understood those teachings, and they embrace the shift in understanding the nature and mission of the Church which the council brought about.

Catholics of the center-left and the center-right differ only on the pace of change and the details of implementation. The center-left, for example, favors a much quicker time-line for a change in the discipline of clerical celibacy and in the Church’s official stance on the ordination of women.

Catholics of the center-right (which includes the shrinking band of so-called moderate bishops, many of whom were appointed by Pope Paul VI) prefer a more cautious course, stressing continuity more than change, while not opposing the two.

This real Catholic center needs to be re-claimed.