c. 1999 Religion News Service

(Eugene Kennedy, a longtime observer of the Roman Catholic Church, is professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago and author most recently of”My Brother Joseph, published by St. Martin Press.)

CHICAGO _ Commonweal magazine recently sponsored a symposium here on what was termed”liberal Catholicism,”offering Cardinal Francis George, the city’s archbishop, the opportunity to reflect on his observation that liberal Catholicism”is an exhausted project … unable to pass on the faith in its integrity and … inadequate for fostering … self-surrender called for in Christian marriage, consecrated life and the priesthood.” Acknowledging his criticism may have been”too general and somewhat unfair,”this distinguished prelate, thought to be the intellectual leader of America’s Catholic bishops, nonetheless noted the liberal approach in his cross-hairs leads to a”dead end”resulting in a”betrayal of the Lord regardless of intention.” Theses observations, however, left most of the Chicago audience wondering just what this good man was talking about. How, I wondered, could such a cleft have opened up between what an important American bishop understands as liberal Catholicism and what most of his mainly liberal hearers understood in their own experience of the same concept?

Could it be the nation’s bishops are operating _ and perhaps making policy decisions _ on such a foreshortened interpretation of the liberal impulse, one so lacking in dimensions as to border on a caricature? Is this, one must wonder, what some bishops are led to believe is the raw distillate of Catholic higher education they must somehow monitor and control? One could hardly blame them if this defining down and out of Catholic liberalism came anywhere near the truth.

There must be, even innocent bystanders could sense, a misunderstanding as big as the Ritz somewhere going largely unidentified.

George, at ease with his own intellectual gifts and interests, would be the first to wish to listen to a healthier and more reliable version of this idea. Otherwise he would run the risk of providing both a charter and a set of slogans for a crusade to diminish the radical liberal root of Catholicism itself. It is unimaginable that this is his intention.

The audience, a mixture of men and women, lay and religious, reminded me of the crowd described in Matthew as standing together for the Last Judgment. It included such Catholic luminaries as Monsignor Jack Egan and Ed Marciniak, who have borne the light of Catholicism into the moral darkness of urban America, illuminating every big city mischief, from racism and anti-Semitism to the folly of funding government by gambling schemes that victimize the poor.

The members of this group would react, I felt, exactly like the men and women in the judgment story when they are invited to enter the kingdom prepared for them from all eternity. Their surprise is echoed in their questions: When did we see you hungry and feed you, or naked and clothe you, in prison and visit you? They cannot remember the actions through which they saved their souls.

Understand their surprise and you also grasp the liberal Catholic spirit that was not even approximately defined that day. For the liberalism this audience represented is better appreciated as the Catholic liberality of heart continuing to be the impulse of their lives and work. This liberality is defined in the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary as”free in giving”and”freedom from bias or prejudice.”Its synonyms are”generosity”and”munificence.” This openness of heart is what Jesus preached. It is the hallmark of genuine Catholicism, the true coin that resists the bite of the doubter. You experience this liberality of heart from progressives and conservatives, showing the inadequacy of equating left wing politics with such a fundamental Catholic spirit.

Liberality of heart, I realized as I scanned the crowd, was what its members, like the Christian community described in Acts,”held in common.”It was also the source of their resemblance to the saved at the last judgment.

The saved cannot remember what the Lord commends them for because they were not thinking about themselves when they fed the hungry, clothed the naked and visited prisoners. They forgot themselves as they gave themselves away. That is the essential note of Catholic liberality easily observed in the crowd gathered at this symposium.

They shared, I suspect, another characteristic with the heaven-bound cohort. If the latter forgot themselves, they were also accustomed to being forgotten by others, to not getting the credit, much less thanks, for what they did. That is about what the generous Catholic audience experienced that afternoon, a first judgment unrelated to the last judgment. They will go on doing good anyway. That is what Catholic liberality of heart really is.

DEA END KENNEDY