At the Committee meeting in February, 2003, I was asked to address the question, “What do we, the Initiative, need to do to reach out to more conservative and younger voices?” Below is a slightly expanded version of my response. I hope that by presenting these thoughts some light can be shed on the purpose and current state of the Initiative.

I think I was chosen to address this question because I had suggested participants for the Bernardin conferences that by almost anyone’s reckoning fit into the categories of “conservative” and/or younger. I was pleased to have made these suggestions and disappointed that not all of them were able to attend the conference. I suspect, however, that the categories of liberal and conservative need to be re-thought. I am therefore going to repose the question and suggest that it be withdrawn as formulated.

Cardinal Bernardin insisted in his last days that the Initiative was to be a Catholic initiative and in doing so set forth no quota as to the percentage of “liberals” or “conservatives.” Msgr. Kenneth Velo in his funeral homily said that the cardinal had taught us that common ground is sacred ground. Commenting on this eloquent turn of phrase, Archbishop Oscar Lipscomb, Bernardin’s successor as chair of the committee, writes: It is the mysterium tremendum encountered in the transforming experience of the church’s public worship that provides our dialogue with its source and goal.1

This insight circumvents, it seems to me, a deliberate politicizing of the Initiative. I want to propose that the categories of “liberal” and “conservative” be abandoned as a way of building up a Catholic common ground. In saying that, I realize that these are convenient yardsticks for measuring specific cultural, political, and even ecclesiological positions. I believe, however, that whatever purpose they served in the past, they are no longer of great use to build up a Catholic common ground oriented toward the future. An example may help. If I follow the Holy Father in maintaining that war is always a “defeat for humanity” and that this applies also to the intervention in Iraq, am I to be labeled as a conservative for my fidelity to Rome or a liberal for questioning the actions of a conservative political regime? The point is that the categories limp, even in less complicated scenarios. Adding more conservative voices to the Initiative is not necessarily going to make it more Catholic.

What I have just said may be viewed as irenic, and perhaps even as naïve. To abandon the categories of liberal and conservative altogether may leave us with no concrete measures for safeguarding a legitimate diversity of opinions. Why not avoid extreme positions and seek out those who are either slightly to the left or slightly to the right of a secure and salutary center? This seemingly cautious approach is also problematic. The safe middle ground that the Initiative has sometimes occupied can also be a retreat from real issues and real problems. To seek out only those who occupy the middle ground is not a real form of dialogue. It’s just a sophisticated way of stacking the deck.

There are real, sharp, and important differences of opinion within the Catholic Church today about which Catholics can disagree. This is not to say that all disagreements are just matters of preference. Moreover, these differences have been on display in every event sponsored by the Initiative that I have attended. I therefore am offering a catalogue of four issues around which I have seen differences arising. These issues, I contend, are where common ground can and should be sought. By the way, this list is hardly exhaustive, and considerable overlap is also likely.

Generational Differences

Much more important than the differences between liberals and conservatives are the differences between the different generations of American Catholics. In the 2001 Bernardin conference on young adult Catholics, these differences were much discussed. Many young adults do not find themselves pulled by forces that can be identified as liberal or conservative in the same manner that the “former” young adults (that group’s preferred nomenclature) were so swayed.

Young adult Catholics resist the well-intentioned efforts of highly respectable sociologists to categorize them along these lines. They want to be understood as Catholics who are seeking answers to questions that affect their daily lives. As far as Catholic identity is concerned, they do not find themselves attracted to a political program of one sort or another so much as they are adrift in a search for meaning in a culture that is beginning to deny its very possibility.

The trend among the youth has a rather precise parallel in the academy. In the working paper that he prepared for the 2003 conference, Scott Appleby documented the trend toward a popular skepticism in contemporary academic culture. Accordingly, there is no moral crisis that can still shock us. Appleby writes: “In this milieu, the central themes of Catholic theology and anthropology, if they are to gain a hearing, must overcome the formidable obstacle of ‘melancholy,’ twenty-first century style.” In other words, boredom has taken hold of the academy, and this time it is actually being taught as a dogma.

A brief and thoroughly unscientific vignette may illustrate the point about the generation gap even better.

Among the many shapes and sizes of undergraduates that one encounters at The Catholic University of America, Arthur blends in quite nicely. He sports an earring, sideburns vaguely reminiscent of James Dean, and is often seen in the company of equally stylish drama majors. He lives across the hall from a football player who leaves empty pizza boxes in the hallway and some Classics majors who post jokes in Greek and Latin on their doors. In other words, the hallway is a rich treasure for analyzing the semiotics of today’s youth. In this milieu Arthur decided to paste on his door the poster that he and many of his fellow classmates carried around the Mall in Washington during the annual pro-life march: “Women deserve better than abortion.”

What strikes me as interesting about this statement by a nineteen year-old pro-life feminist is the ordinariness of the experience. No one reacts to it as controversial or innovative. No one seems to grasp how unimaginable this scenario would have been forty or even twenty years ago on the same campus. It’s just part of the new landscape of American Catholicism.

Roman v. American Catholicism

Here we face a problematic that requires sustained analysis in terms of the rich historical heritage, complicated sociological structure, and intriguing ecclesial shape of the American Catholic experience. What I have to report, however, are just facts of my own experience with the Initiative.

Often in the deliberations of the committee we have opted to focus on the American experience. Foreign guests are invited, but usually because they can speak to the problems of the American experience. A notable exception was the decision, quite laudable in my estimation, to invite Cardinal Walter Kasper, president of the Pontifical Council to Promote Christian Unity, to deliver the Initiative’s annual lecture in Washington, DC, in Spring 2002. His Eminence, it seemed to me, was allowed to break the rule of focusing on the American Church because he at least would lend Roman legitimacy to our very American project. And he did so with characteristic conviction and eloquence, I am thankful to report.

The insufficiently acknowledged problem is whether common ground can ever just focus on the American Catholic experience. To put it another way, participants in Initiative events differ, it seems to me, precisely on whether and to what degree they view the distinctively American Catholic experience as a problem or a solution. In one Bernardin conference, for example, a secular sociologist took many of the other participants by surprise when he spoke in favor of the analytical rigor of an infamous Roman curial document entitled “Some Aspects of the Church Understood As Communion.” Surrounded by a sea of experts on American Catholicism, the outsider stood somewhat alone in wanting to lend a sympathetic ear to the Vatican’s theology.

The Initiative, it seems to me, can function effectively only if it consciously avoids taking a “pick and choose” attitude towards Roman authority. Unlike other movements in the church, Catholic Common Ground has minimal aspirations to achieve international success. In that sense, the American experience has to be our point of departure. On the other hand, what makes the Initiative necessary and worthwhile is that those who believe that Rome is right to take a dim view of the purported “exceptionalism” in the American Catholic experience are not dismissed as crazy or ultramontane.

Parish v. Ecclesial Movements

The Initiative has a huge stake in parish life. This fact cannot be ignored or dismissed. It offers practical guidelines so that dialogues can take place within parishes. Moreover, as an academic theologian, the experience of listening to pastors of diverse backgrounds speak about parish life has been invaluable. The parish is clearly a locus theologicus, and I myself would rather hear the theology of the parish straight from the source rather than filtered through the opinions of academicians. Experienced pastors are almost always more effective at conveying their message than tenured professors anyway. Moreover, the sharing of viewpoints among academics, bishops, lay leaders, and parish priests at meetings has been a surprisingly educational aspect of the Initiative experience.

But I have also noticed a new development, one that first came to my attention in the wake of the conference on the young adult Catholics. After that event, I had the impression that the viewpoint of the new ecclesial movements in the church began to be taken much more seriously. A key intervention was made by a lay woman from the Focolare movement, Claudia Cosenza, at the next conference on participation in the church. The point here is that these contributions not be pigeon-holed as conservative or as inauthentically American by virtue of their international scope and Roman stamp of approval. Some view the ecclesial movements, for example, as contributing a “marian” stance within the unity of the church and contrast this stance with the more clerically centered, “petrine” focus of the parishes.

There is an additional issue, which the Initiative has barely touched. Mutual mistrust sometimes marks the encounters between members of the movements and parish leaders. As the movements grow, the configuration of this relationship will become a key issue for the whole church. Contrary to popular opinion, the ecclesial movements do not compete with parishes for the attention or time of the faithful. They are not “extra-parochial” but a self-subsistent ecclesial entity.

If participation in parish life is the sole standard for measuring “success,” however, then the contribution of the ecclesial movements will be deemed a hindrance or of secondary importance in one’s evaluation of the state of American Catholic life. In fact, the ecclesial movements are a form of renewal in the church that can aid and reinforce the work of the pastor. It is my hope that the Initiative will continue to pay attention to this dynamic and maybe even give it more explicit attention in future conferences and events.

Dialogue v. Debate

It is axiomatic for the Initiative that civil discussion be fostered. To relinquish this principle would be tantamount to undermining the founding vision of Cardinal Bernardin and almost everyone else who has participated along the way. It offers the lofty but realizable vision of a church in which polemic and strife are replaced by dialogue and understanding. That’s as worth supporting now as it was when the Initiative was founded.

But, there is also a curious sense in which this very principle does not appeal to some Catholics. The problem, as I see it, is not that this group is close-minded. The problem is that some issues in the church need to be debated rather than just discussed. This insight runs counter to the commonplace view that all experiences are equally valid. Debate by its very nature implies taking sides and passing judgments. Endless discussion and airing of diverse viewpoints does not of itself lead to a clarification of the neuralgic points. To be fair, the form of dialogue promoted by the Initiative never aimed at the expediency of compromise for the sake of attaining agreement. As I understand it, the principle of dialogue was established for the sake of the truth; the method of dialogue is not a substitute for objective truth.

Nonetheless, the style or method of dialogue as practiced by the Initiative is in some instances not adequate to the issue at hand. The classical sense of dialogue, as envisaged for example by Plato, involved a small group of like-minded interlocutors who had enough free time to discuss matters until each one was thoroughly familiar with the wisdom contained in the other’s opinion. A master guided the discussion and was presumed to be the true “midwife” of wisdom.

Initiative meetings, by contrast, involve large groups of people with highly differentiated professional training and diverse experiences within the church. There is no common philosophy or single socratic questioner. The value of these meetings, it seems to me, is to expose everyone to some aspect of the Catholic experience of which he or she may have been unaware. On a good day, academics like me go away educated about the challenges of a parish or diocese, and pastoral agents, for example, gain a new insight into the relevance of the documents of Vatican II. Participating in a conference is like looking at the family photo album. There are lots of snapshots, and you get to see distant relatives up close for a change.

The problem with these sessions is that conceptual clarification is not the desired outcome and consequently is seldom achieved. Analysis, in the strict sense of the term, is sacrificed for a kind of communion. That is not an altogether bad thing. In my view, dialogue and debate are not polar opposites but mutually reinforcing complements. Through their opposition, we recognize that the kind of dialogue that the Initiative is meant to foster is not just a matter of therapeutic self-expression. The kind of debate that it could promote is likewise not of the classroom sort. Practical topics must be chosen that are of paramount interest to all members of the church. Positions should be discussed that represent those of the Catholic faithful and allow legitimate viewpoints to be sharply delineated. As examples of topics that could be debated, I would cite the recent controversy about the priestly ordination of homosexuals, or even the question of whether a preemptive first strike can be justified on the basis of the principles of a just war.

In conclusion, I can report that the Catholic Common Ground Initiative is still healthy, happy, and productive. Younger voices are being heard, and the new ecclesial movements are beginning to be represented as well. In my view, these developments show that the Initiative is fundamentally open to growing and maturing in a way that belies the liberal/conservative split. These categories ought to be abandoned in order to address the new needs and realities in the church today. The future lies not in liberalism, not in conservatism, and especially not in a fusion of the two.

The future lies rather in a diverse set of Catholic spiritual traditions and practices. Cardinal Bernardin, for example, faced his own death as a friend rather than as an occasion for fear. Here we see a favored son of progressive Catholicism reviving the late medieval art of dying well. It seems hard for me to conceive of the late cardinal making an effort to ally his ‘liberal’ self with a long abandoned traditional practice. Wasn’t this attitude simply the unitary act of a Christian who confidently hoped to meet the Lord?

1 Archbishop Oscar H. Lipscomb, “Dialogue: A Labor of Love,” in: Catholic Common Ground Initiative: Founding Documents (New York: Crossroad, 1997), 95.

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