Agere Contra: an “Ignatian Option” for Engagement with American Society and Culture

Journal of Moral Theology, Vol 6, No. 2 (2017): 175-193 Agere Contra: An “Ignatian Option” for Engagement with American Society and Culture Benjamin T. Peters N HIS REVIEW OF GEORGE WEIGEL’S Evangelical Catholicism for Commonweal in April 2013, William Portier declared: It is time to admit that the “Americanist” tradition…inherited from I [John Courtney] Murray…is dead. If there was ever a harmonious fit between America and the Catholic natural–law tradition, there certainly isn’t now. Catholics will not save America, as Murray dared to hope in 1960. Neither City on a Hill nor pagan cesspool, the United States is just our country.1 While there is much to Portier’s statement, his claim that the “Americanist tradition” is dead stands out. For if he is correct, we are at an important historical moment in U.S. Catholicism: the end of an almost two-hundred year old argument (dating back at least to Orestes Brownson) that America is good for Catholicism and that Catholics are good for—and can even save—America. This is the bold assertion that has formed the way generations of Catholics have engaged with U.S. society and culture. And the demise of this belief has left many Catholics lost in a very real “moral wilderness”—to borrow a phrase from MacIntyre—searching for a new way to understand America.2 In order to address this new found predicament for American Catholics, I have broken my article into three parts. First, I look at some of the more recent discussions surrounding the idea that the Americanist proposition is no longer viable. Next, I suggest an alternative approach to social engagement that is rooted in Ignatian spirituality, one that is neither a wholesale withdrawal from nor blanket embrace of American life. Finally, I highlight some of figures 1 William L. Portier, “More Mission, Less Maintenance,” Commonweal, April 12, 2013, 29-31. 2 See Alasdair MacIntyre, “Notes from the Moral Wilderness,” in The MacIntyre Reader, ed. Kelvin Knight (Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1998), 31-49. 176 Benjamin T. Peters who seem to embody this “Ignatian option,” in particular Dorothy Day and Pope Francis. THE VIABILITY OF THE AMERICAN PROPOSITION Not long after Portier’s review appeared in Commonweal, Patrick Deneen published a much talked about piece on The American Conservative website titled “A Catholic Showdown Worth Watching.”3 In it, Deneen, who teaches political science at Notre Dame, stated, The relationship of Catholicism to America, and America to Catholicism, began with rancor and hostility, but became a comfortable partnership forged in the cauldron of World War II and the Cold War. But was that period one of “ordinary time,” or an aberration which is now passing, returning us to the inescapably hostile relationship? A growing body of evidence suggests that the latter possibility can’t simply be dismissed out of hand: liberalism appears to be daily more hostile to Catholicism, not merely disagreeing with its stances, but demanding that they be changed in conformity to liberal views on self-sovereignty or, failing that, that the Church be defined out of the bounds of decent liberal society, an institution no more respectable than the Ku Klux Klan.4 Deneen then went on to distinguish three approaches to social engagement taken by U.S. Catholics. One, which he called “Liberal Catholicism,” he dismissed outright as being doomed to oblivion— “fated to become liberalism simpliciter within a generation.” But a second approach also exists, which he described as an “older American tradition of orthodox Catholicism” closely aligned with John Courtney Murray, SJ. According to Deneen, the basis of this approach has been that: Essentially, there is no fundamental contradiction between liberal democracy and Catholicism. Liberal democracy is, or at its best can be, a tolerant home for Catholics, one that acknowledges contributions of the Catholic tradition and is leavened by its moral commitments. While liberalism alone can be brittle and thin—its stated neutrality can leave it awash in relativism and indifferentism—it is deepened and rendered more sustainable by the Catholic presence. Murray went so far as to argue that America is in fact more Catholic than even its Protestant founders realized—that they availed themselves unknowingly of a longer and deeper tradition of natural law that undergirded the thinner liberal commitments of the American 3 Patrick Deneen, “A Catholic Showdown Worth Watching,” The American Conservative, February 6, 2014, www.theamericanconservative.com/2014/02/06/a- catholic- showdown-worth-watching/. 4 Deneen, “A Catholic Showdown.” Agere Contra: An “Ignatian” Option 177 founding. The Founders “built better than they knew,” and so it is Catholics like Orestes Brownson and Murray, and not liberal lions like John Locke or Thomas Jefferson, who have better articulated and today defend the American project.5 This is the Americanist tradition to which Portier was referring. A tradition that, as Michael Hanby has recently explained, has had a profound influence on U.S. Catholicism, Catholics generally find the argument for the compatibility of Catholicism with the principles of the American founding convincing because they believe that the argument has been vindicated by the growth and assimilation of the Church in the United States and by the apparent vitality of American Catholicism in comparison with Catholicism in Europe. Rarely do political or theological disagreements penetrate deeply enough to disturb this shared foundation.6 In short, Hanby concluded, “Liberal or conservative, postconciliar Catholicism is essentially Murrayite.”7 But Deneen also distinguished a third approach, labeled “radical,” that “rejects the view that Catholicism and liberal democracy are fundamentally compatible.” This position is deeply critical of “contemporary arrangements of market capitalism, is deeply suspicious of America’s imperial ambitions, and wary of the basic premises of liberal government.”8 Of course Deneen’s argument here is not new. Richard Gaillardetz, for instance, has described three very similar approaches to what he called Catholic “cultural engagement”: a “correlationist” approach, which he noted is advocated by theologians such as Charles Curran, J. Bryan Hehir, David Hollenbach, as well as Kenneth and Michael Himes; a “neo- conservative” approach advanced by George Weigel, Michael Novak, and the late Richard John Neuhaus; and a “radical” approach taken by Michael Baxter, William Cavanaugh, Michael Budde, David 5 Deneen, “A Catholic Showdown.” 6 Michael Hanby, “The Civic Project of American Christianity: How the Public Significance of Christianity is Changing,” First Things, February 2015, www.firstthings.com/article/2015/02/the-civic-project-of-american-christianity. 7 Hanby, “The Civic Project.” 8 Deneen “A Catholic Showdown.” 178 Benjamin T. Peters Schindler, and others associated with Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker movement.9 Interestingly, while very different in there stances on particular issues, both Gaillardetz’s “correlationist” and “neo-conservative” approaches ultimately seek to maintain Murray’s notion of the relationship between America and the Church. For both Deneen and Gaillardetz, then, there seem to be really only two viable options for Catholics: either somehow revive Murray’s project and embrace American society and culture or reject it. Or, as Deneen put it, U.S. Catholics must choose, “Whether the marriage between the Church and the State can be rescued, or whether a divorce is in the offing.”10 And the degree to which one views the American milieu as corrupt or hostile to Catholicism seems to determine the approach one would choose. For if it is sinful or lost, divorce should be inevitable, but, if it isn’t, then the marriage can be saved. The underlying theological assertion here seems to be that it is primarily sin which must be resisted in Catholic social engagement. Not surprisingly, this was also the theological assertion underlying Murray’s account of “incarnational” and “eschatological humanism.”11 For Murray, Catholic withdrawal from U.S. political and economic institutions in the 1940s-50s was rooted in an “eschatological humanism” that he said regarded these institutions as completely corrupt, and so withdrawal from them was an “utter prophetic condemnation” of the United States—a “contempt for the world.”12 Murray contrasted this with an “incarnational humanism,” which he clearly preferred, that took a more affirming approach to the structures and institutions in America as not sinful and therefore able to be embraced. This paradigm continues to inform our discussions today and can be seen in Massimo Faggioli’s critique of Baxter and Cavanaugh in America where Faggioli accused them of advancing an argument for “sectarian” withdrawal from corrupt American political and economic life.13 It is also evident in the discussions over the so-called “Benedict Option” that began to appear in First Things in 2014. This option— influenced by MacIntyre’s call for another St. Benedict—has been championed as of late by the likes of Rod Dreher and other self- described “crunchy-cons” as “a means of cultivating a new 9 Richard Gaillardetz, “The Ecclesiological Foundations of Modern Catholic Social Teaching,” in Modern Catholic Social Teaching: Commentaries & Interpretations, ed. Kenneth Himes, O.F.M. (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2005), 72- 98, 77-80. 10 Deneen,“A Catholic Showdown.” 11 See John Courtney Murray, We Hold These Truths, (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1960), 184-193. 12 Murray, We Hold These Truths, 185-189. 13 Massimo Faggioli, “A View From Abroad” America, February 24, 2014, 20-23, 22. Agere Contra: An “Ignatian” Option 179 counterculture that can resist the barbarian onslaught” through small communities of virtue, a renewed localism, and a return to the land.14 As C.C. Pecknold noted, though—sticking to Murray’s template—this option can be dismissed as “withdrawing” from a corrupt world.15 In response, Pecknold has proposed a “Dominican Option,” flowing out of St.

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