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Authors: Lawrence Kaplan

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4
Catholic Integralism as a Fundamentalism
John A. Coleman, S. J.
Recently many major American academic conferences have focused on variant forms of fundamentalism: Islamic, Jewish, Protestant, Catholic, even Sikh. In the spring of 1988, at the University of California, Berkeley, I took part in one such symposium at which noted sociologist Robert N. Bellah startled many with his electrifying address on "Enlightenment Fundamentalism." In this presentation, he suggested that the worldwide resurgence of religious traditionalist movements (generally unanticipated by scholars a mere decade ago) came about, in part, as a reaction-formation to the narrow, scientivistic intolerance and cribbed and confined world view of the academy's positivistic fundamentalism: its exclusionary tactic of ruling out anything but what German critic Jürgen Habermas refers to as the technical-rational paradigm for understanding our world.
1
Bellah's comments alert us to the need to expand our notion of aggressive, literalist, and reductionist fundamentalisms to include scientific reductionism among our case studies.
No doubt this recent proliferation of academic conferences (and eventual scholarly volumes) on fundamentalism derives mainly from concerned foundations and funding agencies that want to understand how resurgent Islamic fundamentalism affects Middle Eastern and world politics, and that hope to fathom the new Christian right's
 
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strategies for influencing the American political arena. But there is conceivably a much longer-range legitimate scholarly interest in studying variant forms of fundamentalism.
In each case, fundamentalism serves as a lens to focus on the conflict between modernity and traditionalism in divergent religious communities. The modern liberal technological project has notoriously lacked sympathy for tradition. With the exception of some social scientists, such as Edward Shils, few conceive of tradition as a universal social need and
desideratum
.
2
Few are content to view the enlightenment tradition as one tradition among many.
Fundamentalism should not be equated,
tout court,
with either traditionalism or conservatism, both of which exist in nonfundamentalist forms.
3
Indeed, fundamentalism itself is a modern phenomenon, an aggressive reassertion of elements of traditionalism in the fight against modernity. For purposes of this essay I will define fundamentalism as an innovating and aggressive form of traditionalism based on a literal and hermeneutically privileged focus of authority: a book, a set of customs, an interpreting institution such as the papacy or the Twelve Apostles in Mormonism.
Moreover, as Lester Kurtz suggests in
The Politics of Heresy,
his intriguing, award-winning book about the Catholic case of fundamentalism, case studies of fundamentalism help us understand "the social construction" of heresy versus orthodoxy as they feed off each other, dialectically, within religious traditions.
4
For, as Kurtz notes, the principal enemy of fundamentalism tends to be less an external enemye.g., secular humaniststhan a deviant insider heretic, a stalking Trojan horse that brings the values of secular modernity into the midst of the religious camp. Thus, American Protestant invective is notoriously stronger against the National Council of Churches, and Catholic integralists decry progressive theologians within the church more than secular rationalists.
Critique of Modernity as an Erosion of Authority
I will be mainly preoccupied with the peculiarly Catholic variant of fundamentalism which in the Catholic lexicon is called
integrisme
(in French) or integralism (in German and English). Until recently,
 
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the term "fundamentalism," was not even found in French dictionaries to refer to a religious doctrine. Thus, Daniel Alexander, writing in the Belgian journal of sociology of religion,
Social Compass,
could pose the question: "Is Fundamentalism an Integrism?"
5
I maintain that integralism is the Catholic variant of fundamentalism.
At root, this Catholic version of fundamentalism does not care so much for a literalism of the bookthe classic scriptural fundamentalism of Protestantismas for "papal fundamentalism": a literal, ahistorical and nonhermeneutical reading of papal pronouncements, even papal
obiter dicta,
as a bulwark against the tides of relativism, the claims of science, and the inroads of modernity.
While we shall perceive some notable convergence between Catholic integralism and Protestant fundamentalism, we will also note distinctive differences. Since Catholicism locates authority in both scripture and tradition and reads the scripture within the living church as a "book of the church," scriptural fundamentalism does not represent, in my view, the main form of Catholic fundamentalism. At least since the papacy of Pius XII, Catholic biblical scholars employ the full apparatus of the modern historical-critical method. Moreover, the highest authorities within Catholicism have attacked biblical fundamentalism. The American bishops warned the faithful against biblical fundamentalism in their 1987 document,
A Pastoral Statement for Catholics on Biblical Fundamentalism
.
6
Gabriel Daly, a specialist on integralism, claims that "authoritarian heteronomy can rightly be seen as the Catholic form of fundamentalism in that it treats the ecclesiastical magisterium in the same manner as the Protestant fundamentalists treat the Bible."
7
In each case, a central authority in the tradition (accepted by all in the tradition as in some sense authoritative)the Bible in Protestantism and the papacy in Catholicismis viewed as above history, free from every hermeneutic of suspicion, and containing a safe guide for all behavior. The authority is accepted as an all-encompassing blueprint for life. Uncritical acceptance of this authorityas the sole and inerrant authoritybecomes the litmus test of orthodoxy (another term we would do well to distinguish from fundamentalism).
8
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the papacy had to meet the challenge of historical criticism and the Darwinian
 
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revolution. In so doing, it turned not to the Bible but to Catholic scholasticism (based on a Neo-Thomist revival spearheaded by Leo XIII) as its principal weapon against the historical-critical method and the scientific revolution's erosion of settled certainties. As Kurtz argues, ''Much of the Modernist controversy concerned the nature of religious truth. The scholastics and Vatican authorities contended that Christian truths were universal and unchanging and that they were interpreted through the teaching authority of the church."
9
To perceive the story of Catholic integralism as a reaction to the "modernist crisis," one must refer to the period from 1900 to 1920, focusing on the papal decree,
Lamentabili,
issued on July 2, 1907, and the encyclical,
Pascendi,
of September 8, 1907. Therein unfolds a tale of spies for orthodoxy who hounded seminary professors and Catholic writersthrough the
Sapinière
group during the reign of Msgr. Umberto Benigni, Vatican secretary of state during the pontificate of Pius X. This "bureaucratic insurgency" of papal bureaucrats against an imagined cabal of scholars may at first seem to be merely an exercise in the archaic and arcane, an historical anomaly.
10
However, it set a cultural tone for much of the Catholic response to higher criticism and the scientific method, a tone that still reverberates in the Catholic world. Moreover, in the post-Vatican II church, worldwide, we see a resurgence of Catholic integralists (e.g., Msgr. Marcel Lefebvre in France, the "Tradition, Property, Family'' movement in Latin America) whose journals and social stance would seem to agree with Msgr. Benigni's sour judgment: "History is one long desperate retching and the only thing humanity is fit for is the Inquisition."
11
First, however, we need to look at the challenge of biblical fundamentalism as such (which I am arguing is not the characteristic Catholic form of fundamentalism) within Catholicism. Basically, this challenge raises two different issues: (1) the external challenge of biblical fundamentalism to Roman Catholicism and (2) the internal presence of biblical fundamentalism within Catholicism.
The External Challenge of Biblical Fundamentalism
Roman Catholicism has long been a target of opprobrium, and converted Catholics are attractive trophies for Protestant fundamental-
 
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ists. The old anti-Catholic canard about "Maria Monk"-like confessions remains alive and well in the Texas-based Chick Publications, with such lurid titles as, "Who is the Whore of Revelation?", "The Beast," and ''Are Roman Catholics Christians?"
12
Fundamentalist groups specializing in the evangelization of Catholicssuch as Christians Evangelizing Catholics, Mission to Catholics, Inc., and Last Days Ministriesprovide evangelistic tips on how to confute Catholics and show them the errors of their ways. For the fundamentalist, few conversion triumphswith the possible exception of Jewish converts to Jews for Jesusoutshine a Catholic's conversion to fundamentalism, especially that of a priest.
Indeed, there is evidence that the long-standing Protestant fundamentalist desire to convert Catholics has been yielding dividends in the post-Vatican church. Although precise statistics are impossible to obtain, Karl Keatingwho founded the defensive antifundamentalist Catholic organization, Catholic Answersestimates that as many as 100,000 American Catholics convert each year to evangelical fundamentalism.
13
Certainly the anecdotal evidence and insider estimates from both the Catholic and the evangelical sides suggest that the number of annual converts from Catholicism to evangelical fundamentalism is sizable.
George Gallup, Jr., for example, indicates that 74 percent of America's Hispanics have been approached by evangelicals, Pentecostals, or Jehovah's Witnesses in an attempt to convert them.
14
A survey found that 10 percent of Hispanics in the archdiocese of New York had converted to another religion after migrating to the United States.
For marginal Catholics, the basic appeal of evangelical fundamentalism is similar to its appeal to mainline liberal Protestants, an appeal that Dean Kelley outlined a decade ago in
Why the Conservative Churches are Growing
.
15
American evangelicals do a much better job than mainline Protestant and Catholic churches of providing: (1) clear identity symbols of belonging to a distinctive, disciplined, and well-defined group and (2) a vivid reality of a small community of support. The modal evangelical-fundamentalist congregation, for example, contains about 180 members when compared
 
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to the modal size of a Catholic parish which numbers around 2,300 members!
In his recent book,
Catholics and Fundamentalism,
Karl Keating argues that the appeal of fundamentalism is not only to marginal, economically poor, uneducated, or young Catholics; that the bulk of Catholic converts to fundamentalism are actually middle-aged.
16
Moreover, dynamic fundamentalist groups such as Campus Crusade, the Navigators, Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship, and the University Bible Fellowship have successfully recruited Catholic students on such campuses as Rutgers and the University of Illinois.
17
But, I would argue, the Catholic organizational network is relatively alert and poised to answer this challenge. In their national pastoral letter on Catholics and fundamentalists, the American bishops stress that the Catholic Church is a Bible church. They encourage scripture courses at the parish level and Bible masses where, after the manner of the fundamentalists, everyone brings their well-thumbed Bibles to mass. Scripture courses abound in Catholic parishes and diocesesalmost never taught using a fundamentalist approach or hermeneutic. Moreover, conferences on the challenge of fundamentalism to Catholicism are being held throughout the country, especially in places such as Texas, Florida, and Arkansas, where the challenge is greatest. Tapes to combat the fundamentalist challenge circulate in parishes. While certain tactics of fundamentalists may sometimes be urged on Catholics, the more usual reaction echoes that of Archbishop John Whealon, who chairs the American Bishops' Committee on Fundamentalism: "I cannot understand how a Catholic could live without the mass and other sacraments, without liturgy and the Virgin Mother, without the magisterial guidance of the Lord's church."
18
Whealon's remarks touch on the strongly sacramental imagination of Catholics. It surprises, indeed, that Catholics could be easily lured to the world view of often anti-Catholic, evangelical fundamentalists. For, indeed, when a Catholic hears the code word "the rapture," he or she is more likely to imagine some mystic state of Teresa of Avila or Catherine of Sienna than the Second Coming of Christ. The fundamentalist scholastic controversies about pre- versus post-

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