Fundamentalism in Comparative Perspective (19 page)

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Authors: Lawrence Kaplan

Tags: #Religion, #General, #Fundamentalism, #Comparative Religion, #Philosophy, #test

BOOK: Fundamentalism in Comparative Perspective
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millenialism and dispensationalism remain as arcane to most Catholics as the Catholic Tridentine disputes over transubstantiation do to fundamentalists. In any event, almost every major strand of American Catholicismthe bishops, the clergy, scripture scholars, and religious educators, even Catholic integralist groups such as the Wanderer Forumagrees about resisting the challenge of biblical fundamentalism. Few want Catholicism to give up its sacramental and symbolic imagination to become a church whose sensibilities reflect the world of Jerry Falwell and Jimmy Swaggert.
The Internal Challenge of Biblical Fundamentalism
There exist, however, certain minor tendencies toward a biblical fundamentalism within Catholicism itself. George Gallup notes that nearly four million Catholics claim to be "born again" Bible Christians while remaining active in the Catholic church.
19
Most of these would seem to be Catholic charismatics. In the first stages of the Catholic Pentecostal movement, charismatic prayer groups held joint meetings with Protestant Pentecostals, and some leading charismatic Catholics converted out. But the history of this recent biblical fundamentalist movement within Catholicism is largely a tale of Catholic success in containing schism and constraining charism in the service of, and under the aegis of, the institutional church.
Very early on, Catholic charismatic prayer groups held their prayer meetings in the context of the Catholic mass, which emphasizes the Scriptures as a living book in the church and introduces a Catholic sensibility toward multiple and symbolic readings of the Scriptures. Moreover, shrewd chancery offices appointed nonfundamentalist priests as official diocesan liaisons or vicars to this fundamentalist-oriented movement. These tended to coopt the groups for Catholic purposes and stressed the importance of "the teaching" (a more nuanced and critical reflection period which emphasizes Catholic understandings) as a corrective to free-wheeling charismatic prayer sessions.
In a survey of Catholic Pentecostals, conducted in the early 1970s, sociologist Joseph Fichter found traces of fundamentalism and het-
 
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erodox understandings, although he notes that the social attitudes of Catholic Pentecostals were much more liberal than the average for Protestant fundamentalists.
20
A later sociological study by Meredith B. McGuire,
Pentecostal Catholics,
establishes that the Catholic gamble to contain the charisma and tame the fundamentalist tendencies among Pentecostal Catholics generally paid off.
21
McGuire documents how the new Pentecostal imagery becomes subordinated to the larger Catholic sacramental sense. More important, Catholic Pentecostals exhibit a strong desire to legitimate their practices to fellow Catholics. They try hard to show their direct connection to the Catholic tradition and are aware that even the mere appearance of any unorthodoxy can pose a threat to potential members. Thus, "there is considerable attention paid, in charismatic literature, to the Catholic orthodoxy of their movement and to possible unorthodox practices which should be avoided."
22
This legitimist desire for acceptance within a nonbiblically fundamentalist church, McGuire claims, routinizes the charisma. Especially instructive is the tendency in Catholic charismatic circles to reduce prophesy to a merely affective (almost contentless) use, "because such prophesy is not likely to challenge the authority of the church hierarchy."
23
Moreover, leadership roles in Catholic prayer groupsin contradistinction to the Protestant Pentecostal practiceare widely shared and rotated, thus avoiding possible clashes between a powerful charismatic prayer leader and the hierarchy. By charting the evolution of a number of Catholic charismatic groups over a decade, McGuire details how, over time, the Catholic charismatic movement became less fundamentalist, more symbolic, and multifaceted in its understandings of Scripture and church authority.
McGuire's research should not surprise us since, as I contend, biblical fundamentalism has never been and is unlikely to become a characteristically Catholic form of fundamentalism. The rich resources of the institutional church are poised to ward off the danger of this form of fundamentalism. Rather, alluding to The Wanderer, The Remnant, and other Catholic right-wing integralist groups in the United States, San Francisco's Archbishop John R. Quinn warned of the dangers of a new integralism. What is Catholic integralism?
 
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What constitutes its classic religious and social agenda? How does it compare and contrast with Protestant fundamentalism? How important is it to understand contemporary Catholicism?
Classic Catholic Integralism
In the last decades of the nineteenth century Catholicism, like Protestantism, had to come to grips with modernity in the forms of: higher-biblical criticism; the scientific, especially Darwinian, revolution; and the new forces of liberal, bourgeois democracy in Europe with its decided anticlerical stamp and its program of separation of church and state and social progress. Especially after the loss of the Papal States in 1870, European Catholicism felt under siege. Long allied in France with an antirevolutionary monarchist party, the church remained rooted in traditionalist politics. At Vatican I, in defiance of its loss of temporal power, the church escalated its spiritual claims by proclaiming, the doctrine of papal infallibility.
Around the turn of the century, a number of Catholic scholars, notably Alfred Loisy in France and George Tyrell and Baron Friedrich von Hügel in England, sought a new Catholic rapprochement with modernity. They combined doctrinal with social modernism, much as liberal Protestantism, at the time, conjoined the social gospel with a project of dialoguein Schliermacher's classic terms, "with the cultural despisers of religion."
The modernist movement in Catholicism was a loose, spontaneous movement of scholars in a number of countries, including the United States. None saw themselves as heretics. A very loose connection also existed between the modernist scholars and socially progressive movements open to the ideas of the French Republic (e.g., Marc Sangnier and the Le Sillon movement in France, Romolu Murri's movement for a Catholic socialism in Italy). Generally, the modernists saw their task as, in Loisy's terms, building a "true Catholicism of the future" and constructing a new Catholic apologetic based on the role of religion rather than by appealing to scholastic theology. They distanced themselves from many elements of Protestant higher criticism. Thus, in treating of Adolph von Harnack's discussion of the essence of Christianity, Loisy insisted that: (1) it
 
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is not possible to separate the Christian idea from the Christian community (and, hence, from historic Catholicism); and (2) it is not possible to isolate any one feature of Christianity as the invariable essence of the Bible. Despite Loisy's attempts to differentiate his position from Harnack's and secular modernists, his thought, in Rome, was perceived as one with these Protestant and secular modernists.
A group of Roman curial insiders, executing a coup of "bureaucratic insurgency," saw in the incipient and unorganized efforts of these scholars (whose sympathizers may have numbered, at the movement's high point, barely 1,500) an alleged international conspiracy against the papacy and Catholicism.
24
In fact, the so-called conspiracy consisted of nothing more than letters and travels of von Hügel. But, "the ecclesiastical elites recognized and capitalized on the possibility of fortifying their own position by constructing a caricature of the modernists' position through weaving their opponents' views into a coherent whole and condemning modernism as a heresy.
25
The Catholic modernists were unfairly lumped together with secular anticlerical and Masonic enemies of the church. Indeed, they were perceived as more dangerous than these external enemies. For, "dissidents working in an organization are within its networks and authority structure and hence are more likely to attract followers than are external critics who can make no legitimate claims."
26
Writing about such scapegoating of "deviant insiders," sociologist Lewis Coser notes, "the search for or invention of a dissenter within may serve to maintain a structure which is threatened from outside."
27
In 1907 Pope Pius X condemned modernism in the church as the synthesis of all heresies, and the full force of the Roman hierarchy was marshalled to crush it. Five of Loisy's books were placed on the Index of Forbidden Books, and both Loisy and Tyrell were excommunicated. Numerous scholars were removed from their teaching posts, and an antimodernist oath was required of all priests (yearly renewed by seminary professors until the 1960s). A secret international organization (the Sapinière) and diocesan "vigilance committees'' were set up to detect and report any signs of the modernist heresy in the church. Countless clerics were harassed, censured, relieved of their posts, and stripped of their credentials. Thus, a
 
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veritable reign of terror against the world of scholarship ensued. By 1920 church modernists had been crushed or, at least, forced deeply underground.
Several similarities between Catholic integralism and Protestant fundamentalism deserve noting:
1. Chronologically, both occurred during the first and second decades of the twentieth century when the forces of a new synthesis between liberalism and religion began to make inroads in both Catholicism and Protestantism.
2. Both movements represent a synthesis of a theological position and an ideological-political stance against the erosion of traditional authorities. Both are
antimoderne
and literalist. In Protestantism, the authority under attack was the infallible inerrancy of Scripture; in Catholicism, it was the infallible inerrancy of papal authority. It deserves noting that the central symbols evoked by fundamentalist reaction (
sola scriptura
and papal primacy) remain central to larger Protestant and Catholic orthodoxy. The fundamentalists took central orthodox symbols and blew them out of proportion to form a caricature. But, by appealing to central symbols of orthodoxy, they could dip into larger constituencies and sensibilities within mainline Protestantism and Catholicism. They had potential allies in the mainstream. Daniel Alexander notes:
When we compare integralism and fundamentalism, we are struck by the fact that both these currents appeal to the concept of infallibility (papal infallibility adopted at Vatican I for the former and the Bible's infallibility as expressed in the dogma of literal inspiration and of inerrancy, asserted at more or less the same time, for the latter). In both cases, we have been led to see in this appeal a defense of the objectivity of the structure of religious tradition threatened by the rise of liberal subjectivism and by the shattering of religious meanings as a result of secularization.
28
3. In both cases, the debate between fundamentalists and liberals (in Protestantism) and modernists and integralists (in Catholicism) is caught up in a polemical field of discourse. The terms used to describe the parties in dispute are not value-neutral. Thus, "in Catholic milieux the word 'integrism' was first used by opponents of those who called themselves 'Integral Catholics,' just as the word 'modernism' was immediately used by the Roman hierarchy to disqualify the

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