Fundamentalism in Comparative Perspective (21 page)

Read Fundamentalism in Comparative Perspective Online

Authors: Lawrence Kaplan

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

BOOK: Fundamentalism in Comparative Perspective
5.4Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
 
Page 89
be so, short of schism. The cognitive dissonance exercised on papal fundamentalists by the notion of schism from the papacy generally suffices to keep them in the fold, on a papal leash.
3. Protestant fundamentalism's political energies are filtered through a potent millenarian imagination based on dispensationalist readings of the
Book of Revelation
and chiliastic expectations of the rapture. Catholic integralists rarely speak of the Second Coming of Christ or cataclysmic transitions to Christ's kingdom. Their main political complaint suggests, rather, that modernity and secularization have gone quite far enough. It is now time for "the true Catholics" to take a stand before things get even worse. Perhaps millenarianism is not an essential trait of fundamentalist reactions to modernity.
To the extent that a millenarian imagination is found within Catholic integralist groups, it is more likely to be linked to Marian symbolism, as Victor and Edith Turner note.
40
While these versions of modern Marian devotion (based on "secrets," on picturing the Madonna as the Virgin of the Apocalypse, and on tying Marian devotion to the Cold War) are often found within Catholic integralist groups, they are neither exclusive to them nor definitive of their general stance. Marian millenarianism, then, has very little direct political content (except a general skewing toward anticommunist and morally conservative parties).
Lester Kurtz has argued that, ironically, it was the Vatican's posture of heresy-hunting in the early twentieth century that elicited a reform movement among scholars who might otherwise never have created one. First cautiously, then more openly, the modernist scholars transformed the church. If in 1920 the modernist movement was dead, by the 1960s and 1970s, in the wake of Vatican Council II, the modernist program had been adopted by the official church.
41
Contemporary Integralism
Is Catholic integralism really dead, then, in the post-Vatican church? On the contrary, a resurgent integralism can be found throughout the world church. In Europe, the principal integralist movements include Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre's Fraternity of St. Pius X (strong in
 
Page 90
France and Switzerland and closely allied in France with the national populist movement of Jean Le Pen), the Spanish foundation Opus Dei, and the Italian-based Communion and Liberation. It was these integralist movements which the bishops had in mind in the 1987 Synod of Bishops when they feared the free hand of "movements" in the church.
Lefebvre, like earlier integralists, opposes the false values of the French Revolution, which he sees now infecting the church: "
Liberté
was embodied in the pernicious doctrine of religious freedom;
egalité
was expressed in 'collegiality,' the idea that all the bishops of the world formed a team with the pope, thus undermining the papal monarchy; while
fraternité
took the form of ecumenism which allegedly masked the differences between Christians."
42
Lefebvre sees his movement as a "faithful remnant" and believes there has been no legitimate pope since the death of Pius XII in 1958.
Opus Dei (which is also very influential in Peru and other Latin American settings) provided the Franco governments with several cabinet ministers. Communion and Liberation (which sponsors its own Italian political party against the "secularization" of the Christian Democratic Party) sees itself also as a kind of savior of the church and restorer of authentic Catholic values. Giuseppe Lazatti, former rector of the Catholic University of Milan and a close ally of Pope Paul VI, comments on Communion and Liberation: "They define themselves as the one true church, and the only valid Christianity is their kind. At the start they would not even go to mass with anyone else. I don't see how it is possible to come to an understanding with them."
43
Elsewhere in Europe, the Confrontatie group in Holland has revived the heresy-hunting of the Sapinigère group, constituting itself a "vigilance committee'' in the Dutch church and lending support to the newly founded orthodox Roman Catholic Party.
44
In Latin America, the principal integralist movement (besides Opus Dei) is Tradition, Family, Property, which has supported the dictatorships in Brazil and Chile.
45
In the United States, the principal integralist groups are Catholics United for the Faith, the True Catholics, the Remnant, and the Wanderer Forum. These groups represent a throwback to earlier Catholic fundamentalist hopes for a creeping
 
Page 91
infallibility to cover all areas of life. These various national groups are highly influential in Vatican circles and engage in extensive correspondence about sermons heard, theologians read, and catechism classes observed.
I recently performed a content analysis of two Catholic integralist journals,
The Wanderer
and
The Remnant
. According to both journals, whose rhetoric is explicitly religious, the principal enemy lies within the churchthose who have sold out to modernity. Yet, despite disclaimers of being in any way political,
The Wanderer
and
The Remnant
include a political program. With Protestant fundamentalists, these neointegralist journals believe a dominant "secular humanism" pervades American culture. Articles in
The Wanderer
strongly support an ideological anticommunism of the Cold War era (with many explicit appeals of support for the Contras).
The Wanderer
opposes government spending on welfare and suggests that racism is an overblown theme in American society. Politically,
The Wanderer
is strongly promarket and proconservative.
Nor is
The Wanderer
totally against resorting to domestic violence. One
Wanderer
article praises two men who, "in the space of fifteen minutes on Christmas eve, 1984, managed to give three priceless birthday presents to Jesus." These men are now serving sentences in a Tallahassee, Florida, prison for bombing abortion facilities. Another
Wanderer
article notes, "The Communists more and more openly treat a Democratic Party victory as a virtual victory for communism." The political sympathies of articles in
The Remnant
look quite similar. Yet, remarkably, neointegralists deny that integralism has any political views or program.
46
Conclusions
1. The importance of the earlier integralist-modernist controversies rests on the fact that this 80-year-old controversy set a tone for dealing with a perennial Catholic issue that still haunts contemporary Catholicism. As Kurtz states, "The issue of modernism was fundamentally a conflict between ecclesiastical authority and the authority of independent scholars."
47
At the turn of the century, the conflict turned on explicitly dogmatic definitions and issues. Today
 
Page 92
the focus has shifted to moral, especially sexual, issues. The condemnation of Charles Curran, Leonardo Boff, and Hans Küng suggests that the modernist-integralist controversy in contemporary Catholicism is not over yet.
2. Although few in number and sociologically unrepresentative of mainline Catholicism (including the majority of the episcopacy), the neointegralist groups enjoy disproportionate power in the Vatican curia. In the 1970s, Confrontatie in the Netherlands specialized in denouncing erring theologians and catechists. On most issues, their journal was the best predictor of Vatican curial actions against the bishops. In time, the Dutch episcopacy has become paralyzed and Confrontatie has acquired bishops to their liking. In the 1980s Catholics United for the Faith and the Wanderer Forum have stalked American theologians and even archbishops such as Seattle's Raymond Hunthausen and Milwaukee's Rembert Weakland. While their complaints against Hunthausen and Weakland are mainly couched in legalistic and liturgical terms, in both cases the archbishops represent notable episcopal voices for a politics of disarmament and economic justice. Moreover, as earlier in the Netherlands, preoccupation with the pesky and persistent integralist attacks are likely to considerably lessen episcopal inclinations to pursue a forthright social agenda.
3. As noted in Europe and Latin America, integralist groups share an analysis of modernity counter to that of Vatican II's decree,
The Church in the Modern World
. As with classical integralism, their religious agenda often masks both a triumphal reassertion of the church as "a perfect society" and strategic alliances with conservative reactionary political movements.
In the final analysis, however, a polemic view of fundamentalism might overlook ways in which such groups are often shrewder in their diagnosis of the dangers of modernity than in the heteronomous authoritarian responses they espouse. Gabriel Daly picks up on this point, on which I will end this essay:
The existence of a fundamentalist movement in all historical faiths is a phenomenon which should neither surprise nor disturb the reflective believer. It is, in part at least, a protest against the intimations of lost in-
 
Page 93
nocence. . . . From Tertullian on, there has always been some degree of protest in Christianity about what intellectuals are alleged to do to the purity and strength of faith. Not all of this protest can be simply dismissed as irrationalism. It poses an important question, at least for church-affiliated theologians. How is it that when religious belief and practice are brought in harmony with reasonable requirements of the secular world, so often they lose their power to attract and to satisfy? It sometimes seems that a church which squares up with modernity loses precisely the "Dionysian" element which fundamentalism so often preserves. . . . The Kantian ideal of "religion within the limits of reason" is, in the end, the most unreasonable aim of all, because it neglects an element in human nature which is both necessary to spiritual health and impervious to the censorship of reason. Popular religion, even in its most superstitious, anti-intellectual, or emotionalist manifestations may be telling us something we do not want to hear in academe. Just as the cigarette manufacturers are compelled to display a warning on the cigarette package, so perhaps faculties and departments of theology might be profitably compelled to display in their lecture halls the warning, "Dionysus always strikes back"which is only another way of expressing the New Testament conviction that the Spirit breathes where he wills.
48
Notes
1. See Jürgen Habermas,
The Theory of Communicative Action
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1984).
2. See Edward Shils,
Tradition
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981).
3. For some distinctions among fundamentalism, conservatism, and traditionalism, see a special issue of
Lumiere et Vie,
especially the article by Pierre La Thuiliere, "Le Fondamentalisme dans les Traditions Chretiennes," pp. 6985.
4. Lester Kurtz,
The Politics of Heresy
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986).
5. Daniel Alexander, "Is Fundamentalism an Integrism?"
Social Compass
32, no. 4 (1985): 37392.
6.
A Pastoral Statement for Catholics on Biblical Fundamentalism
(Washington, D.C.: National Conference of Catholic Bishops, 1987).
7. Gabriel Daly, "Catholicism and Modernity,"
Journal of the American Academy of Religion
53, no. 3 (December 1985): 794.
8. I do not agree with James Davidson Hunter's equation of fundamentalism with orthodoxy in his
American Evangelicalism: Conservatism, Reli
-

Other books

Swipe by Evan Angler
Foul Play at the Fair by Shelley Freydont
Tea with Jam and Dread by Tamar Myers
Escape Magic by Michelle Garren Flye
Vanquish by Pam Godwin
Wild Child by Shelley Munro
The Butterfly Effect by Julie McLaren
Like Jazz by Heather Blackmore
The Focaccia Fatality by J. M. Griffin