Liberal Catholicism

A response by a minority of Catholic intellectuals to the French Revolution and
nineteenth century European liberalism, liberal Catholicism may be seen as a
chapter in the history of reform Catholicism which has long contended with the
majority, conservative, and authoritarian tradition within Roman Catholicism.
The characteristics of liberal Catholicism are best exemplified in its chief
exponents. The pioneer of the movement was the passionate French priest and
prophet H F R de Lamennais (1782 - 1854), who developed a new apologetic for
Catholicism. The Catholic religion, he maintained, is not evidenced chiefly by
miracles and fulfilled prophecies but by its capacity to perpetuate those
beliefs which mankind has found essential to an ordered social life: monotheism,
the difference between good and evil, the immortality of the soul, and reward or
punishment in a future life. Testifying to these beliefs is the sensus communis
or general reason, the collective judgments derived from custom, tradition, and
education. Hence society is the vehicle of revelation, a belief of great
democratic potential. Lamennais's apologetics led to politics. His mission was
to promote the social regeneration of Europe through the renaissance of
Catholicism. The Catholic church should break with all royalist and absolutist
regimes; the papacy should be the guardian of liberty and the champion of
democracy; and the people, in whom was hidden the Word of God, should be
sovereign.
In a daily newspaper, L'Avenir, with its motto "God and Liberty," Lamennais
advanced his revolutionary program: freedom of conscience and religion
(necessitating the abolition of concordats between the papacy and civil
governments and the stopping both of state payment of clergy and of state
intervention in the appointment of bishops); freedom (not a monopoly) for the
church in education; liberty of the press; freedom of association; universal
suffrage; and decentralization of government.
C R F de Montalembert (1810 - 70), historian and publicist, entered the French
Parliament in 1837, seeking to catholicize liberals and to liberalize Catholics.
His greatest political victory was the passage in 1850 of the Falloux law, which
allowed the development of a Catholic secondary education system independent of
the state system.
The commitment by liberal Catholics to education was accompanied by an emphasis
on preaching, then unusual in the Roman Catholic Church. The greatest liberal
Catholic preacher was the Dominican J B H Lacordaire (1802 - 61), who attracted
vast crowds especially to his Lenten conferences at Notre Dame Cathedral, where
his impassioned sermons combined the call for liberty in church and state with
ultramontanism (centralization of papal authority in matters of church
government and doctrine).
The majority of liberal Catholics remained orthodox, seeking to modernize the
church through the political emancipation of the laity and the separation of
church and state. A later generation of liberal Catholics, including Lord Acton
(1834 - 1902) in England and J J I von Dollinger (1799 - 1890) in Germany,
advocated autonomy for the laity in doctrinal matters.
The currents of liberal Catholicism led at the beginning of the twentieth
century to the much stormier waters of Catholic modernism, which tended to be
antidogmatic and anthropocentric. The leading Catholic modernists, Alfred Loisy,
George Tyrell, Baron Friedrich von Hugel, Edouard Le Roy, Maurice Blondel, and
Ernesto Buonaiuti, were concerned to reconcile traditional Catholic doctrine
with the results of critical scriptural exegesis.
The papacy has consistently criticized and frequently condemned liberal
Catholicism for its rationalism and naturalism. Lamennais's political liberalism
was condemned by Gregory XVI in the encyclical Mirari vos of 1832. In 1834 in
Singulari nos Gregory condemned Lamennais's doctrine that the evolution of truth
was part of the progressive evolution of the people (a view later called
immanentism). Montalembert concluded that it was not possible to be a Catholic
and a liberal after Pius IX's encyclical Quanta Cura and the Syllabus of Errors
(both 1864). Acton and Dollinger withdrew their active support of Rome after the
promulgation in 1870 of the dogma of papal infallibility. Modernism was
condemned in 1907 by Pius X in the decree Lamentabili and the encyclical
Pascendi gregis.
Bibliography
Lord Acton, The History of Freedom and Other Essays; J L Altholz, The Liberal
Catholic Movement in England; E E Y Hales, Pio Nono: A Study in European
Politics and Religion in the Nineteenth Century and Revolution and Papacy, 1769
- 1846; D Holmes, The Triumph of the Holy See: A Short History of the Papacy in
the Nineteenth Century; T M Loome, Liberal Catholicism, Reform Catholicism,
Modernism: A Contribution to a New Orientation in Modernist Research; J N Moody,
ed., Church and Society: Catholic Social and Political Thought and Movements,
1789 - 1950; B M G Reardon, Liberalism and Tradition: Aspects of Catholic
Thought in Nineteenth Century France; A R Vidler, Prophecy and Papacy: A Study
of Lamennais, the Church and the Revolution.