Word: hitchcocks
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...criticisms against the Catholic liberals are reminiscent of various revisionist critiques of the Progressive movement. Like the New Politics, the Catholic Left in America is primarily made up of the wealthy, well-educated and upwardly mobile. For Hitchcock, their revolt is in a very real sense a bid for power...
...Hitchcock notes that many of the new positions of authority in the Church have been taken over by the liberals--they are writing the catechisms, controlling the publishing houses, preparing the curricula. Their fight against authority he says, is not a fight against authority itself, but only against those holding power. Their victory would represent not a real revolution, but only a palace coup...
...Hitchcock perceives (very correctly, I think) that the liberals failed to realize that many of their reforms would lead not to a radicalization of the Church--that is, more power over the Church by individual Catholics and greater Church concern for problems of war, poverty and powerlessness--but rather to what Hitch cock tellingly calls "spiritual sub-urbanization." The radical spiritual ness of the Church is very much outside of the mainstream of American pragmatism with its emphasis on GNP and incentive systems. What liberal Catholics have failed to see--and what the Fathers Berrigan and Thomas Merton...
...precisely this point where Hitchcock's analysis stops. Although he concedes that Catholic radicals are now beginning to rediscover the working class (like their brethren in the New Politics movement), he dismisses this as the same sort of fadism which led his villains to endorse psychoanalysis and the Poverty Program in the middle sixties. In fact, Catholic liberals are going through a kind of radicalization, which may well force them to go beyond fadism. This summer, for example, Michael Novak, a radical Catholic journalist who is a key villain in Hitchcock's analysis, wrote an article for Harper...
Above all, Hitchcock's analysis suffers from his failure to take a closer look at much of what is going on in radical theology. He looks instead at radical journalists like Novak and Daniel Callahan and magazines like Commonweal. These are, to be sure, good indicators of what radical Catholics are thinking about. They are not substitutes for analysis of theology itself. What is significant about radical theologians like Jurgen Motlmann (a Protestant) and Johannes Metz (a Catholic) is that they rely very heavily upon the Gospel in their analysis. Hitchcock simply dismisses their quest...