THE REFORMATION ROLLS ON:

Religious Liberty and Development of Doctrine in Islam (Michael Novak, June 27, 2011, Public Discourse)

By the year 2020, the Islamic nations of the Mediterranean Basin will resound with positive cries for democracy, human rights, individual liberty, and the dignity of every man, woman, and child.

As a graduate student at Catholic University of America I had the privilege of taking a course from Msgr. Joseph Fenton, the tough but unpopular antagonist to John Courtney Murray on religious liberty, one of those who alerted Rome of the “dangers” of Murray’s teachings. Msgr. Fenton knew I sided with Murray—I had already published on that—but he enjoyed repartee with me and rather favored me in class.

I was very early at the center of the American Catholic argument on religious liberty. Reporting from Rome during the Second Vatican Council, I recorded the first passionate stirrings of the discussion of religious liberty at the Council, and followed the backstage private debates at individual episcopal conferences. That is where I first heard the name Karol Wojtyla, the new and youngest ever cardinal of Krakow, and his fresh insistence that the episcopal conferences of Central and Eastern Europe must have a declaration of religious liberty from the Council. Some say his cool intellectual passion did more than anything else to sway Paul VI to throw his weight in favor of bringing that issue to a vote, even though powerful forces (especially but not only) in the Latin world feared greatly that it would lead to relativism and religious indifferentism.

In a word, I saw firsthand how the Catholic Church needed a “development of doctrine”—and quickly—on religious liberty. As an American, I was acutely aware of how late it was in coming. I could not help rejoicing, later, at the powerful similarities between key passages of the Council’s Declaration on Religious Liberty and central lines of argument in James Madison and Thomas Jefferson.

The development of doctrine is happening in dozens of Islamic countries, especially in the eighteen key ones of the Middle East.

Our friend James Lothian has written a terrific book on Catholic intellectuals in England around the time of the two world wars. The loose group, that began with Hillaire Belloc, was initially most notable for what we might now understand as a defense of Catholicism that was based on a rejection of the End of History that had occurred in England and America by the late 18th century. They were essentially hostile to parliamentary democracy, capitalism, and protestantism. In mounting this struggle they considered themselves to be defending the West.

We, of course, live in a time when history teaches us that the ultimate defenders of the West were Britain and America, when Pope John Paul II reconciled the Church to capitalism, and when the current Pope is a Tocquevillian, who has written and spoken in glowing terms of the American model of religious liberty (protestantism). Bellocianism is comprehensively routed.

And yet, the works of this English Catholic intellectual circle--those by G. K. Chesterton, Evelyn Waugh, Christopher Dawson, in particular--remain popular and influential among American conservatives. [Not to mention those outside the circle--C. S. Lewis, Dorothy L. Sayers, J.R.R. Tolkien.] So we are naturally disposed to view them sympathetically, even as we read about them fighting this rearguard action against the Anglosphere, even going so far as to play footsie with not just Mussolini but Oswald Mosley.

Watching these good and decent people we still admire wrestle futilely with the threat of globalization, one is struck by the parallels to what is going on in the Islamic world. Look at how long it took us to Reform the Catholic Church and now consider that, our attention finally having turned to Islam after the end of the Cold War, we;re trying to compress their Reformation into a single generation. No wonder it's so disorienting, even for the best among them.

Posted by oj at July 3, 2011 5:32 PM
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