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Contents © 2005
by Jim Holman.
All rights reserved.

CONFESSIONS
April 2005

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THE ETERNAL DIMNESS OF THE LIBERAL CATHOLIC MIND

You're on different sides of the street, but it's the same street."

What a gentle way of putting it, I thought. I had just spent dinner in the company of my friend Phil and Lisa, one of his colleagues. We were going to a movie. Lisa was young, hipper than me (which may not be saying much), and professionally put-together. She was also, in Phil's words, a liberal Catholic. I think she would have accepted the title. Several times during a discussion of the devil, she referred to Catholic publishers on the far right, "like Ignatius and TAN," who seemed as devil-obsessed as any conservative Evangelical press. I kept having to say, "Now, wait a minute. I know people on the far right, and I don't think that's quite how they'd put it...." Hence Phil's suggestion that we were on different sides of the street.

So does that make me a conservative? I do seek to conserve the tradition of the Church as it has been handed down, and I am opposed to practices and ideas which do violence to that tradition. (What exactly is contained within that tradition is a matter of some debate, I know.) But I'm not looking to "drag the Church back to the days before Vatican II," as the old accusation goes. I don't know what it was like then; I wasn't there. I don't have some notion of the grand old days. I do have some notion of tradition and violence to tradition.

Phil and Lisa had spent the day attending the Religious Book Trade Expo up in Anaheim. During dinner, Phil asked whose talks she had heard. She mentioned Father Richard Rohr. She said he had spoken about how Jesus was always in the now, that he almost never spoke about the past or the future, but rather, about the present.

Conservative or no, I turned contrarian. I felt like the idea was scraping my brain as it entered; it just sounded so wrong. I shifted into objection mode, which was a mistake. I should have begun by affirming what I thought good about the statement. Jesus certainly warned against anxiety and worry over the future. "Consider the lilies of the field," etc. He warned against false security — the parable of the man who built bigger silos and rested, confident in his comfortable future, only to discover that God had other plans. And when Jesus forgave sinners, he certainly helped them make a break with their pasts. He established a new covenant. He was no slave to what had come before.

Instead, I said "What about Matthew 25 — the Last Judgement? Jesus is certainly talking about the future there: 'This is how it's going to be at the Last Judgement. Some of you are going to paradise; some of you are going into the lake of fire.'"

That got her hackles up. Perhaps she felt she wasn't giving a full account of Rohr's talk, and here I was, jumping down his throat when he wasn't there to defend himself. She started talking about how the Jews marked time, their concepts of past and future.

I got stubborn. "But what about the Judgement?"

She got warm. "That's one small part of the Gospel. It's not about the last ten minutes of your life!"

She was right there, but that wasn't my point. If I hadn't been so perturbed, I could have gone abstract — pointed out that the end in something dictates what comes before it. If you live your life in consideration of the last things, it will color your entire life, not merely the time immediately before you meet your maker. And I could have stopped fixating on Matthew 25 and talked about how Jesus drew on what had come before all the time — the traditions and teachings of the Jews. And that he talked about his future crucifixion, the future martyrdom of the disciples, and his future coming in glory.

Lisa cut the discussion short, and it was just as well. We weren't there to debate, and things were getting too heated too fast.

The rest of the night went much the same way. I kept objecting, Lisa kept sliding away from the battle. But by the end of the night, I was improving.

"Do you know what you never hear about any more?" she asked. "Purgatory. Is that even still around?"

"I think it's in the Catechism."

"Now there's a book I don't ever plan to read all the way through."

I don't know if I do, either, but I don't think I'd put it that way. Still, I kept silent. The movie was starting.

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