Russell Shaw Responds to His Critics

CWR: My response to criticisms and questions regarding "American Church"

Conceding the rightness of the liberal viewpoint - "Yes, America has moved ahead on some fronts—racial justice and women’s rights are notable instances."

Others are willing enough to grant the truth of that, but fault me for not championing their preferred understanding of the historic roots of the present situation. Apparently I’m to be faulted for not lining up with their side (whichever it happens to be) in a long-running quarrel between two opposed groups of Catholic intellectuals arguing very different positions in regard to the American founding.

One group (David Schindler is an exemplary figure) sees something radically at odds with Catholicism in the philosophical-theological premises of the founders who, after all, were men of the Enlightenment with more than a dash of Deism flowing in their veins. An interviewer for a conservative blog expresses this by citing Leo XIII in support of the proposition that the founders’ liberalism is flat-out incompatible with natural law. But others (call them the John Courtney Murray-Michael Novak School) hold that the founders were operating, albeit unknowingly, within a profoundly Catholic tradition. In an oddly equivocal column on my book, George Weigel argues that Catholics should now busy themselves filling in the natural law foundations of the admirable democratic system they built.

No doubt about it, this is an interesting debate, but it’s not one I saw—or see—any particular reason to enter into in American Church. My thesis, as I’ve said, is much simpler: Uncritical Catholic assimilation into American secular culture as it is today is a grave threat to the faith and one we need to address with no further delay. Time enough to argue later about the founders and the American founding.

The question of the founding and the resulting narrative is important, though, if we are to understand how Catholics have assimilated. It's not just the push to be "secular" (which can be a vague descriptor) but the adoption of a certain mindset or culture, not one that necessariliy belonged to all of the Founding Fathers. What is the origin of the worldview that competes with Catholicism in its adherents, and in what ways is it erroneous? What if the "two opposed groups of Catholic intellectuals" are wrong and Mr. Shaw does not offer a viable alternative to either?