In his most recent NRO essay, "Catholics and Modernity",
George Weigel argues that it is nigh time to lose the left-right,
liberal-conservative, politically-fixated categories when it comes to
accurately describing Catholicism:
For it was Father Murphy who, covering the Second Vatican Council for The New Yorker
under the pseudonym “Xavier Rynne,” concocted the cowboys-and-Indians
hermeneutic of all things Catholic that has plagued the mainstream
media’s reporting and commentary on the Catholic Church for two
generations: There are good-guy Catholics, known as “liberals” or
“progressives,” who want to make the Church relevant to contemporary
society and culture; and there are bad-guy Catholics, known as
“conservatives” or “traditionalists,” who want to retreat into catacombs
of intransigence because of their inability to grasp or comprehend a
modern (and, latterly, postmodern) world they regard with horror.
Now, to be sure, a writer like Murphy,
trying to explain the 21st ecumenical council in history to the
generally secularized readership of The New Yorker, had a
problem on his hands. How could even a gifted and witty scribe (which
Murphy/Rynne was) explain, let alone make exciting, arcane debates over
doctrine, often conducted in a strange vocabulary, for people who
regarded “doctrine” as a synonym for “mindlessness” and “intellectual
immaturity,” and in a culture where pragmatism and “technique” had
conquered all? Murphy/Rynne had excellent inside sources in Rome, where
he had long worked; what he needed was what would now be called — cue
fingernails scraping down blackboard — a “narrative.” So Murphy/Rynne
hit on a brilliant strategy, perfectly adapted to the Sixties and the
middle years of Kennedy Camelot: treat Vatican II as a political
contest between the forces of light and the forces of reaction; run
everything and everybody at the council through those filters; and then
watch readers acclaim, with one voice, “I get it!”
So, beginning 50 years ago this coming
October, “Xavier Rynne”/Francis X. Murphy set in analytic concrete an
interpretation of the Catholic Church, its internal affairs, and its
engagement with public life that is ubiquitous in the 21st-century
mainstream media — and not only in the United States. Here too in
Poland, the cowboys-and-Indians hermeneutic dominates the national
media, although the preferred good-guy/bad-guy categories are “open
Church” and “closed Church.” The same nonsense prevails throughout the
rest of Europe, even as the European Catholicism that most
enthusiastically embraced the “progressive” or “open Church” model
shrinks into ecclesial and public inconsequence.
The problem, of course, is that the cowboys-Indians/left-right optic is
incapable of grappling with the fact that the Catholic Church is about
true-and-false, not liberal-and-conservative.
Later, this "take it home and frame it" line: "The party of ultimate fungibility is dying in the Catholic Church." Read the entire essay.