Deadening the Intellectual Life of the Church: the Passing of a Generation
Upon the passing of Mary Daly, a retired professor at Boston College, Charlotte Allen asks in a January 14, 2010 Wall Street Journal article, where are all the Catholic dissidents, and notes that the Flame of Catholic Dissent is dying out. She notes that Mary Daly, Hans Küng, Edward Schillebeeckx, and Sister Sandra M. Schneiders are all of the Vatican II era and points out the void.
“So where is the second generation of brilliant progressive Catholic theologians? There are plenty of liberal lay Catholics. The church’s ban on artificial birth control is nearly a dead letter, a majority of Catholics say they believe their church should ordain women, and 40% have no moral objections to abortion, according to a 2009 Gallup poll. But dissident Catholicism seems to have lost steam as an intellectual movement, and not only because the issues relating to sex and papal authority that originally sparked Catholic dissidents have not changed in nearly 50 years.”
“The first-generation dissidents were products of a strong and confident traditional Catholic culture against which they rebelled, one whose intellectual standards grounded them in the faith they later came to question. Sister Schneiders, for example, earned four degrees from Catholic institutions, including the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome. Yet most Catholics of her generation have not passed on the tenets of their faith to their children—the offspring of the Vatican II generation tend either to be churchless or not to go to church—or, in the case of academics, to their students. It’s hard to rebel when you don’t even know what you are rebelling against.”
Again I have to wonder if the intellectual life of the church has lost its zip not so much from outright repression (which would inspire dissent) but from a growing sense of the irrelevance of the authority of the institution.
