Democratize the Catholic Church
Brian C. Anderson
July 1, 1996
ON MAY 22, 1996, A COALITION of liberal American Catholics began a year-long effort to gather one million signatures on a document calling for a fundamental transformation of the Catholic Church's teaching on matters of sexuality and in its form of governance. The "We Are the Church" campaign, supported by several dissident Catholic organizations, including Call to Action and the homosexual group Dignity, and patterned after similar initiatives in Germany and Australia, seeks the ordination of women, recognition of homosexual rights, the end of priestly celibacy, and a softening of divorce rules. These various demands are grounded in "the primacy of conscience in all decision-making." What "We Are the Church" so fervently desires, it must be said, and said directly, is both wrong and destructive, and raises extremely important questions concerning the relationship of the Catholic Church to the modern democratic regime, the spring from which the waters of dissidence endlessly flow. What the dissidents want is wrong because it is based on a misunderstanding of the nature of the church. It is destructive because it further erodes the latter's teaching authority, and thus weakens an institution that dares to criticize—and correct—the modern project. This is not just harmful to the church, however, but also to the flourishing of democracy, which now more than ever needs to hear the church's full, unadulterated, message. "We Are the Church" and other similar efforts to "modernize" the Catholic Church seek its reconstruction into a democratic society or, more accurately, a democratic society dedicated to realizing the agenda of a desiccated variant of modern liberalism. That agenda consists in a uniform egalitarianism, the fetishization ...
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