Post-Conciliar Liberal Catholicism

The most significant contribution to the universal Church of pre-conciliar liberal Catholicism in America was the development of a Catholic theory of religious freedom—which led, in due course, to Vatican II’s epic Declaration on Religious Freedom, to the post-conciliar Church’s history-changing defense of human rights, and to the Church’s crucial role in democratic transitions around the world. This achievement, in which the debates on religious freedom at Vatican II were pivotal, unfolded in close collaboration with the U.S. bishops. It was Cardinal Francis Spellman of New York, for instance, who brought Father John Courtney Murray, S.J., to the Council, where Murray became one of the intellectual architects of the Declaration on Religious Freedom. And it was Murray (now falsely enlisted post-mortem into the pro-Obama camp of the Catholic diaspora) who, with the U.S. bishops and others, worked the Council process so that it became clear to a critical mass of the world’s bishops that religious freedom was indeed congruent with what Cardinal George called “the Catholic and apostolic faith.” That liberal Catholics of the 2012 diaspora refuse to concede the grave threat to religious freedom posed by the administration’s mandate, and that they have given political cover to a gross infringement on religious freedom by a federal government that looks ever more like Hobbes’ Leviathan, is a grave breach of ecclesial communion in itself. It also represents a tragic betrayal of the best in the liberal Catholic heritage in the U.S., even as it illustrates the utter incoherence into which post-conciliar liberal Catholicism in America has tragically fallen.

Link (here) to George Wiegal's article entitled, The Catholic diaspora and the tragedy of liberal Catholicism.