Reconstructionist Catholics?

A handful of Catholic higher-ups have recently voiced surprising sympathy for, of all things, the New Atheist project. One is Monsignor Lorenzo Albacete, who, in a recent debate with Christopher Hitchens, seemed to agree with nearly everything Hitchens had to say. Another is the Vatican Latinist Reginald Foster, who appears in Bill Maher’s new film Religulous admitting that most of the things Catholics believe in are just “stories.” Third, and most reluctant, is theologian Michael Novak, whose recent book, No One Sees God, makes at least a paltry effort to learn from atheists before ruthlessly refuting them. Taken together, these three old men, each touched by the liberalizing efforts of Vatican II, point to some desire buried in the Church’s collective unconscious to hear the New Atheists out.

Of course this is not the position taken by the Pope, who has committed his papacy to opposing strident secularism, or by any stretch of the Catholic mainstream. But the voices of these few vocal elites might pave the way for a new discourse—one that holds on to Catholic tradition and experience while listening to the New Atheist concern about supernatural doctrines. It almost brings to mind Mordecai Kaplan’s Reconstructionist movement in Judaism, which frames Jewish identity entirely in terms of ethnic community rather than religious belief.

Modernist Protestants made a go of this in the 1960s, during the last major atheist surge. Their “Death of God Theology,” represented by thinkers like Thomas Altizer, Gabriel Vahanian, and Harvey Cox, tried to accommodate Christianity to what they thought was the inevitable secularization of the world. Cox’s The Secular City did away with virtually every feature of religion short of the badness of pornography. But the movement didn’t turn out a great success. As the “desecularization of the world” began to be noticed in the late 1970s and 1980s, many of these same thinkers decided that the death of God was both premature and a dead end for theology (duh).

Could Catholicism offer a more fertile ground for atheism-friendly religion than Protestantism? After all, Catholics don’t have to worry about Luther’s sola fide doctrine; there is more to religion than faith in supernatural conditions. Since tradition, rather than sacred scripture, lies at the center of Catholic thought, it seems possible to decide that “the tradition” might move in favor of atheist positions. Tradition changed, for example, when the Church moved toward acceptance of democracy under the influence of John Courtney Murray in the twentieth century—that among so many of the other traditions that Vatican II was so willing to rethink.

When I mentioned this observation to my priest, he pointed to the Vatican II-era document Gaudium et Spes—”On the Church in the Modern World” (19-21). It has no friendliness for atheism, which it counts “among the most serious problems of this age.” Yet it proposes an interesting dialectic calls believers to task for the emergence of atheism:

Undeniably, those who willfully shut out God from their hearts and try to dodge religious questions are not following the dictates of their consciences, and hence are not free of blame; yet believers themselves frequently bear some responsibility for this situation. For, taken as a whole, atheism is not a spontaneous development but stems from a variety of causes, including a critical reaction against religious beliefs, and in some places against the Christian religion in particular. Hence believers can have more than a little to do with the birth of atheism. To the extent that they neglect their own training in the faith, or teach erroneous doctrine, or are deficient in their religious, moral or social life, they must be said to conceal rather than reveal the authentic face of God and religion.

Indeed,

she [the Church] strives to detect in the atheistic mind the hidden causes for the denial of God; conscious of how weighty are the questions which atheism raises, and motivated by love for all men, she believes these questions ought to be examined seriously and more profoundly.

Are these “reconstructionist Catholics” simply taking the message of Gaudium et Spes to heart? They agree that atheism raises valid questions that people of faith should internalize, and none of them falls short of denying theism outright. Or are they beginning to step beyond the clear divisions between theist and atheist that Gaudium presumes?

How, by the way, are atheists receiving this posture among Catholics? Are they welcoming the agreeable Catholics with open arms? I’ve already described how Christopher Hitchens reacted to Albacete (evisceration). And, in an interview, this is what Bill Maher had to say about Fr. Foster:

Here’s a guy who lives down the hall from the pope. We saw where the pope lives. And he’s just saying, “Ah, they’re all just stories.” It gave us a real insight that perhaps some of these people who are in the hierarchies of the religions—they don’t really believe it. But they understand that you can’t tear it all down for the common man, that people need their stories. It’s just amazing that he would say it to me publicly, and on camera.

That is to say, the reconstructionists are hypocrites—the worst of all. I doubt this is what Gaudium had in mind.