Catholicism and modernity: Confrontation or capitulation?

by James Hitchcock

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• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0816404275
• ISBN13: 9780816404278
• Release Date: January 1979
• Publisher: Seabury Press
• Length: 250 Pages
• Weight: 1.25 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Slightly outdated, but still a great book

James Hitchcock has been described as "probably the most prolific (and easily the most articulate) critic of theological liberalism in the American church" (Michael Cuneo, in The Smoke of Satan) in the years since Vatican 2, and this book is a great example of that articulate and powerful voice at work. Published in 1979, it is obvious that at one level it is out of date, since in the last thirty years many things have happened in the American Catholic church, and, though Hitchcock makes some attempts at predictions in the book, not all of them came to fruition--which for the most part is a good thing, given some of his gloomy scenarios. What Hitchcock did not foresee--and that turned out to be a good thing--was the vitality that the pontificate of John Paul 2 would bring to the Church in the ensuing years after Hitchcock's book was published. Not to mention the insight and energy of Evangelical converts to the Church like Scott Hahn, Fr. Richard Neuhaus, and Francis Beckwith (among others). "Catholicism and Modernity" stands out in two significant ways to this reader: one is the litany of examples that he draws from to prove his case that many of the clergy and religious in the Church had succumbed in numerous ways to the modernity of the culture at large. These examples (drawn often from the National Catholic Reporter) show a wholesale rejection of the Magisterium of the Church, a rejection apparently predicated on the mistaken notion that soon, the Pope and all his bishops would also, in a moment of "enlightenment" overturn centuries of Church teaching in favor of theological modernism. Hitchcock shows how this worked through the bureacracy of the church as well as by catering to the media--and the media is taken to task as much as is the bureacracy. The other aspect about the book that stands out is its theoretical framework. Here Hitchcock draws on several notable books to make his case--"The Triumph of the Therapeutic" by Philip Rieff and "The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism" by Daniel Bell. I don't know if either of those writers are Christians, but they are certainly put to good use by Hitchcock--Rieff in particular. Hitchcock quotes Rieff ("Religious man was born to be saved; psychological man was born to be pleased") and then goes on that "many Catholics have adopted the therapeutic mentality without even realizing it" and that its spread "is at the root of most other problems." These problems are brought into the Church through the "residual hold" the church has on people, and in the way they "demand that the Church give its blessing to their transgressions." Later chapters in the book take the personal into the political--there is a lengthy explication about the rather glaring preference that numerous left-wing Catholics had (and sometimes continue to have) for various totalitarian regimes of the 1970's, and this includes the huge impact that the Vietnam war had on these leftists as well. Here Hitchcock points out as well