{"id":195,"date":"2008-12-29T08:19:12","date_gmt":"2008-12-29T08:19:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/pontifications\/2008\/12\/fr-richard-mcbrien-liberal-try.html"},"modified":"2008-12-29T08:19:12","modified_gmt":"2008-12-29T08:19:12","slug":"fr-richard-mcbrien-liberal-try","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/2008\/12\/fr-richard-mcbrien-liberal-try.html","title":{"rendered":"Fr. Richard McBrien: Liberal? Try “broad centrist”…"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Richard<\/span>Notre Dame’s well-known, highly-regarded–though not in some circles–theologian and commentator Richard McBrien spoke recently with the Globe’s Michael Paulson<\/a> and, not surprisingly, fireworks ensued.
\nYet as often happens, it wasn’t so much anything McBrien said, as much as the apoplexy of the reactions to his even saying anything. For my money, McBrien is one of the surest guides to church history and theology anywhere. Yes, his commentary can be provocative to some, especially these day, as commentary tends to be. Yet his weekly columns (which are finding fewer outlets these days) and certainly his academic work is top-notch.
\n“Academic” is actually an unwise adjective here. McBrien’s “Encyclopedia of Catholicism” is an indispensible one-volume work (and includes entries from the best experts across the spectrum), and his “Lives of the Popes” and “Lives of the Saints” are also superb. I am also just getting through his latest, “The Church,”<\/a> a study in ecclesiology and “the development of Catholicism,” and McBrien is again at his best, displaying wide and deep knowledge and a broad perspective.
\nSo why the agita when McBrien talks? He himself does not get angry. Check out the interview here<\/a>, and the nature of the comments. Over at dotCommonweal. Cathleen Kaveny had to shut down her thread<\/a> on the interview because it turned divisive.
\nMcBrien also doesn’t regard himself as a “liberal” necessarily, which may be what gets conservatives riled:<\/p>\n

McBRIEN:<\/strong> I regard myself as a broad centrist. But to an extreme right-wing person, especially in religion, and within the Catholic Church, a centrist or a center\/left person is automatically perceived as an extreme left-wing person, bordering on, if not actually in, heresy. But for every e-mail or blog that you would see that would condemn me…I can tell you I got a lot of e-mails and letters from Catholics who said that I had given them hope and that their teenage kids who had been alienated from the church said that, “If there were more priests like the guy we were watching on television, I’d still be a Catholic.”
\nIDEAS:<\/strong> And why don’t you leave?
\nMcBRIEN:<\/strong> Because it’s my church. It’s my home. And I was born in it. I’ve been a Catholic all my life. And I have affirmation from so many good people. I feel that I have a responsibility to them to continue working at it and doing the best I can.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Not much to argue with there. And I do think McBrien is certainly in the broad center, if one looks at the sense of the faithful on various matters of church practice and law, not to mention theology.
\nYet my view is that, essentially, we are all liberals now, in the sense that everyone in the church takes the classic “liberal” view toward history and culture and, most especially the Church–criticizing what we like, and who we like, be it the laity, the clergy or the hierarchy, and coming at the institution with an attitude of skepticism rather than reflexive acceptance. This is certainly true of “conservatives” as much if not moreso than “liberals.” The Catholic cafeteria isn’t just open, but the line is long, and covers the spectrum.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Notre Dame’s well-known, highly-regarded–though not in some circles–theologian and commentator Richard McBrien spoke recently with the Globe’s Michael Paulson and, not surprisingly, fireworks ensued. Yet as often happens, it wasn’t so much anything McBrien said, as much as the apoplexy of the reactions to his even saying anything. For my money, McBrien is one of…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":128,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,2,6,7,3,4,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-195","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bishops","category-catholic","category-church","category-history","category-politics","category-pop-culture","category-pope"],"yoast_head":"\nFr. Richard McBrien: Liberal? 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He came by all those vocations by accident, or Providence, during a longer-than-expected sojourn in Rome in the 1980s. Gibson began his journalistic career as a walk-on sports editor and columnist at The International Courier, a small daily in Rome serving Italy's English-language community. He then found a job as a newscaster and writer across the Tiber at the English Programme at Vatican Radio, an entity he describes as a cross between NPR and Armed Forces Radio for the pope. The Jesuits who ran the radio were charitable enough to hire Gibson even though he had no radio background, could not pronounce the name \"Karol Wojtyla,\" and wasn't Catholic. Time and experience overcame all those challenges, and Gibson went on to cover dozens of John Paul II's overseas trips, including papal visits to Africa, Europe, Latin America and the United States. When Gibson returned to the United States in 1990 he returned to print journalism to cover the religion beat in his native New Jersey for two dailies. He worked first for The Record of Hackensack, and then for The Star-Ledger of New Jersey, winning the nation's top awards in religion writing at both places. In 1999 he won the Supple Religion Writer of the Year contest, and in 2000 he was chosen as the Templeton Religion Reporter of the Year. Gibson is a longtime board member of the Religion Newswriters Association and he is a contributor to ReligionLink, a service of the Religion Newswriters Foundation. Since 2003, David Gibson has been an independent writer specializing in Catholicism, religion in contemporary America, and early Christian history. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Boston Magazine, Commonweal, America, The New York Observer, Beliefnet and Religion News Service. He has produced documentaries on early Christianity for CNN and other networks and has traveled on assignment to dozens of countries, with an emphasis on reporting from Europe and the Middle East. He is a frequent television commentator and has appeared on the major cable and broadcast networks. He is also a regular speaker at conferences and seminars on Catholicism, religion in America, and journalism. Gibson's first book, The Coming Catholic Church: How the Faithful are Shaping a New American Catholicism (HarperSanFrancisco), was published in 2003 and deals with the church-wide crisis revealed by the clergy sexual abuse crisis. The book was widely hailed as a \"powerful\" and \"first-rate\" treatment of the crisis from \"an academically informed journalist of the highest caliber.\" His second book, The Rule of Benedict: Pope Benedict XVI and His Battle with the Modern World (HarperSanFrancisco), came out in 2006 and is the first full-scale treatment of the Ratzinger papacy--how it happened, who he is, and what it means for the Catholic Church. The Rule of Benedict has been praised as \"an exceptionally interesting and illuminating book\" from \"a master storyeller.\" Born and raised in New Jersey, David Gibson studied European history at Furman University in South Carolina and spent a year working on Capitol Hill before moving to Italy. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughter and is working on a book about conversion, and on several film and television projects.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/author\/dgibson"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/195","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/128"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=195"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/195\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=195"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=195"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=195"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}