The Psychological Makeup of the Catholic Liberal

By Dr. Gavin Ashenden

History has brought us to a crossroads in the life of the Catholic Church. As one papacy ends and the prayers and the collective mind of the church give more thought to what the right relationship between the Catholic Church and the world ought to look like, what has become a civil war in the Church between progressive and traditionalists, between liberals and conservatives plays an ever more important role.

In theological as well as psychological and political terms, it’s easy to confuse prophecy and appeasement. Appeasement takes place when values central to the secular culture are celebrated as legitimate moral developments purportedly common to both Christianity and the zeitgeist, usually in terms of sexual or political ethics. “Forward” thinking voices from within the faith confuse development with prophecy. There is the assumption that all development, all change must be for the good. In fact, baptizing with Christian approbation what, as we look back, turns out to have been either sterile or corrupt, becomes an act of appeasement towards what has increasingly been shown to be a culture hostile to the values of Christendom.

Western Society, a little inebriated by its own technological and scientific success, has convinced itself that it walks the road of progress. But there is no consensus of what constitutes progress. Few people make a distinction between technological ingenuity and moral probity or wisdom. There is an unfounded secular assumption that they go together.

But the history of the 20th century, if it teaches us anything, suggests that there is no obvious or inevitable link between technological skill and learning to love your neighbor, or finding a more meaningful relationship with God. How do we learn to tell the difference between a prophetic preparation and foretelling of the coming future, and the appeasement of a competing world view? If we are going to assess a change in sexual ethics or political priority, we need to be able to do so by weighing them according to the historic ethics of the Church down the ages. The liberal mind finds the weight of tradition unconvincing. It has been taught that all development must constitute progress. This produces two different currencies of authenticity: primitive bad; contemporary good.

Staying in tune with a liberal society that has no clear idea of what it is moving forward to, doesn’t necessarily constitute being prophetic. The outcome may be in an entirely different direction. If adopting the priorities of progressive society undermines or waters down Christian ethics then it’s not prophecy but appeasement.

There has long been a philosophical struggle between secularism and the Church stretching back to the French Revolution and beyond. Perhaps one of the most influential challenges to the Catholic world view that re-emerged then is found in the work of Rousseau.

It’s never easy to separate the strands of the political, philosophical, and spiritual, but it’s particularly problematic in the work of Rousseau. His personal influences included a period as a would-be seminarian, then later a paid up Calvinist as he sought refuge in Geneva. But perhaps most interesting of all he experienced a kind of counter Pauline Damascene experience while walking near Paris on the road to Vincennes; his “road to Vincennes” conversion.

He claimed some kind of private revelation came upon him bringing two convictions: the first that the arts and sciences were responsible for the moral degeneration of society; and the second that mankind was otherwise pure and unspoilt.

His new insight didn’t much damage the prospects of either art or science, but it did undermine the acceptance of what the Church called original sin. The liberal (optimistic) mindset has always found the idea of a deeply embedded inherited moral flaw upsetting. It prefers the self-congratulatory unrealistic optimism of Rousseau.

Rousseau’s optimism about human nature proved to be also deeply attractive to an age that was itching to throw off the restraints of both the Church and the monarchical slate. His insistence that humans were born with a blank moral state, capable of unlimited moral and intellectual improvement, proved to be a preferable reading of human nature to reformers. It allowed them unlimited potential for their revolutions.

Was this an intellectual misreading of human nature or an intrusive spiritual perversion mediated by Rousseau, offering a hubristic contrasting alternative to the account of original sin in Genesis?

Either way it appealed to a culture that entertained ambitions for freedom, progress, autonomy, and a variety of versions of political and personal fulfilment. If human beings were born with a moral blank slate, then all transformation took was limitless education and the infusion of state resources.

The Christian critique of secular utopianism is that it represents a mis-directed quest for heaven. The natural and the supernatural are constantly in tension in the human experience. Why wait for heaven if you can create heaven on earth?

For Catholics, one of the consequences of this perspective is that the extent to which the supernatural and miraculous aspects of the faith become less or inaccessible—is the extent to which educational, political, or rational solutions become attractive, or a more accessible means of fulfilling a quest for peace, justice, the offering of education, health, and the relief of suffering in a wounded and conflicted world.

The last few centuries have seen an assault on the claims of the supernatural by an empirically minded, pragmatic culture. It has either been rubbished as illusion and manipulation or dismissed as scientifically impossible. But of all expressions of Christianity, Catholicism has embodied the claims of the supernatural. From transubstantiation in the Mass to miraculous healings from prayer and relics, Catholicism has unashamedly prioritized the spiritual over the skeptical.

But the liberal (Catholic) mindset finds the empirical and political more convincing than the spiritual and the metaphysical.

There is always an eschatological tension in the Christian mind. The goal of heaven has implications for now, but in a metaphysically conflicted world, it can only be realized behind time and space.

The twin challenges of holding that tension in balance, while straddling both the natural and supernatural, dimension prove too much for secularized Catholics.

The attraction of downplaying original sin and leaning more deeply into blank slate has proved too powerful for the eschatologically impatient.

“Justice and peace” now offer a short cut for the sharp discomfort of utopian longing. The immediacy of the seductive promise offered by the progressive left strengthens its grip as the fog of rationalism obscures the potency of the supernatural. External improvement is always more measurable than internal transformation. Political solutions are drawn in more eye-catching colors than the purification of motive and the heart.

But secularism smuggles in more than the empirical. It acts as a Trojan horse and carries deep in its belly a relativism that dissolves allegiance to absolute morality. Ethics becomes a matter more of relieving immediate pain than a task of purification, spiritual battle, and transformation. The progressive mind is tuned to the empiricism of diminishing pain and amplifying ease.

All the ethical compromises of liberal Catholics, from birth control to abortion, gay rights to net zero, place the body before the soul, the political before the spiritual, the now before the then, earth before heaven, the seen before the unseen, power before Spirit.

The absolute gives way to the relative, the higher principle to the attainable pragmatic. The fact that the elusive moral and relational “progress” sought for and invoked is disappearing in a puff of fin de siècle smoke is a realization the liberal Catholic mind has managed to rebuff by means of some increasingly desperate cognitive dissonance.

What we need now is a return to the prioritization of the soul and the spiritual goods that accompany it. That is not to say the material is not important, hardly, but that if it eclipses the spiritual order then we no longer have a Christian way of seeing the world.

---

Having originally trained as a lawyer, Gavin Ashenden spent 40 years ordained as an Anglican clergyman. Following 10 years in parishes he studied postgraduate psychology with the Jesuits at the University of London and then spent 25 years as a Chaplain and Professor of the psychology of religion at a radical English University. For nine years, he served as one of the chaplains to the Queen. For four years he was the presenter of a faith and ethics program on BBC radio, and also wrote occasionally for the Times and the Daily Telegraph. After converting to Catholicism in 2019, he became associated editor of the Catholic Herald and co-presenter of the Catholic Unscripted podcast.