Polarization in the Church and the crisis of the Catholic mind

Polarization in the Church has caused a crisis of membership, in the sense that some faithful are so disgusted by this verbally violent atmosphere that they leave. And it is also a crisis of ecclesial citizenship, whereby many Catholics have forgotten how to live their lives of faith in a Church that is not polarized. 

In addition to this, it is also a crisis of scholarship, in the sense that it has become difficult to think about religion, theology and the Church in non-polarized terms. This polarization has, in fact, become the default disposition towards all sensitive issues.

But from a historical point of view, this is a new phenomenon. The public acknowledgment of it precedes the study of what happened and why it happened. There are a few interesting beginnings, such as a book published last year called, Polarization in the US Catholic Church. 

Addressing this problem requires intellectual comprehension as much as spiritual and ecclesial healing. For polarization is not just a problem of individual or communal ecclesial praxis or of individual or communal believing and understanding Catholic faith. It has become systemic in the sense that it has become an industry.

The sensus Ecclesiae, or “sense of the Church”, that many Catholics have today is largely determined by a journalistic-theological complex, an “access journalism” where a writer’s personal and ideological connections have become more important than research and analysis of the facts. A recent example is an interview with Cardinal Müller, the Vatican’s former doctrinal chief, that appeared in the Italy’s most respected daily, Il Corriere della Sera.

Catholic news outlets have become a symbol of Catholic polarization. During the Soviet era, there was this well-known joke about Russian propaganda: “In Pravda [the Russian word for truth] there’s no news and in Izvestia [the Russian word for news] there is no truth”.

One is reminded of this when reading some Catholic news report, especially about Pope Francis. But it is even worse to try to cure the ills of a polarized Catholic information system by printing articles whose only virtue is balance, often with nothing more important or intelligent to say other than “I am for balance”. 

Balance alone is no virtue; the truth does not always lie in the middle. It is the Catholic, pious version of what American screenwriter, producer, and playwright Aaron Sorkin (“The West Wing” and “The Newsroom” among others) called “bias toward fairness”.

The ideological partisanship of Catholic media is only one side of the polarization within the Church. Its focus on short-term analysis is producing long-term effects on the thinking of the Church. This is an intellectual disaster in the making and should cause serious concern, especially for those who value the Catholic tradition. 

It’s a problem when today’s students of theology grew up watching and listening to very powerful Catholic media organizations that are the equivalent of Fox News or Breitbart. Needless to say, conservative Catholics have been much more active and successful than their liberal co-religionists in organizing these Catholic media conglomerates.

But there is also a problem on the other side of the classroom. In Catholic academia, the polarization has created ideologically different kinds of Catholic colleges and universities and to some grotesque extremes. 

The latest trend is to create, within the same university, different departments, centers, and institutes that are in competition with one another. Judging by the way they do (or, rather, do not) cooperate on the same campus, it is clear that these various entities offer not only different but obviously incompatible understandings of Catholicism.

Once again, it goes without saying that conservative-leaning Catholic theological initiatives are usually much better funded than the liberal-leaning ones.

The polarization has changed not only the politics of funding theological initiatives on Catholic campuses. It has also distorted the way of doing theology. On Catholic campuses today there is an unstated, but very deeply internalized pressure to adhere to a pre-determined theological narrative and a pre-determined ecclesial politics.

This formation of parallel and separated Catholic theological cultures is one of the reasons for the crisis of Catholic public intellectuals and of the marginalization of theology and religious studies in Catholic colleges and universities. It is an internal division that university administrators have learned to exploit and committed Catholic students have learned to navigate astutely.

In the long term, there is no imaginable survival of Catholic theology without a vital, non-perfunctory role for academic theology in Catholic colleges and universities. The evangelical historian Mark Noll, in describing the decline of American Evangelical Protestantism writing, said, “The scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind.”

It is certainly too early to issue this kind of judgment on Catholicism, given the differences between Catholicism and Evangelicalism. But there are some clear symptoms that point to a looming, epochal crisis for Catholic intellectual life. It is a crisis caused by many factors.

Catholic intellectual life is being killed by the corporatization and “commodification” of Catholic colleges and universities, located within a more general crisis of higher education.

But it is also a self-inflicted wound. The death of Catholic intellectual life in the Western world may come even sooner than we think. It can only be so when Catholic minds have spent at least an entire generation, the last quarter of a century, feeding the polarized narratives of a polarized Church.