There’s No ‘Liberal’ or ‘Conservative’ in Catholicism, by Paul Murano

Republican_Democrat_brains. Liberal versus conservative

One of the more significant contemporary errors in religious discourse is the tendency to use political terms like “liberal” and “conservative.” These words have legitimate meaning for politics and government, but emphatically not for the One True Faith. A person is not a liberal or conservative Catholic, but is rather a faithful or unfaithful one. This is the only distinction that matters.

The press is often guilty of this lingual imprecision. Case in point — a few weeks ago, The Wall Street Journal published an article titled “U.S. Catholic Priests Are Increasingly Conservative as Faithful Grow More Liberal.” Its contention is that with each decade since the 1980s, clerics have become more deferent to the Church’s essential teachings — which they vow to accept and uphold — while the lion’s share of Catholic laymen persist in dissent against the Fifth and Sixth Commandments, those dealing with sexuality and human life. The underlying presumption is that these two camps, “liberal” and “conservative” Catholics, display legitimate ways of being Catholic. Nothing can be further from the truth. …

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