A 2 Degree-of-Freedom Perspective of the Catholic Landscape.

Over the course of the last couple years I have realized that the scales we use to classify different types of Catholics may be impeding our spiritual progress.  My particular concern is with Faithful Catholics that are more on the conservative side.  Catholicism is a tough religion to follow.  You spend many, many years (read decades) struggling just to get a sense of it and live somewhat "comfortably" with it.  I am not sure many people at all even get to this point.  It seems you almost have to adopt a somewhat conservative stance at some point to get to this point.  It can be done from a more progressive standpoint, but it seems people are much more likely to fall away from that side or at least be less consistent about it.  I may have a bias here though because I came more from a conservative outlook.  I have observed there may be a different lesson learned from the other direction that I am just not able to observe.  What I have been finding myself trying to explain to people for a few years though now is that we should not be content with a simply conservative Catholic Church.  I think this is what Pope Francis is really trying to push right now.  It is also the case that the role of the Laity is increasing.  The Laity is more educated than ever and we do have a role in developing the body of Christ.  This implies taking a more "progressive" stance.  It is the case thought that when a "conservative" hears about "progressive-ism" they tend to right away think that some kind of evil is afoot.  What I am trying to get across is that this is not always the case.  It is entirely possible to stay within a defined set of constraints and come up with new insights and frameworks that push the community forward.  I am a research engineer.  From my point of view this is completely possible.  I learned all about physics and chemistry and math...  And what I learned is that with those tools we constantly need to update our models as new information, tools and skills come to light.   We occasionally need to look at problems from new paradigms.  We are not throwing away all the work of the past, we are just using it in a different way.  It takes a certain kind of person to effectively do this.  Oftentimes this person has a rebellious streak to them but demands logical consistency.  I know many people like this myself, but they are not common in the general population.  The even rarer person is the deeply spiritual Catholic who is Faithful to the Magisterium of the Church, but also recognizes the need for new "paradigms" so to speak.  It is very intellectually easy to be outright rebellious and just throw teachings out in order to further some agenda a person might have.  It is much harder to find a person who accepts the Truths of Divine Revelation, but is willing to try and apply new human methods of looking at them.  Personally I have seen so many results in fields such a information theory, game theory, math, psychology, sociology, management and negotiation, and engineering that shed additional light on Faith that I baffled that theologians are not having a field day picking off intellectual low-hanging fruit left and right.  I am actually kind of disappointed.  On the other side I occasionally see things in these secular fields that could benefit from the Divine Intuition offered by the Church.  It is easier in this case though for me to understand why they might ignore it.  But I digress.  My point is that is is possible to be Faithful to the Magisterium and be a progressive thinker.  Many of our Saints would fall into this category as would Jesus himself.  This is why many Saints were investigated by the Church during their time.  They were promoting ideas/actions that were revolutionary and meant non-incremental change.  But the Saints were obedient to the will of legitimate authority.  I think more Catholics should be encouraged to engage in this type of activity.  There are so many results available from so many fields and such a massive ability to collect data on the human condition that the time is supremely ripe for a Catholic Intellectual renaissance.  To make matters even better we are currently in the perfect position to mess it up.  The secular world has little to no respect for the Catholic church right now on account of the sex scandles.  The upside of this is that any mistake we make now is easy to dismiss from a secular point of view because we are just those backwards Catholics who don't allow women to be priests or use birth control.   Actually I get excited as I write this because as a professional intellectual I can assure you that it is absolutely necessary to allow tolerance for mistakes in order to move forward.  If the Catholic Church were more respected we would probably take a more reluctant stance towards allowing intellectual freedom and mistake making.  I say lets make the best of the situation we find ourselves in.  

I have also noticed many non-Catholics, and even Catholics themselves do not really understand the Catholic family with any amount of breadth.  I have spent the last four years living in a place with very few young Catholics.  Most of the people I interact with here are some kind of secular humanist/atheist who have no idea what the Catholic church is about.  My impression is that they think of it as some super-coherent, wealthy cult with brain-washed followers who blindly do whatever the Pope says when and his clergy minions are not involved in some kind of scandal or attempt to oppress someone.  

For some reason people have no trouble thinking that a religion like Islam is complicated with groups like Sunnis and Shiites, and various tribal, historical and geopolitical differences.  We seem to think that since the Catholic Church of the west is right in front of our faces that it is easy to understand based on sound bites on the news.  

I am guessing that part of the reason people think of us as a uniform mob is that the Catholic Church likes to emphasis our temporal and geographic unity - and for good reason.  However, while it is true that we are unified, but we are far from homogeneous.  There are something like 23 different rites within the Church.  Most people are somewhat familiar with the Roman rite, but are totally unaware of the others.   There are slightly different little "t" traditions all over the world.  And it is more common than not for baptized Catholics to ignore the teachings of the Church.  We are also far from wealthy.  It is more like we have high revenue, not so much high profit.  Alot of money flows through the Church because we are attending to alot of different concerns. A reactionary is happy with going back to ways we used to do things, at this time people in this category tend to lean towards pre-Vatican II policies.  

In order to give people not familiar with the Church family a better sense of what we are about I have made this chart.  I got tired of the 1-D scale that involved Conservatives/Orthodox, Reactionaries and Progressives/liberals.  This is an elementary way to look at the world that does not even begin to capture the subtitles of what is really going on.  For now I just did the cliche cartesian thing and added a second dimension.  I might try something else later, but this will do for now.  In this case, the second dimension is whether or not a person or organization is Faithful to the Magisterium of the Church.  I have populated the chart with examples of people or groups that I perceive as falling into the different categories.  To clarify a little, in my terminology, a progressive is a person who is trying to aggressively pursue new paradigms of thought or practice.  They might also be looking for order-of-magnitude changes.  I consider JPII and his "Theology of the Body" an example of a progressive.  This was a fairly new way of thinking that had not been considered before.  I consider Christopher West and his approach to the Theology of the Body also in this Category because he adopted a very modern style to presenting it and has received alot of flack in the process.  A conservative may still be tending toward new growth, but in a much more incremental manner.  They might be content simply finding new ways to communicate what we already know or thing.  When I say Faithful to the Magisterium I basically mean that a person at least does not obstinately say or do things that are against the Church teaching or authority.  Hopefully more positively they uphold the teachings of the Church and spread them, but practically this is a hard definition to use because it is hard to apply to progressives due to differences of perspectives and opinions.  The "questionable" category here implies people/groups that I perceive do something that appears to be against Church teachings, but they may still be in good standing with their superiors, or the matter is somewhat being debated.  I put "Live Action" in this group because traditional Catholic teaching is that lying is never an acceptable tactic, but some reputable Catholics are willing to come to their defense so I am just not sure.  Personally I would not want to be a part of it, but it is a tough judgement call.  The no group refers to people/groups that may be baptized Catholics who are blatantly against Church teachings, or authority.  Such people promote the use of artificial birth control, promote abortion, have separated themselves from their legitimate Superiors, or obstinately remain in some form of state of sin.  Some of the groups are in this column are schismatic Catholic groups.   I am admittedly a little loose with my whole terminology - for instance Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden have not been publically excommunicated, but they actively promote Abortion which implies a self-excommunication has occurred.  Who I put in which group is not so important and is a matter for debate.  The more important idea I am trying to get across is that there are different ways of looking at Catholicism that are valid.  From a Salvation point of view I assert that the main thing that matters is that you fall into the column of Yes's with regards to being Faithful to the Magisterium.  Basically being sure to stay free from mortal sin and practicing lawful obedience.  I would say that if you fall in this category it does not matter if you want to get into the Catholic Charismatic Renewal or go to Latin Mass every day of the week with a mantilla on your head.  From a salvation point of view it probably does not matter.  On the other hand, there are conservative groups that have removed themselves from the Church and have gone against Church teaching.  SSPX is probably the best example of this.  I have been around the Catholic block more that a few times now and I have seen other examples.  For instance before the scandal broke concerning the founder of the Legion of Christ I was always a little leary of the Legion from the first time I ever heard of them.  The thing about the Legion that made me nervous is that they seemed to be too controlling and militant.  My experience has been that tendencies in this direction are not healthy.  There are unhealthy and health levels of discipline and they seemed on the unhealthy side.  I think this had something to do with their leadership.  I hope the organization goes in a holy direction from here on out.  

My main goal in talking about this is to encourage those who might be so inclined to move into the Upper left box I call Faithful to the Magisterium/Progressive.  This group is not for everyone and admittedly it is probably pretty rare to find a person with the temperament and spiritual confidence required operate there, but maybe someone will say, "I saw this interesting result during my work involving how parrots talk to people more during morning hours vs at lunchtime and that times into so an so theological concept in this new way."  And when that person arises I would like to meet them so we can talk and move forward with action.