THE KNUCKLEHEAD
'
S GUIDE TO COVENANTAL THEOLOGY
19
- Catholicism indeed is whatever authentic grown-ups, such as
yourself, happen to think it is.
This is the childish Catholicism of many Catholic members of the
New Class,
1
those of us either directly producing knowledge, as
academics, scientists, or engineers, or making direct and substantial
use of it, in the manner of high-level bureaucrats, technicians, public-
relations directors, attorneys, and so forth. The house organ of New
Class American Catholicism (as Fr. Keefe as well as many others has
noted) is of course the National Catholic Reporter, within whose pages
is weekly presented the requirement of Catholicism to adjust itself to
the presumed needs of the times. I know. Not so many years ago, I was
an NCR Catholic myself.
As someone whose entire adult life has been spent on the fringes of
the New Class world, being a New Class Catholic was in fact the
reasonable choice for me. Therefore, one important detail needs
emphasis here. My choice for New Class Catholicism was the
reasonable choice. All readers of this book need to understand that
New Class Catholicism is one current embodiment of an intellectual
tradition that nearly every school Thomist for eight centuries, and St.
Thomas himself (with a few highly unsystematic exceptions) has
presented as the Thinking Man's Approach to Catholicism. New Class
Catholicism is in fact a highly logical manifestation of the paradigm
that I will shortly be drawing many pictures of:
1. Gouldner A (1976). The future of intellectuals
and the rise of the new class. New York: Seabury.
The Eucharist is over here,
< - - - and here we are, standing
some place else, in the 'normal
universe,' looking at it, and trying to
understand it.
Thus the theological foundations of the "conservative" midwestern
lay Catholic newspaper, The Wanderer, are at root identical to the
theological foundations of the "progressive" midwestern lay Catholic
newspaper, the National Catholic Reporter. The root intellectual defect
in both is in fact the same, and fully "traditional," and indeed the
existence of the defect within Catholic thought very substantially pre-
dates even Aquinas.
To both those in the school of Aquinas, and therefore to the
"conservative" The Wanderer, and to the "progressive" National
Catholic Reporter, it is childish, "contrary to reason," simply
unimaginable, to propose what Fr. Keefe does, that there is no 'normal
universe' outside of the Eucharist where we can stand to understand
the Eucharist.
1
1. "The objective truth of human existence is
given in the liturgical freedom of the Church's
mediation of her faith, and only if we stand there
may we understand. This is a hard saying, but it is
ancient in the Church, and Catholic theology
exists only in the service of its truth." CT, p. 652
N.B. This is an html-ized copy of a page from the pdf file, The Knucklehead's Guide to Covenantal Theology.