Perception can be a funny thing. In many African and tribal societies, large bone plates worn through the nose or lip are considered things of great beauty and are very desirable in a woman, though most westerners would find these customs bizarre and grotesque. The same could be said of scarification, artificially extended earlobes, and many other practices from the obscure corners of the earth. Whether we find these things beautiful or hideous, desirable or repulsive is a matter of our perception and in what we believe beauty to consist.
        
This is no less true in the Catholic Church. We could go around the world and easily find legions of Catholics who are dissatisfied with the current state of the Church. However, were we to inquire the reason, we would get two drastically different answers. Some would say that their unhappiness with the Church was due to the fact that they perceived it as being too caught up in tradition and too behind the times. Others would find dissatisfaction in pointing out that the Church is way too liberal and has discarded too much tradition. Both groups are speaking of the same Church, and both positions are matters of perception.
 
The same principle underlies both conceptions: liberalism. For one side, there is not enough liberalism, for others, too much. What is this principle of liberalism that so rends the body of Christ? For many Catholics, this question is conveniently brushed aside by saying, “I’m not a liberal Catholic or a traditional Catholic. Just being Catholic is enough for me.” This is really no answer at all. With such a split in the life and practice of the Church there really can be no middle ground and this type of situation is not new to the Church. Take the hotly contested declarations of the Council of Chalcedon in 451 against Monophysitism. It would have done no good to attempt such a middle position in that controversy: either Christ had two natures or He did not. Were you a Chalcedonian Catholic or a Monophysite? Were you to say, “I don’t like those labels; just Catholic is good enough for me,” then you would have in effect said nothing at all. If you were not one then you were de facto of the other party. This is the same today. Are you for continuity with Catholic Tradition? If you are not, then you are by that very fact against it. So let’s not delude ourselves with any of this “I don’t like labels” nonsense.
   
But back to liberalism. The issue is partially obfuscated by the political connotations of the word. Usually, we use the word “liberal” in political discussion to distinguish it from “conservative.” Though political liberalism and theological Catholic liberalism share many aspects in common and spring from the same source, they are not exactly the same thing. Originally, liberalism was a philosophy, not a political label. It denoted one who believed that man ought to be constantly progressing away from the brutal and superstitious past towards a bright future perfected by the workings of man’s own genius, unlocked and unleashed from the restraints of religion and morality. Man himself was the end of man’s existence.¹  Thus, there were monarchist liberals and republican liberals, Christian liberals and atheist liberals, pacifist liberals and violent liberals, and, in America, Democratic liberals (like Woodrow Wilson) and Republican liberals (like Teddy Roosevelt, who belonged to a group of reformers known as the Progressives). Liberalism was a philosophy that underlies several organizations and schools of thought of the mid-19th and early 20th centuries.
   
But what of its infiltration into Catholicism, and why is it so prevalent today? At first, the Church assiduously rejected liberalism in all its strains. Pius IX and Leo XIII fought against it voraciously, and St. Pius X is credited with dismantling it as an organized force within the Church. Nevertheless, like Sauron whose body was vanquished but whose spirit survived his defeat by Isildur, liberalism endured and flourished in the weak underbelly of the Church. The priest of Barcelona, Fr. Felix Sarda Y Salvany, in his famous book Liberalism is a Sin, attempted to expose this dangerous ideology festering within the Church and drawing away many Catholics. For Pius IX and Pius X, Leo XIII and Fr. Felix, liberalism was deadly because of two things: its belief in continual progress and change (an evolutionary model), and its rejection of all absolutes (relativism).²
   
What this meant for Catholicism in particular was a rejection of traditional Catholic moral principles (a new and excessive focus on intention instead of the nature of the deed committed), a rejection of the traditional understanding of the inspiration of the Scriptures (divine dictation became anathema to liberals), an implicit disbelief in the possibility of the miraculous, and a general acceptance of the principle of evolution as a model for the Church’s own existence. Since all things must evolve to progress, so must the Church, and this evolution applied to dogma, discipline and Church hierarchical structures as well. Even as a string of popes thundered down anathemas on the odious ideology that came to be known as modernism, it was taking root underground in the person of various theologians, influential members of religious orders, seminary professors and even various Curia officials.
   
A parallel development was taking place as the philosophy of liberalism was applied to politics. Because its central tenet was progress and the overturning of the old order, liberalism was enthusiastically received by the lower classes, who saw in it an ideology that would defend them and promote their interests against the old landed nobility. In its political manifestations of socialism and Communism, liberalism fed the greed and envy inherent in the heart of man and quickly became the philosophy of choice for the unthinking among the lower classes.³  It is always easier to destroy than to build up, to take by force than to earn, to demand immediate action rather than patient endurance. By appealing to these lower instincts of man, liberalism encouraged the lower classes to take the political path of least resistance.
   
In America, most of the lower classes were Catholic, especially after the Civil War, when the nation was flooded with immigrants from Ireland, Italy, Poland, the Slavic countries and the Baltic lands. Meeting with obstinate resistance from the entrenched Protestant Anglo-Saxon majority, most of these immigrants clung to their Catholicism as the source of their identity. To this day, many third and fourth generation Italian or Polish families could be classified as what we would call “culturally Catholic,” which in practice means they go through the motions of the faith because it is something their family has always done, yet the substance of the faith is lacking. Because these immigrant groups found themselves at the lowest end of the social scale, and because their Catholicism was often cultural more than creedal, liberalism was able to creep in and make many converts among the first and second generations of Catholics in this country. Though early on many of these liberal Catholic converts supported anarchist or socialist groups, as they gradually became Americanized in the early 20th century their liberalism was manifested by a loyal and unswerving support of the American Democratic Party, whom they believed best represented the interests of the poor.
   
Catholics embraced the liberal Democrats because the liberals spoke a lot about helping the poor, and the Catholics knew that the teaching of Christ commanded help of the poor, ignorantly thinking the Catholic idea of charity to be synonymous with the liberal idea of welfare and lack of individual responsibility. They thought they were being more Christian in their support of liberalism, especially since the opposition party was too often represented by big business Protestants who despised Catholicism.⁴  Thus Catholicism and the Democratic Party became joined in a complex relationship. But when the Democratic Party began rapidly shifting to the left in the 1950’s and 1960’s, the legions of Catholics who had voted Democratic since their Irish and Italian ancestors stepped off the boats in the 19th century followed suit and continued to vote Democratic. For generations, it was a given that the Catholic bloc would go Democratic, just as sure as the South would do the same. It was part of Catholic identity.
   
As so often happens with cultural phenomenon, the practice has gone on well beyond the period when it had any meaning. The original reasons why the poor Irish and Italian Catholic immigrants supported the Democratic Party no longer exist. The Democratic Party itself is an entirely different organization than it was in 1880 or even 1928. The Catholic Church is altered almost beyond recognition. But the union of liberalism and Catholicism remains, and many Catholics still ardently maintain this union because they fallaciously believe that liberalism is in keeping with the Gospel, not knowing (or caring) that the very principles of liberalism have been condemned so many times by their Church that it is difficult to list them all.
   
And so, the Church goes on voting liberal, even though liberalism believes that no creed is better than any other. It goes on casting her votes and throwing her money towards candidates who would do the most to dismantle the sacred heritage upon which the Church is built. It goes on supporting abortion, rallying behind bishops who speak out against global warming and capital punishment while pews are empty and seminaries and religious houses close. We go on carousing and worshipping to the hollow music of the liberal golden age of the 1960’s all while there is an exodus of Catholics to the evangelical Protestant churches, which have made no such pact with liberalism.

Perhaps one day we will divest ourselves of this hideous alliance. Perhaps we will relate to liberalism the way a man does who awakes the next morning after a drunken debauch with a loose woman, who looked appealing in the heat of inebriated passion but who in the light of day is revealed for the filthy creature that she is. She will timidly approach us, batting her eyes and making overtures as she did before, hoping to allure us once more. But, God willing, we will no longer be drunk and blind, and we will cast her away from us and say, “Get away from us, you vile thing! You may have seduced us with your charms once, but never again!” Then we will thrust her from us as a man embarrassingly thrusts away his lover when the morning comes and his shame is revealed by the coming of dawn.
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Notes:

1 As the atheist Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-1872) said in The Essence of Christianity, “Homo homini deus”: Man is the god of men.

2  Fr. Felix Salvany says that the origins of liberalism lay in Protestantism ultimately: “Protestantism naturally begets the toleration of error. Rejecting the principle of authority in religion, it has neither criterion nor definition of faith. On the principle that every individual or sect may interpret the deposit of Revelation according to the dictates of private judgment, it gives birth to endless differences and contradictions...as a result, we find among the people of thsi country (excepting well formed Catholics, of course) that authoritative and positive religion has met with utter disaster and that religious beliefs or unbeliefs have come to be mere matters of opinion” (Liberalism is a Sin, Rockford, Ill: Tan Books, 1993, pp 8-9).
 
3  Pope Pius XI in his 1938 encyclical Divini Redemptoris (more commonly known by its English title “On Atheistic Communism”) stated that Communism was based in an appeal to envy.
 
4  For example, take the anti-Catholicism of the Republican attacks on Catholic Democratic candidate Al Smith in the 1928 presidential election.