August 25, 2008
Reviewed by Ted Schmidt

Why can't theologians all write like Dan Maguire? When did dullness become the sine qua non of a theological tome? Where has the organic intellectual gone? And what happened to timorous Catholic publishers who will not give voice to the ongoing critical conversations which Catholicism so desperately needs? All questions which came to my mind when I read Maguire's delightful little book.

The author, a married priest, armed with a doctorate (1969) from Rome's prestigious Gregorian University, has been a longtime prof in Religious Ethics at Milwaukee's Marquette University. Besides his 11 books Maguire has published widely in popular journals in the English speaking world. In other words, he's "out there" vigorously debating and conversing with other Catholics and the world at large.

There are not many books on Catholicism wherein you often find yourself laughing out loud. This is one of them.

The contents set us up for a bracing read – chapters like Good Sex (Even Catholics Can Have It), War is for Dummies, The Perennial Orphans of American Conscience set the tone for the whole book.

The author begins with one of his provocative statements – "The world's religions are left wing movements...powered by the left wing passions of justice, hope and compassion for the powerless." Hard to dispute. So why have they been hijacked by right wingers? Or as Maguire asks "How did they get baptized into the cult of the cozy where the well-salaried and well caloried dwell?" The whole book is peppered with bon mots like these, aphorisms which not only delight but which illuminate and provoke.

Where did the good social justice stuff go?

A familiar theme of the author is: where did all this good social justice stuff go?" Many of us have been asking the same question for decades. "How did it get smothered in the pelvic orthodoxy obsessions of of much of contemporary Catholicism"?

Maguire really writes for "the somnambulist religious left "who have allowed right wing conservatives to highjack the rich justice tradition of the post Conciliar Church."

In many ways the author is reacting to the abysmal ecclesial leadership in the US where Catholics for the first time voted Republican, "a nation which impeaches presidents for having sex but winks at undeclared wars and corporate corruption." As far as sex goes, Maguire indicts the neurotic Augustine " a major culprit in the Christian attack on sexual pleasure." No libertarian, he goes on to write movingly of a sacramental sexual ethic which embodies "respect, justice, hope and joy" and oh yes, which includes "good homosexual relations."

You can see why Maguire drives many Catholics batty. He mentions the strange anti-condom teaching amid an AIDS ravaged Africa. He lauds bishops like South Africa's Kevin Dowling who has deviated from the death-dealing Vatican line. All over the Catholic world the author maintains that "Reality is bypassing dogma. " Here "healthier winds are blowing" courtesy of feminist theologians whose emerging voice is counteracting the centuries-old male celibate bias.

Lest people regard Maguire as hopelessly anti-institution, he goes out of his way to congratulate the hierarchy on their often prophetic teaching (usually decades old) on racism. Did they mean it? Or are these statements "hidden away in the Catholic attic" while millions have left the Church "because they prefer the passions of justice to pelvic obsessions."

Maguire saves his most pointed invective for the continued stupidity of war making: "War demands dimness of wit and mental gimmicks to avoid reality-contact. Without myths it just wont work. We need a fictive " image of the enemy"- and religion has done little to dispel this image, largely through the outmoded "just war" theory.

As Maguire says, "It would be hard to find a war that passed all those noble tests." For the author war has become too commonplace "sewn into the sinews of our imaginations....we have a retardation problem, looking on war as normal." And it was "Catholics who helped create the monstrous myth of war as salvific. The Catholic just war theory"(CJWT) implied that war is fine if only certain amenities are observed." Maguire then proceeds to rip to shreds every criterion of the CJWT. "And then when the United States launches into wars that violate these principles egregiously, the Catholic Bishops are bleating about their pelvic obsessions, abortion and same sex marriage while the American war crimes proceed."

At present Maguire's country spends $30 million an hour on war and war making. How did Christian America get to this point in light of the pacifist Jesus? "A shotgun marriage joined Jesus to state-sponsored violence."Jesus got a new career as a war lord" is Maguire's summation of how the Constantinian arrangement of the 4th century gutted the nonviolent gospel.

But not all is lost for Maguire. He points out the work of "people of faith who are not amnesiacs" – Pax Christi, Catholic workers, Call to Action , people like Dan Berrigan, and Cindy Sheehan who are joining peacemaking Protestants, Jews and Muslims, peacemakers who are not freaks in their tradition...people with more retentive memories ...who are unmasking the fraudulent claim of the "Christian" religious right that war is the sacramental prelude to the triumph of the "kingdom of God." Dan Maguire cheers on The Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue who in 2003 blessed Catholic nonviolent activism.

Hijacked by a rightist fringe

At one time Catholic politics were progressive. They still are among much of the faithful. Since WW ll many Catholics like other citizens have been touched by affluenza and moved right. Maguire quotes U of Alabama prof Glen Feldman who states that in the Reagan-Bush years,"Catholic involvement in politics has largely been hijacked by a small but committed group of lay and clerical activists who represent the rightist fringe of the political and economic spectrum not the views of a majority of American Catholics."

This of course was aided by the "negligence, torpor and timidity of the American hierarchy." All sociological studies indicate that social justice advocacy is one of the enduring fruits of the Vatican Council. Once again Maguire lauds John Paul ll's consistent social justice teaching. He finishes this cogent chapter with the horrendous cost of militarism in America. It is this "military stronghold" which prohibits intelligent distribution of the nation's wealth.

Maguire's final chapter is on the one issue above all which cries out for religious engagement-the ecological imperative. What can religions offer in this crucial battlefield? Though the Bible is more red than green, care of the earth is a prime value. He points out that it is no wonder that Catholics with any earth wisdom are "ecological leaders with influence well beyond Catholicism." Here he mentions Thomas Berry, Mary Ellen Tucker, Rosemary Radford Reuther and John Grim.

Perhaps the coming end of the Petroleum Age will make us heed the cry of the earth. Once again he lauds the pastoral letters which link all of us "in the single web of life." Bishops again have a bully pulpit and they need to leave behind the pelvic issues which have obsessed them. For the author Catholics with their sacramental understanding of the world ("Calvinists never produced a liqueur like the Benedictine monks") are natural leaders in this struggle.

Catholicism of all the major religions champions "the invisible sacred through the visible world" and thus is well placed to continue the necessary defense of the cosmos."

Whose Church: A Concise Guide to Progressive Catholicism, by Daniel C Maguire, The New Press, New York and London, 2008, 178 pp.,

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