Do you think of all conservative Catholics as ``reactionaries stuck in the pre-Vatican II mud''? Do you consider all liberal Catholics to be ``apostate tinkerers with the one true faith''? Would the Church be better off if such name-calling ended in favor of rational dialogue?
As a front-page article reveals this week, Cardinal Joseph Bernardin of Chicago and two dozen other Catholic leaders would answer yes to the last question. They want such labeling to cease before it does serious damage to the Church that both extremes love and want to preserve. But within hours of their request, another cardinal -- Bernard Law of Boston -- called their effort ``not very helpful, gratuitous and biased.''
In short, before it even got off the ground, an effort toward unity -- the Catholic Common Ground Project -- had produced division. Catholics in the Albany Diocese can decide if it deserved the early flak it got from Cardinal Law by reading the text themselves (it begins below).
Cardinal Bernardin's project seeks to find common ground on which all sides can stand solidly and talk calmly to one another -- free of what the group's founding document calls ``the pop scholarship, sound-bite theology, unhistorical assertions and flippant dismissals that have become all too common on both the right and the left of the Church.''
For that to happen, the group wants Catholics to agree on the following ``working principles'':
None of those is going to be an easy task for many Catholics, even though they belong to a Church whose members pledge the same Creed every Sunday, pray to the same God every night and check the same box -- ``Catholic'' -- on the census form. Many of those same Catholics also know that rash judgment and calumny are sins but practice them regularly anyway.
A first step for all of us would be to read the founding document of the Catholic Common Ground Project to see if it indeed provides a foundation on which we and others can construct a more secure Church. Despite Cardinal Law's dismissive response to it, we have not heard the last of this idea. As a project, conference and document, it promises to be part of our Church for some time to come.