Father James Schall: On Being Neither Liberal nor Conservative

Father James Schall offers his thoughts on the inadequacy of labels:

The division of the world into "liberal" and "conservative" on every topic from politics to our taste in cuisine, clothes, or automobiles is one of the really restricting developments that has ever happened to us...

Such a view makes things very simple, I suppose. But it also reduces our minds to utter fuzziness. We are required to define everything as either liberal or conservative even when the two allowable terms of definition are not adequate to explain the reality that they are intended to describe.

Our political language is likewise amusingly confusing, especially when used to describe theological issues or currents...

Whether the notions of "liberal" or "conservative" themselves are, in content, stable and definite concepts or not is another-and not unimportant-matter...

The reason the present pope is consistently called "conservative," or "arch-conservative’ has nothing to do with the normal use of these terms or a fair understanding of his ideas. We might better call Benedict XVI a wild "radical" or even a crypto-"revolutionary," because what he stands for is not something that is constantly changing. His whole purpose in the world as pope, in a way, is to be sure that what was presented in the beginning is still presented in our own time, however it be depicted-liberal or conservative, radical or reactionary...

If we are what is classically called "orthodox," we are neither liberal or conservative as these terms are used today. We are wildly radical and revolutionary. No one is radical as we are over against a culture that has embodied these practices into its very soul. This is what Pope Ratzinger meant by observing that it is the world, not he, that has changed. When Benedict XVI is called a "conservative" or an "arch-conservative," he is in fact nothing of the sort. He is much more "radical" than the wildest theory on the left or the right, however it be designated.

Any pope is ultimately judged by only one criterion, "did he keep the essence of the faith in an articulate manner that was the same as that originally handed down to him?" If he did not, what he has become is nothing more than a conformist to our times in the values used most to define liberal and conservative. If he is beyond these things, as he is, he listens to another voice. This is the root of our freedom-that this voice remains for us to hear.

There is, in the end, something beyond liberal and conservative. That is the truth of things according to which we have a criterion that is not constantly changing between liberal and conservative and, in the meantime, one that means nothing but what we want it to mean. Thus if we claim we are "neither liberal nor conservative," we announce that there are criteria that exist outside of our narrow way of thinking, categories that better define for us what we are and ought to be.