I promised a post last week about the varying conservative Catholic responses to Pope Francis’s apostolic exhortation, and I’ve decided it might be useful to use Damon Linker’s broadside against the pope’s critics as an introductory device. Linker’s piece draws on his own religious psychology as a Catholic convert, and particularly a desire for authority and certainty that he’s since outgrown or let subside, to portray conservative Catholics (myself among others) as order-obsessed absolutists desperate to believing in an unchanging, unchangeable Catholicism:

I became a Catholic (from secular Judaism) in the midst of a personal crisis. I longed to find an absolute moral Truth and craved a sense of belonging with others who recognized and ordered their lives according to that Truth. Catholicism is perfect for people with such yearnings. It tells them that the Roman Catholic Church is the church of Jesus Christ most fully and rightly ordered through time. Its magisterial authority can be traced back to St. Peter and the rest of Christ’s original apostles. It publishes a 900-page Catechism filled with elaborate, absolute rules laying out in minute detail how God wants us to live. It governs itself according to an intricate code of Canon Law that first began to be formulated nearly two millennia ago. For someone who feels troubled by a culture in a constant state of instability and change, the Catholic Church can feel like a rock in a stormy, windswept sea. Finally, something is steady, permanent, unchangeable, fixed, immobile. The church’s very stability can end up looking like the strongest sign and confirmation of its divinity. Everything changes! But not God and his church. For someone drawn to Catholicism by the promise of order and stability, any sign of change in the church will be unwelcome, threatening. The fact that social and cultural mores shift and develop around it is an argument for retrenchment and improved outreach to a world tempted by sin in new ways. It certainly isn’t a sign that the church should adjust its teachings on faith and morals, accommodating them to the latest trends. Any such adjustment would risk diluting the Truth, and (perhaps just as bad) serve as a potentially fatal concession that the church’s teachings can be fallible. Once that door has been opened, there may be no way to close it. Remove even a single brick from the foundation, and the whole edifice could come crashing down.

Is this what conservative Catholics believe? Well, in some ways, yes. For many conservatives, the perduring consistency of Catholicism on certain important issues does seem like one of the strongest reasons to believe in the church as a divinely-founded institution. And if I may adapt Linker’s metaphor a little, conservatives do tend to see certain areas of Catholic moral teaching as a kind of seamless garment that could be unraveled by pulling hard enough on certain threads.

Though of course this view is hardly confined to conservative Catholics. Many a liberal op-ed on How the Church Must Change starts out by suggesting that teaching X (on divorce, homosexuality, etc.) needs to be revamped and proceeds to acknowledge (or celebrate) the fact that this revision will also imply a wholesale abandonment of teachings Y and Z and P and Q as well. Hence the conservative sense — I would call it a suspicion, but it’s rather more than that — that when we’re asked to concede that the church could get something wrong, the people doing the asking often really want us to concede that the church has gotten almost everything wrong, from sexual ethics to sacramental theology to the idea of a priesthood to the person of Jesus of Nazareth himself, and that actually some combination of Arians, Gnostics and Protestants were right about most of the controversies of the Christian past.

Now Linker might respond (depending on where he sits theologically these days) that this is still a false choice even if our fears are understandable, and that conservative Catholics shouldn’t let the radicalism of some our interlocutors justify a perfect intransigence against any change at all. Which is fair enough. Except that one might ask … when exactly have conservative Catholics really shown a perfect intransigence against any and all change?

Let’s make a partial list of the changes that most conservative Catholics have accepted — sometimes grudgingly, sometimes enthusiastically — in their church since the 1960s. A transformation in the church’s attitude toward liberal democracy and religious freedom. A transformation in the church’s attitude toward other Christian churches and non-Christian religions. A total renovation of the church’s liturgy, one with inevitable implications for sacramental life, theology, biblical interpretation, the works, that was staggering in hindsight but accepted at the time by everyone except a tiny minority. A revolution in sacred architecture, albeit one that stalled out once it became apparent that it was, you know, kind of terrible. Massive shifts in church rhetoric around issues of personal morality (sexual morality very much included) even where the formal teaching remained intact. Stark changes in the way the church talks about sin, hell and damnation, and openings (again, including among conservative Catholics) to theological perspectives once considered flatly heterodox. Clear changes, slow-moving or swift, in the Vatican’s public stance on hot-button issues like the death penalty and torture (and perhaps soon just war theory as well). The purging or diminution of a host of Catholic distinctives, from meatless Fridays to communion on the tongue to the ban on cremation to … well, like I said, it’s a partial list, so I’ll stop there.

So whatever the conservative religious psychology, however strong the conservative craving for certainty and stability, nobody looking at the changes wrought in the church over the last fifty years could possibly describe conservative Catholicism as actually committed, in any kind of rigorous or non-negotiable sense, to defending a changeless, timeless church against serious alteration. (Indeed, this is a point that traditionalist Catholics make about the mainstream Catholic right at every opportunity!)

Rather, conservative Catholicism has been on a kind of quest, ever since the crisis atmosphere of the 1960s and 1970s, to define certain essentials of the faith in a time of sweeping flux and change, while effectively conceding (to borrow Linker’s architectural image) that reformers can rearrange and remove the bricks of Catholicism so long as they don’t touch those crucial foundations. For a long time this conservative quest was lent a certain solidity and rigor and self-confidence by John Paul II and Benedict XVI. But the advent of Francis has made it clear that conservative Catholicism doesn’t have as clear a synthesis as conservatives wanted to believe, and that in some ways the conservative view of the post-Vatican II church is a theory in crisis — or the very least that it lacks a clear-enough account of itself, and of what can and cannot change in its vision of Catholicism, to navigate an era in which the pope himself does not seem to be “on side.”

And it’s this uncertainty, to come around to my original intention for this post, that’s left conservatives both perplexed and strikingly divided in their responses to the pope’s exhortation on marriage. First, because the move that’s being pressed by liberals around divorce, remarriage and the sacraments has been very deliberately couched in precisely the language that was used to justify many of the changes listed above: The distinction between the pastoral and the doctrinal that supposedly defined the reforms of Vatican II, the idea that the way the church practices the faith can change so long as the official teaching doesn’t. And since this is a distinction that conservatives have tacitly accepted on a great many issues, in the divorce-remarriage-communion debate they have found themselves defending, not a comprehensive theory of a church that cannot change, but a very specific explanation for why this change in particular differs from all the other changes that they’ve embraced or swallowed hard and learned to live with.

That difference has been defended on roughly the grounds I noted above: That the church’s understanding of marriage is so close to the heart of Catholic moral and sacramental theology, and the pastoral and doctrinal so closely intertwined therein, that liberalization on this point would lead to a great unraveling (and a severing of the church from its own past) in a way that other alterations (past and potential) would not. And this argument has been, relatively speaking, a success, in the sense that it persuaded a great many prelates to effectively oppose the will of the pope himself at the last two synods, which limited Francis’s ability to make the kind of explicit changes that Cardinal Walter Kasper urged, with a papal blessing, on the church.

But only relatively speaking, because if Pope Francis was blocked from going the full Kasper, he still produced a document that if read straightforwardly seems to introduce various kinds of ambiguity into the church’s official teaching on marriage, sin and the sacraments — providing papal cover for theological liberalism, in effect, without actually endorsing the liberal position. It’s not the first time this has happened; as Joseph Shaw notes, it’s very easy to find “examples of Popes and other organs of the Church issuing documents which seemed, if not actually motivated by a rejection of traditional teaching, then are at least motivated by a desire not to be in conflict with those who reject it.” But it’s the first time it’s happened recently on a controversy of this gravity, on an issue where conservative Catholics have tried to draw a clear line and invested so much capital … and I think it’s fair to say that they (that we) don’t know exactly how to respond.

Do conservatives simply declare victory, because the worst didn’t happen, the full theological crisis didn’t come, and it’s important to maintain a basic deference to papal authority (itself a big part of the JPII-era conservative synthesis) so long as no doctrinal line is explicitly crossed? Do they acknowledge the document’s deliberate ambiguities, as my own treatment did, when doing so might give aid and comfort to liberals who are eager to make the most of any perceived shift? Do they deny that any real ambiguity exists, not out of pure deference to Francis but because given conservative premises this document should be read in the context of prior documents, not as a stand-alone, and if you read it that way there’s no issue, no rupture, everything’s fine? Do they stress the technicalities of what counts as magisterial teaching to make the document’s seeming ambiguity less important or less binding? Do they attack the document (and the pope) head-on, on the theory that conservative Catholicism’s essential problem is its vulnerability to constant end-arounds, constant winking “pastoral” moves, and that these need more forthright opposition?

Conservatives have tried all of these strategies and more. Some sincerely believe that the letter of the document is a defeat for liberals and that anxious Catholic pundits are overstating the problems with its spirit. Some think the problems with its spirit are real but also think the church will be better off if conservatives simply claim the document as their own and advance the most orthodox reading of its contents. Some think the best course is to downplay the document’s significance entirely and wait for a different pope to clarify its ambiguities. Some (mostly journalists, as opposed to priests or theologians) think it’s important to acknowledge that this pope has significantly strengthened liberal Catholicism’s hand, and to describe that reality accurately and answer his arguments head-on where they seem to cut against the essentials of the faith. Some think that this document, indeed this entire pontificate, has vindicated a traditionalist critique of post-conciliar Catholicism, and that the time has come for a complete rethinking of past concessions and compromises, past deference to Rome. Some are ambivalent, uncertain, conflicted, unsure of what comes next. Some have shifted between these various perspectives as the debate has proceeded. (And this long list excludes the many moderately-conservative Catholics who didn’t see a grave problem with the Kasper proposal to begin with, or who have simply drifted in a more liberal direction under this pontificate.)

I do not have an answer, alas, to all of this uncertainty. But I do think it’s important to acknowledge its existence, rather than taking a kind of comfort, as some conservative Catholics do, in being accused of Total Inflexibility in Defense of Absolute Truth by writers like Damon Linker. For good or ill (or for good in some cases, and ill in others), that has rarely been an accurate description of the conservative position in the modern church, and it clearly isn’t accurate at the moment. Conservative Catholicism isn’t standing athwart church history yelling stop; since (at least) the 1960s it’s always occupied somewhat more unstable terrain, and under Francis it’s increasingly a movement adrift, tugged at by traditionalism and liberalism alike, and well short of the synthesis that would integrate fifty years of rapid change into a coherent picture of how the church can remain the church, what fidelity and integrity require.

Which will come, I’m sure, by 2216 A.D. or so. Until then, conservative Catholics will remain (by definition) more dogmatic than liberals. But rumors of our righteous certainty, our “retrograde intransigence,” are likely to remain greatly exaggerated.