If Tom Reese is too radical...

then we all might be in trouble. The Boston Globe and the New York Times are both reporting that Jesuit Father Tom Reese has resigned as the editor-in-chief of America magazine, partly or primarily due to pressure from the C.D.F. The National Catholic Reporter may have been involved in breaking the story, but at least at 11:30 on Saturday morning, their website appears to be having some issues.

While I want to hold off final judgment (and running to my bedroom to assume the fetal position) until I've seen some more reporting on the details of this, there's some cause for worry here. First, Fr. Reese, whose book Inside the Vatican is a solid political science analysis of the Vatican as institution, is not a wild-eyed, NCR-subscribing, Call-to-Action-attending radical. (Not that there's anything wrong with that, the blogger quickly adds, before half of his friends jump down his throat.) Reese, on his own and through America's pages, is one of the more moderate, Common Ground-oriented voices in the Catholic church in the U.S. today. As the Times quotes Philip Lawler,

"I'd think of him as sort of a mainstream liberal," said Philip F. Lawler, the editor of Catholic World News, a news outlet on the more conservative end of the spectrum. "I think he's been reasonably politic. I watched him during the transition, and I cannot think of a single thing I heard that would have put him in jeopardy."

If America's reasoned debates are censorable, then I'm worried as well about the chilling effect on Catholic intellectual life which Steve Pope raises. Condemning Tom Reese for being too radical is like treating Harry Reid as though he were Ralph Nader's soulmate.

Secondly, and perhaps more interestingly, the apparent complaint was not that America was radically undermining church teaching, but that by presenting opposing viewpoints on issues like Dominus Iesus, gay priests, and issues around communion for politicians supprotingn abortion, America was not supporting church teaching strongly enough. This reminds me right away of the case of Bob Nugent and Jeannine Gramick, who were disciplined by the CDF not for contradicting church teaching on homosexuality, but for not teaching it forcefully enough. Lisa Sowle Cahill's article on that case back in August of 1999 (in America, ironically) presciently foresees and warns of this move towards a "maximalist criterion of conformity" which, bluntly, comes close to theologians and pastoral ministers being instructed not only to be faithful to church teaching, but to "say it like you mean it". If the only option for adherence to church teachings of differing theological weights is to shout back one's assent loudly and clearly or be cast into the outer darkness, then, IMHO, we're both cheating ourselves of the reasoned debate our church has historically prized and we're in danger of ideologically covering up a situation in which faithful Catholics' real questions need and deserve conversation. If you've ever taught a student or child, you know that it's very easy to have a response parroted back to you in the proper language and, with some encouragement, that response can be louder or appear more convincing. But the moment the phrase "say it like you mean it" leaves your lips, you know that you've left the context of education and entered a discourse of raw power.

Some further questions, and again, I'd like to reserve final judgment until I find out more of the details of the case; after all, seven years is about how long Jesuits often work in the same place, and Fr. Reese's successor, Fr. Drew Christiansen, is not only qualified but doesn't seem likely to radically change the direction of the publication. The elephant in the room is the question of how involved our now Pope Benedict was in this action, which began and appears to have come to its conclusion while he was still head of the C.D.F. I'll leave it to the Vaticanologists to read those tea leaves, with the caveat that, at a first reading, it doesn't look good. I would be very hesistant to draw the conclusion that this is a signal of how a Benedictan papacy is going to treat dissent, since the action occurred before Ratzinger's election, and I, perhaps alone among my friends, am still holding out hope that the office is having an effect upon the man. We shall see.