Revenge of the Neo-Cats by Hilary White

If they have heard of the Oath Against Modernism they hate it and will frequently tell you that Pope (St) Pius X, while he might have had his heart in the right place, was too heavy-handed about the Modernists and accomplished nothing but to drive them underground. (That is if they will concede that Modernists ever existed at all and were not merely the product of the paranoid fantasies of popes given to overreaction, cf: Freemasons, leprechauns and Soviet infiltrators.)

They did a lot of good work in the 70s, 80s and 90s, particularly with founding universities and colleges that more or less teach Catholicism as if it were true. Christendom and TAC are the best examples, with Franciscan U at Steubie bringing up the academic rear. They are often very articulate about the evils of contraception and abortion, but frequently fall into the various intellectual traps designed for them because of their determination that Catholicism and democracy are inherently compatible.

In brief then, neo-Catholics, or neo-conservative Catholics are people who like to think of themselves as conservatives both politically and religiously, who are terrified by the idea of looking like a fanatic, who like to talk a great deal about how the Church has "a place in the public debate". Though they object to being called "moderate", they secretly love the term to be applied to them, and feel like they are at last being taken seriously by The Big Kids at the New York Times, the BBC and CNN when they are invited to comment on debate programmes. In general they are mostly an American phenomenon, with a bit of spillage over the Canadian border. Interestingly, they are almost unknown in Britain, where the divisions are much less ambiguously between Trads and the insane heretics running the show.

Writing a taxonomy for something non-substantial (rather an aggregation of accidents) is difficult, and I don't think faculty members of the small Catholic colleges, who might be "neo-Cats" in other ways, balk at taking the Oath against Modernism. Not all "Neo-Cats" are "theocons (Catholic neo-cons, the biggest examples being Neuhaus and Weigl). They do tend to be ardent Republican part members, though perhaps some are slowly becoming disgusted with the party and are supporting Ron Paul. (I think he gets more support from traddies than mainstream conservative Catholics.) I do think that the rest of the characterization applies, but only because Catholics are culturally Americans, and so they have imbibed certain ideas about feminism, "free market" capitalism, and so on. A failure of catechesis to produce counter-cultural Catholics...