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A decade ago, a priest or layman who found himself at odds with an accepted teaching of the church or an order from the hierarchy would have been forced by conscience to separate formally from the church. In his book, A Question of Conscience, British Theologian Charles Davis argues that Catholicism is a seamless whole and that those who cannot accept the decisions of authority should leave, as Davis did two years ago. Yet the most striking fact of the contemporary Catholic rebellion is that the vast majority of dissenters—except for priests whose marriages entail automatic excommunication—feel free to create and define their own faith and still consider themselves within the church. "Fewer are leaving than ever before," says Bishop Hugh Donohoe of Stockton, Calif. "Their attitude is 'We're not going to be thrown out of the church. We are going to fashion it to our own liking.' "
Historic Community. Many Catholic liberals regard Davis' all-or-nothing approach as curiously old-fashioned and unsophisticated. To be a Catholic, they argue, does not mean formally subscribing to a consistent body of dogma but belonging to a historic community, the self-proclaimed people of God. Liberals further argue that a true spirit of Christian freedom in this community should and even must allow for a diversity of opinion on spiritual issues. Says Philosopher Leslie Dewart (The Future of Belief): "I understand membership in the church not to depend at all on agreement with the Pope, or with any particular authority." Adds Philosopher-Journalist Daniel Callahan: "Even if a bishop should judge me heretical,* I don't grant him the right to judge what is heretical and what is not. I consider myself a Catholic, first of all, because I'm not anything else. This is the tradition out of which I work. This is the tradition in which I was born. If I'm going to remake any tradition, it might as well be my own."
Millions of Catholics simply cannot, and will not, accept Callahan's attitude toward tradition. There is a powerful spirit of conservatism in the church, and it is embodied in urbane archbishops and middle-class managers as well as devout but uneducated peasants. The dissenters are strongest in the U.S. and Western Europe, and except perhaps in The Netherlands, they constitute a minority of the faithful. Father Greeley estimates that no more than 1,000,000 of the 35 million churchgoing U.S. Catholics could be considered rebels. The pastoral problem for the bishops, however, is that the dissenters influence a great many concerned, educated laymen who take their faith seriously as a commitment rather than as a social club held together by ritual, dogma and Friday-night bingo. Their numbers are likely to grow. "I don't know a well-educated young lay person who has religious concerns who's not a dissenter," says Greeley. Among Catholic college students, alienation from the church as an institution is almost a badge of maturity.
Journalist John Cogley, a staff member of the Center for the Study