Quote from The New Catholic Truce by Ross Douthat:
MODERNITY has left nearly every religious tradition in the Western world divided.
The specific issues vary with the faith, but there is an essential sameness to what separates Reform Judaism from Orthodox Judaism, evangelical churches from mainline Protestantism, the liberal Episcopal Church from the conservative Anglican Church in North America.
In each case, disagreements about the authority of tradition, the reliability of Scripture, and eventually the proper response to the Sexual Revolution have made it impossible for liberal and conservative believers to remain in community or communion.
Roman Catholicism, however, remains officially united. The church has a conservative wing, a liberal wing, and a low-grade civil war. But the church’s left and right have found ways to coexist, and since the 1970s any kind of rupture has seemed relatively unlikely.
That coexistence depends on a tension between doctrine and practice, in which the church’s official teaching remains conservative even as the everyday life of Catholicism is shot through with disagreement, relativism, dissent.
Further disunity lies ahead: The New Catholic Truce
