Clare sent me a link to an interesting blog post about a Canadian Catholic’s encounter with the polarization in the American Church:
I loved my Canadian theology school and its gentle, very Canadian, refusal to fight over stuff.
Not so my American theology school, not so. When I got accepted into its program–and a great honour it was–I went to see one of my Canadian school's administrators, whom we all revered as a Genius, for advice.
"Don't get polarized," he said.
"Right!" I said. I wrote it down.
"And don't ever contradict KX."
"Don't ever contract KX," I repeated. I wrote that down too.
I spent a year and a half trying desperately not to get polarized before I lost my marbles and went home. When I went South, I had heard of the Culture Wars, but I did not realize how fiercely they were being fought in the American Catholic schools.
Read the whole thing; it’s both funny and sad.
I sympathize greatly with the blogger’s lament. There are good reasons for the culture wars in America, and there are very good reasons for orthodox Catholics to be unhappy about priests, nuns, bishops, and theologians who clearly reject fundamentals of the Faith. But the atmosphere surrounding these controversies often gets extremely hostile, reactionary, and paranoid on both sides. Far too often people simply sniff at each other for the signs that allow them to pigeonhole each other as liberal or conservative and therefore either an enemy or a friend, as applicable. I’m sure any Catholic who’s been aware of the intra-Church quarrels of the last few decades has had a lot of experience with this. Personally I’m pretty sick of it.
I don’t have anything to say to those progressives who have progressed pretty much out of the Church in everything except name. And I don’t expect to hear much from them except the same old denunciations. It seems to me that their number is dwindling and their influence waning; I think the clearly weakened belief among American Catholics at large has less to do with progressive theology than the general secularism of our society. But there are a lot of people who for lack of a better word can be called “liberal” theologically who are fundamentally orthodox but are sometimes considered heretics by self-appointed enforcers. I expect you know that type; they seem to have a sort of lust for searching out heterodoxy in others, and to get a sort of pleasure out of their outrage when they find it, or think they have found it. Among other things this practice makes orthodoxy look bad. And it’s time for the orthodox to focus their attention less on seeking out error and more on evangelizing, both inside and outside the Church.
The polarization is especially poisonous when the disagreement is really only political, but the culture wars reinforce this tendency: political liberals are suspicious of orthodoxy, because they think it involves right-wing politics, while political conservatives take liberal political opinions as markers of heterodoxy. But the Catholic faith has room for all sorts of political views, and those who truly want to be Catholic should be able to disagree in charity.
Light On Dark Water 
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