After he assumed editorship of Communio in 1992, David Schindler became the most important voice for the movement’s perspective in America. He is the most notable American Catholic thinker.

Philosopher of Love: David L. Schindler

by Jeremy Beer

For the orthodox Christian, is doing one’s public duty more or less reducible to voting for the most socially conservative Republican on the ballot—and then shutting up about whatever misgivings one might have? Surely not. Yet for many election cycles, this has been often implied by the self-appointed guardians of practicality and political realism. It is even increasingly heard from the pulpit.

The assumptions that lurk behind this idea are that when it comes to ordering public life, modern liberal democracy in its best sense has things basically right. America rightly understood is the highest exemplar of this kind of liberalism. And the Republican Party is our best reasonable hope for defending this liberalism’s political, economic, and cultural accomplishments from its enemies. To question these assumptions is to be naïve or—a favorite epithet—utopian.

This view essentially obliterates the need for prudential judgment, not to mention critical thinking. Thus, a number of Catholic moralists have identified three (the list sometimes expands to four or five) “intrinsic evils”—abortion, euthanasia, same-sex marriage—against which one has a moral responsibility to vote, and to which responsibility all else must be subordinated. The idea is that if only the right people were in office legislating against such evils, everything would be pretty much fine in the land of the free and the brave.

Well…if this story strikes you as just a little too pat, may I introduce you to David L. Schindler and the Communio school of theology he represents. Two recent books by and about Schindler—Ordering Love and Being Holy in the World, respectively—show how Christians ought to feel liberated to engage the culture in a deeper and ultimately more faithful way.

Schindler certainly agrees that abortion, euthanasia, same-sex marriage, and the like are evils. However, unlike our partisan “realists” he does not regard these as corruptions of a liberal worldview otherwise rightly ordered but as the ironic fruit of liberalism’s unwitting metaphysics. By showing how the achievements of America and liberalism in general are grounded in the same intellectual foundations as their failings, and by showing how virtually all parties in the public square embrace the same metaphysical misconceptions, he turns down the apocalyptic culture-wars heat while putting the ephemera of electoral politics in their proper context.

David L. Schindler has taught at the John Paul II Institute in Washington, D.C., since 1992, following appointments at Mount St. Mary’s University in Emmitsburg, Maryland, and the University of Notre Dame. Barrel-chested and bearded, he was raised in the Seattle area by a family that owned and operated a major sporting-goods company. After receiving bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Gonzaga University, he enrolled in the Claremont Graduate School. In 1972, he finished a dissertation that brought the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead into conversation with the Thomist tradition. For a while, like novelist Walker Percy, he might even have been thought of as an existential Thomist. In these early years, Schindler was influenced by, among others, Frederick Wilhelmsen, Michael Polanyi, and Eric Voegelin—all important figures in the development of the postwar conservative intellectual tradition. Schindler thus represents a slender strand of that tradition, one unassociated with the conservative political movement or right-wing political theory. Instead, his thinking moved in a theological direction.

In 1974, two years after completing his dissertation, Schindler became assistant editor of the new American edition of Communio, an international theological journal. Communio was founded by, among others, the Catholic theologians Hans Urs von Balthasar, Henri de Lubac, Louis Bouyer, and Joseph Ratzinger. The Second Vatican Council had concluded in 1965, and in various ways many ofCommunio’s founders had played a significant role in the Council. By the early ‘70s, they believed that its work was being misinterpreted and misappropriated, especially by the progressive thinkers grouped around another journal called Concilium, whose leading figures included Karl Rahner, Yves Congar, and Hans Küng. Unlike the Communio circle, the Concilium crowd counseled not just greater engagement with, but also accommodation to, modern culture.

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