Liberal Catholicism Fails The Church

Liberal Catholicism fails the people who need God and his Church the most.

It causes them to downplay the spiritual hazard of certain sins (especially sexual sins) and retreat to a relativistic view of conscience and culpability. Because they haven’t fully hardened their hearts by becoming full-blown dissenters, they can still hear God’s voice calling them to repent of supporting or engaging in sins like sodomy and abortion. 

However, instead of responding to God’s voice, some turn inward and find unhelpful outlets for their natural religiosity. For example, whereas they allow freedom of conscience for the most hardened sexual libertine who says he’s Catholic, they fixate on Catholics who own guns or vote a certain way, claiming they are really the ones who need to repent, because they are “ruining the Church.” 

Cardinal Francis George, in an address he gave in 1998, spoke on liberal Catholicism in words that are as true now as they were then
 
"We are at a turning point in the life of the Church in this country. Liberal Catholicism is an exhausted project. Essentially a critique, even a necessary critique at one point in our history, it is now parasitical on a substance that no longer exists. It has shown itself unable to pass on the Faith in its integrity and inadequate, therefore, in fostering the joyful self-surrender called for in Christian marriage, in consecrated life, in ordained priesthood. It no longer gives life.  
 
The answer, however, is not to be found in a type of conservative Catholicism obsessed with particular practices and so sectarian in its outlook that it cannot serve as a sign of unity of all peoples in Christ. The answer is simply Catholicism, in all its fullness and depth, a faith able to distinguish itself from any cultures and yet able to engage and transform them all, a faith joyful in all the gifts Christ wants to give us and open to the whole world he died to save.  
 
The Catholic faith shapes a church with a lot of room for differences in pastoral approach, for discussion and debate, for initiatives as various as the peoples whom God loves. But, more profoundly, the Faith shapes a church that knows her Lord and knows her own identity, a church able to distinguish between what fits into the tradition that unites her to Christ and what is a false start or a distorting thesis, a church united here and now because she is always one with the church throughout the ages and with the saints in heaven