Posted on 30 September 2013 by Fr. John Zuhlsdorf\t<\/p>\n
There is an intense piece by Rod Dreher over at TIME. The whole thing is worth a close look, but here are some longish samples.<\/p>\n
NB: While I disagree with Dreher\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s decision to leave the Catholic Church, I sure understand how he got to that point and I have to agree with a great deal of what he says about the squishy, formless pabulum Catholics have been fed for decades. Dreher, offering a salutary warning, also makes a connection between the destructive \u00e2\u20ac\u0153spirit of Vatican II\u00e2\u20ac\u009d and its potential replacement, a \u00e2\u20ac\u0153spirit of Francis\u00e2\u20ac\u009d.<\/p>\n
There has been both lavish (nearly irrational) praise of Pope Francis and there has been harsh (nearly irrational) criticism of Pope Francis. I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t agree with everything that Dreher wrote here (of course\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 I usually only agree entirely with myself), but I haven\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t seen the points he makes put so eloquently.<\/p>\n
While Dreher\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s look at The Francis Effect\u00e2\u201e\u00a2 may make you squirm a little, will any of you be willing to disagree with his vivisection of the American Church? When he talks about the effects of the \u00e2\u20ac\u0153spirit of Vatican II\u00e2\u20ac\u009d, doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t he hit the nail square on?<\/p>\n
We need this kind of hard-nosed, cool introspection.<\/p>\n
I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m Still Not Going Back to the Catholic Church<\/p>\n
Pope Francis only confirms my decision to leave<\/p>\n
By Rod Dreher<\/p>\n
It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not hard to understand why people are so excited about Pope Francis. Since his sensational interview last week, many have said that with his personal warmth and determination to put doctrine in the background, Francis is just the man to bring a lot of fallen-away Catholics back into the church.<\/p>\n
Maybe. But I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m an ex-Catholic whose decision to leave the Catholic Church is not challenged by Francis\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s words, but rather confirmed.<\/p>\n
Just over two decades ago, when I began the process to enter the Roman Catholic Church as an adult convert, I chose to receive instruction at a university parish, figuring that the quality of teaching would be more rigorous. After three months of guided meditations and endless God is love lectures, I dropped out. [I thank God that I discovered the Church where and how I did.]<\/p>\n
[…]<\/p>\n
What I was told, in effect, in that university Catholic parish was that God loved me just as I was \u00e2\u20ac\u201d true \u00e2\u20ac\u201d but that I didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t need to do anything else. It dawned on me one day that at the end of this process, all of us in the class would end up as Catholics, but have no idea what the Catholic Church taught. I bolted, and a year later, I was received into the Church in another parish. [Sounds about right.]<\/p>\n
If you only know about the Catholic Church from reading the papers, you are in for a shock once you come inside. The image of American Catholicism shown by the media is of a church preoccupied with sex and abortion. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not remotely true. [Exactly! Where are all these priests and bishops who are “obsessed” with sex and abortion? Do you know any?] I was a faithful mass-going Catholic for 13 years, attending a number of parishes in five cities in different parts of the country. I could count on one hand the number of homilies I heard that addressed abortion or sexuality in any way. Rather, the homilies were wholly therapeutic, almost always some saccharine variation of God is love. [All you need is luv.]<\/p>\n
Well, yes, He is, but Sunday School simplicities only get you so far. Classical Catholic theology dwells on the paradox of God\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s love and God\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s justice. As Dante shows in the Divine Comedy, God\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s love is God\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s justice poured out on those who reject Him. In the Gospels, Jesus offers compassion to sinners rejected by religious rigorists, but he also tells them to reform their lives, to \u00e2\u20ac\u0153go forth and sin no more.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n
Was I frustrated because the priests wouldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t preach God\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s judgment instead of God\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s mercy? By no means. I was frustrated because they wouldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t preach God\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s judgment at all, which is to say, they preached Christ without the Cross. [Ain’t it the truth.] I knew the depths of the sins from which I was being delivered, and it felt wrong to treat His amazing grace like it was a common courtesy. Like the reggae song says, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Everybody wants to get to heaven, but nobody wants to die.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n
[Here we go!] The contemporary era of global Catholicism began in 1959, when the newly elected Pope John XXIII sought to \u00e2\u20ac\u0153open the windows\u00e2\u20ac\u009d of the fusty old Church to the modern world by calling the Second Vatican Council. Three years later, in his opening address to the council, the charismatic and avuncular pope called for \u00e2\u20ac\u0153a new enthusiasm, a new joy and serenity of mind in the unreserved acceptance by all of the entire Christian faith,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d without compromising on doctrine. A fierce spirit of the age blasted through those newly-opened windows, scouring nearly everything in its path. The coming decades would see a collapse in Catholic catechesis and Catholic discipline. The so-called \u00e2\u20ac\u0153spirit of Vatican II\u00e2\u20ac\u009d \u00e2\u20ac\u201d a perversion of the Council\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s actual teaching \u00e2\u20ac\u201d justified many subsequent outrages. [I am tempted to memorize that paragraph.]<\/p>\n
[… skipping stuff about the abuse crisis and how it was handled…]<\/p>\n
All this put the moral unseriousness of the American church in a certain light. As the scandal raged, one Ash Wednesday, I attended mass at my comfortable suburban parish and heard the priest deliver a sermon describing Lent as a time when we should all come to love ourselves more. [ARGH!]<\/p>\n
[…]<\/p>\n
It wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t safe to raise my children in this church, I thought \u00e2\u20ac\u201d not because they would be at risk of predators, but because the entire ethos of the American church, like the ethos of the decadent post-Christian society in which it lives, is not that we should die to ourselves so that we can live in Christ, as the new testament demands, but that we should learn to love ourselves more.<\/p>\n
Flannery O\u00e2\u20ac\u2122Connor, one of my Catholic heroes, famously said, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Push back against the age as hard as it pushes against you. What people don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t realize is how much religion costs. They think faith is a big electric blanket, when of course it is the cross.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d American Catholicism was not pushing back against the hostile age at all. Rather, it had become a pushover. [Pathe-tic.] God is love was not a proclamation that liberated us captives from our sin and despair, but rather a bromide and a platitude that allowed us to believe that, and to behave as if, our lust, greed, malice and so forth \u00e2\u20ac\u201c sins that I struggled with every day \u00e2\u20ac\u201d weren\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t to be despised and cast out, but rather shellacked by a river of treacle.<\/p>\n
I finally broke. Losing my Catholic faith was the most painful thing that ever happened to me. Today, as much as I admire Pope Francis and understand the enthusiasm among Catholics for him, his interview makes me realize that the good, if incomplete, work that John Paul II and Benedict XVI did to restore the Church after the violence of the revolution stands to be undone. [Exactly! And you can feel the erosion happening under our feet even now, like a massive sinkhole at work.] Though I agree with nearly everything the pope said last week in his interview, and cheer inwardly when he chastises rigorist knotheads who would deny the healing medicine of the Church to anyone, [On the other hand, how many of those idiots are there?] I fear his merciful words will be received not as love, but license. [HERE is a money quote…] The \u00e2\u20ac\u0153spirit of Pope Francis\u00e2\u20ac\u009d will replace the \u00e2\u20ac\u0153spirit of Vatican II\u00e2\u20ac\u009d as the rationalization people will use to ignore the difficult teachings of the faith. If so, this pope will turn out to be like his predecessor John XXIII: a dear man, but a tragic figure.<\/p>\n
In his interview, the pope used a metaphor for the Church that is often employed by Eastern Orthodox Christianity: he called it a \u00e2\u20ac\u0153field hospital\u00e2\u20ac\u009d where the walking wounded can receive treatment. He\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s right, but it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s important to discern the nature of the cure on offer. Anesthesia is a kind of medicine that masks the pain, but it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not the kind of medicine that heals the underlying sickness.<\/p>\n
There is, of course, no such thing as the perfect church, but in Orthodoxy, which radically resists the moralistic therapeutic deism that characterizes so much American Christianity, I found a soul-healing balance. In my Russian Orthodox country mission parish this past Sunday, the priest preached about love, joy, repentance, and forgiveness \u00e2\u20ac\u201c in all its dimensions. Addressing parents in the congregation, he exhorted us to be merciful, kind, and forgiving toward our children. But he also warned against thinking of love as giving our children what they want, as opposed to what they need.<\/p>\n
\u00e2\u20ac\u0153Giving them what they want may make it easier for us,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d he said, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153but we must love our children enough to teach them the hard lessons, and compel them toward the good.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d [The Book of Proverbs comments in this way, too.]<\/p>\n
True, that. And I cherish this pastor because he loves his people enough to teach us the hard lessons, and to compel us past mediocrity, and toward the good. Catholic priests of the same mind and orientation as my Orthodox pastor \u00e2\u20ac\u201c and I know many of them \u00e2\u20ac\u201c are telling me that the Holy Father, by signaling to his American flock that God is love, and the rest doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t really matter, just made their mission a lot more difficult. [Damn right it is!] But that is no longer my problem. [No, Rod, it is still your problem. Dogmatic Constitution Lumen gentium, 14: “They could not be saved who, knowing that the Catholic Church was founded as necessary by God through Christ, would refuse either to enter it, or to remain in it.”]<\/p>\n
While it might be tempting to discuss Dreher\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s own \u00e2\u20ac\u0153faith journey\u00e2\u20ac\u009d, the real meat here is in his view of the state of the Church and the direction he guesses it is going.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Posted on 30 September 2013 by Fr. John Zuhlsdorf There is an intense piece by Rod Dreher over at TIME. The whole thing is worth a close look, but here are some longish samples. NB: While I disagree with Dreher\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s decision to leave the Catholic Church, I sure understand how he got to that point […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-417","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.latinliturgy.org\/phila\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/417","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.latinliturgy.org\/phila\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.latinliturgy.org\/phila\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.latinliturgy.org\/phila\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.latinliturgy.org\/phila\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=417"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.latinliturgy.org\/phila\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/417\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.latinliturgy.org\/phila\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=417"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.latinliturgy.org\/phila\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=417"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.latinliturgy.org\/phila\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=417"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}