The Impasse
But the Church’s theological factions are sufficiently far apart that each would rather do nothing than let the other side lead reform — because the liberals think the conservatives want an inquisition, the conservatives think the liberals want Episcopalianism, and there is some truth in both caricatures.
--Ross Douthat, "Sheep Without Shepherds," November 17, 2018.
We are coming to the end, I think, of things to say about the sex abuse crisis in the Roman Catholic Church that are not restatements of previous ideas. But, to go out, I'd like to unpack this is a very smart and insightful observation by Ross Douthat.
Let's take the second part first. On Twitter, Francis biographer Austen Ivereigh expressed confusion as what Douthat meant by "Episcopalianism" in the above quote. Maybe things are different in the UK, but I don't think Douthat was being obtuse at all. "Episcopalianism," in the US Catholic context, is simply a push by folks to be freed of having to pretend to believe the things that they have never really believed in the first place.
I have been asked what the biggest surprise I have had as a result of leaving the Roman Catholic Church for the Episcopal Church, and the best answer I can give is that I was surprised to discover that I had been an Episcopalian all along, even when I was a Roman Catholic. Now, that's a bit of a snarky response, and it can be interpreted in a triumphalist way ("even when I was wandering in the wilderness, I had an inner core of the True Faith," or something along those lines). But that's not what I mean; what I mean is that I came to understand that my basic theological world-view and instincts have always lined up with at least a strand of the Anglican/Episcopalian tradition, so the transition from the Roman Catholic church has been less about changing theological positions and more about being more honest about what I really believed. The stuff that I have shed has mostly been stuff that never really fit particularly well in the first place, or at least stuff that I was conceptually open to getting rid of (like a more democratic governance model on the parish and diocese level).
But, here's the thing. I am not remotely alone in this. This is a totally unscientific and speculative number, but I would say that at least a third, and maybe approaching 50% of US Catholics are in the same boat that I was. And, by that, I don't mean 50% of the people who identify as Roman Catholic in some survey, but also 50% of the people who come every Sunday to Mass, donate to their parish and other Catholic institutions, and are active members of the broader Roman Catholic community. Many, perhaps most, of these people who never leave the Roman Catholic Church for another denomination or religious tradition, including the Episcopal Church. And yet, if you were to make a list of the concrete differences between the Roman Catholic Church and the Episcopal Church in a comparison chart, this 50% would be fine with all or most of the positions taken by the Episcopal Church--birth control, women's ordination, LGBT rights, lay governance. They are Roman Catholic because they are Roman Catholic, not because they are motivated by the Roman Catholic distinctives visa ve other Christian traditions, especially visa ve the Episcopal Church. If Pope Francis were to ordain a bunch of women priests and declare that the Pill was swell, a big chunk of US Catholics would raise a cheer.
And it's not just the sex stuff. I think one of the most instructive metrics of where US Catholics are theologically has to do with the Sacrament of Confession/Reconciliation. I cited these statistics before, but basically half of all regular Mass going Catholics have just opted-out of the Sacrament, in a way that can't be squared with Roman Catholic theology or canon law in any way. If you dig through those surveys, it's not that people are rejecting the concept of the sacrament per se, it's just that they don't feel that they need to go to the sacrament each time before taking Communion, and a third of the weekly Mass-goers say that Confession should be reserved for "serious sins only." In doing so, they are demonstrating a theology and praxis around Confession that is . . . precisely the theology and praxis of the Episcopal Church. Which is not to say that these folks are intentionally aping Episcopal models, just that the equilibrium place they have forged for themselves happens to be in the same spot. They are Episcopalians without knowing it.
One of the things that is so weird about the US Roman Catholic Church post-Vatican II (I limit it in this way because I have no experience of previous times or other places) is how little many its members, including many of the otherwise most committed people in the pews and large swaths of the clergy, take seriously "Roman Catholicism on paper." Roman Catholicism on paper is, at the end of the day, an extremely conservative religious tradition, every bit as much as US evangelical Christianity and in some ways more so. The difference between the two, as a practical matter, is that there is and was in Roman Catholicism a culture that encouraged people to ignore what was "on the books," in favor of unwritten settlements of various sorts, something that is generally not found in the much more "disciplined" world of American evangelicalism. These settlements, contra the revisionist message of the Pope John Paul II/EWTN crowd (more on them in a bit), had quasi-official legitimacy, at least on the level of parishes and priests. Priests are not stupid--they know how few people follow Humanae Vitae and go to Confession versus the number of folks who show up at Mass on Sunday, and the vast majority of them choose to say nothing about it, ever. And why? In large measure because they agree with the people in the pews and in the settlement that had developed.
The presence of the "unwritten settlement" is something that needs to be discussed in the context of the sex abuse crisis. I have written, and still believe, that ultimately it is clergy who are responsible for the mess they have created, and the only solution is for them to come clean about the various sorts of personal duplicity in which they are enmeshed. But it is also important, I think, to recognize that the "don't ask, don't tell" culture extends to the laity, in the form of the Kabuki Theatre that is the ban on birth control. If the vast majority of the laity are at least tacitly lying about their sex lives, and everyone knows it, then it creates conditions under which it is easier for the clergy to lie about their sex lives. The core lesson of the sex abuse crisis is that if everyone has something to hide, then no one is going to be willing to ask the probative questions, and that principle extends to the laity as well.
In any event, the difference between de jure and de facto Roman Catholicism was massive, and still is. It's hard for US Catholics to realize how weird all of this is until you step out of the Roman Catholic bubble and realize that the dichotomy between what is the official position and what people believe is significantly smaller in most, if not all, other religious traditions. This gap really is a "Catholic thing."
This gap is at the heart of the Roman Catholic conservative project of the last fifty years. The power of the conservative Thermidorian reaction of Pope John Paul II was always found in the fact that he and those aligned with him could point to any number of concrete markers or statements of doctrine that justified what they were doing. If you just looked at what was "on the books," it's difficult to argue with much of the JPII program, and if anything you can throw stones at it from the traditionalist side, on the premise that it didn't go far enough back to the books. From a conservative perspective, the reform program of JPII is really simple--all you are trying to do is shrink the gap between de jure and de facto. And since this massive gap between the two doesn't really make any sense when you hold it up to the light, there is a logical power to what they were presenting.
The problem, and this has come into crystal clear focus in this post-McCarrick period, is that the goal wasn't really to shrink the gap between de jure and de facto, at least not across the board and at least not with regard to the lives of clergy. Instead, it was really about creating a different set of de facto norms for certain insiders, and otherwise to "own the libs" before that term became fashionable. One of the more interesting, and I think important, developments over the last year or so is the recognition by thoughtful Catholic conservatives that they were lied to--in some cases deliberately, but certainly by implication and silence--by conservatives in the hierarchy. Douthat dances around that in this piece, but James Heaney comes out with guns blazing. These folks were told that all of the darkness surrounding sexuality and sexual abuse could be cleanly laid at the feat of progressives, when the people telling the tale knew perfectly well that this was nonsense, as the tellers were themselves actively covering for their own allies and teammates. It's turtles all the way down.
So, as Douthat accurately lays it out, the Roman Catholic Church finds itself at a cross-roads. I think it is pretty clear that the old unwritten settlements are breaking down. There are those who still cling to the JPII promise (if one made under false pretenses) of a church where the people in the pews (those who remain) actually believe and are answerable to official positions of the Church. In other words, the Inquisition. The conservatives, while still fixated on gay sex as the root of all evil, have had many of their illusions shattered about the realities of the Roman Catholic church and the make-up of its leadership, and have had to put aside self-serving, black-and-white narratives. And on the other side you have Episcopalianism--"can we please stop pretending that we believe all this stuff that many of us never took seriously in the first place?" Which, in this telling, will remove in one fell swoop all of the secrecy and dissembling that gave rise to the problems in the first place.
The easy thing to do here is to say, "well, both sides are focused on greater honesty, so they can form common ground around that!" But that, while technically true, is facile. The reality is that if the conservatives were to have their Inquisition, they would push most if not all of the "Episcopalians" out of the church. These folks are loyal, but that loyalty has a breaking point, and a concerted effort to police the sex of married heterosexual couples is far beyond that point. Nor do I think many of them would tolerate a thorough pogrom of gay priests, which is the only solution to the sex abuse crisis on offer from the conservatives. And, on the flip side, the conservatives view the Episcopalian position as an utter repudiation and negation of core doctrines of the Roman Catholic faith. And, guess what, they are right--the fact that only a small group have taken those doctrines seriously doesn't make them less real from a technical, theological perspective. And both sides are well aware of all of these facts.
So, everyone is at an impasse. Everyone wants more truth-telling in theory, but no one wants the answers that come as a result of that truth-telling. I don't know what the way forward is.
--Ross Douthat, "Sheep Without Shepherds," November 17, 2018.
We are coming to the end, I think, of things to say about the sex abuse crisis in the Roman Catholic Church that are not restatements of previous ideas. But, to go out, I'd like to unpack this is a very smart and insightful observation by Ross Douthat.
Let's take the second part first. On Twitter, Francis biographer Austen Ivereigh expressed confusion as what Douthat meant by "Episcopalianism" in the above quote. Maybe things are different in the UK, but I don't think Douthat was being obtuse at all. "Episcopalianism," in the US Catholic context, is simply a push by folks to be freed of having to pretend to believe the things that they have never really believed in the first place.
I have been asked what the biggest surprise I have had as a result of leaving the Roman Catholic Church for the Episcopal Church, and the best answer I can give is that I was surprised to discover that I had been an Episcopalian all along, even when I was a Roman Catholic. Now, that's a bit of a snarky response, and it can be interpreted in a triumphalist way ("even when I was wandering in the wilderness, I had an inner core of the True Faith," or something along those lines). But that's not what I mean; what I mean is that I came to understand that my basic theological world-view and instincts have always lined up with at least a strand of the Anglican/Episcopalian tradition, so the transition from the Roman Catholic church has been less about changing theological positions and more about being more honest about what I really believed. The stuff that I have shed has mostly been stuff that never really fit particularly well in the first place, or at least stuff that I was conceptually open to getting rid of (like a more democratic governance model on the parish and diocese level).
But, here's the thing. I am not remotely alone in this. This is a totally unscientific and speculative number, but I would say that at least a third, and maybe approaching 50% of US Catholics are in the same boat that I was. And, by that, I don't mean 50% of the people who identify as Roman Catholic in some survey, but also 50% of the people who come every Sunday to Mass, donate to their parish and other Catholic institutions, and are active members of the broader Roman Catholic community. Many, perhaps most, of these people who never leave the Roman Catholic Church for another denomination or religious tradition, including the Episcopal Church. And yet, if you were to make a list of the concrete differences between the Roman Catholic Church and the Episcopal Church in a comparison chart, this 50% would be fine with all or most of the positions taken by the Episcopal Church--birth control, women's ordination, LGBT rights, lay governance. They are Roman Catholic because they are Roman Catholic, not because they are motivated by the Roman Catholic distinctives visa ve other Christian traditions, especially visa ve the Episcopal Church. If Pope Francis were to ordain a bunch of women priests and declare that the Pill was swell, a big chunk of US Catholics would raise a cheer.
And it's not just the sex stuff. I think one of the most instructive metrics of where US Catholics are theologically has to do with the Sacrament of Confession/Reconciliation. I cited these statistics before, but basically half of all regular Mass going Catholics have just opted-out of the Sacrament, in a way that can't be squared with Roman Catholic theology or canon law in any way. If you dig through those surveys, it's not that people are rejecting the concept of the sacrament per se, it's just that they don't feel that they need to go to the sacrament each time before taking Communion, and a third of the weekly Mass-goers say that Confession should be reserved for "serious sins only." In doing so, they are demonstrating a theology and praxis around Confession that is . . . precisely the theology and praxis of the Episcopal Church. Which is not to say that these folks are intentionally aping Episcopal models, just that the equilibrium place they have forged for themselves happens to be in the same spot. They are Episcopalians without knowing it.
One of the things that is so weird about the US Roman Catholic Church post-Vatican II (I limit it in this way because I have no experience of previous times or other places) is how little many its members, including many of the otherwise most committed people in the pews and large swaths of the clergy, take seriously "Roman Catholicism on paper." Roman Catholicism on paper is, at the end of the day, an extremely conservative religious tradition, every bit as much as US evangelical Christianity and in some ways more so. The difference between the two, as a practical matter, is that there is and was in Roman Catholicism a culture that encouraged people to ignore what was "on the books," in favor of unwritten settlements of various sorts, something that is generally not found in the much more "disciplined" world of American evangelicalism. These settlements, contra the revisionist message of the Pope John Paul II/EWTN crowd (more on them in a bit), had quasi-official legitimacy, at least on the level of parishes and priests. Priests are not stupid--they know how few people follow Humanae Vitae and go to Confession versus the number of folks who show up at Mass on Sunday, and the vast majority of them choose to say nothing about it, ever. And why? In large measure because they agree with the people in the pews and in the settlement that had developed.
The presence of the "unwritten settlement" is something that needs to be discussed in the context of the sex abuse crisis. I have written, and still believe, that ultimately it is clergy who are responsible for the mess they have created, and the only solution is for them to come clean about the various sorts of personal duplicity in which they are enmeshed. But it is also important, I think, to recognize that the "don't ask, don't tell" culture extends to the laity, in the form of the Kabuki Theatre that is the ban on birth control. If the vast majority of the laity are at least tacitly lying about their sex lives, and everyone knows it, then it creates conditions under which it is easier for the clergy to lie about their sex lives. The core lesson of the sex abuse crisis is that if everyone has something to hide, then no one is going to be willing to ask the probative questions, and that principle extends to the laity as well.
In any event, the difference between de jure and de facto Roman Catholicism was massive, and still is. It's hard for US Catholics to realize how weird all of this is until you step out of the Roman Catholic bubble and realize that the dichotomy between what is the official position and what people believe is significantly smaller in most, if not all, other religious traditions. This gap really is a "Catholic thing."
This gap is at the heart of the Roman Catholic conservative project of the last fifty years. The power of the conservative Thermidorian reaction of Pope John Paul II was always found in the fact that he and those aligned with him could point to any number of concrete markers or statements of doctrine that justified what they were doing. If you just looked at what was "on the books," it's difficult to argue with much of the JPII program, and if anything you can throw stones at it from the traditionalist side, on the premise that it didn't go far enough back to the books. From a conservative perspective, the reform program of JPII is really simple--all you are trying to do is shrink the gap between de jure and de facto. And since this massive gap between the two doesn't really make any sense when you hold it up to the light, there is a logical power to what they were presenting.
The problem, and this has come into crystal clear focus in this post-McCarrick period, is that the goal wasn't really to shrink the gap between de jure and de facto, at least not across the board and at least not with regard to the lives of clergy. Instead, it was really about creating a different set of de facto norms for certain insiders, and otherwise to "own the libs" before that term became fashionable. One of the more interesting, and I think important, developments over the last year or so is the recognition by thoughtful Catholic conservatives that they were lied to--in some cases deliberately, but certainly by implication and silence--by conservatives in the hierarchy. Douthat dances around that in this piece, but James Heaney comes out with guns blazing. These folks were told that all of the darkness surrounding sexuality and sexual abuse could be cleanly laid at the feat of progressives, when the people telling the tale knew perfectly well that this was nonsense, as the tellers were themselves actively covering for their own allies and teammates. It's turtles all the way down.
So, as Douthat accurately lays it out, the Roman Catholic Church finds itself at a cross-roads. I think it is pretty clear that the old unwritten settlements are breaking down. There are those who still cling to the JPII promise (if one made under false pretenses) of a church where the people in the pews (those who remain) actually believe and are answerable to official positions of the Church. In other words, the Inquisition. The conservatives, while still fixated on gay sex as the root of all evil, have had many of their illusions shattered about the realities of the Roman Catholic church and the make-up of its leadership, and have had to put aside self-serving, black-and-white narratives. And on the other side you have Episcopalianism--"can we please stop pretending that we believe all this stuff that many of us never took seriously in the first place?" Which, in this telling, will remove in one fell swoop all of the secrecy and dissembling that gave rise to the problems in the first place.
The easy thing to do here is to say, "well, both sides are focused on greater honesty, so they can form common ground around that!" But that, while technically true, is facile. The reality is that if the conservatives were to have their Inquisition, they would push most if not all of the "Episcopalians" out of the church. These folks are loyal, but that loyalty has a breaking point, and a concerted effort to police the sex of married heterosexual couples is far beyond that point. Nor do I think many of them would tolerate a thorough pogrom of gay priests, which is the only solution to the sex abuse crisis on offer from the conservatives. And, on the flip side, the conservatives view the Episcopalian position as an utter repudiation and negation of core doctrines of the Roman Catholic faith. And, guess what, they are right--the fact that only a small group have taken those doctrines seriously doesn't make them less real from a technical, theological perspective. And both sides are well aware of all of these facts.
So, everyone is at an impasse. Everyone wants more truth-telling in theory, but no one wants the answers that come as a result of that truth-telling. I don't know what the way forward is.
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