A Sound of Sheer Silence

There are times when something happens to you that hits you like a ton of bricks, where you immediately know that something big and significant has occurred that changes the way that you look at things and changes where you stand.  And then there are things that happen that don't seem especially consequential at the time, but that stick with you.  They are like a splinter in your mind and in your soul--at first it doesn't seem like that big a deal, but it just sticks around and becomes more and more prominent by virtue of its presence in your body and your life.  Let me tell you a story of one of the later incidents in my life. A year ago at this time, I spent a week in Philadelphia visiting my sister, brother-in-law, and the rest of my family.  In part, I was going to spend Thanksgiving with them, but in part it was for my nephew's baptism.  My sister and my brother-in-law are not practicing Catholics, but they had their son baptized at my brother-in-law's fa...

Imagine a society that is multiracial, but where one racial group (let's say, just to be provocative, Caucasians) were not eligible to hold public office.  Can't be the President or Prime Minister, can't be in the legislature, can't be a member of a local school board or community board.  No positions of public authority, and the rule is enforced by law. No doubt, there would be a segment of folks who would be upset about this state of affairs and would be pushing back.  They would point out that the origin of this rule (let's say) was a view that Caucasians were intrinsically inferior to people of other races.  "This rule is a product of rank bigotry and must be changed," they would say. "No, you have it all wrong," responds the President of our fictional republic.  "Sure, maybe back in the day  we thought that Caucasians were a lesser form of human than those of other races, but we absolutely reject that now.  We love you, and we value...

Let's take a moment and think about world Christianity, 2016.  You can slice all the Christian bodies that exist in various ways, but one easy way to do that has to do with the Eucharist.  On one side, you have all of the bodies that subscribe to some version of the "memorial" model of the Eucharist--it is a symbolic reenactment of the Last Supper, and nothing more.  Into this bucket one would place all of the churches influenced by Calvin and his theology, all of the evangelical Christian bodies, the Mormons--lots of different folks.  On the other side, you would put what are generally called the "high churches"--those that would argue that the Eucharist is not only a symbol, but also reflects some sort of "Real Presence" of Jesus in the Eucharist in a unique way.  Here, we can think about three sub-buckets within that group--the Orthodox Churches (both "Chalcedonian"--i.e. the Greeks, Russians, etc.--and "non Chalcedonian" or ...

"No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time." --Winston Churchill, speech to the House of Commons, 1947. We hear, endlessly, that "the Church is not a democracy."  It is said by conservative folks with great glee and enthusiasm, and by more progressive folks with a kind of resigned sigh.  And, as a purely factual matter, it is 100% true.  Roman Catholicism is not a democracy in any meaningful way.  But I don't think people have really thought through what that means, and what the consequences of that reality truly are. Some small glimpse of that awareness has broken through in the form of the brouhaha over some emails exchanged four years ago between Hillary Clinton's campaign head John Podesta and various aides and subordinates.  The topic of these emails (or, at least, one of those topics), is Catholi...

Bear with me for a bit of a round-about way of getting into this topic. 1.  By far the coolest thing about writing this blog is that it has been the vehicle for meeting what I call my "internet friends"--people that I have met and come to know via interacting with them purely over the internet.  Frank and Bill and Maureen are three that I mentioned here, but there are many others, and it is great. If there is a one person who I could add to my list of internet friends, that person would be Austin Walker.  Austin Walker is the editor-in-chief of Vice Gaming, and he writes about video games, but he also writes about race and gender and a host of other things.  He also is the ring-leader of "Friends at the Table," an actual-play tabletop RPG podcast which is the best thing since sliced bread.  Walker is a smart, funny, thoughtful dude, and it would be awesome to trade periodic emails and DMs with him as an internet friend. Anyway, I was listening to a podcast...

Let's do a thought experiment, shall we?  Imagine I call you up on the phone and say, "hey, it would be great to see you.  Why don't you come by and visit?"  "Great!" you say, so you drive to where I live.  You knock on the door, and I answer the door while talking on the phone.  Without getting off the phone, I usher you into the house.  Eventually, I get off the phone, and proceed to have a long monologue about how your life is going astray, and how you are making terrible decisions and "lifestyle choices."  I then tell me that you can stay, but you can only have a meal with me if you promise to give up said "lifestyle choices." Would you say that I have been "welcoming" to you on your visit?  Probably not, right?  And if I claimed I was being welcoming insofar as I invited you to come to my house, it would be fair to object that welcoming has much more to do with the treatment once I arrived than the official posture of ...

I talked in the last post about the motivations behind the apocalyptic stance of Ross Douthat's Sunday column .  However, whatever his motivations, his core position--that "allowing" (more on that in a bit) divorced and remarried couples to receive Communion will be the end of everything--is a crazy position.  And it is a crazy position for a couple of reasons, but the most basic reason is this:  Douthat is concerned about Pope Francis softening a disciplinary rule of the Catholic Church that is not only not being enforced, but is one that cannot be enforced, given the culture and socialization of the U.S. Catholic Church in 2016. Let's break that down.  First, despite yeoman's efforts to make all of this into some central doctrinal and theological Rubicon, what we are really talking about here is a disciplinary rule--under what circumstances can a Catholic come up and receive Communion.  Canon law in the Catholic Church (Canon 988, p.1) says "[t]he fait...

As they say, sometimes you go to the mountain, and sometimes the mount comes to you.   Witness Sunday's column by Ross Douthat on his bete noir , Pope Francis.  Douthat evidently is working on a book on how Pope Francis is destroying Catholicism  and maybe Western civilization as well, so perhaps this column is some sort of trial balloon for that project.  I love this column, because it is a perfect encapsulation of many of the sources of dishonesty that I want to talk about in this series, all in a nice package. There are several things I want to hit on in Douthat's column (probably requiring a couple of posts), but I want to start in this post with the question that I am sure New York Times readers who don't follow the ins and outs of Catholic politics are asking themselves---what is Ross's deal?  Why is he so mad at Pope Francis?  Here is my theory--Douthat is singularly focused on Pope Francis because Pope Francis has exposed that conservative Cathol...

I have made the claim before that I disagree with everything Fr. Dwight Longenecker has written .  Well, I have to take that back now, because I more or less agree with this article that he has written in Crux.    I know--dogs and cats, living together, mass hysteria. Before I get to the things I agree with, a couple of niggles.  First, I don't think the statement of Vice Presidential candidate Tim Kaine that "Catholicism will come around on same-sex marriage" is hypocritical.  Longenecker asserts that it is OK to "think the Catholic Church is just plain wrong about this or that," and publicly say so, while "stay[ing] in the Church as 'the loyal opposition.'"  If so, it seems to be a logical extension of that to say "and eventually the Church will come around to my way of thinking, because I am right and they are wrong."  That's a prediction about the future, not a claim about the current state of Church teaching.  Moreover...

Lots of people have lots of different diagnoses of the state of religion in general in the West and the Catholic Church in particular.  Some will say that the forces of secularism are to blame,  necessitating that we retreat into protected, sectarian enclaves.   Some will say that the failures are mostly personal--if we only had better priests or better bishops (however one defines "better"), then things would be swell.  Some say it is simply a lack of faith. I would like to offer an alternative theory.  I believe the biggest problem in the Catholic Church in 2016 is that our discourse--the way we talk to each other and to the outside world--is fundamentally dishonest.  When we talk about the issues that are affecting us or are at the front of our collective consciousness, far too often we don't talk about what the  actual  issues are and what we  actually  think about them, but instead we have this constructed, artificial discussion t...