A Sound of Sheer Silence

On Sunday, I had a visit with a man that I got to know during my time with the Dominicans.  He was enormously supportive of me during that time; in fact, he was the most supportive member of the Dominicans, all told.  I will always be very grateful to him for his kindness and support in my early 20s.  He was a couple of years ahead of me in formation, but he entered the Order older (after a complex and convoluted process), so he is a good 15 or so years older than I am.  He is, at his heart, a good man who cares deeply for the people around him.  He is also someone who takes great joy in being a priest, and he truly puts his whole self into that role. And yet, every time I see him, I come away very sad, and this time was no exception.  While he loves being a priest, he has not found the support among his fellow Dominicans that he hoped for, a fact that he admitted to me on Sunday.  This is to some degree a function of the fact that (as he also acknowle...

"So, what do you think about the bishops wanting to deny Biden Communion?" I've gotten that question a lot. There are a number of ways to approach this issue that I think are interesting on their own merits, but not ultimately the heart of the conversation.  For example, the lawyer in me is fascinated by the applicability of Canon 1405 p.1 , which states that "[i]n the cases mentioned in Canon 1401 [which includes ecclesiastical penalties such as denying Communion], the Roman Pontiff alone has the right to judge . . . Heads of State."  That seems pretty black and white to me--the U.S. Bishops' Conference has no jurisdiction over Biden so long as he is the President.  And, if you think through the "legislative history" of this Canon, it was surely written to prevent local bishops from mucking around with the Pope's broader diplomatic and spiritual initiatives.  In other words, exactly the kind of scenario we have right now.   Along those lines, ...

In The Eighteenth of Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte , Karl Marx said, "Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce."  In the early 17th Century, the Roman Catholic Church committed an enormous, wholly unnecessary own goal when it condemned Galileo's astronomical findings that demonstrated that the solar system revolves around the sun rather than the Earth.  It's important to understand that Galileo was not breaking any new ground with what he was saying, as pretty much every scientifically literate person at the time had a heliocentric view of the universe.  Indeed, that's why it was so damaging--no one  at the time  who knew anything about the topic could take what the Church was saying seriously.  From that, the intellectual world concluded that there was no reason to take anything the Church had to say about the natural world...

First off, I want to thank everyone who has written to me in the last couple of weeks and months, wanting to know if everything is OK and wondering if I will be writing again.  When I started this blog six or so years ago, I did so with the expectation that no one would read it, and the fact that people did, and do, read it has been a wonderful surprise.  I am deeply grateful to everyone who has taken the time to read what I have written and engage with it. My reduced output on these pages has been a product of a couple of things, but mostly the fact that in the last six months or so I haven't felt like I have much to say.  I don't want to be flogging the same horses over and over, and so when I don't feel moved to write something in particular, I just don't.  I would not be surprised if the pendulum swings back in the near future, but as long as I don't really feel like I have particular ideas to put out, it is probably going to continue to be quiet. In fact, I...

Three weeks or so ago, author James Carroll lobbed a grenade into the collective lobby of the Roman Catholic Church with a piece in the Atlantic .  It's title, "Abolish the Priesthood,"  while not an inaccurate description of Carroll's argument, fails to capture the totality and nuance of what he is saying (and it's worth noting that authors generally don't write the headlines or titles of their pieces, and so to the extent your beef is with the title, it's a beef with the Atlantic and not Carroll).  But Carroll is no stranger to chucking incendiaries into Catholic spaces--this is the author of Constantine's Sword , which, among other claims, challenged the narrative that Pope Pius XII was a protector of Jews during the Holocaust.  And he was clearly trying to similarly stir things up with his wide-ranging critique of the Roman Catholic priesthood. And stir things up he did.  Reaction to the piece was wide-ranging and loud.  And it is in this reactio...

About nine months ago, I wrote a paean to Nativity Parish in Fair Haven, New Jersey , the first Catholic parish where I really had a experience of God and of faith.  The pastor of Nativity when we were there was Richard C. Brietzke.  His name is on the list released today of priests in the Diocese of Trenton who have had "credible accusations" of abuse .   According to this list, he was "removed from ministry." What is interesting is that this seems to have come as a surprise to everyone.  This article from the local paper suggests that this was not a known fact about him .  This is backed up by a glowing piece in the Diocesan paper upon his retirement , providing no indication that anything was amiss.  One wonders, though.  Brietzke was the chancellor of the Diocese of Trenton in the 00s, during the period when, or so we are told repeatedly , the Roman Catholic Church "fixed" its problems with the Dallas Charter.  And the man responsible f...

I mentioned in a previous post about the increasingly obvious generational divide in the Episcopal Church, which was on display at General Convention.  I can't really speak to the attitudes coming from the Baby Boomer crew toward the younger generations, but the critique coming from the younger folks toward their elders can be boiled down to "your theology/theological praxis is bad."  For the younger folks of a more conservative bent with regard to the fundamentals of the faith (as distinguished from the sex/gender issues that are almost inevitably the fault lines in Roman Catholicism and evangelical Protestantism), this is usually expressed as the criticism that the Baby Boomers have watered down or sold out core Christian doctrines and distinctives.  But even among the younger folks who have a more progressive theological orientation you can find frustration with the Baby Boomers, leading me to believe that "they don't take the Creeds seriously enough" is...

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 fol...