A Sound of Sheer Silence

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...

When you read the writings of non-religious people, especially more committed, doctrinaire atheists, you get the sense that they assume that faith is a kind of certainty about God--a person, for whatever reason or through whatever process, becomes "sure" that God exists and has certain qualities.  And, to be fair, many religious people certainly try very hard to project that vision of what faith is, and certain theologies (especially certain Evangelical theologies) try to affirm that vision.   But I don't think that's what faith means.  In fact, that sort of certainty is a kind of self-hypnosis, a way to ward off our own doubts about our lives and their meaning.  But we shouldn't be warding off doubt, as disturbing and dislocating as doubt can be.  Faith is not the enemy of doubt; faith is a posture of incorporating doubt into our world view.  Having faith means living in the uncertain space created by our doubts, not banishing or denying the doubts bu...

Yesterday, upon the stair, I met a man who wasn't there. He wasn't there again today, I wish, I wish he'd go away... When I came home last night at three, The man was waiting there for me But when I looked around the hall, I couldn't see him there at all! Go away, go away, don't you come back any more! Go away, go away, and please don't slam the door... Last night I saw upon the stair, A little man who wasn't there, He wasn't there again today Oh, how I wish he'd go away... --  "Antigonish" by Hughes Mearns (1899). 1.   There is a bit of conventional wisdom that says that the legacy of a leader lasts twice as long as the time the leader was in power.  In other words, George W. Bush was President of the United States for eight years, but the effects of his presidency will last for sixteen years after he left office in 2008, through to 2024.  And that seems about right--we are certainly in the middle of working through all ...

A shade over 35 years ago, Archbishop Oscar Romero, the Archbishop San Salvador, El Salvador, was assassinated by government-backed gunmen while he was in the middle of saying Mass.  There was no dispute regarding the motive behind the killing--Romero was outspoken in his opposition to the government on the side of the poor.  He was, like many of his generation among the Latin American clergy, a leftist, a proponent of liberation theology.  Was he a Marxist?  Not really.  As his contemporary, Dom Helder Camara of Recife, Brazil, famously said "When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why they are poor, they call me a communist." [Ed. note: I butchered the quote in a previous version.  My mistake.  BTW, Dom Camara may be on his way to sainthood as well ]. In a couple of months, Oscar Romero will be beatified, the "level below," if you will, being named a saint.  No one seriously doubts that he will be canonized is due cour...

The Vatican Pontifical Council for Culture is putting together a program entitled "Women's Culture: Equality and Difference."  To kick-off that project, they chose the following image for the cover for their program: I cannot fathom why they thought this was a good idea.   The argument half-heartedly offered by the Vatican --that this represents "woman as a subjugated sex object, but also as a creature who rises above men’s depictions" only makes the situation worse, insofar as the actual decision-making of the conference will reside entirely with men.  So, I suppose one could argue the description is on-point, though not in a manner the Vatican would celebrate. This is only the latest of a series of farcical missteps associated with this conference.  The spokeswoman for the conference, an Italian actress named Nancy Brilli, was used in a promotional video so strange and tone-deaf that the English version was officially removed due to protests.  You ...

I have thought for a long time that the most serious and insightful writer among what you can call the "right wing pundit" class was Ross Douthat, formerly of The Atlantic and now of the New York Times.  This blog post  on Benedict's comments on condoms is one of the best discussions of the topic of the Church's position on birth control. A couple of thoughts on Douthat's post.  First, the comment by then-Cardinal Ratzinger that specific scenarios regarding a couple's use of birth control cannot "be projected into the abstract" is interesting, for several reasons.  First, the entire focus of the birth control teaching as presented is about projecting the question into the abstract.  No greater example of this can be found that in Pope John Paul's Theology of the Body program, which more or less spiritualizes every aspect of non-contraceptive married sex.  It is really, really hard to square the circle of the approach taken by Ratzinger/Benedict...

Pope Benedict has a new book coming out on Wednesday, which takes the form of a long interview with journalist Peter Seewald.  "L'Osservatore Romano", the Vatican City newspaper, published some very interesting excerpts from the book.  The big story for most commentators is the Pope's comment that it is more moral for an HIV infected male prostitute to use a condom than not use a condom.  That would seem to be a non-story: condoms are a problem from a Catholic perspective because they are a form of birth control, not because they are some kind of morally cursed object.  If you are engaging in sexual activity that is inherently not capable of leading to conception (i.e. gay sex), then it doesn't matter whether you are wearing a condom, except insofar as it prevents someone else from getting an STD.  That seems to me to be completely divorced from the question of whether condom use is OK to prevent the spread of HIV via heterosexual sex, a topic which, based ...

On the day Pope Benedict XVI was elected, I remember very clearly getting a phone call from a friend giving me the news.  She was very excited about the development, and she knew that I would be disappointed.  I was of the view that a new direction was needed after the "lost years" of John Paul II's pontificate when he was sick.  I thought that many of John Paul's selections of American bishops were very poor--pure institutional men, who did not have the pastoral or personal skills to respond to the sex abuse crisis or the other challenges facing the Church.  I thought we had become locked into a tired fight over the meaning of Vatican II, one that had come to drown out every other concern. I still believe all of that.  However, I assumed the election of Josef Ratzinger was a sign that we were going to continue in the status quo for the foreseeable future, and that Pope Benedict would govern just like Pope John Paul did.  In that, I was wro...