A Sound of Sheer Silence

So, Ross Douthat wrote an interesting blog post yesterday .  The topic of the post is, in essence, why conservative Catholics are adrift during the Age of Francis, and he raises some interesting and thought provoking points.  But it seems to me that he doesn't really name the heart of the issue, despite orbiting it very closely. He begins by discussing Damon Linker's piece in The Week, which I mentioned last week .  Douthat's primary argument is that Linker is totally wrong about conservative Catholics, since after all they have been willing to change on all sorts of stuff.  If we were really as reactionary and fearful of change, Douthat argues, we would have revolted long ago when they got rid of the Latin Mass, ecumenism, etc.  If Linker were really right about who we are, all of us would have joined the SSPX folks, but we didn't, so we are not afraid of change. This position, however, raises an an issue not directly addressed by Douthat in the piece. ...

Over at The Week , Damon Linker has written a thoughtful and heart-felt reflection on his own evolution away from a more conservative vision of Catholicism .  All I can say is that his experience is almost perfectly aligned with mine in this area--where once I saw the Politics of Certainty as the primary attraction of Catholicism, now I see it as the primary problem.  As Linker says so beautifully: The Catholic conservative doesn't want to live spiritually within a debating society or an ongoing, open-ended conversation. He wants matters to be definitive — done, settled, fixed for all time. Even if, considered objectively, the teachings of another authoritative Christian tradition in one area of doctrine appear more humane and less prone to alienating millions of parishioners. Because that's just not the way Catholics do it. We had that debate. It's over. End of discussion. I once wanted that, too — the Catholic Church serving as the final, infallible guardian and guara...

One of the things that has become increasingly clear to me over the last year or so is that not everyone believes in the same God.  In saying that, I don't mean that Christians have a different understanding of God from Hindus or Buddhists or Wiccans, though that is certainly true as well.  What I mean is that two people who use the same words to refer to God, and even subscribe to the same formal definitions of God, can have a radically different and mutually exclusive subjective picture of who God is.  And that subjective picture of who God is is just as important, and perhaps more important, than the formal definitions that we have been handed down to us via our theological heritage. This is the main point of David Gushee's piece from the other day .   There are people who insist on a God that they must fear, a God that is out to get them "for their own good" in some inscrutable manner.  They disdain those who challenge that picture as soft, cowardly, not w...

1.  When two people of completely different ideological orientations and convictions come to the same conclusion on something within their shared space, it is worth taking that conclusion seriously.  Such was the case yesterday, when we saw articles form Ross Douthat (the mainstream-media endorsed voice for conservative Catholicism) and James Carroll (author of Constantine's Sword  and vocal critic of the Catholic Church from the progressive end) offer essentially the same analysis of Amoris Laetitia . The analysis goes something like this.  In the aftermath of Vatican II, Catholicism developed a kind of "two track" method of operation.  On one level there was the "official" message of Catholicism, which (particularly with regard to anything dealing with sex) held tightly to essentially the same positions that controlled prior to the Council.  On the "ground," however, many priests were covertly (or, especially in the beginning, overtly) providing ...

So, it has come, the long anticipated Papal document summarizing the Synod on the Family ,  Amoris Laetitia .  I should state up front that, because of its enormous length (250+ pages), I've skimmed the more theoretical sections (Chapters 1, 2, 3, 7, and 9) to focus on the parts on marriage (4-6, and 8).  I hope to come back and give those theoretical sections some time and reflection later.  I should also say that, despite its length, this is probably the most accessible Vatican document I have read.  The writing is smooth and unforced, and mostly avoids technical theological or philosophical jargon.   Laudato Si' had some of that quality, but this is far more pronounced.  It is, for lack of a better term, an easy read. With that out of the way, how is it?  Well, it's very, very Pope Francis.  Like Laudato Si' , it aspires to a comprehensive account of the topic.   So, for example, if you were curious to get Pope Francis's thoughts o...

Those things which I am saying now may be obscure, yet they will be made clearer in their proper place.   --Nicolaus Copernicus. Sometime in the next couple of weeks, Pope Francis will bring to an end his Synod on the Family , in the form of an exhortation.  Much of the talk connected to this exhortation deals with whether, and to what degree, he is going to relax the rules about divorced people obtaining communion.  Some, perhaps more optimistic, folks hold out hope that he will say something nice about LGBT folks.  We shall see. None of this, though, is remotely sufficient to move the needle in a real way.  The Synod on the Family was called by the Pope "to reflect on the reality of the family."  ( Final Report of the Synod, paragraph 3 ).  The Bishops, while perhaps making a good faith effort to do so, clearly failed in their task.  They failed because they failed to come to grips with the fact that the concept of family, as understood by a...

If you have followed the discussion about the Synod on the Family, or any discussion about sexual morality in Christianity, surely you have heard some reference to the "hard sayings" of Jesus.  These discussions go something like this--someone will make a point about how difficult or impractical this or that traditional bit of sexual morality is to actually and fairly implement and live, and someone will respond "well, sure, these are hard sayings of Jesus, but Jesus is calling us to do the hard thing."  The implication, of course, is that the person who is expressing concerns about the stance at issue is looking to take the easy way out, to avoid the challenge of Gospel living.  It is a way to take the moral high ground. No doubt, there are many hard sayings of Jesus, and many hard sayings throughout the Scriptures.  Here is another one--"You shall not wrong or oppress a resident alien, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt." (Exodus 22:21, as well a...

I have been continuing to think about Ross Douthat's column from Sunday .  One of the things that strikes me about Douthat on this subject is that he seems to really, really find the current status quo position regarding divorce and remarried couples sensible and correct, in a way that seems genuine and heartfelt.  That is of course his right to do so, but it highlighted for me the degree to which I am not similarly persuaded.  It has taken me a while to work through why I am not satisfied with the current position, but I think I have found the heart of the problem. First, let's set out the text that we are all arguing about--Matthew 19:3-9: Some Pharisees came to him, and to test him they asked, ‘Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any cause?’ He answered, ‘Have you not read that the one who made them at the beginning “made them male and female”, and said, “For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two...

Last week marked the 50th anniversary of the release of the Second Vatican Council document Nostra Aetate ("In Our Time").  I have not counted words, but I believe  Nostra Aetate  is the shortest of the Vatican II documents, clocking in at only five paragraphs.  Nevertheless, there is an argument to be made that  Nostra Aetate  is the most consequential of all of the Vatican II documents, and is undoubtedly the most revolutionary. Special attention should be paid to Paragraph 4 of  Nostra Aetate .  The document as a whole is about the relationship between the Catholic Church and non-Christian religions, and Paragraph 4 deals with Judaism. In it, it makes three major claims.  First, while acknowledging that Catholics believe Jesus to represent the true fulfillment of the Abrahamic and Mosaic covenants, it rejects the notion this transition from the old to the new covenant leaves continued practitioners of the old divorced from God's love a...

Well, it's over.  Everyone has gone home, and the pundits--amateur and professional--now get to dissect what has happened and What It All Means.   I continue to maintain that we should not be distracted by the shiny object that is the final document produced by the Synod, and instead focus on whatever Pope Francis ultimately says or does with regard to divorced and remarried Catholics.  Still, I think that the Synod made a number of advances from a process standpoint, even if the product that was generated is not as important as it might seem.  And, inspired by Cardinal Marx's impressive use of Shakespeare to make his points , I too will draw from the The Bard. "This above all- to thine own self be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man."   Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 3.   With the possible exception of the handful of heads of religious orders, everyone who attended the Synod of Bishops was put into a high offic...

I am going to make a bet with you.  Nothing that comes out of the Synod on the Family--no speech, no document, no pronouncement from the Pope-- will prove to be as significant as the Pope's speech on Saturday.   The prompting for the speech was the 50th anniversary of the institution of the Synod of Bishops in the aftermath of Vatican II, and in the speech Pope Francis lays out in the clearest form his vision of the Church and the role of the Synods in that Church.  It is, I think, the most radical thing that Pope Francis has ever said.  If Pope Francis is able to implement this vision, the nature and operation of the Catholic Church will be different.  Not unrecognizably different, but different nonetheless. There are at least three important take-aways from the speech. The first has to do with the final outcome of the current Synod on the Family happening in Rome.  Amid talk that the Synod was doomed to fail  as a result of diminishing prospects fo...

While I still maintain that we should Trust the Process and embrace the point of view of Nick Saban , I must say this Synod on the Family has proven more chaotic than even I had anticipated.  The various reports from the working groups after the first week are all over the map , making it difficult to see how consensus can be found.  Conservative provocateur Sandro Magister reported that a group of Cardinals have been complaining about The Process , a claim that a number of the alleged signatories have backed away from.   One can discern all sorts of fault lines of various kinds among the participants (along those lines, I should note that Michael Sean Winters, who I am often critical of, had a good piece on this topic today ). In looking at all of this, it seemed like there was something weird about the way the Synod was talking about and thinking about the family and family issues, but I couldn't put my finger on it.   Rereading Thomas Bushnell's essay on marriag...

The funny thing about having an open conversation is that sometimes people take the conversation in directions you don't really want it to go.  Witness the currently ongoing Synod on the Family in Rome.   Pope Francis wants to talk about economic and social issues affecting families , and lots of folks want to talk about divorce and/or LGBT issues.  But then here comes Archbishop Paul-Andre Durocher of Gatineau, Quebec , and he wants to talk about women.  Specifically, he wants to talk about two things.  First, he wants the Catholic Church to explicitly reject the idea that Paul's discussion of gender roles means that women must be subordinate to men--itself a big statement, and one that would undermine problematic complementarian ideas that still circulate in Catholic thought.  But the real bombshell is that Archbishop Durocher wants a full, public discussion of ordaining women as deacons. Now, Pope Francis has gone out of his way to say that he supports...

Yesterday I wrote a post suggesting that Catholics should channel Nick Saban and embrace The Process .  Clearly, Michael Brendan Dougherty is not college football fan . I guess I have two major take-aways from this piece.  One, I simply cannot fathom why people like Dougherty (and, to a less extent, Ross Douthat ) think that so much is at stake with the so-called Kasper proposal specifically and the Synod discussions generally.  Prior to the coming of Pope Francis, the Catholic Church's position was that marriages are indissoluble in theory, but in practice in most dioceses in the world one could get out from under a failed marriage to remarry through the annulment process.  After Pope Francis's canon law reforms a few weeks ago, the position of the Church is that marriages are indissoluble in theory, but in practice in most dioceses in the world one could get out from underneath a failed marriage to remarry through the ( now faster and more "user friendly" ) annu...

When he was sitting on the Mount of Olives, the disciples came to him privately, saying, ‘Tell us, when will this be, and what will be the sign of your coming and of the end of the age?’ Jesus answered them, ‘Beware that no one leads you astray. For many will come in my name, saying, “I am the Messiah!” and they will lead many astray. And you will hear of wars and rumours of wars; see that you are not alarmed; for this must take place, but the end is not yet. For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom, and there will be famines and earthquakes in various places: all this is but the beginning of the birth pangs. -- Matthew 24:3-8. If you are a Catholic, perhaps you are a bit exhausted right now (I know I am).  It's been a busy ten days--Pope Francis comes, Pope Francis talks to all sorts of people, Pope Francis meets with Kim Davis, Pope Francis meets with a gay couple.  Conservatives are furious, liberals are furious; conservatives are cheered, libera...

In the last couple weeks, Pope Francis has made two announcements that have caught worldwide attention.  First, as part of his Year of Mercy, he announced that priests would be given a blanket authorization to grant absolution to those who have participated in an abortion .  In truth, this is a non-story.  While it is true that abortion (which, by the way, is not just women who have abortions but everyone who participates in the process--doctors, clinic staff, etc.) is a so-called "reserved sin" that bishops have the right to reserve absolution to themselves, in practice in most places the bishop just grants priests the right to absolve abortion-related confessions.  So, as a practical matter, this represents no change in most cases. The other story is the change in the rules for annulments .  The changes, in essence, are designed to speed up the process and remove any impediments--dioceses can no longer charge fees for processing annulments, and the automatic...

We got the wall of D.C. to remind us all That you can't trust freedom When it's not in your hands When everybody's fightin' For their promised land -- Civil War , Guns N' Roses It always starts with something small.  On July 30, 1419, a rock thrown from a window by some person unknown to history led to the Hussite wars, a terribly bloody conflict in central Europe that set the stage for the Protestant Reformation.  The seeds of the American Revolution began when the British government decided, not to raise taxes on the American colonies (that came later), but to actually collect  taxes on sugar and molasses that had been on the books for a long time but had never been enforced. The reason, I think, that it always starts with something small is tied up in the power of marginal changes.  The mind-bogglingly complex system that is human culture works because of a nested series of equilibria.  These equilibria can be stable for a long time, but ...