A reader replies to my remarks about Anne Rice’s defection with the Usual Boilerplate from the AmChurch side of the aisle:
The church is the body of Christ and all of us are united to Christ as the head. The institutional church is an organization of ordained celibate males who have little or no regard for the opinions and wisdom of the rest of the body of Christ. The more the institutional church expands its power and authority away from the rest of the body of Christ, they sucuumb to that which corrupts all centralized institutions of humans. Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. A simple reading of the history of the church shows the many ways and times where the majesterium has been wrong. Look at slavery, religous freedom, Galilleo, the burnings at the stake during the iquisition, The war against Islam, and on and on. Where is it written that the Spirit speaks on ly to the istitutional church. How many times did God raise up ordinary pwople to challenge the istitutional church of the time. Ann objected to the institutional church position on gays, the denigration of women and use of contraceptive birth control which the rest of the body of Christ almost universally practises.
Yes, that is indeed a simple reading, much beloved by those whose understanding of Church history is formed more by George Lucas’ simplicities than by grappling with the actual facts which are enormously more complex and difficult. The notion of the Church as neatly divided between hidebound clerics defending Fortress Catholicism and a marching army of Progressive Laity whose sole desire is for truth, justice, love and freedom is one of the many myths that Generation Narcissus has suckled itself to sleep on ever since the Council.
What simple-minded believers in this simple minded “Evil Empire Clerics vs. Plucky Rebel Alliance Laity” myth never seem to understand is that it was just as often the laity who were eagerly tanking up on the Blood Libel and chucking Jews down wells for the supposed crime of drinking the blood of Christian children while it was the clerics who were telling everybody to cool off and stop believing urban legends.
So, for instance, the simple tale of slavery turns out to be fraught with complexity, not least because it was not all laypeople opposing it (lots of laity got stinking rich off it) and it was not all clerics supporting it. Slavery, it turns out, was an immemorial institution throughout all of human civilization and the way in which the Church engaged it simply cannot be boiled down to laity good/cleric bad. Lots and lots and lots of laity had as little patience for the Church’s nuanced arguments for the dignity of the slave as readers like the one above have for the Church’s nuanced arguments for the distinction between the dignity of the homosexual person and the sin of homosexual intercourse.
Indeed, one of the ironies of the Church’s history is that, for most of it, the main charge brought against the Church is not that it is too conservative, but that it is too liberal. It is the laity that, again and again, rushes off all agog for some form of extremist rigorism. Had the Church listened to the “opinions and wisdom of the rest of the body of Christ” during the Donatist enthusiasm, we would have excommunicated large portions of the Body of Christ because they did not measure up to the hyper-rigorism of the Donatists, who held that any priest who did not measure up under persecution could not validly consecrate the Eucharist and any bishop who did not measure up could not validly ordain. We would have caved in to Lollards who insisted that anybody not in a state of grace could not function as an agent of the state and need not be obeyed by citizens of that state. Asking whether the cop who is arresting a mugger is in a state of grace may seem spiritual to some of our more ethereal members of the Body of Christ, but for most of us it is, as Chesterton noted, “wanting in actuality.” Most Catholic heresies down through the ages have been attempts to keep as many people away from the grace of God as possible, urging the faithful to stay away from the Eucharist, shut up, and give up the hope of salvation. The “wisdom” of the first antipope in history was that the Pope was a wuss who welcomed people back to communion far too easily, when what they needed was merciless rejection by the pure.
Indeed, the reason for the Church’s creation of a system of Inquisitions was precisely that laypeople were, in their profound wisdom that needed no guidance from celibate old men, already running around doing it on their own as vigilantes and lynch mobs. Turns out the Church thought that having a system whereby the facts were obtained and evaluated in an orderly way was better than something like this.
Of course, most people get their history from Monty Python and therefore could not tell you five intelligent words from a primary source about what actually took place in an Inquisition (and yeah, there were more than one and they weren’t all in Spain). Similarly, most people don’t seem to know that though God does indeed sometimes raise up “ordinary pwople to challenge the istitutional church of the time”, He also raises up clergy to challenge the easy assumptions of fat, dumb, and happy ordinary people, who are quite certain that, whatever Gregory X says, Jews are drinking the blood of Christian children; or that whatever out-of-touch Dominicans may say, Indians are natural slaves; or that whatever pantywaists like the pope and bishops say, the nuclear murder of thousands of Japanese or the torture of prisoners in the War on Terror is the glorious work of God; or that whatever the Church says about the value of human life, abortion is a beautiful right and the sole core value of the Democratic party. Looking around at our violent, selfish and sex-besotted culture, I’m not immediately persuaded that we glorious laity are a civilization of St. Catherines who are prevented from flourishing in sanctity by the evil machinations of Benedict XVI. This optimistic self-assessment, while quite in keeping with the enormously high self-regard of the Baby Boomers, fails to premise itself on much resembling “reality”. One forms, rather, the impression that Benedict is a thoughtful, gentle, and holy man who is doing his best to speak the Church’s beautiful teaching to a braying horde of crazies compact of talk radio lackeys, cokeheads, horndogs, warmongers, sex maniacs and addicts of therapeutic moralistic deism who let Oprah or FoxNews do all their thinking for them. That he maintains his gentle and thoughtful composure in the midst of such a TV-addled culture with the attention span of fruit flies is astounding to me.
For those willing to listen and not just regurgitate platitudes from a Facebook page, the teaching of the Church on gays is that they are human beings made in the image and likeness of God for whom Christ died. It’s true that Church does not pretend that homosex is rightly ordered sex, just as the Church does not pretend that gluttony is rightly ordered eating. But that is a comment about behavior, not about the person. Likewise, the Church does not pretend that contraceptive sex is rightly ordered sex, just as the Church does not pretend that the Roman vomitorium is rightly ordered eating. As to the “denigration of women”, calling woman a creature made in the image and likeness of God and declaring her to be intended by Christ for glories that will make her a creature which, if you saw her now, you would be strongly tempted to worship… well, that’s an odd sort of contempt. The Blessed Virgin doesn’t seem too denigrated to me.
The myth, cherished by Generation Narcissus, that Jesus made precious, precious Us—the Baby Boomers, source and summit of all goodness, and final peak toward which all human history has been straining—-into the rightful teachers of the Church and that the job of the Pope and the bishops is to sit at our feet and learn until the Catholic Church is finally remade in the image and likeness of trendy liberal Episcopalianism or bellicose Messianic Americanism is a fantasy that will not die till the last member of Generation Narcissus is rubbed out by their pro-euthanasia children.
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Whoa Mark! when you get fed up you really get fed up…LOL!!! I hear the pale riders of post modernist self congratulation bearing down upon this piece - hehehehe…but thanks for the article and the chuckle…enjoyed it:)
Amen
As they like to say - come on, Mark, tell us how you REALLY feel!! :-)
The reader, sadly like so many others, has not used information to actually ‘form’ themselves- i.e. read it critically, test it against truth and actual history as well as the wisdom and the teachings of the Church. You can usually detect this when criticism of the Church includes the name Galileo.
I couldn’t resist posting the sentences about Benedict to my Facebook page. Excellent article. You express my views better than I can express them, and Rachel is right: you can usually spot a bunch of nonsense when Galileo is thrown into a contemporary issue. Another way is when the person complains about the evils of the “iquisition,” and praises ordinary “pwople” over the “istitutional” Church.
Go Go Go Go Go!!!!
“Looking around at our violent, selfish and sex-besotted culture, I’m not immediately persuaded that we glorious laity are a civilization of St. Catherines who are prevented from flourishing in sanctity by the evil machinations of Benedict XVI.”
Well said, I do not think this is the nature of our cultural moment either. I also appreciate that your Catholicism does not fit into pre-made ideological categories that were devised in 19th and 20th century America (i.e. “liberal” vs. “conservative”).
One thought: you do read, anachronistically, the categories of “liberal” and “conservative” back into the entirety of Church history, when as a point of fact these worldviews/ideologies did not come about until the last couple centuries (see the quote from your piece below). Both “liberal” and “conservative” reflect the classical, Enlightenment categories that received formation mostly via Locke/Kant and Burke respectively. As such, they do not pertain to other epochs in human history…
“Indeed, one of the ironies of the Church’s history is that, for most of it, the main charge brought against the Church is not that it is too conservative, but that it is too liberal.”
“Evil Empire Clerics vs. Plucky Rebel Alliance Laity”
“Looking around at our violent, selfish and sex-besotted culture, I’m not immediately persuaded that we glorious laity are a civilization of St. Catherines who are prevented from flourishing in sanctity by the evil machinations of Benedict XVI.”
...and once again, I am reminded why I love Mark Shea.
You are so, so right.
And it’s high past time we orthodox go on the offensive. Instead of responding to the apostates with measured words and mellow tones, we need to metaphorically wad their heresies up and fling them boldly back into their faces. Scripture will demonstrate that our Lord was not averse to the use of sarcasm, ridicule, and invective when the situation warranted it. Down with the Hippie Savior! No more Mr. Nice Jesus!
Nice. Of course, I wonder what my generation, Generation Satyr, will do…
One thought: you do read, anachronistically, the categories of “liberal” and “conservative” back into the entirety of Church history
I was writing in simple terms for those very simple readers who cannot think past these categories.
Bruce Lewis:
You make me regret what I wrote. If there’s one thing the Church doesn’t need more of it’s self-appointed bishops declaring fellow Catholics apostate and indulging the sins of anger and self-righteousness. My goal was to attack some particularly dumb *ideas*, not to read my correspondent out of the Church. Far too many self-described “faithful conservative Catholics” do this—and then turn around and declare that torture or the deliberate nuclear murder of civilians is just fine and the bishops need to shut up about that. Fewer excommunications by laity and more charity and humility would do many of our “faithful conservative Catholics” a world of good.
“Looking around at our violent, selfish and sex-besotted culture, I’m not immediately persuaded that we glorious laity are a civilization of St. Catherines who are prevented from flourishing in sanctity by the evil machinations of Benedict XVI.”
Perfect.
Absolutely brilliant. Well said!
Mr. Shea:
I see the tea is brewed weakly here as well. Well, it’s all right; Saint Jerome himself was chased from his home by those in favor of “charity and “humility”. Why should a lesser light like me avoid rebuke?
Consider it all unsaid, and me gone from these delicate, sensitive pages. Kum bah yah, my brother, and may Jonathan Livingston Seagull spread his wings over you.
Sincerely,
Bruce
“Most Catholic heresies down through the ages have been attempts to keep as many people away from the grace of God as possible, urging the faithful to stay away from the Eucharist, shut up, and give up the hope of salvation.”
Excellent point, one I have never heard in quite those words before. Loved the whole piece!
Bruce:
While you are busy admiring yourself as a second St. Jerome, you might consider the possibility that what made him *St.* Jerome was that he *overcame* his immense faults, often with the help of rebuke from others in the Body of Christ. The sins of the saints can damn us to hell. Or are you going to endorse Jerome’s jealous screeds against St. Ambrose as worthy of imitation? Charity and humility happen to be Christian virtues. Spitting on them with contempt is to make the common conservative blunder of confusing arrogant brutality with “courage”. You’re not a bishop. Deal with it.
Don’t you wonder, as God is looking down on His world, that He’s throwing His hands in the air and saying: “That’s it! I’ve had it! Earth you’re done.”?
No. Anne Rice walking off in a huff or somebody saying something dumb to defend it is not, I reckon, cause for God to despair. He’s pretty resilient.
Mark Shea,
Usually if all I have to say is, “Well done,” or, “Nicely said,” I merely smile and let others give the simple compliment.
But, after reading this piece, my fingers can not remain still! I must join in on the rousing ovation that readers across the blogosphere have initiated.
Outstanding work. This is a piece of rhetorical brilliance. Studiously insightful as well as stylistically tasty.
Thanks!
Mark,
Brilliant, hilarious, perfect!
Chestertonian in scope, humor and insight. Bravo!
Mark,
The above piece and the comments reminded me of something I’ve been meaning to do…. Thank you. You’ve reminded me of something I had learned when I converted that I’ve forgotten for some years. That if what I’m getting out of Scripture and prayer sounds like I do then I’m not fully worshiping Christ, but what I want Him to be. If the Gospel doesn’t make me uncomfortable then I need to go back and start really listening. Thanks for the reminder.
Know what I like about Mark? He knows how to gently instruct. But he also knows that sometimes you have to slip the bar of soap into the gym sock and administer a little “tough learnin’”
Dumb is NOT synonym for stupid. Don’t be lazy. When you mean stupid, write stupid.
Many of the generation complained of have the excusable fault that college taught them to read, but not to think. Indeed, it taught them to read so much that they did not have time to learn to think.
“Fewer excommunications by laity and more charity and humility would do many of our “faithful conservative Catholics” a world of good”.
It would do all Catholics good, including those so critical of conservative Catholics. The regimes which did the greatest torturing were socialist regimes.
Dumb is NOT synonym for stupid. Don’t be lazy. When you mean stupid, write stupid.
Sorry. That was dumb of me.
It would do all Catholics good, including those so critical of conservative Catholics. The regimes which did the greatest torturing were socialist regimes.
And that would really matter if I was defending social regimes. As it wasm, I was pointing out the extreme folly of conservative Catholics embracing the use of torture in statistical averages greater than the average American and in blatant defiance of the Church’s obvious magisterial teaching. It is but one of the many exquisite traits of pettifogging “conservatism” that use of a colloquialism like dumb matters vastly more to you than the fact that “faithful conservative Catholics” are more like to spring to the defense of torture (excuse me, “enhanced interrogation”) than the average American.
I don’t however, read anybody out of the Church, for that (as my reader is so eager to do). That’s above my pay grade. I simply note the fact that this body of opinion is a) popular with self-described “faithful conservative Catholics” and b) incompatible with what the Church, in fact, teaches.
Saying “dumb” for “stupid” is, I am reasonable sure, not high on the Church’s list of sin in the Examination of Conscience.
insert 80’s movie “slow clap” ending here.
Thank you, Mark! You perfectly expressed what so many of us want to say to self-described “liberal” Catholics (odd, since Jesus never described anything in terms of liberal or conservative, only right and wrong)when they spout their erroneous “facts”, which are often delivered with a smug assertion of “everybody knows.” Great job!
Wow, Mark – that was a tsunami of logic and history that I will definitely read again. Seems to me that turning the other cheek is always right, but instruction and admonition have their value. I confess that I do get tired of it always being “open season” on Catholics.
I especially enjoyed ‘majesterium’ - makes it sound so ... so majestic!
:-)
jj
How dare you insult Monty Python…!!
Seriously though, great job. As Wilde noted, “The truth is rarely pure and never simple.”
But why bother with learning and reading when it is easier to run your mouth on forums about the evils of the RCC with, perhaps, Hislop or Chick to back you up?
Excellent! I laughed hard and learned at the same time. Thank you, Mark.
Mark Shea,
As I said before, I enjoyed the piece.
But something bothers me.
How can the Church so roundly reject torture?
In the War on Terror, torture has been used in a utilitarian attempt to achieve a greater good. But, according to your sources, is this not the same justification for the Church’s previous support of slavery?
Here! Here!
Mark Shea (and others),
I’m really trying to flesh this out, but is it possible that the Church’s politics regarding slavery were wrong and now they are simply pursuing “right” politics by opposing torture? (We are, after all, an institution of humans…)
If this is the case, then am I right in assuming that the Church’s wrongful dealings with slave traders do not challenge the Pope’s infallibility because it was an issue other than majesterial teaching?
Mark Shea creates a “strawman” of his own design and then attempts to destroy him. It is a clever ruse often used to avoid dealing with the issues presented. When my kids were in high school I would often get examples of left and right wing political rhetoric and then show them how to spot bias, ways of avoiding the issues, using ridicule instead of rational discussion, and in some cases just pure propaganda. Read his piece again and look at the language used, the use of ridicule, appeals to emotion, the creation of bogeymen out of thin air and you see what I mean. Good thing we don’t still have the inquisition, which Mark seems to excuse, or he would be nominating me for the rack. He makes a Rush Limbaugh or a James Carville seem almost civil!
Dude. I quoted your words in their entirety and let you have your full say. The only straw men in it are the ones you kindly provided me with via your “simple reading” of Catholic history.
d.h.
I think the questions your are asking require more understanding of the historical development of doctrine than can be provided in a combox. I suspect somebody out there has done a history of the Church’s engagement with slavery, but I wouldn’t know who that is. Likewise, I suspect somebody has engaged the history of the Church’s attitudes toward torture, but I don’t know who that might be either.
From what I can see, the Church’s definition of torture (and slavery) as “intrinsically immoral” takes place at Vatican 2 and is the fruit of theological reflection on the dignity of the human person. What you have before that are various juridical pronouncements which don’t define doctrine but simply try to grapple with the situation on the ground. The Church can go a long time before she makes up her mind about something. Her not making up her mind doesn’t constitute a doctrinal definition of something. So when Paul assumes the existence of slavery and tells slaves to obey their master, that doesn’t mean that Paul believes slavery is the Will of God. Same for Catholics after him. Similarly, when Lateran IV commands that Jews be compelled to wear special clothing, that does not constitute an infallible doctrine. The Church can (and I think obviously did) blunder there, just as it blundered in permitting the use of torture or slaves. At the same time, we have to bear in mind that such blunders are quite on the cards since the Church is people, feeling their way through history and suffering from all the blindness and historical conditioning to which flesh is heir. Infallibility is an entirely negative protection. It keeps the Church from defining error as doctrine. It does not keep Catholics from living in weakness, ignorance, error or sin.
You might give Newman’s “Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine” a read as a way of softening the ground for a look at the development of doctrine regarding torture and slavery.
“..we have to bear in mind that such blunders are quite on the cards since the church is people feeling their way thru history and suffering from all the blindness and histroical conditioning to which flesh is heir.” AMEN. What will be the blunders from this age that people will look back upon in the future? Some of us believe that these will include mandatory celibacy, castigating gays as “disordered”, clasifying contraceptive birth control among married people as sinful, and refusing to ordain women. If anything suffers from blindness and historical conditioning it is the ordination of women. My prayer for vocations has changed to pray that the church will accept and ordain all those whom God has called to the priesthood. Surely no one can object to that.
If anything suffers from blindness and historical conditioning it is the ordination of women.
Poor blind Jesus. He didn’t have the benefit of being a Baby Boomer living at the summit of human history and able to tell Where the Future Is Going. So glad you are here to instruct Jesus on who he *should* have ordained. He was historically conditioned. Your thinking isn’t at all conditioned by the period in which you live.
Seriously, dude. Can you pack anymore mindless platitudes from early third millenium leftist America into your dogmatic utterances?
All right, Mark. Be nice. We are all fallible creatures in need of guidance.
TeresaRose:
That’s rather the point. Jim is cocksure he is not fallible and knows precisely where history is going and where the Church is wrong in her teaching. He takes himself and the opinion of his circle of friends as the final and permanent platform from which to judge and condemn all who disagree with him. It’s a sort of smugness called “chronological snobbery”.
Mark,
Thanks for the thoughtful reply! I think I’ll try to pick up the suggested reading. It’s a difficult thing - seeing our Church stumble through some of the politics of history and yet knowing that her heart is true.
God bless… keep up the good work.
Of course Christ did not appoint women as apostles. They were nothing in that culture, better than slaves but not by much. Just ask St. Paul. Suppose he appointed mary Magdalene. The apostles mainly preached in the temples. she could not have done that. If she had tried St. Paul would have shouted her down. He said women should not speak in church. So like with divorce in the old testament, because of the hardness of their hearts he appointed only men. I’ll bet he also depended on the church in later times to realize that and set it right. And what a long time it took. It is less than 100 years that women even got the right to vote in this country!
Oh! Loved this.
My favorite part
“Looking around at our violent, selfish and sex-besotted culture, I’m not immediately persuaded that we glorious laity are a civilization of St. Catherines who are prevented from flourishing in sanctity by the evil machinations of Benedict XVI. This optimistic self-assessment, while quite in keeping with the enormously high self-regard of the Baby Boomers, fails to premise itself on much resembling “reality”
Mark: I’m mad as heck, and I’m not going to take it any more!
Oh, yeah—and by the way, Jim: you’d think that by now, about two millenia since Mary Magdalene, the ancient Christian Church (Byzantine or Roman, you choose it) would have finally figured this woman thing out!
Jim:
Your simple reading of history continues. In point of fact, there were all sorts of priestesses in ancient pagan culture. Had Jesus wanted to, he or his apostles could have simply continued this tradition. But they did not. What you are saying is that Jesus could proclaim that he was God to his countrymen and invite crucifixion, but he was too scared to ordain women because that might offend people. Seriously, dude. If you are going to proclaim yourself the Master of History, you should really find out something about it. Your simplistic Baby Boomer narrative is big on self-congratulation, but short on facts.
...precious, precious Us—the Baby Boomers, source and summit of all goodness, and final peak toward which all human history has been straining…
“The Victorians thought that history ended well—because it ended with the Victorians.”
—G.K.Chesterton
Wonderful post. Its always inspiring to hear the Church defended both fairly and eloquently. I was wondering if you were intentionaly using C.S. Lewis’ excellent phrase describing each human’s potential state of perfection in Christ: “... a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship…” from The Weight of Glory? Its one of my personal favorites.
Regarding slavery, I read somewhere that slave owners would justify slavery saying that because of it many heathens came to know the True Faith. To which theologians responded: a good can come out from an evil, just as from Judas´treason came the salvation of the world; however, that didn´t report any benefit to Judas´soul, who, as the gospel says, would wish he´d never been born.
I got rid of them because they suffered from severe stupidity, bigotry and irrelevance.
Wow! I don’t know how I missed this when it first came out but I am glad I didn’t miss it completely!! BRAVO!!! I would add on the slavery tip that as many as 15 Popes going back to St. Gregory the Great and ,one, Eugene IV, issued a papal bull Sicut Dudum that in addition to giving a scathing attack on slavery that was developing in the newly-colonized Canary Islands it gave all those to whom it was addressed precisely fifteen days to return these people to their freedom and he meant every single one or they were excommunicated from Mother Church!! This was 1435!!
Whoops! Sorry! I got a little ahead of myself and forgot to finish in commenting on the slavery tip that as many as 15 Popes going back to St. Gregory the Great have condemned slavery in no uncertain terms.
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