The ugly side of the cleansing of the Church

[fpb]

I think I said somewhere - I know that I have been worried about this for a while - that the necessary cleansing of the American Catholic Church from "liberal" infiltrators, heretics, and pagans, risked involving a great deal of uncharity and mental violence. The cleansing will be carried out largely from below, by angry and organized conservatives who have spent the last decades watching the rats take over the ship. That means that it will have many of the features of lynch law. There will be, one hopes, no bodies swinging from trees. But you do not need nooses, torches and hoods to be a lynch lawyer.

Let us be clear about this. The Church only makes sense if it is faithful to its doctrine. Attempts to move it away from its historical position are attempts to destroy it, as the Anglican Episcopal Church has effectively been destroyed. (When the USA became independent, about a third of its three million citizens were Anglican, and the Anglicans were the absolute majority in the Southern States. Now the whole country has hardly more than three million Episcopalians out of almost three hundred million Americans, and the Southern States are Baptist. If that is not a picture of historical disaster, I don't know what is.) This is something that even the enemies of the Church ought to understand, and most of them do: most enemies of the Church wish to see it silenced or destroyed, not aligned to their positions - that is a Plan B position that they eventually reach when they find that they cannot destroy it.

The Church must remain the Church. And that being the case, the prevalence of such figures as Cardinals Weakland and Mahoney, not to mention dozens of lesser bishops, abbots, priors, and university professors, has been worse for the Church than a Diocletian persecution. And persecution there has been: as these men and women could not prevail on the majority of pastors and laity to buy their view of a "renewed" church very much like the Episcopalians, they tended to make a void around themselves. Horror stories of orthodox priests thrown out of their churches to face poverty and loneliness, of congregations oppressed and ignored, abound: and I will not even speak of what has become the most notorious problem - the control of seminaries (schools for future priests) that let in the sexually and intellectually alien and left out faithful Catholics - when it did not hand them over to psychologists and counsellors, to have their incorrect thought corrected. Anyone who thinks that the rule of the American Church by ageing hippies would be a mild, benevolent, vegetarian sort of thing simply did not know what was going on.

Now the shoe is on the other foot. Groups forged in the fire of opposition, in the years when the Church cultivated teachings that went from sexual everything-goes to Earth-worship and paganism (sometimes I fancy I can feel its influence in some particularly foolish phrasing in the English mass) are now on the offensive, smelling victory. On the popular level, there is the formidable phenomenon of Mother Angelica's Eternal World Television Network, with its dozens of million viewers; on the intellectual one, a flowering of Catholic writing, in which new magazines such as FIRST THINGS and CULTURE WARS join old stalwarts who can rightly boast that, like the Cistercian order, "they were never reformed, because they never needed to", such as THE WANDERER and THE NEW OXFORD REVIEW.

This is almost entirely a grassroots phenomenon, although one that has found increasing interest and responsiveness in Rome. Time was when the Vatican regarded the American Church as at best a semi-detached member of the communion, huge and unruly, one on which it would be impossible, even if it was desirable, to impose discipline. In recent years, however, people have started to feel, on the one hand, that things had simply been allowed to drift too far - as the paedophile scandal proved; and, on the other, that there were forces in the American Church with which it would be possible to collaborate. More and more appeals to Rome were made on matters such as priestly unchastity, breaches of the Confessional seal, closures of parishes, co-operation between sinful priests and oppressive bishops, and the Vatican became aware of the existence of a large and rising body of orthodox opposition within the American rogue elephant.

But opposition breeds unpleasant kinds of mind. I was and remain unhappy with the tone of such groups as Roman Catholic Faithful: faithful they may be, but all their work seems to be in hunting down and exposing pandering prelates and scandalous priests. This can be an unpleasant duty; it ought never to be the central feature of one's spiritual life. One looks in vain, or at least I did, for proper spiritual reading in RCF's publications. All that they seem concerned is to find and stop deviations from orthodox practice. And we all know what kind of results that can have.

What prompted this post is a rather ghastly little newsletter callet SpiritDaily, which I had never seen before, which critictized the Bishops for an opinion from a movie review body that treated PoA favourably. Don't you know that it is about - *gasp* - magic? I really thought we did not have that sort of nonsense in the Church; every mention of HP I have come across in the conservative Catholic press has been positive, except for a typically wrong-headed yet interesting analysis by E.Michael Jones in CULTURE WARS magazine. Jones, who is a scholar and an educated man, treated the novels as symptomatic of modern deracination, and on the whole did not view them too badly. Certainly I have never seen this kind of illiterate, persecution-minded nonsense. What next? LORD OF THE RINGS, written by a devout Catholic, because it features wizards? Superhero comics, because they feature superhuman powers? THE SCREWTAPE LETTERS, because it claims to be from Hell?

We must be careful, especially as orthodox Catholic, that we do not fall into this sort of thing. Clearly, the spirit of Judge Lynch is abroad in the land.

Comments

[simplydhara.livejournal.com]

One question, if you don't mind, about this excerpt from your post: (When the USA became independent, about a third of its three million citizens were Anglican, and the Anglicans were the absolute majority in the Southern States. Now the whole country has hardly more than three million Episcopalians out of almost three hundred million Americans, and the Southern States are Baptist. If that is not a picture of historical disaster, I don't know what is.)

Er. Why's it a disaster? I don't know much at all about the differences between Christian denomination, so that's a question born entirely of ignorance. Should the US have remained Anglican? Why? What is it that's different about Anglican doctrine that makes it "better", so to speak?

People and societies are extremely dynamic; they change quite a bit, and power shifts like the one you mentioned seem quite normal to me. Personally, I couldn't see anything disastrous about the shift from Anglican to...well, everything else, and I was wondering if you could explain why it's a historical disaster.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

This is the sort of question that makes me wonder how to answer it. If you do not understand that the complete loss of relevance by a Church, its fading to a mere sideshow in the society it helped create, is a historical disaster for that church, I cannot explain it to you. The Episcopal Church has sold its soul, and found that it gained nothing by the exchange. That is what the American Catholic Church was in danger of doing under such "leaders" as Weakland and Mahoney; and the rise of brilliant orthodox leaders such as Chaput is significant exactly because it marks the point where the sale stops and the process of recovery begins. I greatly fear the extremism and uncharity which will attend it, but it is a necessary process, and on the whole a beneficent one.

[simplydhara.livejournal.com]

Well, it's a disaster for that church, certainly - any institution that's lost its base can count said loss as a diaster in its history - but how so on wider terms, indeed for all of American society? (Random example: the institution of slavery was abolished, which was certainly a disaster for that institution, but for society as a whole it was not a bad thing. I am not comparing the Church to slavery, just illustrating that what's a major disturbance for one institution need not have a similar impact on all of society.) As for fading to a mere sideshow, American society now is extremely different from American society in its first half century. For one thing, it's far more diverse - you have nationalities hailing from every corner of the planet here, and all of them brought along their respective religions. I would think that would at least partially explain the diminishing of the Anglican Church. On top of that, in recent years, there's been much exploration of the Eastern religions and many Westerns have crossed over to that side of the spectrum. I suspect, however, that you intended to address not those outside changes - the changes in American demographics and the general environment - but changes made within the Anglican Church itself that led to its diminishing. I'm afraid I'm not aware of any of those internal reasons. I don't know what changes various denominations have made to their doctrines and what effects those changes had. I'll take your word that said changes were negative ones, but I'd like to know exactly what they were, if you wouldn't mind explaining.

Not knowing a great deal about the history of various Christian denominations but being curious anyway, I thought you might be able to answer some questions I had after reading your post. I understand if you're too busy right now to tell some random kid whatever she'd like to know about this subject, so please free feel to defer on this, but if you do have time to respond I'd be obliged.

[simplydhara.livejournal.com]

*Westerners, not Westerns.

[ravenclaw-eric.livejournal.com]

There's a book about what a mess a lot of American seminaries have become: Goodbye, Good Men by Michael Rose. I was, to put it mildly, not raised Catholic, but when I read it some years ago even I was utterly shocked at what I read, and could hardly believe such things could go on in Catholic seminaries. If this account is to be trusted, some of them are hardly better than homosexual bath houses and dating services. Non-homosexuals find such institutions highly unwelcoming, and many are driven out before they finish.

And the American Episcopal (Anglican) Church's decline began a long time before any theological liberalization; by the early decades of the 19th century, it was already very much a minority (albeit wealthy!) church compared to the Methodists and Baptists. The Methodists and Baptists appealed far better to the "common man," and did things like send "circuit riders" out into the frontier districts to preach and attend to the spiritual needs of the pioneering folk. The Episcopal church became a "silk-stocking" church, with membership as much a badge of belonging to the upper class as anything else. It was also associated in many people's minds with the British Crown, which was the kiss of death in those days in the US for many Americans.