After I posted about the implications of Scottish Cardinal O’Brien’s resignation amidst allegations of sexual misconduct, I’ve found myself swept up into the surging currents of Rod Dreher’s blog.
Given that Rod says a great deal, there’s of course a great deal that can be said in response. But I’ll refrain. Instead, what interests me is the urgent tone of Rod’s postings on these and related matters. There’s an odd atmosphere of collapse, a kind of apocalyptic anxiety. Rod speaks of declining (collapsing!) Church attendance in Britain, which he merges with evocations and warnings about still more depravities to be uncovered. In his mind it adds up to a crisis of Catholicism akin to the traumas of the Reformation. He can’t understand why I’m not outraged, or mad, or in some way properly agitated by what he sees as the evident signs of a world-historical threat to the Christian witness.
Maybe I’m blind. Maybe I’m morally obtuse. Maybe I’m spiritually deluded. But then again maybe Christian faith and the Church have enough spiritual range, as it were, to cover bad situations like the current clerical abuse crisis, or larger trends such as secularism.
Some years ago I was talking with Muslim friends. They expressed some of Rod’s dire urgency. By their thinking, Islamic fundamentalism is a reaction of Islam to the traumatic challenges of modernity: science, secularism, pluralism, the atomizing effects of free market capitalism, the lure of sexual freedom, the pleasure-a-day seductions of consumer culture, and so forth. They were anxious, concerned, and in ways akin to Rod’s postings, fearful of collapse though self-inflicted wounds as Islam over-reacts and corrupts itself in a spirit of blind opposition and desperate negation.
I expressed sympathy. But I told them that Christianity and Judaism put failure and collapse into their founding narratives. The Israelites make a golden calf. They prostitute themselves to strange gods in every generation. In their captivity they are seduced by assimilation. The same holds for the disciples. They deny and abandon Jesus. With characteristic insight into the logic of the Old Testament and its fulfillment in Christ, St. Paul does not push these truths about our weakness and humiliation away, but draws them near: “For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities; for when I am weak, then I am strong.”
And your point, my Muslim friends asked? Ah, I replied, Christianity and Judaism are of course threatened, debilitated, and weakened by modernity, for all the reasons you say, and more—and for all the reasons Rod Dreher says, and more. But it’s not unprecedented. On the contrary, it’s common, almost the norm. This is why Christianity and Judaism, however beaten down by the present age, need not be anxious and despairing. We need not think that the real debilitations and real wounds inflicted on the Church—and the sexual sins of the clergy to wound the church in a special way in our era, a time when sexual morality plays such a central symbolic role in Western Culture—are fatal.
So of course I agree with Rod that clerical sins should be censored and miscreants disciplined. And of course I regret that more people don’t go to church in Britain (or New York for that matter). But I can’t participate in his odd sense that somehow the Church is on the verge of collapse. No longer at the center of Western culture, no longer influential, no longer the obvious option for morally sensitive upper-middle-class people? Yes, quite possible, and in many ways already all too actual. But the collapse of the cultural dominance of Christianity is not at all the same thing as a spiritual, theological collapse. From where I sit, when it comes to the interior lives of Catholics and of the Church, things have gotten better, not worse, in the last two decades. I suppose it’s as St. Paul says: for when I am weak, then I am strong.
February 26th, 2013 | 3:41 pm
In defense of Rod, I don’t think he’s saying that the Christian faith is about to vanish. He’s saying that the INSTITUTION of the Roman Catholic Church is in sharp decline. The “it’s not a big deal—everyone’s a sinner” response to rampant sexual abuse and coercion (that’s what it is when a superior is pressuring those in his charge to have sex with him) is one of the reasons why the Catholic Church is continuing to lose influence in the West.
February 26th, 2013 | 3:57 pm
I’d like to hear more about that.
February 26th, 2013 | 4:07 pm
An ex-Catholic Orthodox has bagahzh in a way cradle Orthodox and straight-from-atheist-to-Orthodox do not. Perhaps, when the Church is in the news – and when is She not, b/c all history is Church history – we need a Rod Dreher outrage-o-meter, similar to the one there used to be for Andrew Sullivan.
February 26th, 2013 | 4:12 pm
The Catholic Church is NOT losing influence in the West due to rampant sexual abuse and coercion.
The West is absolutely fine with rampant sexual abuse and coercion when it fits their agenda. The Church is losing influence because the West has learned to cover its physical needs with technology. That physical comfort allows it to pretend it doesn’t need spiritual healing, that spiritual healing will flow naturally from the same technological wellspring.
It thinks it can find God in the machine, so it is deliberately walking away from God in the Eucharist. It can’t work, of course, but as long as technology provides physical comfort, the West will try to avoid the Truth.
February 26th, 2013 | 4:18 pm
In defense of R.R., I don’t think he’s saying “It’s not a big deal — everyone’s a sinner.” I don’t think he ever thought that, let alone wrote it.
I think he’s saying what those sensitive to Church history have always said — that the Church is always under attack, always hated, that those of the Church always let it down in various ways, laity and clergy. Catholicism is hated for the abuse scandal, yes. (That abuse exists in all faiths, too, even Rod’s, although the attention paid is quite different.) But it’s also hated because it’s not of the world.
February 26th, 2013 | 4:21 pm
This is great.
February 26th, 2013 | 4:40 pm
R. R. Reno’s post was a pleasure to read. I sometimes feel I have more faith in the Catholic Church than Catholics do. I predict that when the new pope is announced, unless the College of Cardinals makes an egregiously bad pick, all this concern and pessimism will be forgotten.
February 26th, 2013 | 5:06 pm
“it’s not a big deal—everyone’s a sinner”
Well, Stephen P, I think you got the latter half right. Stop believing that and the Catholic Church no longer exists. Attempting to purify the Church _is_ a big deal but also an ongoing and never ending effort that will only culminate with the Second Coming. And the purification always begins with me, as I am constantly in need of it.
But as one can note in Cardinal O’Brien’s case, the sexual abuse and coercion is no longer rampant but decades in the past. Still the after effects continue and judgement is passed, hopefully only as appropriate. That does affect the Church’s say in the secular world. Given the current developing mores, perhaps what is needed is for the Church to hold fast to what is timeless, so it can help catch parts of our civilization as they fall.
And in that, I think Mr. Reno has it right. We are recovering from the excesses of the near past and tending to needed maintenance on our own house.
February 26th, 2013 | 5:20 pm
Father Edward Oakes some time ago wrote something to the effect that Catholics should be grateful to those who uncovered the sexual scandals. In his opinion we need only regret that this was not discovered sooner.
Pope Benedict remarked that the “Year of the Priest” intended as a celebration became instead an opportunity for penance and for a Catholic “teshuvah” – return, repentance, reparation, and renewal.
I think the sense of calm within our sorrow is the proper and reasonable response. The Church on earth is always in need of purification. Purification is the work of the Holy Spirit. So we trust this will take place in accordance with God’s will – not as and when we might will it.
February 26th, 2013 | 5:30 pm
Mr. Nickol’s comment is exactly right.
February 26th, 2013 | 9:48 pm
Dreher is smart, interesting, and completely sincere. He’s also a total catastrophist who thinks the end of the world is one or two steps away depending on the news story of the day. His chicken-little routine does get old after a while.
February 26th, 2013 | 11:51 pm
Steve Kellmeyer writes:
“The Catholic Church is NOT losing influence in the West due to rampant sexual abuse and coercion.
“The West is absolutely fine with rampant sexual abuse and coercion when it fits their agenda. The Church is losing influence because the West has learned to cover its physical needs with technology.”
Which is true. As Phil Lawler argued persuasively, the steep drop in Catholic practice in Boston really predated the explosion of the sex scandals in 2002 – and one can can argue the same thing has happened in Ireland and the UK. Those claiming that the scandals drove them out really had one foot (or both) already out the door anyway. The scandals merely provided many with a handy excuse. An excuse for other motivations: indifference, or refusal to be open to Catholic moral teachings – all made possible, in part, through new technology and affluence.
And yet: It pains me to disagree with R.R. Reno, but this is a case where Rod may not be playing Cassandra. The Church already has massive filters to penetrate through now to deliver its message. But the moral rot extends much deeper through the clergy and even the episcopate than most of us thought, or than much of the First Things staff has often seemed ready to admit. As we’ve reached the point where we just can’t afford this level of bad and corrupt leadership. The witness being provided is simply devastating.
Yes, the Church has always had sin. Yes, it will survive. But that should not be an excuse not to demand more – a lot more – of our leaders.
February 27th, 2013 | 12:09 am
Hello Mike,
“But as one can note in Cardinal O’Brien’s case, the sexual abuse and coercion is no longer rampant but decades in the past.”
The worst has been dealt with, at least in the U.S. and parts of Western Europe. The “pink palace” seminaries have been mostly closed or cleaned up.
But if you think that sexually misbehaving clergy are a thing o the past, you may want to take a trip to the Archdiocese of Miami, where the numbers may shock you. And if you think that the bishops have really acknowledged their own sins in covering it all up, I’d like to see the evidence.
February 27th, 2013 | 8:09 am
The comment from Richard M. brings Jeremiah 7:1-15 to mind.
And Jeremiah 9:18-23, a verse the Tanakh ascribes to God himself.
February 27th, 2013 | 8:15 am
Richard M.: Don’t forget that the abuse scandals really predate 2002. The Porter scandal in Fall River was revealed in the early 1990s. (That is Massachusetts-relevant, but there were scandals in other states, such as Louisiana, that were exposed even earlier.) And while ignoring Church teachings and voting for the likes of Ted Kennedy certainly predates 2002, abandoning the Church entirely – not having a Catholic wedding, not sending your kids to C.C.D. (or even having them baptized), etc. – seems to have increased greatly in recent years.
I agree more with your second paragraph, but to be pedantic, Cassandra was the one who was always right but always ignored. If Dreher is correct, he IS a Cassandra.
February 27th, 2013 | 8:30 am
“But that should not be an excuse not to demand more – a lot more – of our leaders.”
And ourselves, Richard M, and ourselves.
February 27th, 2013 | 9:14 am
Dreher became so exercised by the sex abuse scandals he left the Church. I gather he’s becoming scandalized by sinfulness in his new home in Orthodoxy. I’m with R.R. Reno: I expect sin; as an old sinner I know it’s pretty much the default mode of humanity (this human at least). Holiness, which I’ve encountered not infrequently in the Church, and not infrequently among her priests, I find inexplicable apart from Grace. With Reno, I’m encouraged by the interior lives of many of the Catholics I meet. I worry though about our lost sheep.
February 27th, 2013 | 9:30 am
Hello James,
Actually, I would say (looking at the numbers, and my own experience) that most of the collapse – in attendance, in resort to sacraments, in vocations – in places like Boston really happened all the way back in the 1965-1985 period, which I think is before most of the sex scandal revelations (which admittedly predate 2002 to some degree).
Did 2002 and its successors hurt the Church’s witness further? Absolutely. No question about it. This is a fine line I’m trying to walk, but it is an important one. The scandals (and their coverups), and the corruption they reveal in the clergy, are more serious, and more damaging than R.R. Reno seems willing to concede. Yet on the other hand, they’re only symptomatic of deeper maladies that go back much further in time. The bishops, priests, missionaries who built the Church in America out of nothing in the 19th century were courageous and zealous men. Their successors eventually became (too often) time-servers, adjusted to the comforts of the mighty institutions they inherited. And they had no powers of resistance when the cultural revolution came in the 60′s.
The Church in America could survive such behavior, after a fashion, in those years. It no longer can.
I agree more with your second paragraph, but to be pedantic, Cassandra was the one who was always right but always ignored.
I am mortified but thankful for the correction of my mangled allusion.
February 27th, 2013 | 9:32 am
“The gates of hell will not prevail…” We have this from a usually-reliable source. Long after the USA is consigned to the dustbin of history, the Catholic Church will still be standing, and fulfilling the mission given by its Founder.
Now, a detail–the “atomizing effect of market capitalism”? What does this mean? And describe to me the preferred alternative. If this means that in a market system each person makes his own choices in the marketplace, including where and how he makes his own productive contribution, then I’m for atomism.
February 27th, 2013 | 12:23 pm
I think it may have been in Orthodoxy where Chesterton wrote of the Church, bearer of the truth, careening through history, “reeling but erect.” The Church ever reels and is ever erect.
The Church in the West has not been cherished, so we may well lose it: when God would discipline us, He sometimes removes the Church.
When Enver Hoxha’s regime fell in officially atheist Albania, a lone Catholic priest emerged from hiding. The Church survived Hoxha’s regime.
Rod Dreher is what used to be called a “lapsed Catholic.” The Church will not be rescued by the advice of lapsed Catholics or laicized priests. Rod Dreher is utterly beside the point for the Church in America. But I wish him well.
February 27th, 2013 | 1:28 pm
If the New Testament is true, the ultimate fate of the Church is not to be wildly successful with everyone enthusiastically embracing the faith; rather, the New Testament suggests that the Church’s ultimate fate is to be small and persecuted. E.g., Matthew 24:9-13.
February 27th, 2013 | 2:52 pm
Article reminds me of a comment by Ted Ross, S.J. I heard years ago: ‘the normal situation of the Church is scandal, crisis and turmoil.’
Perhaps just another way of agreeing with St Paul: ‘we hold this treasure in earthen vessels’.
jJ.
February 27th, 2013 | 4:12 pm
Dan and Anthony,
Thank you for your simple responses which contain complex truths.
We all wait for the Second Coming when the Church will, indeed, be “triumphant”. In the meantime “militant” means we have to deal with adversity.
IMHO, the Church flourishes in times of adversity. Who is to say that a smaller, more orthodox Church is not better for us who inhabit it? We are the Church; as sinners and imperfect in all regards, we are responsible for our own sins. Let G-d handle the rest……in His own time.
February 27th, 2013 | 5:48 pm
I agree Rod Dreher has a catastrophist bent to him. I have one as well, and try to keep it in check. I also have every confidence that the Catholic Church as a whole will survive this and many other scandals.
HOWEVER, persecution from without (see Japan in the 1600s, Albania in the mid-20th century, the Eastern Churches during and after the Muslim invasions of a millenium ago in many areas) and severe rot from with (see Ireland today?) can effectively destroy it within a given society. Where is the Church in Saudi Arabia, where once Christians worshipped many centuries ago? Where, effectively, is it in large parts of Europe now, especially the Scandanavian regions?
The Church is at basic risk now of losing its tenuous toehold in Western society and being washed away there. One priest in hiding does not a Church make in any useful or meaningful sense (to claim it does is to adopt a Protestant understanding of Christianity, I would argue). One can still find scattered pagans (“official pagans,” I guess one might say) in Europe today, but ancient paganism such as the early Church encountered is gone forever as a cultural force.
Africa, Asia, the Indian Subcontinent may well become the new home of the Church, and hurray for that. But, at the same time, we could easily see the Church become as small and marginalized in our culture as would be any number of fringe sects which Catholics have always dismissed as irrelevant. Whatever theological solace one might take from there still be “some Catholics here and many elsewhere outside the West,” this would be a world-historic tragedy, and yet it could easily happen. So much the worse for the world? Sure. But even more so for the Church.
So don’t dismiss Rod’s concerns too quickly. The next Pope is but a small piece of the solution to an eopchal challenge the Church is confronting.
February 27th, 2013 | 11:19 pm
““The gates of hell will not prevail…” We have this from a usually-reliable source…”
## Or possibly: long after the Catholic Church is “consigned to the dustbin”, God will have a Church even so. STM the CC is mistaken to take those words as a guarantee of survival no matter what – the danger in doing so, is that God’s Righteousness is lost sight of. That is what the Jews did – they were so sure that the Temple guaranteed the Presence of God’s Name in Jerusalem, that they forgot that they, as the covenant people, were obliged to be a holy people. Jeremiah had his work cut out insisting that Zion was not inviolable when it was filled with wickedness. The Exile shows God sweeping away king, Temple, city, & people because of their sins.
If God can do that, why can He not destroy a sinful Church ? It does not follow that He will not have one – for He can raise one up from the stones. Revelation 2 & 3 seem appropriate. Or is this approach too naive for words ?
February 28th, 2013 | 11:14 am
“From where I sit, when it comes to the interior lives of Catholics and of the Church, things have gotten better, not worse, in the last two decades.
I’d like to hear more about that.”
Nobody.really, check out a book written by a former journalist for the St. Louis Post Dispatch:
The New Faithful: Why Young Adults Are Embracing Christian Orthodoxy by Colleen Carroll Campbell (Sep 1, 2002)
I would also second the opinion that things are getting better in the American Catholic Church. I went through Catholic grade & high schools in the 80s and 90s–when good catechesis was hard to come by–and finished a graduate degree in theology in 2006. Having spent the last seven years teaching in Catholic high schools, I can personally attest that this generation of adolescents is much better taught and more devout than was my generation.
Vocations to priesthood and religious life are booming in most orthodox dioceses and orders. The number of 20-40 something Catholics who’ve ditched contraception and embraced the Gospel of Life is also up (in this archdiocese, at least). I personally know at least 11 families with 9+ children, and going strong. Those committed to religion will win the demographic battle long-term if for no other reason than that of outbreeding and out-adopting more selfish, secular couples.
February 28th, 2013 | 11:21 am
Leo,
Your speculation about the Roman Catholic Church and attempted comparison to Judaism loses sight of the fact that while God chastised and corrected the Jewish people many, many times, He never destroyed them completely, nor has He, to this day, ended His covenantal Love relationship with them.
The destruction of the Temple, Diasporas, Exiles, Holocaust/pogroms have only served to spread Judaism throughout the world and make its peoples’ accomplishments more miraculous.
The only thing capable of destroying the 1.18 billion person, worldwide Catholic Church is something that eradicated all of humanity.
February 28th, 2013 | 5:09 pm
When he’s not hysterical about Roman Catholics, Dreher can make cogent but atomized points. But he clearly doesn’t know history, and is therefore a very shallow thinker.
Links
Blogs
Find Us
Contact