The Eccentric

In all seriousness I must confess that I find Richard Williamson, a former bishop of the Society of St. Pius X and noted Holocaust denier, fascinating. By all accounts he is a cultured, well-educated, and eloquent man who also happens to be a “9/11 truther” and a firm believer in cyclical theories of history. I recently stumbled on an interesting profile of Williamson at the Religious Studies blog, “Richard Williamson – Fall of a Wykehamist.” The piece is surprisingly well-sourced for a blog post and not nearly as hyperbolic as most of the critical commentary written on Williamson. That is to say, the post refrained from insinuating that Williamson is a mentally impaired homosexual.

One of the points that stuck out from the piece was the speculation on why exactly Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre chose Williamson for consecration. One theory — which seems to have played out in strange and contradictory ways over the years — centers on Williamson’s loyalty to Lefebvre. Another view has it that Lefebvre took Williamson’s unique outlook as a byproduct of “British eccentricity.” If that’s true, it leaves me to wonder about how the French typically view the English, but I digress…

There are recent reports that one of the Society’s current bishops, Bernard Tissier de Mallerais (a figure I find as fascinating as Williamson), wrote a letter to his estranged episcopal brethren stating that it was a mistake to consecrate him. All things considered that’s a fairly harsh charge since Williamson and Tissier seem to be the most united when it comes to criticizing the (dubious?) doctrinal developments of Vatican II. On the other hand, Tissier has never espoused, to the best of my knowledge, anything close to Williamson’s apocalyptic worldview, nor does he seem particularly interested in the “celebrity spotlight” (as far as traditionalist’s go) in the way Williamson appears to be interested in it. Judging by certain passages contained in his mammoth biography of Archbishop Lefebvre, Tissier, like a good number of European traditionalist Catholics, doesn’t have much patience for the obsessiveness with liturgical purity and ritual that seems to him to be a hallmark of Anglophone trad-Caths. For instance, Tissier has dismissed those American traditionalists who split with the SSPX over the 1962 Missal and Breviary as being concerned with form over substance. Embedded with this charge seems to be a typical (and perhaps right) Continental view that Americans especially lack grounding when it comes to matters of the spirit. Form, thus, becomes sacrosanct.

On Being Back in GR

It’s official. I now live in the metropolitan area—Grand Rapids—with one of the fastest growing rates of poverty in the United States. That “startling fact” (which shouldn’t be that startling for those with eyes to see) is found in a new Brookings Institute book, Confronting Suburban Poverty in America (a website for the book is available here). While the report emphasizes the 90% spike in poverty found in GR suburbs, the city itself hasn’t fared that much better. The city’s mayor, George Heartwell, could only muster an, “I’m stunned…” when told of the news.

During the nearly nine years I spent away from the city of my birth I took notice of its steady makeover from a near-dying manufacturing city to professional-class service sector economy. Prudent incentivizing by city planners helped attract a new wave of business investments, and somewhere along the way some marketing genius got the idea to rebrand the city, a one-time Dutch Calvinist stronghold, “Beer City, USA.” (Yes, Founders is local to GR, but when I left in 2004 it was the only kid on the block worth noticing.) Nobody who drives across GR’s expressways can fail to notice that Spectrum Health, a large integrated healthcare network, now occupies an entire quadrant of downtown. These are good developments for those legions of graduates from the various local schools (Calvin, Aquinas, Grand Valley State University, etc.), though the alleged “economic boom” that has been transpiring here hasn’t left many table scraps for the typically unnoticed masses who hold high school diplomas (or less) or once made their living off of skilled-base manufacturing and technical jobs. That type of work simply does not exist here anymore, and once you drive five to ten miles past the city limits, the best employment options for many is the gas station Subway. Even low-skilled service sector jobs aren’t what they used to be. For instance, when I turned 18 in 1998 and was eligible to begin working in the grocery department at Meijer (I had worked there as a bagger and then bottle-return clerk since I was 15), my starting, union-secured wage was $7.60/hour. By the time I was 21 I was close to the departmental max out of $10.90/hour. Since then the union—United Food and Commercial Workers—has buckled to the point where when my brother (who is 11 years my junior) took a job there a couple of years ago, he was starting at $7.30/hour. That is, he was making 30 cents less an hour than what I made doing the same work 13 years earlier.

When I was growing up Catholic I remember asking my mom what a Protestant was. “They’re people who hate Mary,” she replied. During those years I came to understand, from a sociological (rather than theological) vantage point, that the history of Grand Rapids could be read as a history of Protestant (Calvinist) owners and Catholic (immigrant) workers with a great deal of mistrust directed by the latter against the former. Obviously this dissipated over time, though I can say that the ecclesial-class divide was not entirely lost on my grandparents’ generation. But the Catholic Church in Grand Rapids, much like the Catholic Church in most parts of the country, increasingly bought into the mindset of assimilation, particularly after the sweeping reforms instituted after Vatican II. Liturgical and architectural renovation ran wild in Grand Rapids. Beautiful old structures that had stood unmolested since the first wave of Polish, German, and Irish immigration hit West Michigan were gutted to make room for drum kits, pianos, and guitars. Side altars were abolished and the Confessionals were degraded into janitor’s closets. Once “white flight” became the norm in the city, abysmal barns bearing traditional Catholic names were erected so as to assure that neither a black nor brown man need be seen on the stroll from parking lot to pew each Sunday. Despite a recent surge in Hispanic immigration helping to keep the doors of some city parishes open, several monuments of the city’s once noble Catholic heritage have been slated for permanent closure. Their likes will not be seen here again.

Over the years I have met several people who, upon hearing I hailed from Grand Rapids, instantly assumed that I came from America’s equivalent of 16th C. Geneva. After all the Economist once identified West Michigan as the second most conservative area in the country behind Salt Lake City, Utah. Yes, Grand Rapids is apparently in the Top 10 for churches-per-capita, though it also boasts surprisingly high rates of homosexuals and restaurants. Go figure. Really, though, the “Christian image” of the city, to the extent it hasn’t faded completely from the eyes of many residents, means very little as a practical matter. Some locals like to get misty-eyed because Grand Rapids was “progressive” enough to elect an Arab (Orthodox Christian) to Congress, but his politics are informed by cookie-cutter Tea Party ideology, not the Gospel. The most prevalent manifestations of Christianity in this region represent nothing less than the worst manifestations of vulgar Calvinism, fundamentalism, and, for the younger generation, thoroughly unorthodox quasi-cults of self-worship and self-indulgent spiritualism. It’s a gimmicky sort of Christianity, which is perhaps a necessity when the church’s main competitors are television and Internet pornography. The more impoverished areas of the city and suburbs are, not surprisingly, held up by “prosperity gospel” establishments (or nothing at all).

The small strand of idealist left in me wants to believe that there is ample room for a “Catholic moment” in Grand Rapids, that is, an authentic renewal of the city’s once-marginalized Catholic identity that understands itself as being in continuity with what the region’s European immigrants struggled to establish over a century ago. There are some small signs of a restoration. Two of the city’s parishes (both good-sized) are working diligently to restore an authentic Catholic identity at the spiritual, liturgical, theological, and, eventually, architectural level. The city now has a dedicated Catholic radio station that broadcasts orthodox programming and the diocesan Catholic Charities office runs some of the city’s most visible charity programs. Two of the city’s more notable Christian bookstores now dedicate significant shelf space to Catholic titles, and there are two additional Catholic-only bookstores as well. While I am unaware of any demographic studies available, it does appear to my eyes that there are growing numbers of young (35 and below) attendees in the city’s more traditional parishes and that their vision for Catholicism goes far beyond seeing at as merely a “Sunday church.” But these are small steps, and I don’t doubt for a second that as Grand Rapids continues to promote itself as a white-washed hub for rote Republicanism, mindless entertainment, and “bourgeois ethics” (in the worst sense) “blessed” by the withered hand of the deity of American civil religion, the temptation to follow the previous generation down the short and wide path to hell will appear overwhelming.

Hype

Among the “Next Big Things that weren’t and aren’t,” the blogger known as the Young Fogey singles out “American Eastern Orthodox converts.” The comments which follow this observation, particularly YF’s brief summary of why he returned to Catholicism after nearly a decade in Orthodoxy, are well worth reading.

Conversion booms and busts happen all the time, especially in the context of American religious consumerism. I hope that most soberminded observers can agree that the last great Orthodox conversion boom has been at an end for some time. The question which seems to be on some people’s minds is whether or not a bust, that is, a noticeable exodus, is on the horizon. I must admit that I am of two minds on this. On the one hand I have encountered plenty of anecdotal evidence concerning Orthodox “reversions” to some form of Evangelicalism or Catholicism. Heck, my family’s experience is an anecdote in and of itself. In the last two years several Orthodox blogging personalities have returned to Rome, though I will be the first to admit that the blogosphere is not a perfect reflection of reality. On the other hand, American Orthodoxy doesn’t seem to be at risk for anything as dramatic as an entire parish flipping over to Catholicism (or anywhere else). For that matter, most Evangelical converts to Orthodoxy, due to the theological and ecclesial bets they have made, probably believe they are at the end of the road with respect to Christianity. If Orthodoxy isn’t “the way,” then there is no “true church” and the Christian religion is a fraud. And since many of these folks have made a life’s work out of ripping on Catholicism, Rome fails to provide a safe haven.

As I have discussed before on this blog and in other forums, my experience with ex-Catholic converts to Orthodoxy has been that these folks were looking for liturgical-spiritual shelter from the post-Vatican II Catholic Church and not much else. I can’t recall a single substantive discussion with an ex-Catholic Orthodox Christian who was willing to accept Orthodoxy’s pop polemics against Catholicism, up to and including the specious assertion that Rome lacks Grace and therefore its sacraments are barren. Most of the Orthodox I have spoken with who have returned to Rome have done so because the illusion of what Orthodoxy “is supposed to be” wore off and, moreover, they no longer saw much utility in playing pretend. Contemporary Orthodoxy, like contemporary Catholicism, is filled to the brim with scandals, contradictions, ineptitude, and spiritual decay. In the end, perhaps it all just comes down to whether or not you like beards…

And by the “illusion of Orthodoxy,” I mean only what certain partisans of the Orthodox Church promote it as being compared to Catholicism or Protestantism. Even when the illusion disappears, Protestants are more likely than Catholics to still see it as superior than the confessional haunt they left behind. Catholics have good reason to be less sure, particularly in light of the reforms instituted by Benedict XVI and the apparently growing number of more orthodox and traditional Catholic priests and bishops. As I have also discussed before, American Orthodoxy benefits a great deal from the post-Conciliar ceasefire. Because most American Catholics, rightly or wrong, regard Orthodox as “just like them”; “sister churches”; “estranged brethren”; etc., there is very little incentive within the Catholic Church to go out and win converts from Orthodoxy.

None of this is to say that the convert stream has run completely dry. In Grand Rapids, for instance, there seems to be a growing interest among young college-level Evangelicals in Orthodoxy. Whether it’s a passing fad or not is something I really don’t know. What I do know is that both the Eerdmans and Baker bookstores (both of which are quite impressive) carry a surprising number of Orthodox titles. Baker recently invited a local Orthodox priest to speak as part of its Thursday night series on Christianity and several students from Calvin College recently converted. Is that a trend? Maybe, or maybe not. Some will remember that there was a great deal of fervor for Orthodoxy among certain students at Wheaton College some years back. Not only did that fervor die out, but, from what I understand, a good number of the converts eventually left Orthodoxy. When discussing Orthodoxy with some of these Evangelicals (a few of whom have or are receiving graduate degrees in theology), it doesn’t surprise me how “intellectualized” their interests are. Nor, for that matter, am I terribly shocked by the somewhat naive way they conflate their idea of “authentic Orthodoxy” with their previous theological commitments. To be honest, I half-expect that most of these kids will wind up in some offshoot of Anglicanism before it’s all said and done, and for those who have already gone Anglican, they’ll be Romeward bound eventually.

Quick Friday Note on Stupidity

In the combox of my previous post, Owen White chimes in on, inter alia, the ubiquity of stupidity in contemporary American society. Despite the inherently unrefined nature of such an observation (unrefined only to the extent that there are many different types of stupidity and not all of them are not likely interconnected), it’s one that ought to be made more often. Granted, there are several plausible reasons why most persons are gun shy about making such claims.

First, there is a general tendency in contemporary society to eschew “elitism,” particularly when that “elitism” concerns mental faculties and education; all “elitism” should be up for sale and theoretically available to all persons in a democratized society. Intellectual elitism doesn’t work that way. Second, many people probably fear that if they call someone or something else “stupid,” they, too, will be labeled “stupid” by someone presumably “less stupid” than they. It’s an irrational fear, I think, but it’s probably strong enough to stifle a lot of people. Third, there is a popular sense that the term “stupid” lacks precision and its deployment may even be a sign of childishness. Maybe, though it seems to me that the puerile nature of contemporary education and information dissemination in a mass capitalist society such as ours makes “stupid” a more-than-appropriate term of art. Last, and not least, there is probably a sense among some who agree with the “stupidity” charge that “stupid” lacks theoretical precision and therefore ought to be avoided. But this reservation misses the point, I think. “Stupidity” is just a starting point on an analytical road full of twists, turns, forks and detours. If you can’t start with “stupid,” you’re going to have a tough time getting anywhere.

There are any number of theories out there which map the seeming paradox of intellectual stagnation in an era where education, even “higher education,” is available to an unprecedented percentage of the population. The stupidity Owen is referring to may be bound up with this problem, but it’s not synonymous with it. It seems to me that contemporary stupid goes hand-in-hand with boredom and laziness. Laziness in particular is well-encouraged in the age of Wikipedia, smart phones, and “intelligent television.” These are ready-at-hand sources of easy-to-digest factual information; they require little-to-no discipline to master and they certainly don’t invite thoughtful reflection. There is also a heavy-handed culture of disdain in modern education against “rote memorization.” The belief of many today seems to be that anybody can always “look that stuff up”; generalized concepts and theoretical notions are deemed to be of more value in the classroom than the bits n’ pieces that are supposed to comprise the theories. There is no sense given that someone just ought to know these things off the top of their head, nor is any value placed on knowing the elements in the hopes that someone, somewhere might see new connections between them. Authentic theoretical advancement, at least in the “soft sciences,” is practically gone given that most “new ideas” and “new theory” are just accretions on old theory and old ideas. Who bothers to go back and look at the ground?

Admittedly these two problems should, in a more thorough analysis, be disaggregated, though I think the connection is clear enough. Superficiality and the sheen of intellectualism provides enough fuel for most “educated persons” to successfully negotiate the minor trials and petty tribulations of undergrad and graduate programs. People are now intelligent enough to “question” the world around them, but they lack the training, critical faculties, and refinement to turn that questioning into an answer with any real heft. And no, this has nothing to do with political persuasions either.

Universal Suffrage Questioned

I know nothing of the web-log called Cruising Down the Coast of the High Barbaree, but a recent post, “The Moral Disaster of Benghazi, Obamacare, and Universal Suffrage,” was sent to me via e-mail. The thesis of the post is nicely summarized in this one line: “Let me put it bluntly: Universal suffrage is a terrible idea because people who can reliably be trusted to vote for stupid reasons shouldn’t vote.” Perhaps, but all that does is beg the question, What constitutes a “stupid reason”? Some examples are offered in the post, and I can come up with a few more, but it seems to me that the losing side, that is, whatever camp doesn’t happen to hold political power in a liberal democracy, always believes the other side won because of mass idiocy. Several moons ago, when I was on law review, I worked with an editor who used to go on incessantly about the apparent need for “voting tests.” This was during the Bush II administration and my fellow editor, being a cookie-cutter liberal of meager imagination, thought that a test could weed out the greatest national affliction since the Red Scare: single-issue voters or, more accurately, individuals who voted for pro-life candidates exclusively. He believed, perhaps rightly (though I have my doubts), that pro-life voters were ignorant of other issues and therefore were likely to ignore the national interest in favor of their sectarian moral agenda. My fellow editor believed that if these single-issue voters were forced to take a test on the candidates’ other political views, they would either fail and therefore be disqualified from voting or, by virtue of studying for the test, become more enlightened and pick the best (read: liberal Democrat) candidate. I confess that I mocked him ruthlessly for this idea and made no reservations when it came to extending the logic of his argument to the “political processes” of Nazi Germany and the Old South. Unfair? Maybe, though sometimes shame is a better corrective than reason, especially in the face of unabashed childishness.

Now, while I do not believe that the aforementioned blogger critique of universal suffrage approaches the voting test’s magnitude of idiocy, it does strike me as expressing the same resentful sentiment while failing to really address the structural problems with our (America’s) form of representative democracy. With a legislative branch that is hopelessly deadlocked due to polarization and ideological stagnation, the executive branch—and the attendant administrative stat—remains the only expedient means of advancing any political goals. The system of checks and balances we learned about in grade school is now a thing of legend (if not myth). So, too, is the concept of federalism which at one time, arguably, undergirded American democracy. Regardless of why the executive is elected, the hard truth remains that he does and, from a certain vantage point, must act based on his own conception of the national interest, an interest which is bound to be informed by the same lobbying and self-interested gamesmanship that is ubiquitous regardless of which political party holds office. Having a “more informed,” “less stupid,” “propertied,” “financially independent,” etc. electorate won’t change this. If anything it is likely to compromise what little say is currently left to the “man on the street” concerning the direction of the country. What limiting the electorate to a certain “elite” (however defined) will likely do is ensure that those who, either directly or indirectly, have their mouths the closest to the king’s ear won’t even have to feign shame when it comes to the hard truth of our dysfunctional political system. How is that a solution to anything?

For decades now “learned” people on the Left and Right have believed that the Constitution, “rightly understood,” could save the American project. Those on the Right, espousing some form of originalism, believe that the constitutional text lays out a near-utopian framework of small government, free enterprise, and fundamental freedoms that will inevitably lead to the good society. Those on the Left, when they don’t simply see the Constitution as a blank slate upon which each new generation can pen their political whims, find a text that offers plenty of room for the administrate state, government intervention in the economy, and a centralized federal government which may or may not “need” to be ruled by the executive. Both sides have poured an astonishing amount of intellectual energy into justifying their respective hermeneutics, and neither side, unsurprisingly, has done much to convince the other. Because abstract theoretical arguments lack practical purchase, the judiciary has had to become increasingly politicized to the point where it almost no longer makes sense to speak of federal judges as anything other than Democrats or Republicans. Reverse engineering legalistic justifications for unmistakably politicized outcomes is not a new trick, though some judges are certainly better at shielding their hand than others.

While I don’t have anything approaching a “new political theory” on hand, let me suggest, contra the critique of universal suffrage, that what we, as a country, need is more voting—only directed at increasingly more localized levels of governance. The individual states need to be weaned from their dependence on national political outcomes before they can breathe on their own again, but that result is unlikely to occur if individuals remain apathetic about what transpires in their own communities. Those concerned about “idiot voters” (regardless of their political persuasion) might find more opportunities at the local level to inform their fellow electors of what is at stake in a given election; the immediate “tangibility” of the results might lead to more open forums, a greater dissemination of information, and a wider realization that everyone is, in theory, a stakeholder. The temptation toward political apathy may not be fully curable, but it could appear to be a more unsavory option if the effects of such apathy were more widely known. That’s just a hunch, of course. But if people are truly tired of national “political stars” using their respective spotlights to sway voters to enter the polls for less-than-noble reasons, than some serious effort ought to be made to dim those politicians’ lights. Reducing their capacity to effectively dictate the political pace of the entire country, with no regard for state and municipal governance, strikes me as a step in the right direction. Concocting self-interested criteria for who ought to be eligible for voting based on nothing more than one’s own political persuasion is a bridge too far.

To the Blunder?

Owen White is never short on critical (even harsh) takes on, well, everything. Despite my appreciation of Terrence Malick and his latest film, To the Wonder, I have to admit that Owen’s critique of the film leaves me thinking that I missed a thing or two upon my initial viewing. I think I will have to watch the film a second time with an eye toward Owen’s criticisms to really test their plausibility. Still, if you have seen the film, his review is well worth reading.

Moving Forward?

After a surprisingly long silence, the Society of St. Pius X (SSPX) has finally chimed-in on the prospects of “rebuilding the Church” under Pope Francis. Like several other traditionalist outlets, the Society is taking a dim view of this pontificate even before it really begins. Is that fair? Is it charitable? No, probably not, but there may be feeling among the SSPX guard that the Society needs to bolster its traditionalist posture in the light of recent internal dissension concerning Bishop Bernard Fellay’s stillborn negotiations with the Vatican for canonical regularity. Interestingly, the Society appears suspicious of Pope Francis’ pragmatism. Can this be read as a tacit endorsement or, at least, a more favorable acceptance of the “intellectualism” of popes Benedict XVI and John Paul II? That would be somewhat ironic given how fervent anti-intellectualism is among far too many traditionalist Catholics. As a certain trad tale goes, it was the “intellectuals” who poisoned the Church in the 20th C. with novel doctrines and radical reinterpretations of the Christian tradition. Moreover, many of the traditionalist movement’s spiritual heroes, including St. Pius X, were arguably “men of action” rather than “men of learning.” Moreover, many traditionalist Catholics remain tethered to a very superficial idea of Thomism. Few, I suspect, have ever bothered to read the Angelic Doctor or, for that matter, directly engage with the neo-Scholastic tradition which the traditionalists regularly cite as the sole pure intellectual lifeblood of the Catholic Church.

Now, this “picture” doesn’t fully capture the entire traditionalist landscape. In fact, to its great credit, the SSPX has a fairly well-established history of engaging the post-Conciliar Catholic Church at a fairly sophisticated intellectual level. For those who have read the publicly available documents of the Society’s 40-year-old back-and-forth with Rome, it’s pretty clear that the Vatican has preferred to dodge many (though not all) of the Society’s critiques rather than meet them head on. This is no doubt why many of the SSPX’s critics have relied on attacking the Society’s view of “the tradition.” They claim that the Society is myopic and that it’s vision of “traditional Catholicism” and “eternal Rome” date back no further than the mid-19th C. There is a certain plausibility to this line of critique, though it fails to make some additional steps. For instance, just because the Society’s model may be 19th C. Catholicism does not mean that 19th C. Catholicism itself represented a unique break with the previous 18 centuries. If, as the Society maintains, 19th C. Catholicism was the ripe fruit of a much older tradition, then why not take that as the model? Is there a superior one available? An easy rejoinder to that claim would be that even 19th C. Catholicism didn’t try to ape a prior age. It maintained harmony with the tradition, but it took on its own “look.” It had to apply the tradition in such a way as to be relevant to the world around it. So, for example, Papal encylicals such as Rerum Novarum and the Syllabus were wholly in line with the Catholic tradition, but they would have been inexplicable in an earlier age. Even their idiom would not have been perfectly intelligence to, say, the late medieval period (to say nothing of the first millennium). From this angle, 19th C. Catholicism, while not “revolutionary” or “novel,” was comprised of its own phenomena; it was never intended to be a rehearsal of an earlier age.

If this is true (and I think it is), what does that mean for the traditionalist movement today? Just because it may want to look approvingly on the 19th C. Catholic revival doesn’t mean it can fully furnish the 21st C. Catholic world with the contours of its being. Nostalgia is not the answer. Yet so much of the traditionalist movement is built on nostalgia for a world that resembles the glossy images found in the St. Joseph’s Sunday Missal. Some traditionalist will regurgitate the rhetoric of the “errors of our time,” but few seem to have any grasp of where those errors originated; why they originated in the first place; and what, if any, good can be culled from them. Instead, traditionalist Catholics (at least a good number of them) remain convinced that there is a genuinely monolithic “modernist” (or “neo-modernist”) ideology that sprung forth a thousand heresies on its own without any other cultural, social, political, or intellectual context informing it. They blithely ignore that there were genuine problems in the Catholic Church prior to the French Revolution and, more critically, many of these traditionalists seem unaware of the fact that a number of so-called “modernists” genuinely believed they were providing the Church with the means to combat the destructive intellectual emanations of the Enlightenment. Without ignoring the fact that missteps were made and that the Church failed to properly police the danger of theologians relying on Enlightenment categories to respond to the Enlightenment, it’s hardly true that every piece of writing found in Communio is rife with renovationism.

At some point the traditionalist movement will have to come to terms with the impossibility of turning back the clock. Why they haven’t come to terms with this yet, despite being students of 19th/early 20th C. Catholicism, is beyond me. While that period can rightly be called a period of Catholic renewal in the face of grave crises, it was not a wholly backward-looking renewal. To offer just one example, think of St. Pius X’s reform of the Breviarium Romanum — a reform inspired by a traditional desire to restore the full reading of the Psalter to the weekly prayer life of the Church. To accomplish this task without tearing down the centuries-old festal devotion to the Saints, Pius X radically reordered the daily Psalter readings while modifying the rubrics to ensure that Saints’ days did not perpetually preempt the weekly cycle. Almost every traditionalist Catholic (who aren’t liturgical fetishists) smiles favorably on the reform while simultaneously ignoring how innovative it was for the time. Are there traditionalists today who are willing to recognize that renewing the Church means taking steps which may also appear innovative? Can traditionalists comprehend the need to restore the Church’s tradition in a forward-looking manner that will preserve her life and liturgy from degenerating into a museum piece? And what of the Church’s intellectual life? Must it only embrace the manualist tradition? If so, can any traditionalist mount a case for how the manualist tradition can, in any way, shape, or form, adequately respond to the intellectual and moral pathologies of late modernity? Can the traditionalists come to grips with the fact that many “postmodern” theologians and non-Catholics have developed a far superior understanding of our degenerate intellectual and cultural milieu than they have? Or does pride remain the ultimate blinder?

The Hart of Nature

Though a couple of months have passed since this brouhaha began, I do want to mention that there hasn’t been a more interesting “pop theology” debate in recent years than the ongoing “debate” between (Orthodox) David Bentley Hart and (Catholic) Edward Feser concerning natural law.

It all began with Hart’s back page critique, “Is, Ought, and Nature’s Laws,” in the March 2013 issue of First Things. Feser, a longstanding partisan for the “classic” natural law tradition, retorted on the FT web-log with “A Christian Hart, a Humean Head.” Because refusing to take Hart at his authoritative word is more than sufficient for getting his dander up, Hart came back at Feser in the May 2013 issue of FT with “Nature Loves to Hide.” The piece was pure Hart: ornery, dismissive, and not nearly as well-reasoned as one would hope. Freser, naturally, responded here.

A lot of other folks have chimed in on the debate, though surprisingly few (that I’ve seen) have rallied to Hart’s defense. The most “potent” claim Hart advanced in both of his pieces is that natural law reasoning doesn’t convince many people. The sky is blue. Freser, to his credit, doesn’t ignore that reality, and to the best of my knowledge nobody who seriously argues on behalf of natural law, whether it be more classical theorists like Freser and Russel Hittinger or the “new natural law” proponents like John Finnis and Robert George, ever rests their claims on the baseless assertion that natural law can be discerned from the actual behavior and beliefs of human beings in the 21st C. At the same time critics of natural law still persist in maintaining that because natural law lacks widespread cultural purchase it is wrong. Some have tried to evade the problem by pointing out that natural law is inseparable from a revealed context, and that to speak of natural law without God is practically meaningless. I confess that I am not unsympathetic to this claim, though I am not sure that it acknowledges anything more than what most natural law theorists already believe, namely that God is the author of all things — including the natural law. The sticky stuff consists of whether or not human beings, isolated from Christian revelation, can come to know any aspect of the natural law. The Catholic tradition has long maintained that they can, though it has not shied away from the difficulty of unaided human reasoning, marred as it is in a postlapsarian universe, can delve too deeply into it. A parallel observation is often made by proponents of classical natural right (the sort found classically in the work of Aristotle and, more recently, among some of the followers of Leo Strauss). While their claims are not anchored by the theological reality of the Fall, they do have empirical purchase given what we know of the cognitive limitations of human beings and the difficulties met within the realm of philosophical reasoning.

In seeming to keep somewhat with these observations, James K.A. Smith recently posted an excerpt from his forthcoming book, Who’s Afraid of Relativism, in which he expresses agreement with Hart’s critique before moving on to claim that his concept of “Christian pragmatism . . . would simply emphasize . . . that one needs to be inculcated in the community of grace that is the body of Christ in order to be able to ‘see’ nature as the natural law theorist claims any rational being can.” I can already see the hangup that natural law theorists are going to have with the word “needs.” I very much doubt that Smith has gone the distance necessary to demonstrate the invariable “necessity” of the “community of grace” (i.e., the Church) for promulgating the natural law. Moreover, I doubt that Smith bothers to engage with the pre-Christian pagan concept of physis and what source could be found for their “splendid vices.” Does Smith believe that natural law is a sui generis construct of the Christian tradition? Has he peeked at the Institutes of Gaius or the (pagan) discussion of natural law in Justinian’s Digest? Probably not, but so it goes.

Error Has No Rights

I meant to write this post last week, but my new son decided that he wasn’t interested in working his birth schedule around my blogging efforts.

There seems to be recurrent confusion among some readers of this blog on what I mean when I use the expression “error has no rights.” While I admit that the expression can evoke any number of potential (and incorrect) meanings in a day and age when the term “rights” has been so overused as to become almost meaningless, I do not believe any of the contexts in which I have used the expression ought to give rise to the opinion that I am advocating for any man who speaks contrary to the Catholic Faith to be clasped in irons and held indefinitely on some remote island like an unlawful enemy combatant. Far from it. The expression “error has no rights” is merely shorthand for expressing the principle that individuals do not have a moral right to spread error in public. Period. As Pope Pius XII affirmed in Ci riesce, “That which does not correspond to truth or to the norm of morality objectively has no right to exist, to be spread, or to be activated.” I doubt most persons today, including those of a liberal temperament, would pay much mind if this principle were applied when dealing with those who claim that blacks are a biologically inferior subclass of the human species or that throwing a woman off the side of a cliff is the surest way to determine whether or not she’s a witch. Apply the principle consistently when it comes to matters of religious truth and you’re tantamount to a fascist.

Now, of course, just because an individual may not have a moral right to spread error, including religious error, that does not mean that he will always lack a civil right to spread it. For example, even a hypothetical Catholic state could, in the exercise of prudence, allow non-Catholic (and non-Christian) groups to practice their religion publicly if doing so would fulfill a compelling end such as maintaining social peace or encouraging rapprochement between, say, Catholics and Orthodox. In non-Catholic states, particularly where there exists a plurality of confessions, prudence dictates that a large blanket of tolerance be spread over the land so as to avoid civil strife. Even so, no Catholic ought to take this political reality as meaning that one religion is as good as another or that the Catholic Church is not one, holy, and Apostolic Church founded by Jesus Christ. For this reason Catholics should be especially on guard against conflating the modern-day discourse concerning religious liberty in the civil sense with the specious principle of religious liberty endorsed after the Second Vatican Council. It is prudent for Catholics living in a liberal-secular state to contend against government encroachments upon their liberty. It is something else altogether to hold that manifestly false religions such as Islam and Mormonism ought, by moral right, to be spread across the face of the earth.

And for those who seem to forget, I am Catholic not by geographic designation or genetic inheritance, but because I believe that the Church I profess in the Nicene Creed is the Catholic Church. Those who have objected on here that I am somehow being inconsistent in my views because I believe the Catholic Church ought, by right, to enjoy a privileged status in all societies throughout the world are either hopelessly relativistic or lack the conviction that their own confession (be it Catholic or otherwise) amounts to much more than a private preference little different in status than their favorite flavor of ice cream. I certainly would not expect an Orthodox Christian worth his salt to believe anything less about his church, and I dare say that I wouldn’t have a terrible amount of respect for him if he did.

Christus Resurrexit

For all of the Orthodox and Eastern Catholics who keep the Paschal Feast on the Julian Calendar.

Blessings to you all.