"The Pope Has Let Us Down"

"The sex abuse scandal should've spurred John Paul to clean house."

Here, of course, is the (in)famous article by Rod Dreher yesterday at OpinonJournal, originally published in the Wall Street Journal, August 20. (It had been posted to the FreeRepublic website that same day.)

Let me begin by saying that I will be 27 years old on October 9, 2002. Well, no. Not really. Actually, I will be 45 years old, January 10, 2003. I will have been a Catholic for 27 years this coming October 9. I hope 27 years in the Catholic Church gives me enough Catholicity to avoid being pegged as an ignorant, snot-nosed convert. :)

I have read Dreher's article several times. I find it to be respectful, measured, and sober. From some of his comments at In Between Naps, I see that he had a 900-word limit and only four hours in which to write. What very few real complaints may be made of it can probably be chalked up to those limitations. I only wish that I could have written so precisely, so well, with similar constraints.

Frankly, I am astonished — and I am appalled — at the reaction by many Catholics to Dreher's article. Mostly because vitriolic personal judgements have been levelled at him for daring to criticize the prudential judgements of a reigning pontiff. He is accused of grandstanding, of not thinking with the Tradition, and of being the seat of monstrous pride.

No matter what else they do, these inexcusable personal attacks will provide boatloads of ammunition to any anti-Catholic bigot who is paying attention.

How's that? A well-educated Catholic has a ready reply to the typical bigot's accusation that Catholics think the pope can do no wrong: it's not true. Yes, the pope is infallible in carefully circumscribed conditions. Yes, his doctrinal pronouncements in other conditions must be given religious assent, because he is by divine intention the Teacher of the Universal Church. But God never promised His Church that anybody in positions of authority would be wise and just. Not even the pope. So, Catholics do not believe that the pope can do no wrong.

But anti-Catholic bigots following the embarrassing attacks on Rod Dreher — embarrassing to the attackers and embarrassing to Catholics at large — will have scads of evidence to the contrary. Dreher is being pilloried because he has dared to criticize the pope's actions (or inactions).

Seldom do any of Dreher's attackers actually respond to what he wrote. Indeed, I find it difficult to avoid the impression that the most vehement attackers did not read the article before they launched, and now have to hold a position that is unwarranted by the actual circumstances. They don't, most of them, seem to want to bother to attempt to say why his viewpoint is mistaken: they attack him for daring to have it and for daring to express it.

Some think that it was inappropriate to publish the article in a secular newspaper. I'm not sure I would quarrel with that complaint. But that does not seem to me to be enough to have elicited the scorched-Dreher response we are seeing. And, surely, the article reached far more Catholics that way than it would have any other. (And that's a sad observation to have to make, in and of itself.) And, really, ought it to be a secret from the public at large that faithful Catholics have been complaining with alarm for decades about the seemingly unstoppable multiplication of Subversive Traitors in our midst in the Church in the USA? I think the more people who know that faithful Catholics are dismayed at the gutting of the Catholic faith here, the better.

Some also complain that Dreher is picking on an old man, laying a burden on his already over-burdened shoulders. But this pope wasn't always old and frail. And Dreher is not criticizing merely the pope's failure to remove miscreants this year: he is criticizing the pope's failure to remove miscreants for the past twenty years. I cannot help but think that these same Rod-attackers would have said, 15 or 20 years ago, to give the pope time: he's just getting started. And, had the criticism come after the pope's death, I cannot help but think that they would have attacked Dreher for not having the courage to speak up while the great man was still alive. It would have all boiled down to the same thing: don't dare criticize the pope. At least, don't dare criticize this one.

The most reasonable and well-thought "response" actually came months ago, from the indefatigable Dave Armstrong (whom I have known for many years, by the way). Several bloggers and/or commenters have posted a link to his essay "Why Doesn't Pope John Paul II DO Something About the Modernist Dissenters in the Catholic Church?" dated March 7, 2002.

I hope I'm not taking too many liberties if I sum up Dave's argument this way: a crackdown would have provoked a schism, and that would have been worse than mere rampant heresy.

He's right. I think. But he's also wrong. I think. Because not having cracked down is going to... provoke a schism. As I have written before, thousands and thousands of professional Catholics (priests, religious, theologians, etc.) genuinely feel that this conservative pope is the only thing standing between them and their dreams come true: women priests, married priests, homosexual marriage, moral abortion, moral divorce and remarriage, moral artificial contraception, and moral fornication. (In a nutshell, complete capitulation to the world.) And millions and millions of Catholics in the USA have been taught to feel the same way: the Catholic Church is finally going to wake up and change 2,000 years of doctrine when this conservative pope is dead and gone.

And it simply is not going to happen. Not in the next ten years. Not in the next ten thousand years. And the Subversive Traitors, of every rank and station, are going to explode with rage. Not because a pope cracked down. But because the pope, whoever he may have been or will be, did not cave in to their demands.

Would judicious use of papal authority to remove Subversive Traitors have provoked schism? Or would it have prevented schism by showing heretics they will not be tolerated in the body, and by showing hard-pressed faithful Catholics that the Catholic Church in the USA is not doomed to rot away to unrecognizable debris? I don't know. Neither do you. (If the choice boils down to Dave's argument and Rod's argument, though, I think Dave makes the better case.)

This I know: it is stupid for faithful Catholics to pillory another faithful Catholic for criticizing the pope's prudential judgements. Stupid! Stupid! STUPID!

As I said earlier, I am astonished by the vitriolic reaction. Trying to distance myself from the situation — I think both Pope John Paul II and Rod Dreher are a blessing to the Church — I wonder why some of the reaction is so vitriolic. I don't know. But I have a suspicion. And my suspicion is this: the most vitriolic attacks on Rod Dreher are coming from those who do not want to admit to themselves that, though he may be ultimately mistaken, Dreher's argument has an awful lot going for it.

That being said, I do want to make something clear: Pope John Paul II is a great man and a great pope. Were there such an election, I would gladly nominate him for Greatest Man of the Twentieth Century. But I'd probably have to stand in a very long line to do so. The wonderful work he has done or overseen — especially his encyclicals, the new Code of Canon Law, and the new Catechism — and particularly his own life, personal and public, are inspiring the new generation of Catholics to embrace the real Catholic faith without embarrassment, and are laying the groundwork for a further renewal that is already beginning.

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Mon. 08/26/02 08:33:46 PM
Categorized as Classic & Pope John Paul the Great.