"A Traditionalist Slandering Of 'Neo-Catholics'"

Rerum Novarum links to an editorial at The Wanderer. By and large, it is very good; but, the following impassioned passage, which I infer to have been sparked by Rod Dreher's (in)famous WSJ article, would be very hard for me to defend:

.... It appears to be increasingly fashionable for some "conservative" and "orthodox" Catholic commentators to bewail and assail the lack of governance over the Church by this Holy Father, even beyond ultra-trad fringe groups.

It may well be that many of us may secretly desire that he defrock bishops, send cardinals into prison ministry, issue anathemas, and so on, but it is not for any of us to judge the Holy Father, not just because we do not know all the things he knows, but because it is simply not the right thing to do — unless we happen to be St. Bernard of Clairvaux or St. Catherine of Siena.

The Holy Father is judged by no one, except God.

We’re living in a strange epoch, when thousands of years of civilized behavior — pleasant things such as respect for parents and elders, piety, simplicity, honesty — are vanishing. The duty of every Catholic in such times is to pray for the Holy Father, not to dump barrels of corrosive criticism over his every word and gesture.

Judge not lest ye be judged. To those who show mercy, mercy will be shown....

Yep. That's the kind of thing the anti-Catholic bigots love to see: Don't you even think to dare to criticize the pope unless you're a canonized saint. It's ammunition, you see, to aim at the mind-numbed robotic can't-think-for-themselves Catholics who think the pope is God and can't be criticized. Moreover, the editorialist seems to confuse dominical admonitions against judging another person with a prohibition of judging another person's actions. And, God alone is my judge, too: that certainly does not mean my actions are beyond criticism.

I don't know of any "conservative" "orthodox" Catholics (why do these adjectives need to be in quotation marks, Wanderer?) who "dump barrels of corrosive criticism over" the pope's "every word and gesture". If the editorialist cannot distinguish sober, measured, responsible criticism from "barrels" of corrosion, maybe he shouldn't be writing about these things. Or, rather, he should be more specific, so we don't have to suppose who it is to whom he refers. And cut down on high-sounding flourishes that do nothing for his case except overstate it.

I'm going to stop here, before I get to the point where I might be charged with dumping corrosive criticism on his every word......... ;)

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Thu. 09/05/02 12:24:51 PM
Categorized as Classic.