A Leisurely Ramble through the Comboxes and "The Posting That Failed"

My return to blogging and my decision to write about the threat to the Church from the theological and political right wing were both occasioned by my growing awareness of the extensive right-wing Catholic blogosphere. Within this category, I have recently had occasion to discover a little clutch of interconnected blogs which chronicle the goings-on, or imagined goings-on, within the Archdiocese of Boston. All of these display a strong animus toward the Archbishop himself, Seán Cardinal O'Malley (who has a blog of his own, by the way), and number of other archdiocesan officials, especially Fr. J. Bryan Hehir, currently the Cardinal's Secretary for Health and Social Services, and Fr. Richard Erikson, currently the Vicar General. Indeed, one of this clutch of blogs is dedicated exclusively to "exposing" Fr. Hehir.

Other targets of these bloggers' indignation and scorn are a long list of Catholic organizations and institutions, some of them ostensibly on the same side of controversial issues involving Church and state as the bloggers themselves. On this list, for example, are certain pro-life organizations, like Massachusetts Citizens for Life and the National Right to Life Committee, which some of the bloggers have decided are insufficiently rigorous or orthodox. And some of the people who post comments to these blogs are even more particular about the fellow Catholics they are willing to associate with than the bloggers themselves.

Recently, for example, when someone for MCFL dropped the name of Fr. Frank A. Pavone, the National Director of Priests for Life, a "Throw the Bums Out in 2010" combox poster calling himself "Jerry B." wrote to hurl this double anathema: "1) Fr. P. promotes the heresy that babies who die in Original Sin yet enter Heaven. 2) Fr. endorses blood-communion with the drippings of murdered babies, otherwise known as vaccination." Now, while I must admit that I do not understand the vaccination reference in point #2, I do recognize the position on unbaptized infants in point #1. The problem here is that Fr. Pavone, if he does indeed incline to take a lenient view of the matter, happens to be in good company -- so does His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI, who is, apparently, not quite Catholic enough for Jerry B. If you doubt me, you an look it up here and in several other places you can find by doing a little creative Googling.

When I said I recognize the position expressed in point #1, I meant that I recognize it from certain specific sources, namely those which claim that the present Pope is heretical on this and (in some instances) a large number of other topics and thus cannot be a legitimate holder of his office. Thus, they hold a position with regard to the Pope which is remarkably parallel with that of the "Birthers" toward President Barack Obama. Remarkable, isn't it, how much religious and political rightist extremisms seem to have in common!

This is not the only instance in which the voices in the blogs and their comboxes have come perilously close to Sedevacantism. Usually, to be sure, they never come right out and say that the pope is either illegitimate or grossly incompetent, but often that is the clear implication. For example, the unremitting blanket criticism of the American hierarchy to be found in some of these blogs can only be an indirect criticism of the present Pope and his immediate predecessor. Given the length of John Paul II's reign, very few of the currently serving American bishops can have been appointed by John XXIII or Paul VI, two Popes of whom the right wing is often openly contemptuous. So in spite of a commonly expressed admiration for John Paul II and a piously professed allegiance to Benedict XVI, the implication is that both pontiffs were too dull or busy to notice the heretical and morally derelict tendencies of the men they appointed, or that they approved of and shared these tendencies themselves. The latter possibility is exactly what people like Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, who would like to have the Pope arrested in Britain and tried in the Hague, would maintain to have been the case. Does the Catholic right wing really want to ally itself to these characters? (By the way, please pray for poor Hitch, who has a very serious case of cancer. Even he feels that he is not long for this world.)

But the extremist tone of much of what appears in the comboxes may not be there entirely at random. As the television pundits have found out, featuring extremists who agree with them is good for ratings and keeps the excitement of their regular followers at a high level, while faturing extremists from the other side helps to establish a caricature of their views as representing all of them in the public mind and keeps the indignation of their followers at a fever pitch. In the political realm, the media on the left, like MSNBC, have been playing this game with the likes of Rand Paul and Sharron Angle, both of whom can be counted on to make statements which lead everyone but their greatest enthusiasts to question whether they are living in the real world.

I have recently had some personal experience of this tactic. After having explored the comments posted on a couple of the Boston blogs that had caught my attention, I concluded that these comments were either in close agreement with the positions of the blogger or, if in disagreement, so extreme, vituperative, unreasonable, ignorant, and at times obscene that they destroyed the credibility of their side of the argument. So I decided on a little experiment. Not a scientific experiment, nothing I would want to submit in an article to The New England Journal of Religious Pathology, yet none the less good enough for here. So I submitted two comments to the same moderated combox within minutes of one another. The first was a short, slightly snarky post criticizing the weak Latin of another commentator who had chosen to call herself "tantamergo." Within a reasonable time that comment appeared on the blog. my second contribution. reproduced below was much longer and more serious and addressed itself, in an unmistakably critical, yet reasonable and polite tone, I thought, to my difficulties with the tenor and intent of the anti-hierarchical blogs which I was just then discovering. This contribution has yet to make it past the moderator and onto the blog. I thought that perhaps, to complete the experiment, I should have written a third submission expressing the same objection but vituperative, abusive, and laced with deletable expletives, just to see if that would make it through the moderator's screening be posted because it would have been a self-discrediting verbal tantrum. But, alas, I simply do not have it in me to write that sort of thing, even anonymously. I suspect, however, based on other reactions allowed to appear in connection with earlier topics, that it might well have appeared.

Whatever the case may be, I have decided that it does, in fact, have merit, and I am posting it below for the record and to get it off my chest. (The piece in its original form was too long to be uploaded, so I cut the two sections printed below in brackets [...]. So here it is:

"The Bishops vs. Catholic Faithful (The Second Inning)" -- the title of this posting expresses what is so deeply wrong about your understanding of the Church and how it functions. The Church is not some kind of mobocracy in which a populist uprising can topple the government. It is not even an orderly democracy (as theological conservatives were once at great pains to tell us) in which the people get to "throw the bums out" periodically through free and fair elections. The Church is hierarchical.

Trying to apply the norms and methods of American secular politics to the Church, as you seem to do, is, on the face of it, profoundly non-Catholic, and shows exactly how deeply secular assumptions and instincts have tinctured the minds even of those who might think of themselves as the defenders of some kind of old-fashioned, "real Catholicism."

There is no justification in the traditions of the Church for its members to "take the law into their own hands" in the manner of secular revolutionaries, however just their grievances. Those who have attempted this in the past are known as Protestants and schismatics and have harmed, rather than built up, the unity of the Church.

[For the Catholic "faithful" (as a whole) to be "versus the Bishops,"(as a body) -- which is very different from an individual Catholic's being in conflict with a particular bishop over a specific issue -- would have been unthinkable to our "faithful" Catholic ancestors. The resolution of particular conflicts with particular bishops is possible within the structures of the hierarchical Church as regulated by Canon Law and papal decrees.]

I find the uncharitable tone and apparent intent of this blog (to somehow weaken people's loyalty and respect for the Cardinal Archbishop of Boston, toward whom the Pope has recently given renewed evidence of his confidence through his appointment as a visitor to the Church in Dublin) repugnant to a Catholic mind and sensibility. It would be better for the Church, I think, were it to be discontinued.

[Finally, the phrase "The Second Inning" reveals an understanding of conflict within the Church as a kind of game, an understanding which is, considering the gravity of what is at stake, completely inappropriate. The life of the Church is not a game, and its phases are measured in eras and ages, not "innings."]

How Times Have Changed!

Four years or so ago, when I established this blog and briefly continued to write for it, the most significant threats to the well-being and unity of the Catholic Church in the United States seemed to be coming from people who had misinterpreted the Second Vatican Council as permitting them, if not indeed encouraging them, to adapt the cultural style and teachings of the Church to the norms of American culture. This "inculturation" meant, in effect, a movement to Protestantize and even to some extent to secularize American Catholics' ways of belief and practice. The powerful appeal of this project to many American Catholics came mainly from two sources: (1) a deeply rooted sense of the superiority of "the American Way of Life," including the principles of the U. S. Constitution, over all others; (2) a misguided notion that loyalty to the Church in the wake of the Council meant a wholesale abandonment of old ways and an unquestioning adoption of the new.

In the absence of a clear idea of what was "reformable" in the Church and what was not, everything could seem equally up for grabs. If one was no longer obliged to abstain from eating meat on Fridays, then why bother any longer to go to Confession on Saturdays, which had always been even more of a drag? Furthermore, if aggiornamento meant that any given facet of the Church's life could be "updated," then why not change or eliminate those things about the Church which made her seem most foreign because they had no spontaneous appeal to American cultural sensibilities?

The almost instantaneous emergence of the "folk Mass" in the mid-to-late sixties and the continuation of the trend that it set even up to the present in many American parishes illustrates well the effect of the two influences mentioned above. Ironically, as I remember it, some of the earliest and most enthusiastic proponents of the "folk" approach to liturgical music had not too long before been among those most devoted to the cultivation of Gregorian Chant. The reason was that the chant had been important to the reform-minded liturgists in the decades leading up to the Council; many of the same people after the council, strongly under the influence both of its "pastoral" emphasis and of the contemporaneous burgeoning of a "folk" music associated with the promotion of social justice and resistance to the Vietnam War, found almost irresistible a new style of music which appealed to young people even as it expressed strong moral commitments on issues such as civil rights and peace.

In any case, the real threat to the Church in America seemed to me four years ago to be coming from groups like "Call to Action" and ideas like Robert Blair Kaiser's notion of an American "autochthonous church." Then, through various random circumstances, I started paying more attention to the opposite side of the spectrum of ecclesial opinion -- the so-called "conservative" side. And what I found there seemed, as time went by, just as extreme, just as mistaken, and just as alarming. In fact, it appeared to me that as the tactics and rhetoric of the American political Right became increasingly unrestrained by standards of truthfulness and fairness, so too did those of the ecclesiastical Right (involving, in many cases, the very same people).

There has even developed within the Church a rough equivalent of the political "Tea Party" movement, a kind of raucous populism that has had enough of the hierarchy and is not going to take it any more. Examples of this phenomenon can be found on Carol McKinley's blog "Throw the Bums Out in 2010," and the blogs it links to. In spite of a title which seems to allude to this year's mid-term elections, this blog is actually taken up almost exclusively with the affairs of the Archdiocese of Boston and with secular politics only in so far as they intersect with ecclesiastical concerns, such as in opposition to abortion. And it is almost completely devoted to discrediting the cardinal archbishop, the archdiocesan administration, and many of the institutions within the archdiocese. It is also not particularly enthusiastic about the rest of the American ecclesiastical establishment, especially as represented and governed by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (hereinafter the USCCB). In this it follows in the footsteps of the man who appears to be its principal theological mentor, frequently linked to or embedded in various like-minded blogs, Michael Voris, S. T. B., once of "St. Michael's Media," now of "Real Catholic TV."

Less populist in style and more professionally polished in his delivery of his views, Mr. Voris seems to share with Ms. McKinley two important things: the conviction that it is a mortal sin for Catholics to vote for most non-Republicans and the same interpretation of recent Church history. What it means to vote almost exclusively for Republicans is something I will let my readers discover for themselves -- it is all there in the public record. But the shared metanarrative concerning the course of Church history since Pius XII is something less obvious to the untrained eye and less generally accessible outside any source not already controlled by it.

The master idea behind this metanarrative is that the Catholic Church and most of its established institutions (i.e., its religious orders, schools, official liturgy, and major publicatons) have been hijacked by people acting, wittingly or unwittingly, according to the plans of the Forces of Darkness, and hence must be reclaimed or rescued by the Forces of Light, which happily include the likes of Mr. Voris, Ms. McKinley, and most of those ordinary folks in the pews. Some of the specific complaints which these people raise, such as that run-of-the-mill catechesis since the Seventies has been insipid and often barely Catholic seem justified and would meet with widespread agreement. But the overarching metanarrative seems unnecessary as a way of accounting for this and all the other specific sources of discontent with recent Catholic practices and attitudes in the United States and elsewhere.

On the one hand, this metanarrative is an easy extrapolation from the Biblical and traditional account of universal history as the titanic struggle of Satan versus God. Rejecting it therefore can be make to look like a rejection of the whole framework of Salvation History. On the other hand, a rejection of it is not necessarily a rejection of the underlying reality of history as a struggle between good and evil; it could rather be merely the rejection of a too confident assignment of roles in this struggle to particular historical figures and movements. Few would quarrel with the giving Hitler and Stalin, or Simon Magus and Alexander VI for that matter, stations in the ranks of the Powers of Darkness. But Father Joseph Gelineau and Archbishop Annibale Bugnini? One hesitates. Especially in an era superabounding in nonsensical conspiracy theories, the reasonable person with a concern for truth and justice can only resist giving easy credence to what seems nothing but another clutch of such theories.

In subsequent postings to this blog I hope to explore further this topic of the threat to the good estate of the Church from some of those on its theological and political right wing.