Throne and Altar

Matthew Franck at First Things recommends George Weigel’s, new summons for Catholics to be useful stooges for classical liberalism.  At least, I think he does.

I urge our readers to go read the rest of Weigel’s piece, which is as cogently argued as they will have come to expect.

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I’m preparing a big “why-I-am-a-Catholic” essay, and some of what follows might make it into that.  Let’s consider some incorrect models of how the Catholic mind works.

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I like them.  I really do.  I hope they don’t take a contrary impression from this post, in which I have my taxonomist hat on.  Anyway, please read and comment there.

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Mundabor has a great post on it here.  Excerpt:

Francis very often has a way of expressing himself that, no doubt with premeditation and malice, achieves his objective in a refined way. He does so by using a double subject that I will call, for the purposes of this post, the major and the minor one. The major subject is the one meant to make the worldwide headlines, the minor one is there to feed the pigeons. I have noticed this trick several times already. If you have paid attention to Francis’ utterances you will immediately recognise the style.

Imagine a phrase like this:

Gays, those who love God and do good, are the crown of Christ.

The major subject is “Gays”, the word Francis and other Modernists uses for “Homosexuals” and/or “Sodomites”. This is what makes the worldwide headlines.

The minor subject, “those who love God and do good”, is the pigeon food. The Pollyannas will immediately clutch on this straw to interpret “gays” as “those homosexuals who accept in its entirety the teaching of the Church, live a chaste life and pray unceasingly that God’s may give them the necessary graces so that they may get rid of their horrible perversion”.

After the phrase has been printed into the atheist and anti-clerical newspaper of your choice, Bergoglio’s Jesuitical Spiel begins: liberal newspapers the world over will run headlines on the lines of “Gays Are The Crown Of Christ, Says Pope”. Meanwhile, the “reading Hitler through Snow White” party will publish countless blog post, all more or less titled “did Francis really say that Gays are the crown of Christ?”, trying to explain to us the baddies of the press of the entire planet – yes, pretty much all of them – really do not get the humble, saintly man. You see, they will explain, he did say “Gays” (which is unfortunate, they will admit obtorto collo under the pressure of their smarter commenters) but hold on, he meant a certain particular very rare type of “gay”, who never even calls himself “gay”, and not your usual sodomite.

Yes, I’ve noticed this, too, although I’ve never described it so well.  And, of course, Pope Francis is by no means the only, or even the most egregious, one I hear it from.  It irritates me even more than outright heresy would, because heresy at least is honest in its aggression.  When I hear from various prelates that “proselytism” is evil, that “homophobia” is a sin, or that one shouldn’t “obsess” over doctrine, I know perfectly well that orthodox Catholicism is being attacked.  But when I, as an orthodox Catholic, defend my beliefs, someone will always tell me that I am being “uncharitable” in not giving these statements a Catholic meaning (rather than the meaning suggested by the statement’s context or the meaning its audience would be expected to take, and without any evidence that the orthodox reading was the speaker’s intended one), and that in showing myself so unkind and impious to my spiritual shepherds, I no doubt deserve to be further harangued by our non-judgemental pope.  Yes, one can define “proselytism” to mean something other than “evangelism”; one can define “homophobia” to mean something other than “disapproval of sodomy”; one can imagine a purely hypothetical situation of someone too obsessed with arguing the filioque for his own spiritual good.  But to speak this way is not to use the language as its current speakers do.  It is, at the very least, unpastoral.  It objectively promotes heresy, whether or not this was subjectively intended.  And, confound it, I wasn’t born yesterday–it certainly was intended.

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Ralph Hancock gives his fellow Mormons some good advice at First Things.  I suspect he’s right that when “thoughtful” Mormons insist that they are “open to continuing revelation”, what they really mean is that they’re on board with a slow-motion capitulation to the Left.

I suspect the situation of the LDS is as follows.  On the one hand, there are liberal Mormons who want their Church to surrender to the Left, and they let it be known that they will fight without ceasing until they get what they want.  (There are fewer of this type than there are liberal Catholics or liberal Evangelicals, which is no small strength for the LDS, but I doubt the ones they’ve got are much different from the ones we have.)  On the other hand, there are the faithful Mormons, who make it very clear that they will go along meekly whenever the leadership decides to surrender.  This does not create the proper incentive structure for the LDS leadership.  Equilibrium requires that force to the Left must be matched by equal and opposite force to the Right.

I would not presume to give advice to my Mormon friends, who after all inhabit a less grievously compromised religious body than mine (at least when judged by what happens at the parish level, rather than what’s “on the books” in the catechism).  However, I suspect that a general knowledge that there will be hell to pay for any compromise on sexual issues would only have a healthy effect on your leaders’ discussions.

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This made me return to that question.  I’ve never been sent to a seminar that told me I would be punished for participating in “hate groups” as labeled by the SPLC.

It was once true that universities were more belligerently Leftist than the rest of the country, but that is no longer really true.  Universities haven’t moved rightward, but the rest of society has moved far to the Left.  Now a university is one of the best places for a conservative to be, just because that’s where the old books are.

The one bright side of this is that it may rectify a distortion of the organized Right that I noted here:

A key difference between liberalism and conservatism:

Left intellectuals are expected to be more extreme than liberal voters.

Right intellectuals are expected to be more moderate than conservative voters.

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Behold American conservatism:

…They write laws to codify bigotry against people whose sexual orientation they condemn. They throw the members of a punk rock band in jail for the crime of being provocative and vulgar and for having the audacity to protest President Putin’s rule…

(See also the take-down on Alternative Right.)

Funny, I don’t remember John McCain officially having his little-homo-bluegrass-player moment yet.  Maybe I missed it, or maybe they’re not even bothering with formal announcements of apostasy anymore.  After all, America is our religion, and publicly-sanctioned sodomy and blasphemy are core American values.  As Edward Feser said about that other case, “I would say that Bottum isn’t being true to his religion, except that I suspect that he is.”

By the way, on the eve of the 2012 election, here was Jerry Salyer rootin’ for Putin:

 

Of course I’m not claiming Russia’s rulers actually do their duty, much less that they do it well; I am saying that however unscrupulous, Machiavellian, and power-hungry they may be, they are at least vaguely aware of what their duty is:  To preserve the nation.  This stands in stark contrast to Western rulers, who feel it their duty to destroy their respective nations so as to make way for a Brave New World.

In other words, Vladimir Putin is not really detested among our elite for his sins but for his redeeming qualities.  As we live in an age of liberal hegemony, Putin is hated for not being yet another groveling overseas yes-man for the Beltway establishment; as we live in an age of absurd militant tolerance, Putin is hated for not renouncing the very notion of a particular Russian identity; as we live in an age of Alan Alda, Ashton Kucher, and the metrosexual android from Star Trek:  The Next Generation, Putin is hated for appearing somewhat like a man.

That last is worth emphasizing:  The New York Times can’t stand Putin not because he’s a corrupt man, but because he’s a corrupt man.

As for his KGB ties, the outrage is hardly due to the KGB’s role in promoting godless Marxist revolution.   The real offense is that the KGB played a role in Russian nationalism — one of the few sane features of the Soviet mind and empire.

Yes, please do color me un-American, for actually, no, I don’t lie awake at night lamenting the shortage of gay pride parades in Moscow.  Nor do I lose much sleep fretting that, in the event “we” fail to take a strong stand, feminist punk bands throughout the world might lose their Soros-given right to bust into churches and shriek sacrilegious obscenities at the altar.  Nor do I patriotically yearn to see Pushkin and the balalaika finally and irrevocably supplanted by Coca-Cola and Lady Gaga.

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