Throne and Altar

Eric Sammons at OnePeterFive writes concerning why our bishops are so bad

I would say a big reason is the selection process. The process as it’s currently set up results in choosing priests like my old pastor. Although ideology is one factor in bishop picks, I think pragmatism is a much bigger factor. The Church wants “safe” bishops – bishops who won’t rock the boat, who maintain the status quo. The Church wants bishops whose first priority is protecting not the Faith or souls, but the institutional Church.

I hear this a lot from conservative Catholics who should remember that Luther’s idea that there is a visible and an invisible Church is heresy.  The “institutional Church” is the only Church–the bride and mystical body of Christ, etc.  There will be no invisible, spiritual Church left over if media and government action destroy the “institutional Church”, so preserving it should be a bishop’s first priority.

As the process currently stands, the selection of new bishops rests almost entirely in the hands of the local and regional bishops, along with the apostolic nuncio for the country…As should be obvious, this bureaucratic process essentially ensures that the status quo is maintained. If a potential candidate has at any time “rocked the boat,” he will be passed over for a “compromise” choice. There’s almost no chance of a radical selection. In a sense, it’s an oligarchy: a small number of men have all the power in determining who will become a bishop.

Thank God!

Sammons’ advice, of course, is to give the laity a say, which would just put us on the fast track to apostasy, since no episcopal candidate could ever be approved again who wasn’t openly in favor of gay marriage.  As with any democratic element, one might as well just give power directly to the New York Times editorial board and cut out the middleman.

In dioceses that have historically been overrun by heresy, it’s likely the selection committee will make bad selections. But let’s be honest: it’s unlikely their selections will be worse than what we have now.

I don’t think conservatives appreciate how well the Church’s authoritarian constitution has worked.  The Church has kept her prohibition of contraception on the books for half a century in the face of 80-90% lay dissent.  This is extraordinary.

The reason the bishops and priests are so rotten is because the laity is even more rotten.  They may well be the least rotten bunch we’d be willing to endure, which still makes them a loathsome bunch.  We should be grateful that the Church is not following the protocol left by Jesus Christ for situations like ours.

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I’ve seen some bad ideas floating around the Catholic blogosophere of late.

One, I hear that we could ordain married men to flush out the gay priests.  But is a married man more likely to be uncompromised by sexual sin than a homosexually-inclined, nominally-celibate priest?  Remember that contraception is a mortal sin.  Also, the modern clergy is just not very appealing to masculine men, so at best we might end up only as queer-ridden as the Mainline Protestants, which is hardly worth messing with tradition for.

Two, remember that no matter how awful the teaching of Pope Francis is, if the majority of the laity had their way, it would be far, far worse.  If it were true that Catholic doctrine is only valid if “received” (i.e. accepted) by the laity, then this would negate the Church’s teaching on contraception, cohabitation, divorce, homosexuality, and transubstantiation.  The laity would dismantle the Church faster than the clergy if they had the chance.

Thank God for the Church’s authoritarian structure.  Without it, we would be completely trapped within the bubble of modern prejudice.

I won’t say that the laity will never rebel against their clergy.  In fact, the Catholic laity was all in favor of punishing the Church with the contraception mandate.  Not for the first time–remember the French revolution–the Church was protected from her laity by Protestants with their heretical notion of religious freedom.  Or consider the frequent persecution of the Church in Latin America, where there are not enough Protestants to protect her (a preview of our future if our open-borders clergy have their way).  But if the laity do rebel, you can be sure it will be in the service of evil.  Really, I am a Catholic layman, and outsiders cannot fathom how vile and worthless we are.  Never grateful to the Church, never mind even the thought of suffering unpopularity for her defense.  Always so insufferably pleased with ourselves.  Always whining about how we deserve better.  And what we want is always more license to sin, more surrender to the world.

There is no reservoir of good Catholics to whom we can look to save us.  Quite a dilemma, I admit.

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This is why I don’t trust psychology.  Keith Kahn-Harris at the Guardian wonders what can be wrong with people that they would doubt officially-promulgated truth on the Holocaust, vaccines, AIDS, global warming, and evolution.  Yes, these sinister “denialists” construct an elaborate pretense of reasoned argumentation, but all of that can be ignored.   As a professional sociologist, Dr. Kahn-Harris is privy to the inner thoughts of strangers, and he knows that denialists actually do it because they hate reason and want to commit mass murder.  Ah, but here they run into a contradiction, because in order to promote their science-hating, Jew-hating, homicidal plans, they must pretend to respect the scientific method and regard genocide as a bad thing.  Of course, it’s only a contradiction if you accept that, for example, climate change skeptics actually do hate science and just want to promote mindless greed, which of course they have never admitted or provided any evidence of believing.  But Dr. Kahn-Harris is, as I said, a credentialed expert and believer of the establishment creed, so if you doubt him, you probably just hate science.

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I give a summary of the whole “welcome to the ranks of the deplorables” series here.

Also, I got tired of social science papers on conservative stupidity just giving means but not the amount of overlap.  So I did it myself.  Below, “1” is the most liberal, and “7” is the most conservative.  Details in the Orthosphere link.

You see why just giving averages can be deceptive?

I was pleased with myself for this article.  Unlike most of mine, it has actual information.

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The Cathechism now states

Today, however, there is an increasing awareness that the dignity of the person is not lost even after the commission of very serious crimes…

Consequently, the Church teaches, in the light of the Gospel, that “the death penalty is inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person”,[1] and she works with determination for its abolition worldwide.

Dignity arguments are always fallacious when claiming to establish universal norms.  This is because the way that dignity is recognized is entirely culture-dependent.  As with standards of modesty, the intentional object of dignity is an objective, universal reality, but the rules of its expression vary from people to people.  Even as we recognize this, we are nevertheless bound by rules of our own people.  Indeed, to follow a customary rule with full knowledge of its contingency is to make two acts of recognition at once, the first to the universal object (the dignity of persons, in this case) and the second to the value of spiritual unity with one’s people.  My neighbor’s dignity deserves to be recognized, and my people deserve that I should do it in the manner of my ancestors and neighbors.  Thus, dignity arguments may well be valid for the culture in which they are made.

For example, there is nothing intrinsically immoral about the owning of slaves.  The Church has recognized this from the beginning, and abolitionist arguments all fail (at least as intending to prove the intrinsic inadmissibility of slavery as opposed to noting some dangers and disadvantages of the practice).  No slave-owning people would have agreed that they fail to recognize the humanity of their slaves, and they knew their own minds far better than self-righteous Bostonians.  However, abolitionist propaganda has convinced the larger culture that to own a slave is to assert his lack of dignity or “full”  humanity (whatever that means), so now it has become immoral for us to purchase slaves, because we would now see this act as demeaning our slaves, and it is sinful to intend to demean according to the customs of one’s society.  For example, there is nothing intrinsically immoral, absent cultural context, about sticking one’s tongue out at another person, but if one’s people regard this act as a sign of ultimate hatred and scorn, then it is immoral to do so.

Pope Francis now provides an analogous argument against the death penalty.  That execution intrinsically fails to recognize the dignity of the condemned is absurd.  It is, in fact, the ultimate recognition of him as a moral agent.  All other times and places have recognized this.  The Church herself has always recognized it.  There are strong arguments for the intrinsic immorality of the death penalty, but this is not one of them.  Dignity arguments can at most apply within a single cultural context.  Thus, the Pope must appeal to “Today…growing awareness…”  Just execution by lawful authority may be in itself morally admissible, but we in the West have developed this bizarre hangup over killing people, so we should not do it.

Alternatively, one could regard the change to the Catechism as an act of papal authority.  The death penalty is not intrinsically immoral, but the spiritual power is superior to the temporal, and Christ’s Vicar on Earth now commands temporal powers to refrain from this act.  However, my explanation at least makes some use of His Holiness’ arguments, which appear to use his teaching/declarative role rather than his ruling/imperative role.  (“The Church teaches…” rather than “the Church commands…”)

I begin to think that it is becoming spiritually perilous for the laity to seek to know what the Church’s teaching is on topics which do not affect us personally.  The experience of physics and mathematics has led us to expect that the truth should be simple, beautiful, and clear.  We would like to have a few clear principles to understand, defend, and apply.  But when we wish to know what the Church teaches about something like the death penalty, we find that we cannot proceed as we would wish.  Instead of applying general principles, we must first gather two thousand years of documents, then try to carefully parse the language in each one looking for some set of readings that will make all of them consistent.  I admit that my mind rebels against this, and I say to myself “I don’t have time for all this lawyer sh*t”.  Perhaps this is my pride, that I think myself too good for “lawyer sh*t”.  Perhaps I’m just spoiled by science and philosophy.  But then again, there’s no reason why I must understand what the Church teaches on the death penalty.  I am not a magistrate with the power of life and death, and the Church has made it clear that she doesn’t want amateur apologists like me picking fights on her behalf.  So perhaps I should just leave it at that.  I do not know if the death penalty is always immoral.  I do not know what the Church teaches about it.  The question of faith–do I believe that what the Church teaches about it is true?–does not even arise for me on this issue.

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Some reaction-friendly articles that have been linked on Arts and Letters Daily lately:

Heather MacDonald on the diversity craze wrecking science.

A scientist at UCLA reports: “All across the country the big question now in STEM is: how can we promote more women and minorities by ‘changing’ (i.e., lowering) the requirements we had previously set for graduate level study?” Mathematical problem-solving is being deemphasized in favor of more qualitative group projects; the pace of undergraduate physics education is being slowed down so that no one gets left behind.

The New York Times (!) respectfully notes Michael Houellebecq’s critique of the sexual revolution.

The sexual revolution of the 1960s, widely seen as a liberation movement, is better understood as the intrusion of capitalist values into the previously sacrosanct realm of intimate life. “Just like unrestrained economic liberalism … sexual liberalism produces phenomena of absolute pauperization,” he writes. “Some men make love every day; others five or six times in their life, or never.”

Matthew Crawford introduces Hedgehog Review readers to the intricacies of virtue signaling.

The ongoing ferment on campus reveals the university as the site where the paradox of bourgeois society is most acute. As gatekeeper to the upper middle class, the elite university has as its primary social function the sorting of the population. (And it seeks rents commensurate with occupying such a choice position.) It detects existing inequalities, exacerbates them, and certifies them. And whatever else it does, it serves as a finishing school where the select learn to recognize one another, forging a class consciousness that has lately hardened into a de facto caste system. But for that very reason, by the logic Furet identifies, it is also the place where the sentiment that every inequality is illegitimate must be performed most strenuously.

…

The term shibboleth is interesting. Its definitions include “a peculiarity of pronunciation, behavior, mode of dress, etc., that distinguishes a particular class or set of persons” and “a common saying or belief with little current meaning or truth.” It is a random Hebrew word that acquired its present meaning when it was used by the Gileadites as a test to identify members of an enemy tribe, the Ephraimites, as they attempted to flee across the Jordan River. Ephraimites could not pronounce the sound sh (Judges 12:4–6). I think it is fair to say that one’s ability to pronounce the word diversity with a straight face, indeed with sincerity made scrupulously evident, serves as a shibboleth in this original sense. It answers the question of whether one wants to continue as a member in good standing of those institutions that secure one’s position in the upper middle class.

This article by James Poulos in National Affairs contains some strong criticisms of the liberal project.  It is poorly organized, as if the author doesn’t want his readers to realize what his real business is.  As I see it, the two most interesting points are 1) the liberal drive to put institutions at the service of individuals neglects the role institutions must play in the pro-social formation of these individuals, and 2) the end result of liberalism’s desire to “save humans from their humanity” is rule by algorithm.

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I notice something odd about this Vanity Fair article on and interview with World Wide Web pioneer Tim Berners-Lee.  Berners-Lee is talking about how to make the web less centralized.  The author, Katrina Brooker, is concerned about how to squash fake news and keep President Trump and Russia from using their web-based mind control powers.  Presumably the answer to that is more centralized censorship.  Do the two realize that they are speaking at cross-purposes, or is at least one of them that muddle-headed?

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