Posted on 10/13/2006 4:59:56 PM PDT by NYer
Back in 2001, when I first started writing about the child sex-abuse scandal in the Church, Father Tom Doyle, the heroic priest who ruined his own career by speaking out for victims, warned me, "If you keep going down this path, you are going to go to places darker than you can imagine." I thought I understood what he meant, but I didn't. Even if I had, by then, I couldn't have stopped. What brought me in touch with Fr. Doyle was my having stumbled upon a cell of clerical molesters at a Carmelite parish in the Bronx. They had preyed on a teenage immigrant boy who was troubled, and whose father was back in Nicaragua. His mother sent him to the priests for counseling, thinking that maybe being around some men of God would do the boy some good. The priests ended up molesting him. When the boy's father arrived in the States and found out what had happened, he went to the Archdiocese of New York to tell them what happened. They offered to cut him a check if he'd sign a paper agreeing to let the Archdiocese's attorneys handle the matter.
And that's how it began for me. At the time, as the father of a young boy, I couldn't shake the thought What if this had happened to my family? Would we be treated this way by the Archdiocese? ...
The sex-abuse scandal can't be easily separated from the wider crisis in the American Catholic Church, involving the corruption of the liturgy, of catechesis, and so forth. I've come to understand how important this point is, because if most other things had been more or less solid, I think I could have weathered the storm. But I found it impossible to find solid ground.
...
After months, we finally made a decision: we would visit an Orthodox parish. As Catholics, we knew at least that the Sacraments there were valid. Though we couldn't receive communion, we could at least be in the presence of the Eucharistic Christ, and worship liturgically with them, and draw close to God on Sunday morning, however imperfectly. I can hardly express the burden of guilt I felt when I crossed the threshold of St. Seraphim's parish that morning. But you know, it was a wonderful place. The liturgy was breathtakingly beautiful. The preaching orthodox. And the people -- half of them Russian, most of the others converts -- could hardly have been kinder and more welcoming. As a new Episcopalian friend told me a couple of weeks ago after he visited St. Seraphim's, "There is life there."
We kept going back, and finally got invited to dinner at the archbishop's house. I feared it would be a stiff, formal affair. I was astonished to turn up at the address given, to find that it was the shabby little cottage behind the cathedral. We went in, and it was like being at a family reunion. Vladika's house was jammed with parishioners celebrating a feast day with ... a feast. There was Archbishop Dmitri in the middle of it all, looking like a grandfatherly Gandalf. I had never in all my years as a Catholic been around people who felt that way about their bishop. The whole thing was dizzying -- the fellowship, the prayerfulness, the feeling of family. I hadn't realized how starved I was for a church community.
Over time, we got to know the people of the parish. They became our friends. It was a new experience for me to be in a parish where you can be openly small-o orthodox, and the priest and the people support you in that. In "Crunchy Cons," the Orthodox convert (from RCism) Hugh O'Beirne says that Catholics new to the Orthodox Church may find it surprising that they don't have to be on a "war footing" -- meaning the culture wars don't intrude into worship. People are on the same page, and if they're not, they're not out trying to get the Church to change her position on abortion, gay marriage, inclusive language, and all that. As someone who more or less is on the front lines of the culture war every day in my job as a journalist, I found it a new and welcome experience to be able to go to church on Sunday and get built back up for the struggle ahead, instead of to find mass the most debilitating hour of the week.
Julie and I could see what was happening to us: we were falling in love with Orthodoxy. On several occasions, we stopped to check ourselves. But we couldn't bring ourselves to leave this place, where we were back in touch with Christ, and learning to serve Him in community, to return to what we had experienced as a spiritual desert. I know this is not every Catholic's experience, but this was ours.
......
I had to admit that I had never seriously considered the case for Orthodoxy. Now I had to do that. And it was difficult poring through the arguments about papal primacy. I'll spare you the details, but I will say that I came to seriously doubt Rome's claims. Reading the accounts of the First Vatican Council, and how they arrived at the dogma of papal infallibility, was a shock to me: I realized that I simply couldn't believe the doctrine. And if that falls, it all falls. Of course I immediately set upon myself, doubting my thinking because doubting my motives. You're just trying to talk yourself into something, I thought. And truth to tell, there was a lot of that, I'm sure.
But what I noticed during all this Sturm und Drang over doctrine was this: we were happy again as a family, and at peace. Julie said one day driving home from liturgy, "Isn't it great to look forward to going to church again?" ... Here I was beginning to live a more Christ-like life as a fellow traveler of Orthodoxy, and knowing that if I went back to full-fledged Catholicism, I would be returning to anger and despair. What does it mean to live in the Christian truth in that situation? How would I feel if I approached the Judgment Seat and said to God, "I lived as a depressed and embittered man, lost my children to the Christian faith, and was a terrible witness to your goodness. But Lord, thanks to you, I never left Catholicism."
It was not an abstract question for me. I wondered: is the point of our life on earth to become like Jesus, or is it to maintain formal affiliation with the Roman Catholic Church? ...
I can look back also and see that my own intellectual pride helped me build a weak foundation for my faith. When I converted to Catholicism in 1992 (I entered the Church formally in 1993), it was a sincere Christian conversion. But I also took on as my own all the cultural and intellectual trappings of the American Catholic right. I remember feeling so grateful for the privilege and gift of being Catholic, but there was a part of me that thought, "Yay! I'm on the A-Team now, the New York Yankees of Christianity. I'm on Father Neuhaus's team!" ...
A few weeks back, I mentioned to Julie on the way to St. Seraphim's one morning, "I'm now part of a small church that nobody's heard of, with zero cultural influence in America, and in a tiny parish that's materially poor. I think that's just where I need to be."
...
As far as tradition goes, I have moved with my family to a church that I believe stands a much better chance of maintaining the historic Christian deposit of faith over time. To be more blunt, I have moved to a church that in my judgment within which I and my family and my descendants will be better able to withstand modernity. Basically, though -- and this is as blunt as I can be -- I'm in a church where I can trust the spiritual headship of the clergy, and where most people want to know more about the faith, and how we can conform our lives to it, rather than wanting to run away from it or hide it so nobody has to be offended.
"If you give them a Catholic Holy Mass, all the smells and bells. May Crownings, devotions, a sprinkling of Latin, they will come."
You know, I think at least in part, you are right. I well remember the High Masses at our local Catholic parish as a kid; long lines of altarboys and choir members, magnificent chanting and clouds of incense. There was no question but that the congregation had joined with the Cherubim and Seraphim, six winged and many eyed, in worshipping Almighty God! Those Liturgies were wonderful and so much like our Divine Liturgy of +John Chrysostomos.
Just a word to the wise, however; don't get too big.
Many Years, Rod. Welcome!
Well that explains it. That and the diet. I think it's the Loukemades, plus Retsina and Ouzo.
The problem was the lack of catechesis or, rather, liberal Christianity in the place of Catholicism. It was not until My children got into college that I woke to the fact that they knew NOTHING about the teachings of the Church. In my inattention I failed to notice they were being turned into Episcopalians.
"That and the diet. I think it's the Loukemades, plus Retsina and Ouzo."
Just the Ouzo. God, what vile stuff!
I used to really like it. Now I can't have licorice...
"The problem was the lack of catechesis or, rather, liberal Christianity in the place of Catholicism. It was not until My children got into college that I woke to the fact that they knew NOTHING about the teachings of the Church. In my inattention I failed to notice they were being turned into Episcopalians."
No doubt that's part of it, but I do believe there is more to it. Even well catechised Roman Catholics, say of my advanced years, know little or nothing of Church history or of the theology behind the teachings of the Roman Church. Even with them when I mention the Fathers, I get a blank stare. Just my opinion, but I suspect this may have to do with an old "pay, pray and obey" mentality which prevailed in the Western Church. The laity was never taught that it was their job to keep an eye on the hierarchy and to ferret out and expose heresy and heterodoxy among the priests and their superiors. Now of course that wasn't the way things worked in the Latin Church so to expect such behavior is unfair, I'll admit. I hate to use this term, but it seems to me that the Latin system prevented and prevents the People of God from "taking ownership" of the Faith and that much of the trouble the Latin Church now may be experiencing stems from this mentality. Isn't it interesting that the same problems haven't cropped up in the other particular churches in communion with Rome!
Both. But part of the problem was the POSITIVE content of what they did learn in religious education, and I must admit I was confued myself. I did not realize that so many priests and religious had lost the faith. I attribute the scandals to the number of pretenders in the Church.
I should have read my comments more carefully. Most of her hostility about RCC is that "you guys aren't the first anyway.... you left us.... you twisted tradition." That sort of thing.
As a reader of history, and a "fan" of John Henry Newman and of the historian Christopher Dawson , I have always taken a long view of the Church. However, it has taken me a long to sort out what has happened to the Church since VII, to separate the sheep from the goats. I now understand the Reformation better, since what has happened since 1965 is another reformation, which like the first was characterized by a rebellion of the lower clergy. I don't know if you have read Jacques Maritain's Peasant of the Garonne, Which was published just at the end of the Council and which forecast all the bad things that have happened since. Maritain had been an idol of the liberals, but this they wrote off as the confusion of a garrolous old man, when what they hated was that he was spot on. It is a prophesy. I bought it, skimmed through it, and more or less discounted what he said. The most striking phase is "geneflection to the world." This is what so many priests did. They abandoned their mission; the ones who stayed too often were like Hans Kueng or , worst, Father Drinan. Eventually I got to see what Dostroyevski so mistrusted the Jesuits. They want a worldly kingdom of heaven, like the Muslims.
"The most striking phase is "geneflection to the world.""
I have often argued this very point with a much loved cousin who is a Jesuit (and, I fear, something of a heretic). The Church is in the world, not of the world. Its role is to conform the world to the Holy Spirit, to a path towards theosis, not make itself relevant to whatever the Zeitgeist, surely a demon, says the world is today. From my vantage point, it appears that this drive to conform The Church to the world is precisely the result of Vatican II.
That isn't the "Latin system," so much as it is a peculiar mentality that has grown up in the West, and is especially bad in this country.
There were/are plenty of priests and religious who nurtured that "religion is something best left to the priests and sisters" mentality, because it made their jobs easier. (If nobody asks tough questions, they don't have to answer tough questions, and can then move on to important things, like golf.)
The absolute antithesis to that is some of the lay movements, like Opus Dei and others, which preach a objective, real lay vocation to holiness and orthodoxy.
As far as there being a lack of community in large parishes, I think the lack of authentic community is not the cause of the problems, but the symptom of them. The problems arise from the utter banality of the liturgy in some of those parishes, and from the extreme clericalism of some of the priests in those parishes. (See above.)
And it's also true that catechesis absolutely stank in the years between 1965 and 1985. The people who were the victims of that bad catechesis are now the young and middle-aged adults who should be the heart of the community in those parishes. Many of them are gone; they're either inactive Catholics or have left the Church completely.
But even those who have stayed often don't have the understanding of their faith necessarily to become the kind of lay defenders of orthodoxy you have in mind.
Poor Dreher, I fear, didn't have the gumption to stand up to the clerics. My model is Father Neuhaus who in another time and place would have become a bishop. I am too old to be overawed by bishops or politicians.
"That isn't the "Latin system," so much as it is a peculiar mentality that has grown up in the West, and is especially bad in this country."
Do you suppose this is a result of the immigrant history of the Catholic Church in America? Just yesterday a priest observed to me that even within the past 100 years the parish priest was sort of the connection between the immigrants in the parish and the protestant authorities around them. Often he was the best educated and likely spoke English. On the other hand, this is the same experience of Orthodoxy here and the mentality about which we are speaking didn't develop there and of course it wouldn;t explain the problems of Catholicism in the rest of the First World.
Besides it was good to find out that K is not man enough to chug Ouzo. Now I have something to hold over his head.
To see some real men, check out the link on my FR page called Georgian Legend. You just know these men would not let a bit of Ouzo stop them.
I don't know for sure, but the Catholic Church in this country was very strongly influenced by the Irish, so it may be partly an Irish thing. Of course, the Irish had to keep their faith alive under intense persecution for a couple of centuries, and that may have led to an over-deferential tendency to "trust Father to do/know it".
"Besides it was good to find out that K is not man enough to chug Ouzo. Now I have something to hold over his head."
In my village we give the Ouzo to babies and grandmothers. Real men drink Tsipuro!
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