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.
"That's about as far as I was willing to read."
Bingo.
Sounds like you are doing a good job. Hang in there.
So after I try it, I'll let you know. Hopefully they have it at the little Greek place we go to.
"Hmm, K, it looks like that stuff is free of licorice and I can have it.
So after I try it, I'll let you know. Hopefully they have it at the little Greek place we go to."
That's real unlikely, unless the owner has a private stash. The stuff is homemade Greek white lightening! But You'll impress the owner if you ask for it. By the way, if you don't like it, it makes a good lighter fluid!
Oh fine, get me interested...and then dash all of my hopes.
"Oh fine, get me interested...and then dash all of my hopes."
Not to worry. Its likely the owner has some back in the kitchen... in case of snake bite. Despina might have some! :) Its good stuff!
I didn't know that, either. I've always like Cavuto's business news and general commentary.
I will make some inquiries...and get back to you.
Lets think about this a moment.
The Priest has (possibly) committed a dreadful sin in his past (can't say for certain unless he owned up to it). He has presumably repented and moved on with his life in a positive direction in tune with the will of Christ (Dreher notes that he was a wonderful priest in Dallas), and been forgiven by God and his spiritual superiors (the Bishops).
Now Dreher the Scandalized comes along and is, "Shocked, shocked" to find old sins amongst the members of the Church. What's more, he feels a need to trumpet them to the world, to make sure that everyone else is aware of another man's secret sins. (In my old Moral Theology Manual, the exposure to public view of the secret sins of others, especially sins for which they have been forgiven and done penance, is noted as a serious mortal sin.)
Dreher was obviously never a Catholic. A Donatist possibly. Maybe a Hussite or Wycliffite. Perhaps a Jansenist. But definitely not a Catholic.
A Catholic would understand that the members of the Church are sinners striving to be saints, and that the reason for the confessionals in the Church is because man is in need of repentance, not because varnished wood doors with latin inscriptions over them look pretty and enhance the aestheitc experience of worship.
Christ came to forgive sinners and perfect them, not gather the perfect and confirm their spiritual superiority.
This priest seems to me to be like the Tax Collector, while Dreher looks like the Pharisee.
Rod needs to take a long hard look in the mirror.
Sure he did. He's renounced the dogma of Papal primacy and Infallibility. That makes him a heretic, and heretics cannot be members of the Church, since the members of the Church have "one faith".
We can speak of the Orthodox as being a quasi-communion with the Catholic Church because the division between us as laity is not a result of either of us changing our faith to something different from what we understand the Apostles to have handed down, but over disagreements between our Bishops over the nature of that faith and how it impacts the organization and operation of the Church. Given such a situation, it is expected that there are material differences between us in certain points of the faith, however these differences are merely material, and not formal, because there is a lack of willfullness in the differences.
That being said, Communion in the Church is a one way affair that flows down from the Pope through the Bishops to the laity. We are in the Church because we hold the faith and are in communion with our Bishop and through our Bishop with the Pope. We are not in the Church because we simply proclaim ourselves so to be. The quasi-Communion we believe to hold with the Orthodox flows from tacit Papal recognition/granting of spiritual jurisdiction to the Bishops of the East (i.e. he has not and does not excommunicate them, unlike the renegades among the Chinese or the Old Catholics or the SSPX, but instead actually recognizes their spiritual authority and holds it to be valid). However, despite this, it is quite possible for a Catholic to take up heresy, as Rod Dreher has done, leave the Church, and attempt to affiliate with the Orthodox. Such a plan of action does not leave one remaining inside the Church since it involves formal rejection of communion with the See of Peter.
This is quite different from a Protestant becoming Orthodox, or an Orthodox simply being himself, because their the acceptance of the Orthodox faith involves a tacit admission of some form of Papal jurisdiction and communion, since the history of Orthodoxy does include at least some recognition of the Roman claims, rather than an outright rejection of it which leaving the Catholic Church necessarily involves.
That's about as far as I was willing to read. It's liek an Orthodox saying "personal take: for me it'd be absurd to join, say, the Latin Church without being Latin."
No, more like an Irish or English Catholic coming to the US and deciding that where they really belong is in a ethnic Slovak or Lithuanian Catholic parish, because it has pretty music and nice people and fun festivals, and its small and inviting.
Correct, but Rod Dreher is, since he has taken up heresy.
"the fact that there were no Eastern Catholic Churches in the DFW area"
(Fingers stuck in ears, loudly singing "I can't hear you, lah di dah di dah!")
http://artemis.crosslink.net/~hrycak/ch_indx/us-tx.html
Garland
St.Thomas The Apostle Indian Catholic Church (Syro-Malabar - Local Roman Ordinary)
4922 Rosehill Road, Garland, TX 75043, Phone: (972) 270-4939
Malankara Catholic Mission of Texas (Syro-Malankara - Jurisdiction of Local Roman Ordinary)
201 South 13th Street, Garland, TX 75040 Phone: (972) 272-4641
Irving
St. Basil the Great (Byzantine - Ruthenian/Pittsburgh)
1118 East Union Bower Road, Irving, TX, 75061, Phone: (214) 438-5644
Lewisville
Our Lady of Lebanon Maronite Mission (Maronite - Los Angeles)
719 University Street, Lewisville, TX 75067, Phone: (214) 436-7617
The TRUTH is that Rod simply couldn't bear any longer being in a Church with "sinners", not that there were no Catholic options for him in Dallas. In other words, he was tired of being a Catholic, and the constant taking of scandal on his part (a serious sin mind you) was wearing down his soul.
What good is it for someone mired in serious sin to receive the sacraments?
Rod clearly has some major issues with taking scandal and other serious sins.
That is to be expected. 50% of all people formally affiliated with a Church in the US are Catholics. Therefore, its to be expected that most "ex-whatevers" are going to be "ex-Catholic" simply because of the sheer numbers of Catholics in the US.
Absent a strong ethnic tie among those people and taking into consideration the top down management style traditional in the Latin Church, how do you create a sense of community in a group like that?
In much of the country, the parish is territorial based and relatively compact. These thousands in the Catholic parish generally will be a plurality or majority of the neighborhood. The sense of community comes from there if you bother to look for it by speaking to your neighbors. If you live a life of isolation, of course you are not going to find community either in Church or in your neighborhood.
"That is to be expected. 50% of all people formally affiliated with a Church in the US are Catholics. Therefore, its to be expected that most "ex-whatevers" are going to be "ex-Catholic" simply because of the sheer numbers of Catholics in the US"
Never thought of that! On the other hand, having the whole paternal side of my family as good and faithful Irish Catholics, I find it astonishing that if one were to leave the Roman Church one would end up with the fundies. Something is very wrong.
"Rod clearly has some major issues with taking scandal and other serious sins."
Good thing for him that The Church is a hospital for sick souls.
Here's one aspect I don't understand, and maybe you can help me: does the Orthodox Church also have (distinct from divorce) such a thing as annulment?
In other words, if something was truly defective about the attempted marriage from the very beginning --- say, they just went through with the wedding to affect the groom's immigration status, with the intention of divorcing thereafter; or they lied to the priest about their age and were in fact underage and personally immature as well; or the wife had no intention of ever having children, but secretly took morning-after pills, deceiving her husband --- is it also possible to get an annulment in the Orthodx Church? Meaning, an investigation and a declaration of nullity, ruling that this was never a truly a sacramental marriage?
pinging myself to respond latter, and to get other Orthodox thoughts on this.
As an American of Serbian heritage currently attending an OCA parish with Russian roots, the nicest thing that I can say about this statement is that it reveals a woefully limited intellect.
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