Why Two Famous Catholic Writers, Michael Coren and Rod Dreher, Left the Church

Aleteia ^ | March 11, 2015 | TOM HOOPES

[NYer]

Two conservative ex-Catholics have recently been in the news sharing their reasons for leaving.

One was Michael Coren. Apparently, the Canadian broadcaster and author of Why Catholics Are Right stopped attending Mass a year ago —but only publicly mentioned his switch to Anglicanism for the first time last month.

He told the National Post on May 2 that he left over the Church’s prohibition of gay sex.

“I couldn’t look people in the eye and make the argument that is still so central to the Catholic Church, that same-sex attraction is acceptable but to act on it is sinful. I felt that the circle of love had to be broadened, not reduced,” Coren said.

His editor at Catholic World Report was a bit blindsided by his columnist’s public renunciation of his Catholic faith. “How far, then, should the circle of love be broadened?” Carl Olson asked in an editorial. “Where does he want to draw the line? And why?”

Those are good questions. There are many Catholics for whom romantic feelings can never lead to sex: single people, those divorced and remarried but not annulled who wish to receive communion — and those married to a spouse who has a sexual impediment. Not to mention priests and religious.

It seems odd that Coren thinks that one subset of this group, the same-sex attracted, should get a “look-the-other-way” sex pass from the Church.

But “There’s more than that,” Coren added to the National Post (in the video, not the transcript), and cited “the teaching on contraception, on life” as another reason for him leaving. His rejection of Church teaching is apparently more broad than first reported.

He should read Rod Dreher.

Dreher has been writing about Dante’s Divine Comedy journey through hell, purgatory and heaven —  including a powerful piece at CNN.com about how Dante has helped him understand his own loss of faith in the Church.

As a journalist in 2002 covering the sex abuse scandal, “I didn’t lose my faith suddenly; it was torn from me bit by bit, like a torturer ripping out his victim's fingernails,” Dreher writes.

Now, years later, he has found in Dante another harsh critic of Church leaders — but one who stayed Catholic.

“I had made a mistake that the devout Dante did not,” Dreher wrote. “I expected more from them than they could deliver, and came undone by the shock of their failures.”

In another column about Dante, this one in The American Conservative, Dreher shared a different lesson from Dante, one that Michael Coren needs to hear.

It’s about the Circle of the Sodomites.

“In the Divine Comedy, when Dante and Virgil visit the circle of hell reserved for the Sodomites (Dante’s term), sex and sexuality never come up,” Dreher writes. “[I]t affords the reader the opportunity to consider the sin of sodomy in a broader philosophical perspective.”

He cites the truly remarkable William Cook and Ronald Herzman Great Courses lectures on the Divine Comedy, which describe sodomy in the poem “as a metaphor for sterility, and the misguided use of creativity and generativity.”

Dante finds his former teacher Brunetto Latini among the sodomites. Latini gives Dante bad counsel, telling him to seek fame in writing — just as Latini has done in his own academic and political career.

Dante’s message, says Dreher, is that “to put one’s creative gift to the service of one’s own fame and fortune, as opposed to serving a higher cause (e.g., Art, the Truth) is to be guilty of violence against the God who gave one those gifts, and expects one to use them in a fruitful way.”

There are two lessons for Coren here, and the rest of us too.

First: Sex is for fruitfulness. Sex that is open to life may be motivated by all kinds of conflicting desires, but what it is in its reality is a life-affirming imitation of God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, whose love generates more life, and therefore more love.

Sex that is not open to life may also have good motives or bad — but what it is in its reality is an act that is closed in on itself; an act from which no new life can emerge; an act that imitates not the exuberance of the Trinity but the men chasing one another across burning sands, in Dante’s apt metaphor.

Coren need not fear. The Church’s sexual morality does not denigrate human love, it protects its nobility. But in addition to what Dante can teach about sex is what he can teach about writing.

Coren, I can only guess, is tempted by the sin that every political or religious writer is tempted by — the sin of writing to increase something in my life (money, fame, social media shares, pride)  instead of writing to increase something in my reader’s life (understanding, love, conviction, joy).

The sin is both more universal and more banal in the blogosphere than it was in 14th-century Florence.

Ironically, Coren and Dreher both started out as spirited defenders of the truths of the Catholic Church — and ended up inadvertently championing relativism. 

In Dominus Iesus (No. 4), Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger sees disunity in the Church as the source-root of the culture of relativism. After all, if Christians’ beliefs about God can be widely divergent yet equally true, then why can’t I have my truth” and you have “your truth”?

Pray that their readers won’t follow Michael Coren and Rod Dreher out of the Church. And pray that they will come back home.

[NYer]

Ping!

[miss marmelstein]

What a pathetic and weird reason to leave any church: sodomy, oh, excuse me, that beautiful act of love.

[jacknhoo]

Well, at least they had the character to leave, rather than staying to poison the well.

[JoeDetweiler]

Hmmm....I really ought to read “The Divine Comedy.” But I think I would need an annotated version to appreciate it.

Any recommendations, Freepers?

[wtd]

Wasn’t Michael Coren initially a Jewish convert to Catholicism?

[Flavious_Maximus]

Good riddance to the degenerate heretics. Now if only the other heretic would leave the Catholic church, i.e. the current Pope.

[Buckeye McFrog]

I believe that Mr. Dreher will find that any other church he chooses to join will also be run by flawed and sinful men.

If you search the world for a flawless church, your search will be in vain. Our Savior is perfect. We are not.

[Ransomed]

I’d get one that has the Gustave Doré illustrations.

http://www.worldofdante.org/gallery_dore.html

FReegards

[AppyPappy]

I think the difference is that disagreeing with the church is practically a sacrament in Protestant churches.

[JoeFromSidney]

“I couldn’t look people in the eye and make the argument that is still so central to the Catholic Church, that same-sex attraction is acceptable but to act on it is sinful.

Opposite-sex attraction isn't a sin either, but acting on it outside of marriage is a sin. His argument doesn't make sense.

[outinyellowdogcountry]

All the labored intellectual reasoning in the world can lead you to belief that suits your mood of the time but if the Bible is your resource you may see truth. It seems other books, writings, philosophy, traditions have more influence on some people and denominations than the word of God.

[maryz]

We used the Dorothy Sayers translation in college — very good and heavily annotated!

[don-o]

Most interesting. Finally, I find something in the RF actually worth digging into. Thank you.

And while digging I found another Dreher piece

Here's a snip to, perhaps, whet appetites for a long, possibly fruitful read...

I was lost, but lost in a familiar way. When I was 17, as a restless, anxious teenager, I wandered unawares into the Gothic cathedral at Chartres. The wonder and beauty of that medieval masterpiece made me realize that life was far more filled with joy, with possibility, with adventure and romance than I had imagined. I did not walk out of the cathedral that day a Christian, but I did leave as a pilgrim who was onto something.

“I need to see Chartres again,” I recently wrote to a friend. What I meant was that I needed my vision renewed, my spirit revived, my world re-enchanted by what I perceived there in 1984 as a world-weary American teenager who thought he had seen it all, but who in truth had no idea how blind he was until he beheld the most beautiful church in the world.

And then, killing time in a Barnes & Noble one hot south Louisiana afternoon, I opened a copy of Dante’s Inferno, the first of his Divine Comedy trilogy, and read these words (the translation I cite in this essay is by Robert and Jean Hollander):

Midway in the journey of our life
I came to myself in a dark wood,
For the straight way was lost.

How Dante Saved My Life A midlife crisis is cured by The Divine Comedy

[Mrs. Don-o]

Rod Dreher was with the Dallas News when some of the ugliest stuff was coming out about abusive priests and their apparent bishop-protectors, and it angers, shamed and scandlized him so deeply that, in pain, he fled to the Orthodox Church. A whole lot of us felt the same way, but didn't leave.

It seems to me that Dreher is now expressing regrets about leaving the Church, realizing that he was expecting a "Community of the Elect", Ivory-Snow Pure, rather than the real Church on Earth described by Our Lord as a field where wheat and tares grow together until the Last Day, and a dragnet which brings up all kinds of fish, good and bad, and strange ugly things from the Deep.

I respect Dreher and give him huge credit for seeing this, and I wish him well as he makes his pilgrim away toward his Master and mine.

Coren, on the other hand, seems a much shallower and shiftier fellow. He apparently is a convert to the LGBT line, and dissents from the Catholic moral objection to contraception. At least there's consistency here, since if it's OK for straight couples to reduce sexual intercourse to sterile jiggery-pokery, then it's OK for homosexuals to do the same.

I thought Coren's book "Why Catholics Are Right" --- which I presume he has now abjured? --- was poorly organized and superficial, and now it doesn't surprise me that he's left.

Frankly, he seems to me a weak and vacillating man. But weak and vacillating men need salvation, too. I'll pray for him, and hope that those who see my faults will pray for me.

[don-o]

It seems other books, writings, philosophy, traditions have more influence on some people and denominations than the word of God.

It does not need to be an either / or proposition.

Luke 10:27 King James Version (KJV)

27 And he answering said, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind; and thy neighbour as thyself.

[NRx]

For clarification, I think some of the commenters were under the impression Dreher left out of support for sodomy, he did not. He initially left because the RCC diocese where in he resided had become spiritually poisonous and the pedophile scandal which he had covered as a reporter had left him deeply scarred. He was also concerned that it was not a spiritually safe environment for his family. Nor is he a Protestant. He joined the Orthodox Church.

[AnAmericanMother]

My favorite translation is that by Dorothy Sayers (yes, THAT Dorothy Sayers, the Lord Peter Wimsey mystery stories). It has very thorough notes.

[xsmommy]

this book is very good. I am also enjoying Dreher's book. It was, in fact, Deher's pieces on Dante on the American Conservative blog, which led me to the first book.

[don-o]

It seems to me that Dreher is now expressing regrets about leaving the Church,

"It seems to me...." is the proper way to couch that thought. I don't find "regret" - perhaps you can. Rather, I find him sharing his deeper understanding of exactly why the corruption so deeply affected him. And it's about the healing of his own soul.