Ping!
What a pathetic and weird reason to leave any church: sodomy, oh, excuse me, that beautiful act of love.
Well, at least they had the character to leave, rather than staying to poison the well.
Hmmm....I really ought to read “The Divine Comedy.” But I think I would need an annotated version to appreciate it.
Any recommendations, Freepers?
Wasn’t Michael Coren initially a Jewish convert to Catholicism?
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.
Opposite-sex attraction isn't a sin either, but acting on it outside of marriage is a sin. His argument doesn't make sense.
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.
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
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.
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.
I seem to recall hearing that the Roman Catholic Church considers homosexual attraction to be "fundamentally disordered" or some similar term. That's not at all the same thing as "acceptable".
More Rod Dreher quotes, showing the fingernails being pulled out:
"The Catholic bishop of Tyler has announced that a church investigation found that Catholic hospitals in his diocese had been performing sterilizations, in contravention of church law -- even though they'd indicated that they hadn't been."
-- from the thread Tyler Catholic hospital sterilizations"This is a distressing new Gallup poll. It shows that churchgoing Catholics are far more likely to approve of moral behavior (sex between unmarried people, homosexuality, etc.) that their church deems immoral than are churchgoing Protestants....Why is it that Catholics have a Pope and a Magisterium -- a clear teaching authority -- as well as a complex, coherent and profoundly intellectual moral theology ... and yet these things, which ought to give it a tremendous advantage in maintaining the obedience of its flock, avail the Catholic Church little?"
-- from the thread Gallup poll: Catholics more unorthodox than Protestants"...as the data show, Catholics are every bit as mainstream American as anybody in their habits and opinions. I agree with Jody that it's offensive that a Catholic university should award an honorary law degree to a lawmaker, even the US president, who favors abortion. But come on, most Catholics voted for Obama. The president of Notre Dame, and other Catholic schools, ought to fear God and anguish over whether or not they're departing from authoritative Catholic teaching, and by so doing leading the faithful away from the truth. But they shouldn't fear that they are out of step with American Catholic culture as it actually exists. They very well know what they're doing....
"....Typically, the most engaged orthodox Catholics I knew when I was one of them picked and chose parishes based on whether or not the teaching there was solid....I knew I was headed into choppy waters when my firstborn became old enough to understand what the priest was saying during mass, and I would have to explain to him that what Father said is not what the Church teaches; it bothered me that I was having to teach him suspicion of Church authority before he'd even learned to trust it....My point here is simply that the decay in the fidelity to magisterial Catholicism on the part of the institutional Catholic Church in America has contributed to the breakup of Catholic culture by putting orthodox Catholics, who no doubt would prefer to go to their geographical parish, as is the norm, in the position of having to parish-shop...."
-- from the thread What Catholic culture?"If Catholicism in America had been healthy, maybe we could have held on through the sex abuse trials....we looked to the church to provide clear moral leadership, and to help us live out the faith with integrity and joy. Here’s the problem: there is very little orthodoxy in the U.S. Catholic Church, and at the parish level, almost no recognition that there is a such thing as “right belief”....I discerned no direction, and no real conviction that parish communities exist for any reason other than to affirm ourselves in our okayness....I had been so hollowed out by despair over all this as a Catholic that when the strong winds of the abuse scandal began to blow, the structure of my Catholic belief did not stand."
-- from his opinion piece in the Washington Post, What's so appealing about Orthodoxy?"Was I frustrated because the priests wouldn’t preach God’s judgment instead of God’s mercy? By no means. I was frustrated because they wouldn’t preach God’s judgment at all, which is to say, they preached Christ without the Cross. I knew the depths of the sins from which I was being delivered, and it felt wrong to treat His amazing grace like it was a common courtesy....American Catholicism was not pushing back against the hostile age at all. Rather, it had become a pushover. God is love was not a proclamation that liberated us captives from our sin and despair, but rather a bromide and a platitude that allowed us to believe that, and to behave as if, our lust, greed, malice and so forth – sins that I struggled with every day — weren’t to be despised and cast out, but rather shellacked by a river of treacle. I finally broke...."
-- from the thread I’m Still Not Going Back to the Catholic Church: Pope Francis only confirms my decision to leave
Thanks everyone for the recommendations! I’ll hit Amazon later and see what I can come up with.
Actually Dreher, who had been born a Methodist and converted to Catholicism, said he was leaving because the Church didn't deal with the pedophilia problem. According to Wikipedia, he made reference to a gay "Mafia" in the Church when he left.
Dreher became Eastern Orthodox, and from his comments over the years, it sounds like he wanted a denomination that was stricter, rather than laxer, than Catholicism.
Why did they leave? They chose sin over God.
Actually, they thought they had better knowledge..very similar to the original sin and rooted in pride!