Note: This post is from the old Opus Publicum; it is being put back up by request. It was originally posted on December 8, 2013.
The Other Illiberal Catholicism
Several months ago University of Notre Dame Professor Patrick Deneen made a bit of a splash with his American Conservative piece, “A Catholic Showdown Worth Watching.” The article was occasioned, in part, by neo-Catholic apologist John Zmirak’s “Illiberal Catholicism,” a childish polemic which inadvertently gave rise to a number of Catholics, including yours truly, adopting the title of Zmirak’s piece as their new moniker. Deneen doesn’t go quite that far terminologically with respect to himself and a host of other Catholic thinkers he identifies as anti-liberal: Alasdair MacIntyre, David Schindler, William Cavanaugh, John Medaille, C.C. Pecknold, and Andrew Haines, along with many of the contributors to Ethika Politika. Deneen prefers the label “radical Catholic,” though at the end of the day they oppose the ideology Zmirak and the old neo-Catholic guard—the late Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, Michael Novak, and George Weigel—strenuously defended: the unnatural union of Catholicism and liberalism, specifically American-style liberal democracy. While neo-Catholicism spent a great deal of the 1990s and 00s allied with neoconservatism and the Republican Party, a sizable wave of Americanist Catholics are now embracing the tenets of high-octane economic liberalism and social freedom, better known as libertarianism. Some examples include Tom Woods and Jeffrey Tucker along with many of the movers-and-shakers at the Acton Institute.
The Josias
Since I am sure all of you, dear readers, do not have enough blogs to read, let me suggest one more: The Josias — a new collective blogging endeavor which will, on occasion, feature my posts from yours truly plus a small horde of other folks who have far more interesting things to say than I. If you are curious about the “theme” of the blog, look no further than its first posting, Abbott Dom Gerard’s 1985 Pentecost sermon which I have posted here before under the title, “Illiberal Catholic Manifesto.” Also, be sure to follow The Josias web-log on Twitter: @josias_rex
Note: The blog address has been updated to reflect its most current location.
Catholic Libertarianism Still Gets It Wrong
Not too long ago, after delivering a talk on a phenomenon I describe as “Catholic libertarianism,” I was informed by one critic that I had over-stated the problem and that a few peripheral voices, like Tom Woods, had no real impact on Catholic socio-economic thought. As much as I wish that were the case, I don’t think it is. On the Catholic libertarian landscape, Woods may be an extremist, but he’s hardly an isolated case. One doesn’t have to look very far to see libertarian ideology being fused with, or favored over, Catholic Social Teaching (CST). Take, for instance, Mark DeForrest’s recent contribution to The Imaginative Conservative: “Can Catholicism and Libertarianism Co-Exist?” While it doesn’t break any new ground in the field of Catholic apologetics for libertarianism, it usefully reveals some of the problems with that line of apologetics.
Seven Years Later
For very understandable reasons, a number of people are today celebrating the seventh anniversary of Summorum Pontificum (SP), though the document didn’t enter into force until September 2007. I already wrote some thoughts on SP here. Contrary to certain claims, I do not believe SP is a flawless document, but my quibbles with it are minor. In fact, they are so powerfully overshadowed by the real problems of SP’s implementation and the active hostility of bishops, priests, and layfok toward the Tridentine Mass that I really see no point in discussing them. Were SP met with open arms by the hierarchs of the world and every diocese on earth committed to offering the vetus ordo regularly, I doubt very much that anyone, even nitpicking traditionalists, would care that much about SP’s marginal tensions. But that is not the case. I can’t remember a week going by since I entered the Catholic Church in 2011 where I didn’t read or hear some Catholic, conservative or otherwise, popping off about SP, the Tridentine Mass, those who attend it, or all of the above. Their criticisms, more often than not, were visceral, not intellectual. And in those rare circumstances where some degree of intelligence was applied to the alleged “problem” of the old Mass, the arguments often rested on rickety premises (“Only old people like it…”) or (potentially false) claims which utterly miss the point: “Nobody understands Latin!”; “The old Mass creates too much distance between the priest and the faithful!”; “What do you mean we can’t sing ‘On Eagle’s Wings’?”
Tomorrow Liberty?
Tomorrow Christendom, the late Abbot Dom Gerard Calvet’s call for the reestablishment of Christian society, is a book seldom read by Catholics on this side of the pond. In fact, the English translation is now out of print. Even if it were widely available still, would we, good Catholics of America, have the cultural tools to comprehend its message? A resplendent glimpse of that message can be found in Calvet’s 1985 Pentecost sermon, what I and others have dubbed “The Illiberal Catholic Manifesto.” In it you will find a call to reclaim society not for free-market ideology or hawkish nationalism, but for our Lord Jesus Christ, King of all creation, rightful ruler of every man and nation. How foreign—how moth-eaten—that call must seem to us as we prepare to binge on beer and hotdogs before blowing off the tips of our fingers with illicitly acquired fireworks, all to honor the colonial rebellion against Great Britain in the name of libertas.
Sexism and Critique
One of the hazards of web-logging is that it induces a fair number of needless, though not necessarily uninteresting, distractions. After posting “Irrelevancy” yesterday, a few people sent me links to various blogs discussing critic Edward Champion’s attack on blogger Emily Gould and others Champion deems “middling millennials.” One friend in particular thought I was giving Champion’s takedown too much credit and, more importantly, that I had missed the sexist (if not misogynistic) nature of the piece. That’s not entirely true, but I am not sure why it matters. The accuracy of Champion’s criticism doesn’t rise or fall with the nature of his personal prejudices. Champion could be the most sexist, petty, jealous-driven man on earth and it wouldn’t necessarily undermine his identification of certain problems found Gould’s work and attitude, not to mention the larger pathologies infecting certain segments of the contemporary “literary scene.” If one wants to knock my take on Champion’s take of Gould, knock me for being out of touch with contemporary culture and, thus, prone to let someone like Champion do my analytical lifting for me. I am not saying I would agree with such a knock wholeheartedly; I did, after all, read some of Gould’s work following the Champion piece, along with her recent interview in New York Magazine. I won’t defend Champion coming unglued in his Gould takedown, but I don’t think he is off his rocker either. (Well, maybe he is a little bit: he threatened to commit suicide on Twitter following a wave of negative feedback for attacking Gould.)
Russian Orthodox Continue Persecuting
The news isn’t new, but since so few Catholic and Orthodox web-logs are mentioning it, I thought I might take a few moments to remind readers that Russia is continuing to persecute both Christians and non-Christians in the recently annexed Crimea. It appears that both the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church (UGCC) and Orthodox Christians loyal to the Kievan Patriarch (as opposed to the Moscow Patriarch (MP)) are high on the target list. More details on what is going on over there are available from Eurasia Review.
Irrelevancy
Sometime around mid-2007, after graduating law school and worrying about a job as Son #2 was in utero, I became culturally irrelevant. Having sold off most of my (non-classical) music and movie collection a couple of years prior, I wasn’t interested in what was going on “artistically” in the world around me, mostly because very little of it sounded or looked like art; it resembled trash. I was dead to contemporary literature as well. After a brief but disastrous flirtation with being an English major in 1998 during my freshman year of college, I had sworn off fiction for almost a decade, though my wife, who double majored in English and Spanish, cajoled me now and again into putting down Leo Strauss, Eric Voegelin, or whatever philosophical page-turner had caught my fancy to read something — anything — of literary substance. It was nice. However, I quickly realized that I was woefully behind on all of those classics “everyone should read,” and so I told myself, facetiously, that I would get around to folks like Jonathan Franzen and David Foster Wallace right after I finished the complete novels of Anthony Trollope. (I haven’t even started yet.) Granted, I’ve made some exceptions here and there. For instance, in 2012 I bought used all of Cormac McCarthy’s novels for a song and proceeded to read them over the course of the summer. Also, during my brief tenure as a New Yorker subscriber, I read a short story or two.
More Hobby Lobby Thoughts
I can’t say I am surprised by the news and social-media reaction to Burwell v. Hobby Lobby. I just didn’t think my patience for it would be so thin. The smug part of me thinks that people should have to digest all 95 pages of the opinion before being allowed to comment. The merciful part would never contemplate such a cruel and unusual form of punishment. Hobby Lobby isn’t poorly written, mind you; it’s just written like every other Supreme Court opinion: needlessly long, unnecessarily footnoted, obscure in some parts, incomplete in others, and so forth. Apparently it’s a slow news week given how much press and commentary this case is attracting. It is, by several orders of magnitude, less groundbreaking and important — from a legal and policy perspective — than last year’s “gay marriage” cases or 2012’s “Obamacare” decision. Still, as several learned observers have pointed out, Hobby Lobby has a lot of symbolic purchase for both religious and non-religious Americans. The First Amendment’s (mythical?) right to religious liberty was not front and center in the case, but the concept was in play just long enough for all sorts of folks with all sorts of ideological dispositions to use an exercise in statutory interpretation as an excuse to ramp the culture wars back up. To what end? Probably not a good one, at least for American Catholics.