In a recent interview on his meeting with Cardinal Gerhard Mueller, Prefect for the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, the Society of St. Pius X’s Superior General, Bishop Bernard Fellay, had this to say on what he sees as a connection between the Second Vatican Council and Cardinal Walter Kasper’s troubling proposal to overhaul Church praxis with respect to divorced-and-remarried Catholics:
Some years ago an online acquaintance of mine suggested that one of the attractions of Roman Catholicism for converts is that it provided something like “philosophical certainty” in a radically uncertain world. In short, if you can’t handle the soft nihilism of mass consumer culture or the more full-throated nihilism embedded in any number of mainline academic disciplines, then the Church is the place for you. I was Orthodox at the time he pitched this idea to me, but even then I thought he was probably onto something. I don’t think Eastern Orthodoxy enjoys such an “exalted” status. Without trying to pass over all of the genuinely good things Orthodoxy provides to those who enter her doorway, I think it’s safe to say that “philosophical certainty” isn’t one of them. In many respects, Orthodoxy, whether it intends to or not, merely reaffirms the popular fideism which runs through large currents of conservative American Christianity. The suspicion of reason which, if pressed far enough, becomes the denigration of thought, plays nicely into certain myths about what an “authentic Christianity” ought to look like. For more “sophisticated” types, intoxicated with the ways and means of postmodern thought and positively indignant toward the idea that unaided human reason can tell us much of anything, the “mysticism” of Orthodoxy provides something resembling stability. In other words, it makes one’s religious solipsism look grounded.
The Synod on the Family has opened. Will this be the end of the Church as we know it? Will it be a moment for “traditional values” to be affirmed? Shall we be treated to a mountain of neo-Catholic claims that everything which transpires is in perfect continuity with the past? Etc., etc., etc.
Regardless, I have no plans whatsoever to discuss the Synod on Opus Publicum. If something truly notable — and verifiable — emerges from the meeting, then maybe a word or two is in order. Otherwise, I am content to leave it to the “experts” to prognosticate and/or panic about this needless and confusing Synod.
Thomas Storck’s excellent Ethika Politika (EP) article, “What Authority Does Catholic Social Teaching Have?,” became the occasion for an intervention in the comments section from Dylan Pahman who, like Storck, is an editor at EP. There are also some important differences between the two. Unlike Storck, who is a confessing Catholic, Pahman is an ex-Calvinist convert to Eastern Orthoodxy and thus is in no way bound by, nor necessarily invested in, Catholic Social Teaching (CST). (I have written on some of Pahman’s thinking here.) Another important divergence between them concerns their socio-economic orientation. Storck rests broadly within the Distributist tradition, though he has also drawn needful attention to the Solidarist economics of Fr. Heinrich Pesch. Pahman, on the other hand, works as an editor for the Acton Institute—a mostly Catholic-run think-tank which eschews the label “libertarian” while endorsing liberal economic policies. Though Acton may not be ideologically homogenous in the purest sense, it is far from clear that it accurately represents principles and positions which faithful Catholics can endorse. Indeed, Storck has written on this very topic for the Social Justice Review, concluding that “the Acton Institute’s promotion of liberalism is not something that can be embraced by an orthodox Catholic.”
