After a period of hibernation, The Josias returns. Read this. Read the archives, and be prepared for more updates in the near future.
A Closing Comment on the Synod
The glib optimism flowing from ostensibly conservative Catholics concerning the recently concluded Extraordinary Synod on the Family is a thing of wonder. Only in a Church where abuse, dissent, and outright heresy are so commonplace could a document like the final Relatio be held up as a banner of orthodoxy. Some conservatives are now laying into traditional Catholics, noting that their worries about schism and collapse were not just overblown, but thoroughly ridiculous. As a friend of mine observed, however, just because a stroke is a more dramatic way to die doesn’t mean a nice quiet bout of cancer won’t do the same job.
Now all eyes are on Pope Francis. The Synod, as most realize by now, was little more than ecclesiastical performance art. Although some brave bishops stood up and challenged the Church to speak clear on marriage, family, and sexuality, it’s become clear that the fix is in. Francis, who has already unilaterally revolutionized the Church’s annulment process, clearly did not get the synod he desired. His petulant rant after the Synod, coupled with his desire to create a “synodal church” with devolved doctrinal authority (see more here), confirms this. What will he do in the interim, though? People are expecting a post-synodal exhortation, one which may or may not follow the rickety Relatio. It’s all up to the Pope, and there is no reason to take comfort in that brutal fact.
Over the past year Catholics have mused about what they might do if the Pope, with or without a majority of the bishops, openly taught heresy with respect to marriage and the sacraments. Even before this year’s Synod I had suggested that any change to the annulment process which further waters-down the sacramental integrity of marriage poses serious problems for those who wish to defend the indefectibility of the Church. At this point there is no meaningful distinction between the de facto Catholic divorce instituted by Francis and the Eastern Orthodox Church’s longstanding practice of dissolving sacramental marriages. And yet Catholics will continue to chirp on about the “error of the East” without confronting the enormity of the error the Pope has introduced into their own communion. So much for self-critical Catholicism.
The truth is that most Catholics scandalized by the Synod and the Pope won’t leave. The sunk costs are too high. Instead, they will close their eyes to their surroundings while singing “Everything is Awesome” just loud enough to drown out all the voices—clerical and lay—calling for a sexual revolution in the Church. Some Catholics, like the Society of St. Pius X and the faithful who remain attached to tradition, will continue to resist the institutional Church, including the Pope if necessary. God bless them. There will be no heavenly reward for obedience to those who betray the clear teachings of our Lord Jesus Christ and His Holy Church.
Everything is Awesome
The Extraordinary Synod on the Family is over. The final Relatio has been published. Sure, as Rorate Caeli details, there are several paragraphs littered with ambiguous, if not alarming, statements, none of which clearly affirm Church teaching and praxis on marriage and the family which no orthodox Catholic dared question for centuries. But, as the conservative Catholic media informs, there is no need to worry. The outcome of the Synod is a cause for celebration because neither rank heresy nor radical disciplinary changes made it into the final document. Yes, you read that right. The fact that the Church’s shepherds somehow, someway managed not to deliver a mortal blow to the teachings of our Lord Jesus Christ means there is nothing to worry about. There is no need for fear. Those vigilant for the Truth are just pharisees after all.
Everything is awesome. Let no man, nor an angel, tell you otherwise.
A Note on Saving Christendom in Europe
Until today I had never read a single word penned by Bret Stephens, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist for the Wall Street Journal who caught some eyes with his recent opinion piece, “In Defense of Christendom.” It’s a mixed bag, reminiscent of George Weigel’s The Cube and the Cathedral and any number of other dystopian takes on Europe’s future. Arguably, Stephens isn’t all that interested in preserving European Christendom so much as he—like many others—is worried about the tidal wave of Muslim immigrants that has hit the Continent in recent months. Better the Cross than the Koran, I suppose. Some have taken umbrage with Stephens’s piece, including Artur Rosman, a pedestrian Patheos blogger emblematic of that site’s intellectual vapidity. Rosman’s main beef with Stephens concerns the latter’s brief reliance on Pope-Emeritus Benedict XVI’s Without Roots to advance the thesis that Europe has lost its sense of self. According to Rosman, Stephens “proof-texted” from the former pontiff’s words because he failed to take into account Benedict’s positive appraisal of multiculturalism. So what? As we’ve come to see over the last two years, popes aren’t always right, especially when speaking outside of a magisterial context.
The immigration crisis in Europe is, to put it mildly, messy. Rosman believes that basic Christian hospitality ought to guide the European Union’s (EU) hand, though he fails to clarify why. States have a duty first and foremost to their own citizens, which cannot be separated from their duty to the true religion. Although the world is now bereft of any authentically Catholic state, that does not mean the nations of the world have a right to religious indifferentism. Although some of the refugees pouring into Europe are Christian, most are not. As such, it behooves the EU, or any individual state, to balance charity with its first-order obligations. If mass Muslim migration to Europe threatens the rights of the Church and Christ the King—and there is good reason to suspect it does—then a blind “open door policy” would not only be imprudent, but contrary to right order as well.
None of this is to say that Muslims should be automatically excluded from finding safe haven in Europe or any other Western country. As Pope Pius XII taught, immigration is a right and the goods of the earth belong to all peoples. However, states are still entitled to take measures to maintain social order and to defend themselves from existential threats, external as well as internal. Should the ongoing violence in the Middle East come to a close, there is no reason why the EU or any state which has taken in Muslim immigrants shouldn’t request them to return if the common good demands it.
But let’s not forget what is often at the heart of many states’ immigration policies, and it has nothing to do with either charity or justice. It’s greed. Immigrants are a useful source of cheap labor which can keep bloated social programs running and white retirees happy. Capitalist greed, not Christian ethics, drive state-level decisions on who to let in, when, and under what conditions. And in the case of Europe, that greed may very well be the EU’s undoing as it trades off short-term maintenance of its economic ordo for civilizational surrender.
Susannah Black and the Kingship of Christ
I confess that I have not paid much mind to Ethika Politika’s ongoing series about what Protestants want from Catholics. In fact, my knee-jerk response to the series was, “Who cares?” If the series concerned what the Orthodox—Eastern or Oriental—want from Catholics (or vice versa), it would have been a different story, perhaps because I am biased toward Apostolic communions which have retained a valid episcopate and Eucharist. Anyway, I was intrigued by the title of today’s installment, “What I Want from Catholics: Occupy the Public Space,” by Susannah Black, an Anglican and editor at Solidarity Hall. After taking note of areas of common interest to Protestants and Catholics, including the unique opportunity the latter has to take advantage of Pope Francis’s public popularity in order to promote Christian social teachings and pro-life values, Black turns her attention to the Kingship of Christ. Here are some excerpts:
Closing Comments (For Now) on Orthodoxy and Catholicism
A single sentence in my earlier post, “A Brief Comment on Rod Dreher, Orthodoxy, and Catholicism,” has caused discomfort among a few readers on Facebook, some of whom appear to be converts to Eastern Orthodoxy. This is the offending line: “If there is anything distinctly ‘Eastern’ in Orthodoxy, it is its occasionally obstinate refusal to be open, honest, and self-critical, particularly when it comes to its complicated, and sometimes tragic, relationship with both Roman and Greek Catholicism.” Admittedly, the statement could use some unpacking and refinement in the light of both Remi Brague’s work on the (arguably unique) cultural openness of what we common refer to as “the West” and Fr. Robert Taft’s repeated calls for self-critical Orthodoxy. To say that openness and, later, self-criticism have eluded the Orthodox East over the centuries should not be a controversial statement unless, of course, one naively buys into the “pure East/degenerate West” rhetoric that is commonplace in certain Orthodox circles. As recent scholarship has shown, it wasn’t always so, though there seems to be a very long road left to travel before that finding becomes common knowledge.
Mark Lilla’s Tragic Trilogy on Islam and France
With the American release of Houllebecq’s Submission [Soumission], I thought this was worth re-blogging for those who might have missed it.
A Brief Comment on Rod Dreher, Orthodoxy, and Catholicism
In the combox to yesterday’s post, “A Comment on Synodality, East and West,” a reader by the name of Luke wrote the following:
That is a paradox that I still can’t wrap my head around: the Orthodox with a decentralized authority have no power to implement a Novus Ordo for example yet they have not turned in to Anglicanism East without a Pope. However, could you imagine the Catholic Church in the U.S without the intervention of JPII or BXVI?
Before I could type out a reply, Rod Dreher, over at The American Conservative, issued a similar query to his readers:
1. Why does the Orthodox Church, which lacks the centralized office of the papacy, and lacks magisterial offices, hold to historical, orthodox Christianity better than the Roman Catholic Church, which has these offices, and in theory ought to have a firmer hold on these things?
One can develop all sorts of sociological, historical, and psychological explanations for Catholic/Orthodox divergences, but they’re probably not terribly helpful. Certain Orthodox living in the (geographic) West enjoy grand narratives filled with Western philosophical-theological decadence and pristine Eastern mysticism, perhaps because it makes them feel like they have found a safe haven in Orthodoxy, free from the complications of (post)modernity. I have never had much patience for such “thinking,” as I have explained in various posts (see, e.g., “The Myth of Hart“). Whether Dreher buys into any of that stuff or not is difficult to say. Assuming he has read his Florovsky, Schmemann, and Meyendorff carefully, he knows full well that the Orthodox Church has never been isolated from intellectual developments and ideological upheavals which are, mistakenly, identified as exclusively “Western.” If there is anything distinctly “Eastern” in Orthodoxy, it is its occasionally obstinate refusal to be open, honest, and self-critical, particularly when it comes to its complicated, and sometimes tragic, relationship with both Roman and Greek Catholicism. At the same time, however, it cannot be denied that Orthodoxy’s “closedness” has protected it from time to time against certain secular-liberal currents that have no business being imported into any Christian confession.
As for Dreher’s question specifically, it’s not even worth answering. It is not worth answering because it is formulated with the assumption that the institutional Orthodox Church “hold[s] to historical, orthodox Christianity better than the” institutional Roman Catholic Church. No Catholic in their right mind would accept that. What Catholics with eyes to see and ears to hear accept is that when it comes to priests and bishops — the body of individuals charged with preserving and passing on the Apostolic Faith — the Orthodox Church appears to have a relative advantage, at least at the global level. Anybody who has spent serious time around Orthodoxy in America knows that “exclusively Catholic problems” such as the so-called “Lavender Mafia,” clerical sexual abuse, lax discipline, moral and doctrinal confusion, and so on, and so forth, can all be found amidst the icons and incense, too. But American Orthodoxy is small and its representation in certain academic, ecumenical, and political circles is grossly disproportionate. Across the pond, ostensibly rigorous Orthodoxy has done no better job holding back cultural decline in Greece than allegedly lackadaisical Catholicism has done in Italy. Both countries are suffering from civilizational exhaustion. Then again, so is ours — and neither the Catholic nor Orthodox churches are doing a damn thing about it.
A Comment on Synodality, East and West
There has been a lot of clamor (panic?) over Pope Francis’s alleged plan (or at least desire) to see the emergence of a “synodal church” where decisionmaking, including judgements concerning doctrine, devolve to the local or regional level. Edward Pentin, over at the National Catholic Register, offers a brief analysis of the Pope’s recent speech discussing this new structure, along with a working translation of the speech. Although Francis-speak, with its rambling references and clumsy formulations, is notoriously difficult to interpret, it does seem as if the Holy Father wants to inaugurate a radical change in ecclesiastical governance that could have far-reaching consequences for the Church. As Rorate Caeli notes, Francis already signaled this desire back in 2013 with his exhortation Evangelii Gaudium, a ponderous document with debatable doctrinal heft. Indeed, the signal was strong enough that I felt compelled to pen a few critical words about the synodal model as it plays out among the Eastern Orthodox for Crisis. My position on the matter has, admittedly, softened over the past year (see, for example, here and here), though not to the point where I believe that Roman Catholicism (as opposed to the Eastern Catholic churches) is in any way, shape, or form prepared for a revolutionary upheaval which will likely affect all aspects of her life.
Remarks on Taking Erik Peterson Seriously
In summarizing Erik Peterson’s provocative and still-timely 1937 essay, “Witness to the Truth,” Michael Hollerich writes that for Peterson “[a]ny regime that does not recognize Christ is ipso facto in the service of Christ’s enemy.” According to Hollerich, Peterson’s critique of the present age, one carried out through a penetrating reflection on martyrdom, is “orient[ed] . . . to the coming New Age rather than to a disappearing and irretrievable past[.]” Oddly, however, Hollerich remains uncertain what Peterson’s piece “has to say to those of us who live today with middling contentment, in the shambling structures of liberal democracy[.]” Hollerich recognizes “Witness to the Truth” to be “a powerful summons to resistance,” but for whom? It is at this point in his summary that Hollerich provides a list of potential audiences, editorializing on their relative worth at the same time before breaking off to allow readers to explore Peterson’s writing for themselves.