Andrew Sullivan, Rod Dreher and Catholicism
I'm not going to engage directly in the substance of the argument between Rod Dreher and Andrew Sullivan over the current priestly (or unpriestly) difficulties in the Roman Catholic Church. (See The Corner and AndrewSullivan.com if you want that.) What I will address is the tone.
I have been following Dreher's comments with interest for some months, even before he and Sullivan started sniping across blogs. And much of what Dreher has said has struck the right note: calls on the Pope to speak forcefully and clearly about the issue; calls for Cardinal Law to resign; and so forth. Sullivan, though I follow him less regularly, also struggles with honesty in his heart, even if it doesn't always seem to reach his intellect quite so fully. (Nor does my own intellect ever speak quite so honestly as my heart.)
But as Dreher's tone of righteous indignation at the institutional Church's behavior has grown, so has his uncharity towards others, and that is my principal complaint. It is one thing to call on Cardinal Law to resign: his institutional leadership has failed, and there is something of "rendering unto Caesar" when one critiques the public actions and decisions of a leader. But his tone towards Sullivan, "cafeteria Catholics" and even towards the perpetrators of these crimes is another thing entirely.
The Holy Father hit a note typical for him, which has gone unmentioned by anyone I have read, when he sent his Good Friday letter to priests. It goes without saying (and without being said in that letter) that we should pray for the victims of these crimes against God and man. Indeed, in my parish, we have done so every Sunday formally since the first story broke. But John Paul has always been quite clear that our Christian duty is to pray for and forgive the perpetrators of evil. Even as a child, I knew and told my parents that the Pope's first public statement after being shot would be to forgive his assailant: that is simply his nature.
Now, there is a heinous idea run amok in modern society that "to forgive" means "to excuse," that is, to let off the hook: once you are forgiven, all is right in the world. This is not true, not true at all. At the end of confession, I am forgiven, but still required to go and serve my penance. I am forgiven, then punished.
John Paul as he so often does, placed the emphasis away from where most were looking: pray for those who have participated in the mystery of evil. The victims are guilty of nothing, and though they need our prayers, they will surely get them without the Pope calling for them. (By the way, he should still call for them, and surely will.) It is the great challenge, perhaps the greatest, of Christianity that we are also called to pray for our enemies, to love them, and to hope that they too will find peace and forgiveness. The Pope highlighted this in his letter, and angered a lot of people in so doing. But it is in fact our duty, and Dreher’s anger has obscured his awareness of it--or at least his acknowledgement of it.
My other problem with Dreher's tone is that it has become increasingly strident, and increasingly intolerant of those who dissent from the Church.
Christ did not come to save those who know their way already. He had little patience with those who set themselves up as judges of the personal moral worth of others. Either they were hypocrites, or they had no need of Christ. Christ came to those for whom muddling through was the best possible outcome: tax collectors; prostitutes; lepers. The Pharisees, too, needed to repent, but he chose Paul to spend his time on that group.
Andrew Sullivan may be misguided, or wrong, or even guilty of grave heresy. He certainly is defensive. But we are each all of those things in any area of our lives where we function with less-than-perfect certainty. As a matter of moral theology, he appears to make the error of giving primacy of place to intentionality or conscience, when it is merely one of a coequal trinity of action, intention, and result. But Dreher, and most Catholic traditionalists, make the opposite but equal error of supposing that--alone among areas of moral theology--in sexuality intentionality has no place in determining the morality of a given course.
I hope Rod Dreher and Andrew Sullivan both can remove the conversation from its present ad hominem level to one of Charity, where each works hardest at, first, giving all due consideration to the supposed good will of the other, and holding a firm belief that each is in fact doing what Christ taught us, by struggling constantly and determinedly to find and live the Truth as God gives us to know it.
It is a legitimate debate to ask how much of the Right God does in fact give us to know, and how much of that He reveals through Rome. Each has arrived at an answer, and those answers are not fully compatible. But it has occasionally descended from “Your answer is wrong,” to “You are wrong” and that is the place the Scriptures tell us not to go. It is no coincidence that Christ chooses adultery, a sin for sure, but one that is largely internally focused, as the moment to tell us not to cast stones. He commands the woman “sin no more,” but leaves that to her to enforce, not the mob.
