One of the handy things about being Protestant is the ease with which you can declare inconvenient co-religionists to be “not really a Christian.” Dave Brown of Logos Ministries (www.logosresourcepages.org/roulette.html) has articulated these precepts for deciding who is spiritually suspect:
1. They rely on infant baptism thinking it will get them to heaven.
2. They believe there are many paths to God.
3. They trust in their religious activities and good works to get them to heaven.
4. They think belief in God is all that matters.
5. They made a phony decision for Christ.
6. They follow false teachers and faulty philosophies.
7. They procrastinate: I’ll trust Christ later.
So if some Christian displeases or embarrasses you in some way, you can always point to one of them and announce that so-and-so “wasn’t really a Christian.” The handy thing about this approach is that it’s so flexible. Catholic? Number 1 has you covered in most cases. A particularly saintly Catholic like Mother Teresa? Apply number 3. Involved in ecumenism? Number 2. Protestant but given to embarrassing statements about Jews and peasants as Luther was? Number 5. Number 5 also covers Jimmy Swaggart, Al Sharpton, the founders of the KKK, and other unsightly blots on the purity of Protestant faith. Number 6 covers all Protestants you disagree with.
Meanwhile, for Catholics, the basic rule of thumb is summed up in the parable of the net (cf. Matt. 13:47–50). The Church catches the bad fish and the good, but the sorting is done at the end of the age, not now and not by us. So, for example, the proabortion politico who is baptized Catholic and explains how abortion is okay “according to my conscience” is a Catholic. That is, he is a member of the Catholic communion who holds false ideas and is, to that degree, out of communion with the mystical body of Christ. Sooner or later, he will have to either shed the belief (and the actions that accompany it) or opt out of heaven. But we have no idea how, whether, or when he will do so. Not our pay grade. So we continue to call him “Catholic” because he calls himself Catholic and the Church doesn’t say he can’t.
Once you are baptized, you are baptized. Some Protestants think they can play the “Oh, he’s not really a Christian” game when faced with a Christian who says or does things repugnant to Christ. We Catholics are pretty much stuck with our family.
Error Has No Rights?
Paul Baumann, editor of Commonweal, reviewed Philip Jenkins’s The New Anti-Catholicism: The Last Acceptable Prejudice (www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&node=&contentId=A56059-2003May29¬Found=true) and wrote, with a straight face, that Jenkins does not “adequately deal with the main source of the historic American skepticism toward Catholicism: the church’s rejection of religious freedom. ‘Error has no rights’ was the Catholic position until the Second Vatican Council.”
Yes, you read that right. We are to believe that the animosity of pre-Vatican II anti-Catholics was rooted in a fondness for religious tolerance. Know Nothings murdered Catholics and burned their orphanages, KKK members lynched papists, and the Irish were told they need not apply because American nativists and bigots were really apostles of warm Unitarian fuzziness.
The Old Moral Equivalence Stratagem
Now and then someone like Eric Rudolph, the suspected Olympic bomber, does some evil thing in the name of Christianity. And when that happens, we all know what to expect from the great mass of Christians: huge demonstrations all around the world in favor of Rudolph, with live images of these cheering throngs shouting “Death to the Jews! Death to the infidels!” beamed everywhere courtesy al-Triniteera. Meanwhile, hundreds of priests and ministers all around the world preach about the glories of Rudolph’s Holy War against the godless and urging as many young men as possible to join him. Yes, this widely adored man inspires massive cheering throngs of Christians to mob football stadiums in his honor. He’s the spark behind the swelling conflagration of “Christian terrorism” that threatens to engulf the world. Because, you know, there are just so many Christians like him.
Oh, wait—Rudolph lived in the woods and ate from garbage cans because he’s utterly isolated from ordinary Christian society? Virtually no Christians regard him as anything other than someone who blasphemes their faith with his vigilante violence? So why is the Boston Globe wringing its hands about “Christian terrorism”? What “debate” is there over Rudolph that prompts them to publish an article entitled “Debate Rises on Radical Christianity”?
The arrest of Eric Rudolph has evoked a frightening phrase: Christian terrorist.
“The man accused of bombing two abortion clinics, a gay nightclub, and an Olympic celebration in Atlanta wasn’t just a madman allegedly acting out of rage. Police and specialists on religious hate crime in the United States believe that he was moved to act by his long embrace of a radical Christian movement that holds Jews, blacks, and gays to be less than human” (www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/159/nation/Debate_rises_on_radical_Christianity+.shtml).
Answer: There is no “debate.” Nobody in the Christian world regards him as anything but deranged. But the Boston Globe makes some specious comparison between the violence widely approved of by mainstream Islam and the violence that is approved of by no mainstream Christians. That way, the Globe can slip more easily back in its comfortable old pattern of bashing Christians.
Chesterton on the Abuse Scandal
John T. McGreevy wrote a piece called “The Fog of Scandal” in the May 23 issue of Commonweal, which began: “We now have well-meaning Catholics telling us that the answer is fidelity, that a reassertion of Catholic teaching on sexuality and authority will resolve this crisis. This is a simple answer to a complex problem, and like most simple answers to complex problems, it is wrong.”
Come again? Fidelity is not the answer to the Church’s ills? Faithfulness to the gospel of Christ is not the remedy for sin? Yes, as McGreevy says, structural, procedural, and political issues will have to be dealt with. But the piece reminds us inexorably of Chesterton’s summation of modern philosophers in St. Thomas Aquinas: The Dumb Ox: “Since the modern world began in the sixteenth century, nobody’s system of philosophy has really corresponded to everybody’s sense of reality: to what, if left to themselves, common men would call common sense. Each started with a paradox: a peculiar point of view demanding the sacrifice of what they would call a sane point of view. That is the one thing common to Hobbes and Hegel, to Kant and Bergson, to Berkeley and William James. A man had to believe something that no normal man would believe, if it were suddenly propounded to his simplicity; as that law is above right, or right is outside reason, or things are only as we think them, or everything is relative to a reality that is not there. The modern philosopher claims, like a sort of confidence man, that if once we will grant him this, the rest will be easy; he will straighten out the world, if once he is allowed to give this one twist to the mind.”
McGreevy has some interesting insights. So do the others with the fundamentally insane view of life mentioned by Chesterton. But he starts by asking us to swallow the camel of believing that “fidelity . . . is a simple answer to a complex problem, and like most simple answers to complex problems, it is wrong.”
No, the answer is fidelity. That comes first. Practical responses to the abuse scandal have to grow out of that.
The Prophets Would Blister Their Hides for This
The BBC proclaims, “Aborted fetus could provide eggs”:
“An aborted fetus could one day become the mother of a new baby by ‘donating’ her eggs to an infertile woman, say researchers.
“The highly controversial idea has been suggested as one solution to a worldwide shortage of women prepared to donate their eggs to help other women become pregnant. It moved a little closer to reality on Monday with the unveiling of research from Israel and the Netherlands that found that the ovarian tissues taken from second and third trimester fetuses could be kept alive in the laboratory for weeks.
“The ovarian follicles from the fetus—which would eventually mature to release eggs in a fully-grown woman—even developed slightly from their ‘primordial’ state when placed in special culture chemicals” (www.news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/3031800.stm).
There is some kind of grotesque historical joke in the fact that members of two cultures who suffered under the Nazi attempts to improve the Master Race are now engaged in furthering such acts of cannibalism in neater and cleaner settings. But that’s apparently okay. When the violence is privatized, all is forgiven.
America to Islam: “We’re not depraved. Trust us”
Gay Pride Parades Celebrate Court Ruling (www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Gay-Pride-Parade.html): “Topless lesbian motorcyclists and men dressed as Brazilian carnival queens marched in gay pride parades across the country, an annual celebration made all the more joyous this year by the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling striking down laws against sodomy.
“Same-sex marriages are legal in Belgium and the Netherlands. Canada’s Liberal government announced two weeks ago that it would enact similar legislation soon.
“Despite the politics, pure fun still abounded at the parades.
“Some male spectators wore multicolored leis and long strings of faux pearls as they cheered floats. A woman smiled as she waved a modified U.S. flag, its red and white stripes replaced by colors of the rainbow, symbolic of the gay rights movement.
“In Atlanta, Seattle, San Francisco, and elsewhere, revelers marched, danced, and carried banners congratulating the Supreme Court and waving rainbow flags. As in years past, the lesbian motorcycle group Dykes on Bikes got the San Francisco parade off to a roaring start.
“’It’s a big party,’ said Jeffrey Sykes, 37, who has attended at least ten Gay Pride parades in San Francisco. ‘It’s a chance to let it all hang out and celebrate who we are.’”
Maybe this helps explain why the U.S. is having trouble persuading the Muslim world that the American Way is an unalloyed blessing. The Church would agree that the Islamic religion is ultimately not a religion of salvation. However, it would also politely suggest that the depraved culture of the West is also not salvific. It is Christ, not Mohammed or Uncle Sam, who is the Savior of the world.
Bishop Plumps for Women Confessors
Late last summer, Bishop Vincent Malone, auxiliary bishop of Liverpool, England, said the Catholic Church should consider choosing lay women to be confessors. Writing in a new book, Healing Priesthood: Women’s Voices Worldwide, he said also that other sacraments reserved for the all-male clergy might be opened to lay people, including the anointing of the sick.
“It is not difficult to conceive circumstances in which a female minister could more appropriately than a man be [sic] the receiver of the humble confession that opens a soul to hear the glad words of the Lord’s forgiveness,” the bishop wrote.
Bishop Malone said he was merely raising questions rather than “starting a revolution” and stressed that any reforms would have to be agreed by the whole Church before they could be implemented. But Bishop Malone’s comments carry particular weight because he is the liaison between the English and Welsh Bishops’ Conference and the National Board of Catholic Women.
Although the Pope had ruled out women priests, the bishop wrote that the Church had “not so ruled in other areas which might yield surprising fruit.” He argued that the Church broadly decreed that only priests could administer the sacraments, and yet lay people were involved in the sacrament of marriage and, in cases of necessity, the sacrament of baptism.
Ah, here’s the rub: Bishop Malone said such reforms might “in part answer the complaint that women can’t do anything” in the Church. More cave-in to feminist pressure.
It is a good example why so many uninformed Catholics are confused. When a prominent Church leader writes things that are clearly contrary to recent pronouncements of the Vatican, what’s a pewsitter to believe?