For the first time in more than thirty years, the rigid traditionalists, who were always a minority of Catholics, had a Pope very much on their side. Their champion was Joseph Ratzinger who viewed even the Second Vatican Council as dangerously open to the currents of modernity and who, as John Paul’s doctrinal enforcer, ruined countless careers, and policed any error, and shut down any dissent to his understanding of orthodoxy. Many of us who disagreed did not throw a hissy fit, threaten schism, or call for open revolt. And we refused to do this even as our very identities were deemed inherently directed toward evil, as we were blamed for the violence sometimes directed against us, as we were blamed for the child abuse of pedophiles, as we had to endure the staggering hypocrisy and venality of a hierarchy that tolerated their peers’ rape of children but reserved their strongest condemnation for gay couples in committed relationships. But according to Ross Douthat, we, it seems, are not the real Catholics. We are not the people who keep the church alive. We are somehow parasitical on the true believers. The real Catholics are: the people who have done the most to keep the church vital in an age of institutional decline: who have given their energy and time and money in an era when the church is stained by scandal, who have struggled to raise families and live up to demanding teachings, who have joined the priesthood and religious life in an age when those vocations are not honored as they once were. They have kept the faith amid moral betrayals by their leaders; they do not deserve a theological betrayal.
Posted on: Mon, 27 Oct 2014 16:42:02 +0000
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