What if the Game Has Changed?

Catholicism is many things, but more often than not for us moderns, it is comfortable.  We can argue every day over whether or not it should be, but the truth is that in the West, it often is.  Now I'm not one of those people who thinks this is an inherently bad thing.  There's a lot to say for structure, routine, a beautiful liturgy and a welcoming community.  People act like this is a bad thing, and I'm just not having it  Like all good things, there is a risk of excess.  The comfort can lead to complacence, and if we aren't careful, we can value those comforts above all else.

What I want to talk about today is what happens when we are careful, but that comfort is still dangerous?  For the past 40 years, Catholicism (especially in the West) has had the comfort of a pretty well defined orthodoxy.  By this I don't just mean doctrinal, but in terms of the overall parameters of Catholic discussion.  The disagreement over Vatican II is really not that big:  the overwhelming majority of Catholics treat the Church before 1960 as a dark age we were gladly liberated from.  The discussion instead centers on what it means to be liberated from that dark age.  Even traditionalists carry out a discussion mostly within those parameters.  The same comes for the various discussions around the liturgy, the role of the laity, etc etc.  

I'm not saying there aren't disagreements, or that these disagreements don't matter.  There are, and they do.  Yet the factions line up pretty smoothly, and everyone mans their post at pretty comfortable, predictable, and familiar positions.  While those who love these debates do that, everyone else tends to follow a pretty predictable path in living out their faith.

I worry that this predictable arrangement is coming to an end, due to two factors.  One is an external event, the other is internal.  While they are not directly related, they are influencing each other.  The first is of course the COVID-19 pandemic.  The pandemic is rearranging every facet of life in the West, and our experience with religion is no different.  In large parts of the West, the Sunday obligation is suspended even now.  When we go to Mass, we are going with drastically smaller congregations, and many of the usual comforts and interactions are no more.  The parishes and communities that thrive do so only with great creativity and tireless work maintaining relationships in the age of social distancing.

In this age of creativity, everyone is beginning to see a new reality.  The first part of that new reality is drastically reduced Mass attendance.  The Church in the West was already contracting in Mass attendance.  Even before the pandemic the much hoped for "Francis Effect" (a pope more in touch with the sensibilities of western elites leading to a better environment for Christianity and increased Mass attendance) gave way to a smaller and shrinking Church.  If any of the numerous videos and writings by bishops are any indication, that Church has gotten dramatically smaller the past 9 months, and it will continue to get smaller.  Before anyone cheers a "smaller, purer" Church, with that smaller church comes a drastically scaled back Church.  Many of the great missionary activities we do rely on money, money that isn't coming in.  It means fewer food banks or crisis pregnancy outreach.  It means less marriage counseling from a spiritual perspective.  It means fewer retreats.  Good liturgy, especially today, requires a bit of training to get people acclimated to a different state of mind.  Good luck convincing a parish to do that when they are broke.

Certainly you shouldn't be so pessimistic Kevin, everyone will come back.  Right?  

Right?

What if they don't?  What if there's something that has happened in the Church over the past few years that has shaken the confidence of even the devout, and left Catholics with a bitter taste towards the hierarchy meant to guide them?  What if, freed from their Sunday obligation, they suddenly start questioning why they should go back?  Why should they go back to an organization that is rotten and corrupt at every level?

I speak of course of the various scandals plaguing the Church over the past few years, especially the crimes (spiritual and sometimes legal) of her bishops and priests.  While the McCarrick scandal takes on outsized importance, he is not the only one.  Catholics in Latin America, especially Argentina, are scandalized by the actions of Bishop Zanchetta, a close personal aide of the Pope.  In Chile, the episcopate is still trying to drag itself out from years of institutional rot over abuse, and the Pope is attempting to recover his reputation after his remarks on abuse in Chile drew widespread condemnation, including from his own inner circle.  In the United States, there is Bishop Malone, a (as yet pretty quiet) Department of Justice Investigation, and the recent arrest of an Ohio priest on federal trafficking charges.  (In what will become a recurring theme, he is alleged to have taken a victim across state lines to abuse him.)  Over 2/3 of American states are investigating their respective dioceses. You can give a defense of various players involved.  The overall picture?  Much less.

Before the pandemic, we were already starting to see the fruits of this.  DC churches were hemorrhaging money.  Dioceses were driven to the brink of insolvency as states began removing limitations on coming forth with sexual abuse charges.  In Europe various individuals resigned, were arrested, or tried in court. This is not just an American problem (as the pope's advisors originally tried to argue), as senior Churchmen are facing abuse charges and scandals on every major continent and island.

This scandal seems to be engineered to keep people away from the faith if they become less attached to it.  Like say, a global pandemic hits and you're no longer required to go to Mass.  What would happen if, say, a large amount of dioceses simply abandoned their flocks during what may have been a necessary lockdown, as happened in a lot of dioceses throughout the USA?  While there were a lot of creative pastors, we also had in some areas no sacraments for months, and nothing to provide some relief outside of a mass you could watch online.

Maybe I'm too much of a pessimist, but let's say this scenario is real:  that the pandemic leads to a drastically smaller Church, and its kept small by the disgust a lot of Catholics, rightly or wrongly, have over the abuse scandals and other corruption scandals in the Church.  What do our debates of comfort have to say about that?  Is this situation going to be reversed by another debate over Dignitatis Humanae or a sub clause in Lumen Gentium?  Will the latest papal writing do much?  Or another revision and debate over the death penalty or the catechism?  Or hey, let's bring back the liturgy wars! 

One thing every one of these has in common is they are debates mostly aimed at converting the in-group.  To those not in the Church, these debates look a bit silly.  (Okay, they are, but shut up outsider!) I don't think that means they are bad.  Just that the relevance to those not already plugged into a Catholic way of life and culture (even if its not a particularly good one) is next to nil.  There might be a lot of people no longer plugged into that life, to say nothing of a wider world experiencing suffering that hasn't been felt in decades.

Consider this a thought experiment.  What if I'm right?

Vigano, Traditionalism, and the Quest for Identity

When I did blogging regularly, I took pride in the fact that the blog stood out from others in that I normally avoided two things.  I avoided a running commentary on Catholic news, and I avoided a running commentary on various Catholic personalities.  If you read between the lines, it was clear these things inspired me to write about issues, but I tried to avoid being stuck in a time-specific piece.

I'm going to violate that rule here, and I think its important to give an outline as to why, and make clear this will be a norm I do my best to follow.  I think the case of Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano is a fascinating study in itself, and what his popularity in traditionalist circles says is pretty instructive of traditionalism, though not for the reason most of your bloviating idiot pundits think.

As mentioned elsewhere, after his scathing J'Accuse of Pope Francis for complicity and coverup in the scandal of Theodore McCarrick, Vigano soon became a minor and then not so minor Catholic celebrity.  He opined on various issues, and he wrote in ways that were clearly trying to grab certain audiences.  This style became a hit among traditionalists, especially as he began to be influenced  by your traditional standard boilerplate about Vatican II.

The standard criticism about Vigano is that it shows how far off the deep end he's gone, and allegedly this is proof of what happens when you are in "rebellion against the Holy Father", whatever that means.  Yet it is also clear that he is going beyond even the standard criticisms of Vatican II.  Its not just that Vatican II is a failed council: its that the council itself was a conspiracy a century in the making, and that it was actually a wildly successful council: it was a successful redefinition of the Catholic Church.

I want to mostly avoid those debates.  I point them out to simply make mention of the fact that there is a bit of a point when some worry about a radicalizing effect Vigano could have.  He's not just thrown his lot in with conservatives and traditionalists:  he's thrown his lot in with the most conspiratorial of the bunch.  So, what are we to make of him?

First, whatever his positions now, it says nothing about the overall truth of his testimony against Francis regarding McCarrick.  This entry takes for granted the truth of his claim because REALLY MAN?  We really have to do this?  Okay then.  His first argument was that, unknown to everyone save a few, Benedict XVI suspended McCarrick from ministry, essentially permanently, for the crime of sexual sins regarding the confessional and sexual abuse of a seminarian.  (at the time his serial child predations do not seem to have been known.)  At the time it seemed like an utterly insane accusation.  For many of us, its sheer absurdity was why it was likely true:  nobody would make that up.

That turned out to be 100% correct: confirmed by McCarrick's own pen.  He admitted to his secretary Benedict had forcibly imposed restrictions on him.  We also learned that from at least the late 90's/early 2000's Rome was made aware of allegations regarding McCarrick that were pretty substantial. We also learned that Rome had secretly punished a few other bishops for similar crimes.  Suddenly secret sentences weren't that crazy.  So on that claim Vigano was absolutely right.

The second claim was the more explosive one:  that Pope Francis knew about it.  While we'll never get a confession, I think its pretty clear he knew about it.  His refusal to originally deny it, along with the overwhelming evidence that the pope would of course know about a good friend, advisor and senior cardinal being punished.  If he didn't, his staff would've made it clear the second his name popped up in the news.  To this day Rome has never answered how Francis couldn't have known, leaving us with only one possibility:  he knew.  He knew, and for whatever reason (it need not even be conspiratorial or sinful) he let those restrictions lapse around McCarrick.

So yes, Vigano was correct on both accounts.  This does not necessarily make him reliable on everything else.  It just means that he was in a unique and fundamental position to know that Francis wasn't being honest.  That doesn't suddenly make him qualified to speak on anything else.  Nor does it make him a figure worthy of belief on everything else.  Still, the man is enjoying his time in the spotlight, and doing what he can to stay in it.  If that means fighting with otherwise natural allies over perceived slights personally and professionally, so be it.

What does this say about traditionalism as a whole?  That's where I think its more interesting.  Traditionalism has always had a bit of a populist strain to it.  They are suspicious of the hierarchy (who, despite their ordained role as shepherds are viewed as rotten for a variety of reasons), and view conformity to a dominant way of life with skepticism.  This strain was evident in its popular thinking.  While today Benedict XVI is viewed as a natural ally of traditionalists who (in the eyes of his critics) did more than anyone to mainstream the movement, as Cardinal Ratzinger traditionalists looked upon him with skepticism, if not outright contempt.  That he mostly agreed with them on the liturgy was viewed as a trojan horse for a variety of other ideas.  Any bishop who did likewise was often treated with the same skepticism, outside of elder princes like Cardinal Stickler.

That is not the traditionalism of today.  Today traditionalists count among their allies or heroes bishops such as Schneider and yes Vigano.  They also count among them Cardinal Sarah, Cardinal Zen of Hong Kong, and a host of other leaders.  Far from an adversarial relationship with bishops in the US, it is pointed out that relations have improved pretty remarkably outside of a few bad dioceses.  That traditionalists are so hungry to quickly point to anytime someone remotely agrees with them, this in itself is instructive.  Its a sign of a movement looking to become more accommodating to the mainstream.  

It is for this reason that a lot of the calls for traditionalists to denounce those individuals tends to fall on deaf ears.  They suspect, often correctly, that the Dawn Eden's and Where Peter Is gang are operating in bad faith.  Traditionalists are rebels against the hierarchy, but when they find episcopal support, those individuals are cranks or rebels.  They are in a perpetual state of rebellion against the Holy Father, but they are also preventing the Holy Father from wielding his Petrine authority when they appeal to him to use that Petrine authority to not allow married priests in the Latin Rite.  

For far too long traditionalists have been told they need to mainstream themselves, and that it wouldn't do to have just high school religion teachers or lay columnists advocate for them.  So they went and persuaded priests and bishops, and are now accused of radicalizing them.  We can't win gang.  We have these kind of debates about what to think of these individuals all the time.  We just refuse to do so on the schedule of hostile outsiders.

If you want to ignore all this and have a quick summary, its this:  we should always be careful about who we elevate, but the choices in who is being elevated should be instructive.  We're playing the game people have long asked us to win, are playing that game pretty well, and now they want us to stop playing.

Vatican II and the Case for Not Caring

In the latest installment of “Some Things Never Change”, Bishop Robert Barron has given a lecture to the Napa Institute in which he lays out why Vatican II is so important today. This is meant as a barely veiled corrective to his brother bishop Carlo Maria Vigano who has grown increasingly hostile to The Second Vatican Council. It is not my intent to say who is right. It is my intent to say that nobody should care.

Wait, did a Catholic just say you shouldn’t care about an Ecumenical Council? Did I just forfeit my Catholic card? To get it out of the way, Vatican II is a lawful and valid ecumenical council, called by a valid, lawful, and reigning Pope. There is nothing in the Council that explicitly contradicts previous Church teaching. In areas where it could be argued it implicitly does, this is nothing new for Church history, and the Church has attempted (sometimes productively, sometimes not so productively) to provide a synthesis. Nothing I have said above or will say below is meant to contradict this.

What I am saying is that the dominant debate about Vatican II is mostly a waste of time, and Catholics need not concern ourselves with it. There’s a lot of nuance to this debate, but a brief summation should suffice. Everyone agrees that at a pivotal moment of the Council deliberations, most of the original plans for the council were scrapped, and instead everyone went in a different direction. Almost everyone at the council (save a few “conservatives”) favored this change. After the Council, a debate among theologians erupted about the nature of this change. One group felt that while the original change was justified, the direction people were claiming “Vatican II” required them to take was a bad idea, and not actually part of the text itself. These are typically called “conservatives” or “orthodox Catholics” in mainstream parlance. They were opposed by those who viewed the initial change as a down payment on a far larger agenda of reform. They didn’t view themselves as betraying the Council, they were its spiritual children. These are known as “progressives”, “liberals”, and a variety of other names.

Who is right? Who is wrong? Do we honestly have to care? There may be some esoteric distinction between “What the council said” and “how the council was implemented”, but its mostly a distinction for purposes of narrative. The most visible change the Council ushered in was the liturgy, and the documents on the liturgical reform that became Sacrosanctum Concillium were almost verbatim the same before and after the change in direction. Second, Paul VI closed the Council, and Paul VI oversaw its implementation. At no point did he view his work being a fundamental change or a hijacking. Quite the contrary, he viewed the work most associate with the “liberal” understanding as the fruits of Vatican II. He also strongly disagreed with many of those voices when they tried to change Church teaching on contraception. We are attempting to read into the immediate post-concilliar era a factionalism that was nowhere near as crystallized as it is now or 15 years later, even if it involved many of the same players.

Finally, Barron and Vigano are debating attitudes about Vatican II. They are not debating teachings. Barron doesn’t mention a specific teaching that is rejected that Vigano is required to accept. Vigano is not calling on Catholics to reject an explicit thing Vatican II taught. Instead, we are debating what Vatican II should look like in an idealized universe.

Yet we can’t say what Vatican II would look like properly implemented, because, spoiler alert, there is no authoritative guide to what Vatican II’s implementation was supposed to look like. The documents were often compromises that would be worked out later, and that “working out later” is very fluid and always in motion. You may think tone policing is a productive part of debate, and there’s no doubt temperatures should be lowered. Yet this is very much a debate tailor made to our social media age: a lot of bromides and rhetoric without really doing anything

To those who would disagree, what do we traditionalists need to “accept” from Vatican II in regards to teachings? Trent had synods and far greater lay involvement than the current Church. Pre and Post Tridentine Catholicism fluctuated between being more and less centralized than the Church today. (Today the Church is considerably more centralized) This would seem to cut against the idea that Vatican II requires x or y when it comes to how the Church is governed. The only serious question is about religious liberty, and the Church has itself allowed far more liberty on this subject than people wish. What she requires people to accept from Dignitatis Humanae is actually quite small.

Sometimes we just need a blunt reminder: the world is not stuck in the 1960’s anymore, and the solutions to the problems facing the Church 60 years later are not necessarily in those documents, for good or ill. We also run the risk of a debate about navel gazing when the Church is facing a post-pandemic and post-abuse crisis world that ravages every faction, and cares little if its still 1968 in Napa Institute lectures. 

Yet in this we reach the real reason everyone is obsessed with debates over Vatican II: the more we debate that, the less we have to take a hard look at the reality that leaders of every faction failed us, and probably deserve being swept to irrelevance by future generations, except as a reminder of what not to do. Faced with that reality, Barron and Vigano would love to debate Vatican II for eternity. At least they are both relevant to history in such a world.

Was My Baptism Valid?

 A small storm was touched off throughout the Catholic world today.  Archbishop Allen Vigneron (of my beloved Archdiocese of Detroit) wrote a pastoral letter informing people that a priest of his diocese was actually not technically a baptized Catholic because some liberal took liberties with the sacramental form.  As a result of this, anyone who had the sacraments administered by said liberal was asked to come forward for conditional baptism.

Naturally, this is touching off a bit of panic and worry for a lot of people.  We should remind people that a sacrament is presumed valid unless there is direct proof of its invalidity.  If you have no proof, it is presumed valid.  Even if by chance it wasn't, without actual proof, the Church presumes the sacrament is valid.  On the technicality it isn't, God is bigger than his sacraments.

Do you have a serious worry what the priest/deacon did was invalid?  Then talk to your current priest, and give him your reasoning.  If he finds it warranted, then he can give you a conditional baptism, and anything else that is needed conditionally.  If he says you are fine, you are fine.

If we shouldn't feel panic over the validity of our sacraments, we should feel outrage.  Contra what you will hear from many people, this kind of stuff did happen quite a lot from the 70's to roughly the 2000's.  "Quite a lot" is a relative term.  Even once out of 100 or one out of 1,000 is "quite a lot" when you consider the number of baptisms.  Even if the odds it happened to you are extremely low.  Shame on those clerics.  If they did not repent, then their souls were/are certainly in danger.  Shame on the bishops who no doubt received complaints and looked the other way, being derelict in their duty to ensure the sacraments were provided to the faithful.  Shame on Rome for letting it get that out of hand.  

Yet do not despair.  Your sacraments were almost certainly valid, and if they were not, that can be corrected.  Just don't try to play armchair theologian in determining the status.  While it is overrated, this really is something we should just leave to the experts.

Allow Me to Reintroduce Myself

 So, after a six year descent into madness, I return to see that I'm actually sane compared to everyone else.  Being serious, hello sports fans, its me, your not so friendly neighborhood traditionalist.  Okay, your very young and bitter traditionalist.  When we last met, I was signing off of blogging.  I stand by most of what I said in those days.  The Catholic blogging community was a wasteland of sin and scandal.  So why am I going back to it?

I'm not.

You see, I'm not returning back to the Catholic blogging community because there is nothing to return to.  It imploded.  Several of its most prominent writers clowned themselves.  Others moved onto podcasting.  Others took their grifting from a few corners of the internet and infilitrated the conspiracy theory market.  When I left, I asked the last blogger to turn out the lights.  Little did I know nobody survived.

Sadly, what we got in its place was even worse.  Catholic Twitter makes La Bloga Nostra look like a sanctum of holiness.  Catholic Twitter is what would happen if the devil saw Mark Shea and said "get on my level son, let me show you how its really done."  (Ironically, Shea, after being fired from his previous job for his inability to play well with others, now screams into the void on twitter, even more detached from reality than he once was.  He saw the devil's taunt and said CHALLENGE ACCEPTED.)

What, you thought I'd come back all nice and pious?  I've been away six years, I got a stockpile of ammo!  Though being real, I'm going to try and avoid that as much as possible.  I'm not here to troll washed up Catholic personalities, (this goes out to you) or to mock overly ambitious former colleagues who sold their soul to their ambition (this goes out to you), or to look askew at people who view the most important things in the world as tools to use in their quest for clicks and recognition. (and you, and you, and you)

I'm here because now that the old order has imploded, I'm comfortable trying to do something different.  I want to write about matters of consequence and conscience.  I want to do so without making my editor friends sweat bullets (this goes out to you) in scaring off donors, but I also don't want to be associated with other places that quite frankly just aren't my thing.  (This goes out to you.)

Some of you remember me, and I'm sure we'll enjoy the journey along the way.  For those that don't know me, I'm a 37 year old who is way too bitter for 37, due to 18 years of traditionalism.  I've seen the landscape change dramatically in those 18 years, in ways entirely predictable and unpredictable.  We'll chart some of that later.  I'm a mix of the Latin Mass, Lorenzo Scupoli, and Public Enemy.  I'm a recovering apologist, and my marriage of seven years with two children has been the medication I use to overcome that spiritually wasteful addiction.  I fight the battle for traditionalism in the Church by refusing to align with any "traditionalist" ideology.  They come and go, and I'm somehow still here.   They will leave, and I will remain.

What are we gonna talk about?  Honestly, whatever I feel like.  I got some raw and uncensored thoughts about the state of Catholic media nowadays, and about a Church that has increasingly lost the plot.  We'll talk about those things, and we'll try to talk common sense about them.  The Catholic Faith is true because it speaks to what is common in all our souls.  It speaks to us where we are at, yet refuses to leave us there abandoned.  Mother Church, hapless and feckless as it may be, is still founded by Christ, and occasionally reminds us of that fact in her acts and authority.  We still have a share in her through our baptism, so let's use the time we have to remind the world and other Catholics of that fact, shall we?

And if you understood the references with the parenthesis, this one absolutely goes out to you.