Should we "Bother" with the Crisis?

 I know my return to blogging is for real because I now can never finish what I set out to do.  I have 3 or 4 grand ideas I want to write about, but things keep getting in the way.  I want to write about the Trumpist temptation of traditionalism.  I want to write a general overview of what I think are the main camps in the Church today.  Yet, in true blogging fashion, something else comes along, and I lose my train of thought.  Yet I think it's something that's really worth talking about.

I was given this opportunity by one Jeff Culbreath in a discussion on Twitter.  Now for those who have been in the trad world for awhile, Jeff is an old name.  Indeed, one of the original traditionalists who took up blogging.  In one form or another, Jeff has been going at this for 2-3 decades now.  I bring this up because I don't want to give the idea that Jeff is some Johnny come lately who doesn't understand the struggle.  He's lived it, he's taken arrows, and he's done a lot of great work, and most of it not in his writing.  So what did he say?

Most Catholics have no business bothering themselves with "The crisis".  Sometimes i wonder if my fellow eggheads online know any real Catholics in the pews.

I know a lot of good people, who have done a lot of good, to traditionalism and the Church as a whole, who hold this idea.  This idea is still wrong in just about every way.  Yet let's first talk about the one way in which it is right.  There is a certain danger in obsessing over the latest scandal de jure or news from a far away land in the Vatican.  Especially when it's done as a form of entertainment online.  That isn't productive, and its ruined countless souls. To the extent this is what one means, then that is correct.

Yet it's wrong every other way.  First is the idea that there is such a thing as a "real Catholic", opposed from the "fake Catholic", and said "fake Catholic" always seems to hold views you disagree with.  It has in common more with political revolutionary movements that seek to purge the impious from their ranks, even if the impious held ideas that five minutes ago were perfectly normal and acceptable.  So let us speak bluntly:  if you are baptized validly, you are a "real Catholic."  Even a Catholic under punishment is still a "real Catholic."  The idea that only "real Catholics" care about things that matter is not only false, it's also telling on yourself.  You've decided, on your own authority, to say what a real Catholic is and is not.  If the Pope and Magisterium say something different, well, who cares what they think?

Second is the idea that "real Catholics" are immune from struggling with certain things, and we shouldn't talk about those struggles, because they aren't becoming of "real Catholics."  This, again, is nonsense.  Catholics are just like everybody else.  We have a lot going for us, and we've got a lot going against us.  If we writers are going to do anything, it should be to talk about Catholicism as it actually exists in the world, not how we wish it would exist.  Sometimes that involves a lot of people angry and upset, even if that anger and sorrow is misdirected.  That's just as much a valid part of the Catholic experience as some boring commentary on the seven sorrowful mysteries that nobody actually reads, but everyone acts like it "matters."  I actually think Catholics need to speak about that stuff more, but that's for another time.

Third is it gets the point about "bothering themselves with the crisis" completely backwards.  The crisis will bother you, whether you want it to or not.  When we are part of a church facing a financial and demographic cliff even before a pandemic, and what that means, that is the crisis.  When you can't get a priest for your mass due to a vocations shortage of cataclysmic proportions that was ignored for decades, that is the crisis.  Yet let us put a more human touch on the matter.

I know an individual who was a weekly Mass goer, in a family of people who mostly stopped going, or didn't really believe.  Yet this individual had a "problem":  she was gay.  Now she had nobody who could give her guidance on how to live with that, outside of the double sins of homophobia and the belief that there really wasn't a difference between homosexuality and heterosexuality.  She got engaged to someone she was dating, and then her partner lost her position in parish ministry, once the reality of Church teaching entered reality.  All of this took her completely by surprise, because nobody ever wanted to address this topic honestly, because its extremely messy.  Now she's estranged from the Church (during the pandemic, she has stayed away from mass, and continues to do so now that the obligation has returned), and the familial bonds are frayed because the family had no clue how to address this from a Catholic perspective either.

Now while this is a composite person, this is no doubt what a lot of "real Catholics" are going through.  That is the fruit of the crisis.  Not everyone has the option of retreating from the world and only hanging out with people who have no struggles.  Honestly, many of us wouldn't even go to that if we could.  That's not where we feel called.

Finally its a belief that if we don't talk about something, its not real, or it doesn't matter.  This places way too much stock in our own feelings and beliefs, and it shows a pretty callous indifference to those who *are* struggling.  An indifference that is not Christianity.  Now you might not feel called to address that.  Yet there are others who want to,  and we should be helping those individuals do so.  I can tell you this:  a lot of the people I discuss the crisis and the faith with aren't Catholics at Mass every Sunday.  They are those fallen away, those who were never Catholic, and they genuinely want to know how on earth I manage to stay Catholic, and why I even want to be Catholic.  I'll tell you something: I love telling them those reasons and that story, and it never gets old, and it never ceases to resonate with them.  They aren't going to convert over that, but I've used the crisis to give them a bit of hope about God.

There is no running from the crisis we face.  We will be bothered by it.  So we might as well bother it back.  What matters is how we bother it back.  Different people will do so in different ways, and those ways will change over time.  Spending too much time dealing with it one way is never healthy, as it needs to be informed by events, situations, circumstances, state in life, etc.  A new convert will react to the crisis a lot differently than someone who has been there for decades.  

There's also something a bit insidious about this suggestion that "Real Catholics" shouldn't "bother themselves" with the crisis when it involves actions of the hierarchy or the ordained.  This reaction itself is a reaction molded by the crisis, and deserves its own treatment, but we've spoken enough today.  Put this down on the list of ideas I swear I'll get to eventually.  For the 100 or so readers, you've stuck with me long enough over the years, you know I come around.

What on Earth is Going On With Cardinal Becciu?

The last 24 hours have been a windmill in Catholic news. I will mostly be relying on links to CNA for links to the stories.  Cardinal Becciu, the prefect for the Congregation of the Causes of the Saints (and the former equivalent to the Vatican's Chief of Staff) was forced to resign Thursday evening, and had his ability to vote as a cardinal revoked.

In a frankly bizarre press conference today, Cardinal Becciu (in a statement that probably made his lawyers cringe) stated the following:

- The Pope demanded his resignation upon learning of a blockbuster story in Italian media accusing Becciu of misappropriating millions of dollars in charitable money, diverting it to his family members who in many cases invested the money (making profit off of the transactions) and in a few cases nobody knows what they did.

- He admits to all the behavior but says it is perfectly legal, though admits he has "made mistakes."

- Eagerly looks forward to a criminal trial where he can offer a spirited defense.

If Ed Condon is right (and he probably is), Becciu will get his wish with a criminal trial.  The Catholic Church will likely to have to endure the spectacle of a member of the Roman Curia standing trial in an Italian court for fraud and possibly embezzlement.  This is also not the first time Becciu has come under scrutiny for some of his financial dealings.  He has been connected to an italian hospital that was a money laundering front for the mafia.  (He steered a major loan obtained through dubious means from a US charity, causing many of the board to resign in protest when senior church leaders on the board forced it through.)  He's been involved in speculative land deals that went south and cost the Vatican a fortune, but not before several of his close allies and friends made a lot of money first.  He was accused of then obscuring the loss through accounting measures explicitly banned by Pope Francis in 2014.  What I'm trying to say is that if prosecutors want to investigate Becciu, they certainly have a lot of things to go on.

So what are we to make of all of this?  I actually think the cynical interpretation (that Francis knew about this all along but only cared once it leaked) is not the correct one.  Becciu's news conference today confirms what the story was about, and there honestly wasn't a lot of media talk about Becciu stealing from Peter's Pence.  There was talk about other speculative deals, but Becciu says those were not part of the deal, and I believe him.  I think its perfectly reasonable to believe that Francis was not going to take action over complex financial transactions unless there was definitive proof the law was broken, at least enough to a prosecutors satisfaction.  That's not the defense it sounds like.  Personally, I think the Pope was doing whatever he could to avoid taking too hard of a look at what Angelo Becciu was doing, and only when it started getting out of control did he take action.  That's consistent with how he treated McCarrick:  he knew of the homosexual relationships and the sleeping with seminarians, and only defrocked him once it became clear he was also a pedophile.  Like most in the post-concilliar Church, the pope is often allergic to discipline and governance, especially of his allies.

It is precisely that allergy that allows these prelates to get away with the indiscretions they do.  This is not the first senior francis aide accused of misappropriating church funds.  His former right hand man Oscar Maradiaga (a famously loud personality who has been awfully quiet the last 2 years) was accused of taking donations from poor Catholics in honduras and funneling them into investment companies that only existed on paper.  It allowed a bishop, Gustavo Zanchetta (a former secretary of then Jorge Bergoglio) to sexually harass seminarians and carry around pornography, but there wasn't anything *that* bad, and besides, my critics are your critics, right padre?  Once that became untenable, the Pope then whisked him away to Rome with a desk job he never actually reported to.  Only when that became revealed was Zanchetta suspended and then sent back home to stand trial.  The McCarrick scandal speaks for itself.  The decision not to discipline and govern has real consequences, and the pope is responsible before God for those consequences.  That should comfort everyone but the Holy Father.

Another way this is a bed of their own making comes in the various defenses offered.  The first is that this is proof the system worked, as Francis sacked Becciu.  Yet Becciu was under a massive cloud of scrutiny for years, and he was still made a cardinal.  He was now clearly under investigation for financial misdealing when Francis promoted him to the Prefect of a Curial Congregation, which now looks like a promotion to get him away from everything, a classic Vatican practice:  screw up minorly, get a reprimand, screw up majorly, get a promotion.

A more creative defense comes from individuals like Gladdin Papin (and many integralists online) who say that the financial scandals are a product not so much of Vatican malfeasance as malfeasance of liberalism.  The argument goes that if the Vatican hadn't been reduced to a small city state, it would have had greater access to money, and wouldn't have engaged in highly speculative endeavors that are a magnet for con artists.

The only way you arrive at this conclusion is if you start with the conclusion that the Holy See can never be blamed for any mistake.  That's a cult, not a religion.  The Vatican lost a lot of access to many of the tools of modern finance because they habitually failed to behave honestly in their finances dating back to the 60's and 70's, if not earlier.  This is where that allergic reaction to governance haunts them.  Combine this with the growing tendency to centralize everything after the Council (viewed as an unfortunate accident but was clearly the intent of most of the experts who helped implement the council) and you have a system with almost zero accountability and millions of dollars.  Even the noblest of men will be tempted to abuse that power, and the noblest of men are by and large not in the College of Cardinals.

As to what the Church can do, there is honestly precious little it can do.  That window has long closed.  The ones who can do something will be civil authorities, and at least in Italy (buttressed by civil authorities in the Vatican) they will be doing something.  While mentioning integralism in passing, it does make one wish for the glory days of Christendom in one respect:  when a powerful Emperor viewed himself as the protector of Christendom, and if he had to throw his considerable weight behind reform, that's what he did.  While Rod Dreher waits for Benedict, maybe we are waiting for Otto, or the Second Coming, whichever comes first.

The Tempting of Traditionalism, Part I

 As it is election season in America, there is a lot of talk about how faith and politics intersect.  Its also something that is a bit new:  the first election where traditionalists are getting a bit more cache in the mainstream.  Whatever one thinks about it, the President tweeting Taylor Marshall and Archbishop Vigano is a thing that happened, and its raised the profile.  Elsewhere in the Church, one finds voices saying Catholics have to vote for Biden, others saying its a mortal sin.  Wishing it wasn't like this is silly and stupid:  it is like this, and it will continue to be like this, so we better figure out how to process it.

A lot of Catholics I know are very worried about the growing affinity for Trump in Catholic circles, especially the more traditionalist ones.  I share that worry, but I'm afraid their inability to understand some key things means they will fail to understand why that affinity is growing, and what to do about it.  We're going to talk about what to do about it, but we need to do so on our terms, not on the terms of outsiders, or of those who wish those Catholics nothing but ill will. 

There is a growing affinity for Trump (and for nationalism in general) in traditionalist circles because a lot of the things he runs on (or professes to believe) are a problem in the Catholic Church as well.  The failure to understand this is why most of the critiques fall on deaf ears.  Without getting too granular, Donald Trump is president because trust in the governing class of Americans has cratered.  Like modern government, the Catholic Church is heavily bureaucratized, and those bureaucrats not only wield immense power, but also generate nothing but immense contempt from wide swathes of those they help govern.  The West was rocked by a financial crisis and by a migration crisis throughout Europe, the Church was rocked by an abuse crisis.  It isn't surprising that Catholics would seek analogies to the present political system to understand our woes.  It isn't just familiarity, the Church is going through a similar crisis in liberalism.  That these analogies have limits is important, and we'll get to that, but we need to understand why those analogies have such pull, even if you don't like it.

Another similarity is the current crisis is a stark reminder of how bad of shape the Church/society is in right now.  15-20 years ago it was common to talk about a coming golden age of the Church.  More recently there was talk of a "Francis effect" which would help make that renewal a reality after previous attempts never materialized.  Western political systems had the same optimism, whether at the fall of the Berlin wall, the election of Barrack Obama, take your pick.  The nationalist crisis within liberalism is causing a debate right out in the open:  is it really a renewal if so few experience it?  Or in the case of the Church, is it really a renewal when Mass attendance continues to decline, discord is now increasingly nasty and out in the open among bishops?  

People don't want to consider that reality because that reality scares them, and because they have not spent adequate time thinking "what if they are right?"  The elites of the West were utterly blindsided by the current tumult, even if it was clearly on the horizon.  In the Church, admitting we're in a really bad position right now would imply that our leadership either put us there, or did little to stop the slide to where we are.  For various reasons, that's a bridge too far for many.

Yet the refusal to admit that is why many trads find the Trumpist temptation so appealing.  At the very least, it isn't built on a lie:  society really is in a bad shape, just like the Church.  If you're annoyed by the elites in the Church, well we're annoyed with the elites in government who refuse to get the message.  So vote for us.  One can poke a thousand holes rhetorically in this argument, but one has to realize the appeal of it, as well as the failure of anyone to offer a compelling alternative.

Later this week I'll talk about the limits of those analogies, and why we should be on guard against them.  But this seemed like the perfect use of "let's write something only a few hundred people will read", because honestly, those few hundred people are likely to be thinking about it as well.