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.

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.

Blogging and The Closing of the Catholic Mind

*Warning:  Due to some of the language quoted herein, reader discretion is advised*

As everyone knows, I haven't been blogging in awhile.  I still write a lot for Catholic Lane and Catholic Exchange, and the material and traffic have never been better.  Since I've been doing that, blogging has taken a back seat.  I never wanted to end things entirely.  I figured sometimes I might have something interesting to say on this blog.

Recent events have caused me to reconsider this position.  This will be the final post of Common Sense Catholicism.  I won't delete this blog, so if people want to see the archives, they can still see it.  Nor will I be done with writing.  I will still be putting out 2-4 articles a month between Catholic Lane and Catholic Exchange.  I'll still be @CatholicSmark on Twitter, so feel free to follow me.  Yet I see no point to continue blogging.  While I have a lot of respect for many bloggers, I feel the blogosphere to be a net negative to the Catholic Faith.  It's behavior is scandalous.  It is frequently an occasion of sin.  Its comboxes are cesspools of mortal sin.  It is the epitome of Francis' "self-referential Church."  Far from leading to a deepening of the faith, it has led to a corrosion of it.

Everyone long knows my criticism of the professional Catholic circut.  But what pushed me over the edge?  What put me over the edge was the latest dustup reported by Hilary White over at LifeSiteNews.  In it, the Pope concelebrated Mass with (and kissed the hand) of a dissident priest known for his promotion of homosexuality.  This wasn't the big story however.

Once it was reported, Catholic Blogger Simcha Fisher said the following:

Two sentences that make me turn on my bullshit detector: ones that start, “Guess what Pope Francis just did?” and ones that start, “According to LifeSiteNews . . . “

Let's start off with the obvious: 

1.) Why on earth is one of the biggest Catholic bloggers talking in such a way?  I get the whole speaking informally and keeping it real.  My Facebook page is full of wrestling talk, and finding ways to work wrestling gimmicks into my links and writing.  I'm not a stoic philosopher.  Yet I don't sit there and say "this turns on my bullshit detector."

Why?  Because I try to act civilized.  It would not look good upon Catholic Lane or Catholic Exchange if one of their writers is dropping F-bombs or other profanities in public.  While everyone curses, nobody should be proud of it.  An unregulated tongue is a vice, not a virtue.   Simcha Fisher is an adult.  If her child went to a priest and said "what you just said activated my bullshit detector" chances are it wouldn't end well.  Even if the priest was making up a bunch of nonsense, there is something called respect.  It's clear Fisher doesn't have respect for those she disagrees with, even though they are fellow Catholics in communion with her.  She might not like Hilary White.  Yet when she acts that way towards a Catholic in communion with her, she has sinned.

2.)  In stating that the reporting was "bullshit" (her words, not mine), she is calling Hilary White a liar.  There's just one problem with this:  the event described actually did happen.  Nowhere did she report an error of fact.  At least, nowhere has anyone actually proven it to be wrong.  We know for a fact Francis met with this priest.  The priest's words have been quoted accurately.  If there's a discrepancy, it's on the role of the priest, not Ms. White. 

Faced with this fact, Fisher and others could have said "my bad, it happened, but your interpretation of it is wrong."  Instead, they said the issue was LifeSite is running a story from a biased reporter, and they were right to reject the story that turned out to be true, because LifeSite is not to be trusted ever.  To this I can only reply:

THAT JUST RAISES FURTHER QUESTIONS!


Can they prove when the story became unreliable?

LifeSiteNews was not the ones who broke the story.  Local Italian media did.  The Priest himself also described the event on Facebook.  This was picked up by other bloggers, who then alerted LifeSiteNews to the story.  At every point along the way, the original sources were available. Yet because Ms. White and others hold undesirable views, they are to be held as automatically suspect, even when the facts bear them out.  And don't you dare admit they got one right! 

This reminds me of what is currently impacting the Republican Party in America.  In the runup to the 2012 Presidential election, most Republicans were certain that not only was Mitt Romney going to win, he was going to win in a landslide.  Various news organizations were reporting that the polling was telling a different story:  President Obama had a narrowly decisive lead in almost every battleground state, and this would put him over 300 Electoral Votes.  Their response?  The polls were rigged.  They were the "lamestream media."  The reporters were biased against truth.

Sound familiar? 

This was the result of an echo chamber.  The actions of our blogger friends were the result of an insular echo chamber.  Not once was it considered that Hilary White was capable of telling the truth.  The worst of motives were automatically assumed about her.  When reality turned out to be a cruel mistress, they amped up the attacks in hoping nobody would notice that they had just gotten got.

What Spin Occurred?

Go ahead and read the work.  It's more a less a piece of straight journalism.  Nowhere does it say "Francis was wrong because X."  It reported what happened, gave quotes from someone involved, and gave background on what happened.  There's no there there.

Instead, we have to infer the meaning between the lines, unskew the reporting as it were, so we can find out what it really means.  Again, this is precisely what people living in the conservative echo chamber did.  They even had a website, unskewedpolls.com, which gave the "real meaning" of the polls, and showed why Romney would win 360 Electoral Votes. 

 

How is this not rank hypocrisy?

The critics assume that implicit in White's reporting is an implicit attempt to show that Francis implicitly did this because he implicitly endorses homosexuality or dissident priests.  When the blogosphere says we need to get to the "real story" behind White's reporting, aren't they doing what they claim she is doing?  What makes Simcha Fisher's unskewing the message right, and White's unskewing the message wrong?  Both are allegedly extrapolating on a lot of unknown data to come to untenable conclusions.    How is this profitable spiritually?

Wait a minute. What do you think about the incident?

For what its worth, I believe the following:

• The Event Clearly Happened
• Francis' motive and intent is not readily apparent
• Guessing charitably, I can come to a conclusion that doesn't speak ill of Francis
• That being said, the execution and fall out could have been handled better

Yet what I say doesn't really matter here.  This is judgement call of legitimate debate.  People are objecting "they act as if the Pope has done something wrong", as if a Pope doing something wrong is inconceivable.  This is the worst caricature Protestants portray of Catholics as automatons who think whatever the Pope does is the best thing ever.  St. John Paul II in 1984 viewed traditionalists as a "problem to solve", and that was awesome.  He reversed course in 1988, recognizing that traditionalists had "lawful aspirations" which should be accommodated instead of swept away, and that was also awesome.  Roughly two decades later, Benedict repudiated the earlier idea that traditionalists were a problem to solve, and you guessed it, that was also awesome.  It is quite possible to believe those lawful aspirations should have been accommodated from day one.

Now that I've exhaustively laid out the facts, I don't want people to think I'm only singling out one faction here.  Everyone knows I've long been a critic of the insular nature of traditionalism, especially traditionalist blogs and social media.  Anyone who has read me over the last 13 years  knows this.  This insular echo chamber exists everywhere within the blogosphere.  Yet here is the ugly truth nobody wants to confront.  By its very nature, the Catholic blogosphere is an insular echo chamber.

 The way the Catholic blogosphere is designed is so that you will never have to get any news you don't want to.  Blogs typically link only with blogs they agree with.  Patheos in particular is mostly an insular community:  they spend time congratulating each other in front of a mostly friendly audience.  Very rarely do people link to an alternative viewpoint, because a lot of times that alternative viewpoint is spiritually dangerous.  Other times the pretense of spiritual danger is used to stigmatize those with opposing viewpoints which are permissible, in direct contradiction to Benedict XV's Ad Beatissimi Apostolorum:

As regards matters in which without harm to faith or discipline-in the absence of any authoritative intervention of the Apostolic See- there is room for divergent opinions, it is clearly the right of everyone to express and defend his own opinion. But in such discussions no expressions should be used which might constitute serious breaches of charity; let each one freely defend his own opinion, but let it be done with due moderation, so that no one should consider himself entitled to affix on those who merely do not agree with his ideas the stigma of disloyalty to faith or to discipline.

How often does any corner of the blogosphere practice this?

Why is this happening? 

Whether we like it or not, the Catholic Church, especially in America, is undergoing an institutional collapse.  This collapse did not happen as a result of splendid leadership.  While some of it was out of the control of Church leaders, many of the declines the Church in America faces were conscious choices that had the opposite result of what was predicted.  When an institution collapses, a power vacuum occurs.  As nature abhors a vacuum, various personalities will attempt to undertake the mantle of authority.  Since none of them are strong enough to provide centralized leadership (as the leaders themselves are normally products of the culture behind such a collapse), what you typically get is the equivalent of commentator warlords who carve up their own little niche kingdom.

In their kingdom, they are the guardians of orthodoxy.  They will tell their subjects what is true, and what isn't.  They will also remind them (in ways subtle and not so) that without them, it's a pretty scary world out there.  If you don't have their commentary, you have to get it from them.  They will lie to you.  In Simcha Fisher's words, they must be suspected of bullshit.  It's why Fisher warns her readers to stay away from traditionalists, because if you hang out around them long enough, you're going to find rank Anti-Semitism.  This was a vicious slander and something no doubt surprising to the overwhelming majority of traditionalists who have never encountered Anti-Semitism in their ranks.  If Fisher actually spent any amount of time in traditionalist communities before this nasty insult, she never would have said it.  Yet in her kingdom, they have an evil underbelly, whereas her kingdom is the kingdom of the pure.  She'll object to high heaven over this, and I'm sure she didn't mean it in this sense.  Yet her words caused real damage.  Most of her readers don't know many traditionalists, since everyone hangs in their own faction and seldom interacts with the other.  So what they heard is to stay away, because they have a serious anti-semitism problem.

This tendency towards warlordism is especially tempting for the blogosphere.  Most Catholics don't read blogs.  The ones who read blogs are normally hyper-educated individuals with a lot of free time.  The people who write blogs are normally hyper-educated individuals with a lot of free time.  When hyper educated individual is praised by hyper educated individuals as someone being used by God to shine light into darkness, there's a real chance a feedback loop will occur.  That feedback loop is really hard to kick.  If there's one thing warlordism enforces, it's that you don't go outside unless you are being kicked out of the enclave.

To make sure we stay in the enclave, we need to have our needs provided for, and our fears confirmed.  As there are some benefits discussed elsewhere in this essay, let's briefly talk about the fears.  Since hyper-educated people will frequently disagree, it becomes impossible for them to disagree unless one of them isn't really that educated. From there, they are part of the dreaded other, to be treated with suspicion. In many trad circles, there is still a suspicion of dealing with catholics in the ordinary form, and vice versa. We often paint each other with the most extreme caricatures. If we got out more, we'd understand what nonsense they are.

What I have just described I call outrage porn.    Everything becomes a source of outrage.  It isn't a minor disagreement.  Instead, it "sets off the bullshit detector."  Those who attend the Ordinary Form aren't Catholic, they are part of "Novusordoism."  Small disputes become world wars.  You have to do this.  If you stopped for one moment and self-reflected, you would go "wait, why am I doing this?"  Just as people need harder and harder doses of pornography to get their "fix", people need more and more outrage to sustain their cause.  Just like porn, the longer you are around it, the quicker your soul is rotted.

What's the Real Problem?

Defenders of this status quo will call it a lot of things.  Rod Dreher calls it "The Benedict Option."  A certain traditionalist magazine believes they are "The Remnant chosen by grace" while the rest of the Church falls sway to "Neo-Catholicism."  Others will say this is just sorting and the free market at work, and who am I to condemn people making a living?

Pope Francis called it something else.  He called it "The Self-Referential Church."  When we descend into warlordism, we are too busy trying to defend our little fiefdoms, and only give glory to members of the same tribe.  That's not the Catholic Church.  The Catholic Church is meant to share Christ with the world, and shine Christ's glory, not that of the warlords.  According to my Catholic Exchange colleague Ben Mann, this is a fate worse than persecution: 

But the erosion and breakdown of relationships – within the Christian community, and between the Church and the world – is already a fact. Unchecked, it will destroy faith in a way that persecution cannot. 

The worst outcome is not for us to suffer: that has happened before, and the Beatitudes tell us how to regard it. The worst outcome is for us to fail to love one another, and the world, in a meaningful and transformative way. A blessing rests upon those persecuted; it does not rest upon those who fail to love.

How Can This Be Fixed?

To be honest, I have no clue.  The easiest way to fix this is to force yourself to submit to the judgement of another before posting.  Preferably a spiritual director. I've got a wild hunch that if Simcha Fisher consulted a spiritual director before stating the story was "bullshit", the director would have pumped the brakes.  If most trad bloggers consulted a spiritual director before posting the latest sky is falling narrative about Francis, they could mail out their editorial content on index cards.  There's something raw and unfiltered about the blogosphere.  If you remove the raw and unfiltered manner of things, it ceases to be the blogosphere.

Another way would be to not turn blogging into a career where you depend on money generated by blogging to live your lifestyle.  That's just asking for trouble.  You will run into "publish or perish", and people will normally go to pretty extreme lengths to perpetuate their lifestyle, even if it is ultimately counterproductive.  Yet is not the worker worth his hire?  Even if they are warlords, warlords do provide security and stability to their subjects.  People learn a lot from the guardians of orthodoxy, and rightly so.  Most bloggers are hyper-educated individuals with a drive to share that knowledge with others.

A final idea might be to swear off of every polemic in blogging and social media.  Be the Bo Dallas of the blogosphere.  Spend your time only writing about spiritual instruction and how to grow in holiness.  In other words, be a spiritual director.  Yet why would readers want an imitation spiritual director when they can have the real thing?  Besides, a blog established with the express intent of avoiding controversy will not generate traffic.  If you want to make it big in blogging, chances are the exact opposite will happen.

In the end, perhaps an all of the above approach is required.  Submit all posting to the review of others.  Keep it a hobby, not a career, and avoid polemics entirely.  If we did this, the blogosphere would be a lot better.  Yet it would also be a lot smaller.  One thing I know for sure:  after today, it will have one less blog.

Conclusion

So you've made it through all the way to the end.  You sat through 3,000 words.  Congratulations!  Maybe some of what I said you nodded your head with.  Perhaps you clenched a fist.  In imitation of Ms. Fisher, you might have even let go some lovely profanity.  If you made it this far, chances are you are asking one thing:  what's the point of this rant?

In the end, the only point is that I'm done blogging.  This served to give my explanation for why I'm done blogging.  This is my pipe bomb.  I followed the advice I laid out above, and I found that my blogging became pointless.  So I devoted energies to Catholic Lane recruiting diverse talent, and becoming part of that diverse talent over at Catholic Exchange.  I'm sure I'll eventually get bored and drop a lengthy pipe bomb about my days as a writer doing essays.  Don't worry Michael, we're cool.  You'll be Paul Heyman [1] in my promo.

Will a lot of people read this?  Who knows.  This is a pretty inactive corner of the blogosphere nowadays, and in the end, I'm just another spoke on the wheel.  There will be better bloggers than myself who will inevitably come along.  I just hope they see this and take these words to heart.

That's right, in all I've written, I haven't completely abandoned hope that the blogosphere can be saved.  There are blogs I love, and I will continue to love.  I recruit them to write for Catholic Lane, and they do great work.  Yet at the same time, I fear we have reached critical mass in the douchebaggery of the Catholic blogosphere.  The big question is which faction passed critical mass the fastest?  Trads?  The Patheos crew?  The charismatics?  The insert your favorite Marian apparition here clique?  A case can be made for all of them.  If you haven't found your way in these factions yet, don't.  If you have, get out of them.  You can maintain your identity without being part of a faction.  I'm a traditionalist and will always be a traditionalist.  Yet I'm not part of the traditionalist uber alles brigade. 

As for me, I've got other work to do. My writers are trads, charismatics, and just about every charism in between.  If you do good work, I want to do good work with you.  I had a good run on this blog.  I re-established myself as a man of decent respect and did things trads aren't supposed to be allowed to do. I had some good fights, but more importantly, I learned a ton and made even better friendships.

So this isn't goodbye from writing period.  That will likely come in 5 years.  But this is the end of an era of my writing life and life as a Catholic.  I'm not a blogger anymore.  I'm just an ordinary writer and editor again.  Everyone have fun in the blogosphere, and will the last blogger please turn off the lights on the way out?

The Reform of the Reform Grows Up

http://catholiclane.com/reform-of-the-reform-2-0/

Lots of people have been talking about the Reform of the Reform lately.  Some think its "dead."  I think its actually just beginning,  except now with something nobody anticipated:  the best vehicle of liturgical reform is the Extraordinary Form.