Solved: The Case of the Disappearing Young Adults

Last updated on: August 2, 2018 at 2:24 am By Jennifer Fitz

I have often wondered why something so simple as getting young adults engaged in parish life is such a mystery to the Church. (I am not speaking of the problem of young people leaving the church by the age of twenty, which is a different problem.) In my present parish, getting the young adults involved and active in parish life has taken a little time under the new pastor’s leadership, but it’s not rocket science:

Do the Catholic + Give Young Adults Room and Responsibility = Mission Accomplished.

How is this so hard?

The McCarrick scandals have answered that question.

I virtually never read One Peter Five, but when I do, it’s for this account of seminary life in the late 90’s in that bastion of orthodoxy the Diocese of Lincoln: Msgr. Kalin & #MeToo Conservatives.

We have generations of priests now whose entire young adult years were consumed by abusive relationships. At a time when young people should be testing their mettle and learning to find their place in the world, our seminarians were being taught to comply-and-compromise. Do what the rector demands or else. No help from the bishop if you complain.

Of course these men have no idea how to mentor the young adults in their parish! They’ve never experienced what it is to be an adult with a healthy sense of self at all.

What’s my parish’s secret? A pastor with a late vocation.

Image by Dmitry A. Mottl, CC 3.0, via Wikimedia.

McCarrick and the Banality of Dissent

Last updated on: July 28, 2018 at 12:15 pm By Jennifer Fitz

As long as we’re asking people to come clean about what they knew and didn’t: I didn’t know about McCarrick. I get a fair bit of Catholic gossip here and there, but the whole “open secret” of McCarrick’s beach house in NJ and the promiscuity of the clergy was not something that came to my ears specifically, that I recall. (Prior to last month — now of course I’m hearing it.) I have a relative who was a major donor to the church in northern New Jersey during the 80’s and 90’s, and so the clergy I met as a result of that — an auxiliary bishop and a few priests — would not have been sharing such stories in Aunt Helen’s family circle. She would have belted them.

I can’t think of any time I’ve had first hand knowledge of a priest having an affair. Honestly, the priests I know don’t even inspire unholy conjecture in that regard.

I have dealt with non-criminal concerns in my years in parish ministry — making sure policies are implemented correctly, for example, or informing the appropriate authority of a red flag on an issue that fell under someone else’s domain. I’ve been told first hand accounts of other people discovering and fixing non-criminal or strictly regulatory problems that came to their attention, and in some of those cases I’ve been able to observe at least indirect evidence that the problem was being dealt with appropriately on an on-going basis. As we speak I’m waiting on guidance from the diocese on how to handle a complex situation that indirectly affects a ministry I was involved in when the situation arose, but which has already been dealt with forthrightly by the civil authorities and by the church ministries that were directly affected.

All that is normal church life — normal life in general.

But here’s another thing that is a fact of church life in the US: Everyone has a story of dissent.

My kids still joke about “Deacon Fish Pockets” who openly preached one Sunday that the miracle of the loaves and fishes was all about people having pockets in their clothes for storing their food. God bless Steve Ray and the SCA, my kids were already prepped for that nonsense. We politely made it to the playground before we bust out laughing.

I’ve heard about catechists who dissent from clear church teaching. I’ve heard about diocesan staff members who dissent. It is so common a problem that “faithful to the magisterium” is the code phrase Catholics who don’t dissent use to distinguish themselves. When I give talks about the Catholic Writers Guild, that’s one of the distinctives I mention: There are other trade associations in the Catholic publishing industry, but the CWG is exclusively for Catholics who don’t dissent.

What do we do about all that dissent? We ignore it, we avoid it, and we gossip about it.

Every now and then someone sends a letter to a bishop, but mostly people don’t, because we are so full of stories of bishops who don’t give a rip.

What does this do to the Church?

It makes us a people who are used to turning a blind eye.

I’ve had two different lay Catholics who live in New Jersey tell me that everyone in the area knew about McCarrick, and it was general knowledge for decades. These are ordinary parishioners — faithfully Catholic, yes, involved in parish life, but these aren’t priests or seminarians or diocesan staff. The culture of dissent is so firmly established in the Church that the big question isn’t, “Is such-and-such cleric living or preaching contrary to the faith?” but rather: Which ones aren’t???

The culture of dissent enables conservative or “orthodox” predators, too. When one of the “good guys” gets involved in criminal or predatory behavior, it’s hard to believe. We’re desperately to clinging to every shred of orthodoxy we can get.

So we tell ourselves: He knew better. He’s “one of us.” Surely there’s a charitable explanation. In a dissent-ridden Church, certain predators use their apparent orthodoxy as a shield to deflect the attention of Catholics who would be much more critical of an openly-dissenting cleric.

The instinct of the faithful is to not press too hard. When you see a bishop with all the right orthodox street cred, you don’t want to grill him on why he’s so quiet on the one hottest topic in Catholicism right now. You want to give him a Good-Guys Pass. He’s strongly pro-life across the board. He’s good to the liturgy. He’s bringing in good priests. Leave him be.

So dissent is the sword that cuts both ways: It gets us used to shrugging at immoral behavior among the ministers of the Church, and it gets us used to letting off easy those who should be stepping up boldly to denounce it.

It gets us used to living without integrity.

Related:

I just liked this picture. And anyway, what was I going to use instead? Via Wikimedia, Public Domain. Okay, so yeah, that astonishingly not-cherubic Bouguereau in the Praying for Terrible Bishops post could have worked here too. But you got stars instead, deal with it.

McCarrick’s Dam of Silence Starts to Crack

Last updated on: July 18, 2018 at 1:04 pm By Jennifer Fitz

The New York Times has come forward with the first round of investigative reporting on Cardinal McCarrick. Points to note:

The victim interviewed by the Times is Robert Ciolek, one of the two priests who were previously bound by confidentiality agreements as part of their settlements with the dioceses they sued for sexual harrassment. So this is not a case of previously-silent priests or seminarians coming forward.
It is good that the dioceses have lifted the confidentiality agreements. Hardly a deluge of transparency, but it’s a beginning.

I don’t usually read America, but when I do, it’s for statements like this:

The Catholic Church cannot pretend to be shocked about the pattern of sexual abuse of adult seminarians by Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, recently detailed in a comprehensive story in The New York Times. As The Times made clear in its reporting, many church leaders had received multiple notices of the cardinal’s behavior. Local dioceses had been told, the papal nuncio in Washington, D.C., had been told and, eventually, even Pope Benedict XVI had been told.

But none of these reports interrupted Cardinal McCarrick’s rise through the ranks nor his appointment as cardinal nor his eventual retirement in 2006 as a respected leader of the U.S. church. Nor did these reports lead to his removal last month from public ministry, which finally resulted from a credible allegation of abuse of a minor almost 50 years ago, recently revealed and acted on by the Archdiocese of New York.

Many church leaders had received multiple notices of the cardinal’s behavior.

It is true that none of the earlier reports of abuse alleged criminal behavior with minors, but they were serious enough that Cardinal McCarrick should have been called to account for the terrible misuse of his office and authority. The church and its leaders should be ashamed of their failure to do so. The slow and halting progress the church has made by way of reforms adopted in response to the sexual abuse of children, for example through the Dallas charter, has been called into question by the revelation of its ongoing failures to deal with other reports of abuse. Nor should the media, including we in Catholic media (Cardinal McCarrick was a longtime friend of this magazine and delivered the homily at our centennial celebration in 2009), be absolved of responsibility for any failure to take these and other rumors and reports as seriously as was required. To demand accountability only of the hierarchy is itself hypocrisy.

Let’s be clear: There’s a very good chance your own bishop was fully knowledgeable of the situation or even was personally involved in it all. There’s a decent chance your local pastor has some tales he’s sitting on.

If the two priests who sued their dioceses had been fabricating events, there would have been no settlement. They were not suing about a torrid affair gone wrong. The legal documents describe a situation in which many seminarians over the course of years and years were being systematically groomed and molested.

Visualize this for a moment: It is likely the man who will lay hands on your teen at confirmation is a guy who has been keeping quiet about his own or his brother bishop’s brazen disregard for chastity and common decency.

This is not about one man’s private struggle with chastity.

People experience disordered sex drives. That’s a thing. It happens. You get addicted to porn, or masturbation, or you abandon all reason and carry on an affair in violation of your vows. Plenty of honest people, Christian or not, clergy or not, find themselves pulled into sexual sins they despise. All Christians commit sins they despise. That’s why we have Confession.

McCarrick’s behavior is not the behavior of a man grappling with his own frailty. It is not a pattern of on-going repentance. It is a pattern of flagrant, shameless hedonism.

Nor is this a case of a criminal carefully covering his tracks. McCarrick was repeatedly promoted despite the fact that everyone who needed to know about his behavior was in fact informed.

How can this happen? Father Longenecker has a good explanation of at least part of the organizational dynamics here. What can you the average Joe or Jane Catholic do to change that dynamic? Be ready to help a whistle-blower make his escape.

Photo by Stefano Corso, via Wikimedia, used with permission.

Soldiers for Christ Hiding Under the Bed

Last updated on: June 22, 2018 at 8:20 pm By Jennifer Fitz

Bishops and bloggers live at opposite ends of the talking jobs. Bishops are charged with being perpetually diplomatic, and bloggers . . . well, I’m going to do my end of the job now:

There’s a reason we can’t have good things like religious freedom, and that reason is all the people who played nice about Cardinal McCarrick.

At this point the allegations about the cardinal’s predatory harassment and molestation of seminarians are still just allegations. There’s a reason for that, and before we fall into a spasm of Oh what a fine man, shame on people casting aspersions! let’s talk about the little old ladies at your parish.

I teach parish Bible study, and easily a half or more of the people I happen to work with are single women in about the same age group as the average parish priest. These ladies are hospitable. They love Jesus. They love their priests. And so a question that comes up is: How do I have Father in for dinner without causing a scandal?

They ask this question because they know that a single lady doesn’t just invite Father over to her apartment for a little one-on-one time.

I approve of this caution. So what I typically suggest is that they pair up with another single friend or two and make a group event of it.

How Innocence Behaves

So what would happen if Fr. Hapless and Miss Hospitable started spending enough time together that the rumour mill churned out the news that those two were an item?

If Father’s innocent, we could expect a few things:

Disbeleiving denials, immediately. “Honey, that’s the most flattering thing I’ve heard in years . . . but no.”
A change in behavior: Father and Miss H. will both become much more particular about avoiding the appearance of scandal.
Likely someone will call the bishop, who will look into the matter and see if Father needs some time off for vocational renewal.

And then Father Hapless, no longer as naive as he once was, will make a point in the future of avoiding scandalous appearances. My limited experience with false-accusation cases (just one that I’ve personally dealt with, though I’ve watched other cases from a distance) is that the accused will do what is possible to prove his or her innocence. Any number of the accused’s faults may come to light, but the accused will behave pretty much like the guy in the movie who scrambles to clear his name.

Cardinal McCarrick’s case doesn’t smell like that.

People Who Have Nothing to Gain

The reason the Cardinal has finally been removed from priestly ministry is because of one credible allegation of abusing a minor. The New York Times relates the allegations here. Keep in mind as you read that a 16-year-old is not a little boy. He is much more like a young man. Back in the day, boys of sixteen were known to lie about their age so they could enlist in the military. Physically speaking, a 16-year-old boy has more in common with an 18-year-old than he does with a 12-year-old or a 30-year-old. Hold that thought.

In 2010, Richard Sipe published excerpts (graphic) of the allegations against Cardinal McCarrick from the court records of a then-seminarian who accused McCarrick of molesting him. Sipe, you should know, is literally a professional at the business of testifying against Catholic clergy in abuse cases. It is possible that the similarities between the accusations of McCarrick’s behavior with a minor and the accusations of his behavior towards (legally adult) seminarians is based on pure fabrication: Take the details of one set of accusations and copy them out into a variation that slips under the legal line between minor and adult.

Possible. False accusations tend to follow scripts copied from real crimes.

Here’s Rod Dreher, professional schismatic, talking about his efforts to expose McCarrick as early as 2002. The summary: He had plenty of people willing to talk to him off the record, but no source would come forward and make the accusations in public. No one dared.

Understand that Dreher’s living is made on scandal. Telling you how bad things are in the church is his bread and butter. It is possible that he is entirely fabricating this whole account of his supposed investigative journalism efforts . . . but if so, that lie is bad business calculus. His market doesn’t want to read fiction, they want real grit. Pretending you almost got the grit is not a winning lie.

The other journalist talking about her efforts to break the McCarrick case is Julia Duin with Get Religion. Like Dreher, she had sources who wouldn’t go on the record, so she ended up at a dead end. In contrast to Dreher, Duin’s market is being the person who sets the record straight on religion reporting. Her job is to wade through the hype and get down to the facts. If she’s lying about her investigation of McCarrick, she’s on a mad quest for unemployment.

Not likely.

What It’s Like at Seminary

The allegations against McCarrick are nobody’s favorite. If you are tired of seeing the Church dragged through the mud, the instinct is to look for proof of innocence. If you are the average pewsitter, probably not gay, probably used to overlooking your parish priest’s little faults, what you want is for all this to be Not That Bad. If you are, whether from within the Church or outside of it, working hard to make homosexuality anodyne, then what you want are clerics who, if they must sin, quietly carry on some personal affair with a sympathetic twist to it. What you don’t want is for The Gay Cardinal to be promiscuous and predatory, forcing himself on young men subject to his power.

What you certainly don’t want is for this kind of predatory behavior to be widespread.

So here’s the late Michael Dubruiel blogging about predatory homosexuality among the clergy. He’s writing in the same era that Dreher and Duin were investigating McCarrick, but reporting on events that happened in the 1980’s and 90’s:

And finally, here he shares the comments of a priest, the original is no longer available, talking about the futility of going to your bishop when you experience all this:

It does no good to go to the bishop when the bishop is the problem! The chancery staff, the Monsignori, were appointed by him.

. . . The few priests foolish enough to speak openly about the scandal of homosexuality in the priesthood have soon learned that they will receive no help or support from anyone. The people don’t want to believe it. The newspapers won’t print it. The district attorney won’t prosecute, after all, his is an elected position, and the only thing more pointless than writing to the bishop is writing to “Rome”! Only in the area of pedophilia have we been able to enlist the aid of lawyers and multi-million dollar lawsuits to help keep some children a little safer.

Keep in mind that Michael Dubruiel was blogging all this while he and his wife were working (she still is) in mainstream Catholic publishing. He had no motive whatsoever to pick fights with the Church. The evidence is ample that McCarrick’s behavior is not an aberration.

Priests Don’t Come from Nowhere

As you read the official statements from Newark, Washington, New York, Metuchen, and the USCCB, think about the men writing these words. Every single one of them has a career built during what we might call The McCarrick Years, but, as we’ve seen, it’s not just one guy. It was a whole way of being Catholic clerics, and it was international.

What does it take to be a seminarian, then priest, then bishop, with a kingmaker who wants to put his hands in your pants? One way or another, you have to be a guy who can tolerate the system.

Some of these men may be singing a Te Deum as we speak, that the criminal they prayed for years would be convicted has finally been brought to some sort of justice. Others may be wondering if they’re next to get caught. We can imagine the bulk fall somewhere in between. To be a priest is to be a company man: A guy who can get along, keep his head down, not make waves.

Is there any wonder not a single priest would come forward and publicly denounce McCarrick? Of course not. To be ordained is by definition to be a guy who managed to make his bishop happy.

You Can’t Have Freedom of Speech and Slavery to Silence Both

If you take a look at the pedigrees of your local bishop and parish priests, and check them against the dioceses and seminaries already on the record as having been hotbeds of predatory homosexuality*, you may start to understand a few things.

Consider, for example, the parish or diocese that gives lip service to praying for vocations, but does not actually do any of the things that would form up young men capable of discerning a vocation at eighteen. It is entirely possible a generation of boys is not being ignored but spared: Wait until the boy’s not so nubile, when he’s a got a better chance of being able to dodge Fr. Handsey and Bishop Bedsheets. A late vocation may well be a much safer vocation.

But silence only takes you so far.

Mark Shea used to have a whole genre of posts called Gay Brownshirts on the March. He was wrong to use such inflammatory language. He was correct in seeing that bit by bit Christian beliefs about human sexuality were slowly being outlawed.

As we launch what was in previous years the Fortnight for Freedom (now apparently scaled back to “Religious Freedom Week”?), the US Catholic bishops are in an awkward position. You can’t demand the right to proclaim your faith while simultaneously refusing to proclaim your faith. Diplomacy only takes you so far. The freedom we are fighting for isn’t the freedom to keep your head down and watch your own back, hoping the predator on the loose doesn’t hurt too many people too badly.

There comes a time when children from abusive homes have to recognize they’ve been avoiding and enabling and adopting self-sabotaging behaviors in their scramble for survival. The boy reaches manhood, and he’s either going to spend the rest of his life behaving like a scared little boy, or he’s going to decide to step up and do what it takes to protect the innocent and vanquish the evil.

This requires a willingness to sacrifice.

Gentleman of the clergy, we need you to come out and fight for your Church.

Updated to share a couple relevant links:

Artwork courtesy of Wikimedia, Public Domain.

*I’d like to clarify here that I am not singling out same sex attraction as some kind of special evil worse than any other sin. A seminary is more likely to attract homosexual predators than, say, true pedophiles or heterosexual predators, for the simple reason that they are where bunches of adult men gather. If bishops were in the business of running the Junior Women’s Club, it would have attracted predators lusting after ladies with monogrammed tote bags. But they’re not.

Can a Protestant Church Get “Too Catholic”?

Last updated on: June 1, 2018 at 3:45 pm By Jennifer Fitz

South Carolina is basically one big small town, so the odds are high that I have kin or acquaintance at Red Bank Baptist Church. I have nothing ill to say about the place, not even after the congregation’s latest art problem went viral. I do think, however, that there’s something Patheos readers across the channels should be thinking about in the whole “Too Catholic” problem.

It’s Not About the Art

There is nothing to be gained by quibbling over whether the congregation should or should not love its art. Being a Christian church-artist is a harrowing proposition: You are commissioned to paint, sculpt, etch, compose, or perform a work that touches the most important, most sacred part of someone’s inner life, and somehow you’re supposed to do that in a way that stirs and satisfies the hearts of hundreds or thousands of people — people who couldn’t agree what temperature to set the thermostat, forget about questions of taste.

So it’s inevitable that not everyone is going to love the Jesus tableau. Even if it was fresh and inspiring a decade ago, you might reach a point where you’re ready for something different. Not far from Red Bank Baptist is Corpus Christi Catholic Church, where Fr. Ray Carlo has been doing a magnificent job of salvaging art from older (closing) parishes around the country and slowly making the relatively recently-built neo-traditional parish more “Catholic” feeling. I could imagine him being tempted to gently decline a work like Red Bank Baptist’s Jesus statue by perhaps saying that it doesn’t quite mesh with a Catholic aesthetic sensibility. And yet you know we Catholics love us some Jesus statues, and there are plenty of Catholic parishes where Red Bank’s art would fit right in.*

Or perhaps Red Bank Baptist wasn’t just looking for a polite way to take down last decade’s artwork. Perhaps they really do have concerns about seeming “too Catholic.” And that is relevant to those of us who run in ecumenical circles.

What Does it Mean to be Protestant?

I’ve had a foot in the Evangelical world for a lot of years now, and every now and then I hear someone say, “Don’t call me Protestant. Call me Christian. I’m not protesting anything, this is just what I believe.”

These people are genuine. They’ve inherited a way of looking at Scripture and looking at the faith that does indeed descend from true protests against the Catholic Church, but they themselves have no fight with Catholics. They are open to any Christian of good will who can sign on to something like CS Lewis’s concept of “Mere Christianity.” When they find common ground with Catholics, they don’t panic.

Here’s an example: At my son’s baptism was a good friend, Christian but not Catholic, who’d never attended a Catholic Mass. I asked her afterwards if she was bothered by the use of Mary’s title “Mother of God.” She told me, “Well, I noticed it, because I’ve never heard anyone say that before. But then I thought about it, and I realized, well, yes, she is the mother of Jesus, and Jesus is God, so I guess why not?” She didn’t drop everything and run out and buy a rosary. But she was fine with other Christians talking about something that was a plain fact right out of Scripture.

Contented, confident “mere Christians” do exist, and they are increasingly drifting into post-Protestant Christianity.

Protesting Too Much?

I’ve volunteered, studied, prayed, and worshiped with post-Protestant mere-Christians. And then I’ve run into true Protestants.

Here’s an example: I was looking around at teaching jobs and came across a school that was hiring in a field I’d be qualified to teach. I doubted they wanted Catholics, but I wasn’t going to assume. I clicked around and found the statement faith. It was one that a Catholic could sign in good conscience.

It’s actually pretty hard to write a mere-Christian statement of faith that manages to keep the diversity of Evangelicals in the net without accidentally writing something Catholic-compatible. When you get onto a topic like, say, free will and predestination, there’s more argument among various shades of Protestants than there is between Catholicism and the average Evangelical.

In a previous generation this school I was looking at might have published a statement of faith that took a strict position along a single denomination’s theology; but these days there’s too much denominational cross-pollination.

In my personal set of friends are a born-and-raised Pentecostal now worshiping at St. Evangelical the Anglican; a retired Assemblies of God pastor tiptoeing through the TULIP at Downtown Prez; friends who’ve reluctantly left Countryside Baptist in order to hang with the First Things crowd at Craft Brew Suburban Reformed; friends raised at St. John Wesley’s Methodist Or Bust now attending Bursting at the Seams Southern Baptist . . . and no shortage of others who choose their church home based on the preaching, the worship service, the community, or even just the physical location, and don’t necessarily even know or care what the official denominational affiliation of the place might be.

Hiring instructors based on strict denominational purity is a non-starter for any Evangelical school trying to grow its staff rather than shrink it.

So the school had an ingenious solution to the statement of faith problem: In addition to signing off on the school’s mere-Christian theology, you also had to be an active, participating member in a Protestant congregation.

Mere Christians, Unite!

Ironically, if I wanted to meet that requirement all I’d need to do is get back involved someplace like the group of non-denominational Evangelicals I used to worship with twenty years ago. They didn’t mind my being openly Catholic, had no problem with my reading their statement of faith through a Catholic lens, and were perfectly happy for me to sing, pray, and study for a few hours a week in Evangelical world and then skip on over to Mass at St. Statuesque. They were not against Catholics. They were for Christianity.

We are living in a time when we need more of this.

What is a Mere Christian?

I’ve seen some people get all in a huff about the American Bible Society requiring employees to sign a statement of faith. Go read it (scroll down to the bottom of the CT article). There’s nothing in that statement that a Catholic couldn’t happily sign. It’s the historic creed plus an affirmation of our basic beliefs about Christian life in general and marriage in particular. Note even the subtle distinction between the “I believe” affirmations of the creed versus the “I will seek” aspirations of the statements on Christian morals: The ABS doesn’t demand you be perfect, it only asks that these basic Christian beliefs be your goal and your ideal.

There’s an old joke that goes like this:

What’s the difference between a liberal Catholic and a conservative Catholic?

A liberal Catholic is more comfortable with a Mainline Protestant than with an Evangelical.

A conservative Catholic is more comfortable with an Evangelical than with a liberal Catholic.

I take exception to the idea that I’m a “conservative” Catholic. I’m just Catholic. I believe all that stuff in the Catechism, done. And if you believe that stuff in the Catechism, you have more in common with a statue-shy Evangelical than you do with people — no matter what they call themselves — who can’t abide the American Bible Society drawing a line around a few important bits of mere-Christianity.

I suspect Evangelicals are catching on to this. The Facebook uproar over Red Bank Baptist’s persistent-Protesting suggests that there are a lot of people who can see clearly the need for post-Protestant mere-Christianity.

*Some of us, of course, think the tableau will only come into its own once it’s been painted glow-in-the-dark. We like our sacred pop art deeply kitschy, thanks.

Usury vs. Contraception: Do Doctrines Die by Difficulty?

Last updated on: March 26, 2018 at 4:29 pm By Jennifer Fitz

Melinda Selmys asks, “Is Contraception the New Usury?” and poses a variation on an old argument. In her view, the Church’s teaching on usury has faded out of memory or practice because it’s just too difficult to obey; she forsees the Church’s teaching on contraception going the same way.

She isn’t original in this line of thought, and Catholic Answers treated the question back in 2006 in “Did the Church Change Its Stance on Usury?”

For a summary of the many different ways Catholic theologians have approached the usury question over the centuries, see this 2014 article from Canon Law Made Easy, “What Does the Church Say About Usury?”

The Distributist Review unravels the history of thinking on usury in extensive detail in “Is Usury Still a Sin?” If I were to very crudely summarize the development of doctrine on this point, it would go like this:

The Church asserts, in continuity with the general thinking of the ancient world, that taking interest on a loan is sinful.
But look! There are certain fees the lender might reasonably charge, such as costs for all the secretarial work in managing in the loan.
And also look at this! You might have a situation in which a passive investor as a business partner agrees to split the profits of a venture in a way that provides a smaller but guaranteed return to the partner who’s fronting the cash, and a larger but not-guaranteed return to the partner who is doing all the hard work.
Also: Opportunity Cost. That’s a thing.
So we can write up contracts on loans in ways that clarify that no interest is being paid on the loan, but here are these other transactions that do involve assorted legitimate payments to the lender that aren’t interest, but are related to the nature of the business going on.
Major development: Even if you don’t write out the all the different transactions in painstaking detail, as long as the fees you’re charging are legit, that’s cool.
Practical development of the 1800’s: Listen, priests: You don’t have to analyze all your penitents’ contracts. It’s reasonable to assume that the “interest” is just the assorted legit fees and compensations we’ve been parsing out over the last hundreds and hundreds of years, and it’s usually cool.

If you’re used to our contemporary banking system, all this is very foreign to you.

***

What modern ears tend to hear is, “We used to not be allowed to charge interest. Then we thought up lots of excuses to cover for the fact that we charge interest and it’s okay.”

We hear this in part for an understandable reason: In the modern world to speak of interest on a loan as being sinful sounds like crazy-talk. We just aren’t used to anyone saying this, ever. There’s another darker reason we might push off thinking about development of doctrine with regards to usury: We’d rather not take this teaching seriously.

The irony is that because the heavy lifting has already been done with regards to thinking through whether percentage-based fees on loans are always and everywhere wrong (no they aren’t), it’s pretty simple for the average Catholic to follow Church teaching on usury without too much trouble, other than the risk of mortal embarrassment if your cosmopolitan friends find out you’re doing it.

But hey, you belong to a religion that believes exploiting the poor is wrong, having a mother and father is right, and the Resurrection is real. Catholics are crazy that way.

***

Is sticking to the Church’s teaching on usury that hard? Based on my present understanding of what the Church actually teaches, I don’t think it really is.

Is sticking to the Church’s teaching on contraception that hard? Eh. Your mileage will vary. The part people usually complain about is the “not having sex” part. Well, lots of people manage to not have sex all the time, and lots more of us manage to not have sex some of the time. If your spouse doesn’t wish to follow Church teaching, that can make it really difficult — same as it’s difficult to get to Mass on Sundays if your spouse is opposed.

As with all moral teachings, some of us are more tempted than others to give in to this or that sin. Some of us might succeed at not contracepting but easily fall into other serious sins, related or not.

But none of that changes Church teaching.

Artwork courtesy of Wikimedia, Public Domain.

Facebook is Not Too Big to Fail

Last updated on: March 23, 2018 at 4:25 pm By Jennifer Fitz

Over the past five or six years I’ve gone from barely using Facebook at all to using it as a major communications portal. I use it professionally, to share my work, keep abreast of what others are doing, to chat with colleagues. Forming a Facebook group is my current go-to when I have a group of people I need to all get in a room to chat with each other, but they never get in the same room in regular life. And finally, like normal people, I also use it to keep up with friends and family.

But guess what? None of us are married to Facebook.

The Guardian has a good piece up about the data-collecting that Facebook does, and why leaving might be a good idea.

One of the fears Facebook users have is that somehow because Facebook is huge, therefore it is an unstoppable behemoth. It just isn’t. All that is required for Facebook to fade into oblivion like Myspace is for another communications platform to come along that does the job better. As the new thing gathers speed, people like me who are expected to use PR tools will join the new thing. We’ll like it better, and we’ll start using it more and FB less. Our friends will slowly migrate that way. FB will shrink into oblivion, another wasteland of automated status updates and Hot Russian Singles in Your City.

This was always going to happen. There’s too much money at play for other entrepreneurs to ignore the siren song hope of becoming the next big thing. Sooner or later, Facebook always was going to make its fatal mistake and die its forlorn death. It happened to the telegraph, it happened to AOL chat rooms, and one day it will happen to Facebook. The only thing in the world keeping Facebook alive is the fact that we use it. When something better comes along, we’ll use that instead.

Personally I’m not too bothered by a lot of what happens in the world of targeted internet ads. I like the way Facebook lets me know what my kids have been shopping for online lately. I like that Facebook has managed to figure out I don’t really want Cheap Viagra Now! But if you don’t like the way Big Data is taking advantage of your quiz results, find the next thing. You aren’t trapped. You were never trapped. You can move on any time.

Artwork courtesy of Wikimedia, Public Domain.