What Bloggers Gab about in Email

So I write Rod Dreher because (bum ba BUM!) I’m coming to Dallas and environs on January 24 ( January 24 9:00 AM – 1:00 PM. St. Anthony parish, Wylie TX. Topics: 101 Reasons Not to Be Catholic, This is My Body, Making Senses Out of Scripture. Contact: Mark Windsor.) I’ve never actually met the guy, so it seemed like a good idea to drop him a line and we could all go out for dinner and a drink.

We work out the details, then he adds:

Say, I just posed a question about a Ross Douthat post, having to do with Catholic teaching on faith and morals and the obligation of Catholics. I’d appreciate it if you’d weigh in. I really do want to know the answer, and I suspect the comboxes are going to turn into a sneerfest involving the word “Galileo”.

This may strike some readers as snarky, but I confess that it cracked me up. I sometimes wonder if I could formulate the perfect flamebait post composed entirely of Pavlovian acoustical cues in a sentence that makes no sense like “The contraception of Galileo by Traditional Latin Mass advocate Benedict XVI shows that Karl Rove, Michael Moore, and Rosie O’Donnell evolved from Nancy Pelosi’s Mormon feminist lesbian and Iraqi baby conceived via in vitro fertilization after her gay marriage to Andrew Sullivan–on 9/11, in Israel.” Long experience at blogging has taught me that sometimes mere acoustical cues are sometimes all that is necessary for a combox thread to instantly fall into a deep, deep rut in which virtually every thrust and parry of rhetoric is entirely predictable.

Sure enough, one of his readers does attempt the Galileo sneerfest but, to their credit, most of the “Church is full of crap” crowd manages to keep their sneering roughly on topic and only indulges in the normal “This is all because of sex-obsessed celibate old men making crazy rules” sneers and not the “The Church hates and fears science and progress” sneers he feared. So the conversation still struggles to get out of a rut, but at least it’s not the rut Rod anticipated. Also, there are are number of good replies that basically mirror my own.

Re: Ross’ post: The question is not really what one is to believe but what one is to do. Even when we are talking about dogma (which we aren’t here) one of the interesting features of Catholic teaching is that in, say, an encyclical or othe document formulating a dogma (such as, say, Unam Sanctam) *only* the dogma* is protected by infallibility while the reasoning and argument which might be adduced to support it in the rest of the document are not. Similarly, while the Church is guided by the Holy Spirit in matters of faith and morals, how she might practically counsel somebody to apply those teachings in a given situation is not protected by infallibility. So we are under no obligation to think that the Magisterium is composed of infallible scientists or economista or political theorists. (Of course, we are also under no obligation to think it is composed of uneducated men either. Indeed, these guys generally are far better educated about stuff than the average American who is often so ready to think they are still grumbling about Galileo.)

Given that the task of the Magisterium is to be informed but not infallible about the places Catholic teaching impinges on practical application in “real life” the general approach I think we should take is to assume they know what they are talking about, but leave wiggle room for mistakes. That does not mean “look for loopholes” but “don’t have a crisis of faith if it turns out they make a blunder about some practical matter of fact in science, economics, politics, etc.” So, for instance, if it turns out that they get their facts muddled about the effects of a morning after pill, so that they thought it was abortifacient when it wasn’t… well then, oh well. They were mistaken. It’s not abortifacient.

But so what? It’s still an artificial contraceptive and the Church has always taught that this is contrary to the revealed purpose of sex and marriage. So not much changes beyond a comparatively minor detail. You still shouldn’t take the pill (nor indulge in the activity that necessitates it outside of the sacrament of Matrimony).

For me, what this comes down to is a sort of posture of docility with regard to Church teaching. I find that if one is in a “looking for loopholes” posture of “how little can I get away with believing and obeying?” then every factual peccadillo of the Magisterium tends to get exaggerated into a crisis of “How can I possibly trust a word they say, much less obey it?” One the other hand, if (like me) the assumption is that they basically are doing what they have ever done–articulating the teaching of the Church and giving broad advice on how to apply it practically (along with lots of caveats about how this is “in most cases” or “assuming the current science is accurate” or “if what the experts say about global warming or the Laffer Curve or the effects of gamma rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds or the situation in Gaza or the abortifacient qualities of morning-after pills is true”)–then crises of faith or obedience tend to be very very rare. I’ve been a Catholic for 20 years and have run across nothing in the Church’s teaching that constituted anything like a crisis of conscience for me (though there’s plenty that constitutes a crisis of convenience for me). Knowledge of the technical details of science, politics, technology, economics, the arts can be quite bollixed up in the mind of a bishop–just as Thomas can have his science from Aristotle be somewhat dodgy–and the main point (and validity) of the Church’s teaching will still stand.

So, for instance, the question that animates Ross would not arise at all for me, because I’m not particularly interested in the problem of whether a morning after pill is abortifacient or not. It’s an artificial contraceptive and so is immoral to use, whether or not it works by murdering a baby or simply by keeping a baby who should exist from coming into being. In the same way, while I’m not sold on the whole global warming thing, I am puzzled by the weird hostility some conservative Catholics have for the Vatican getting behind reduction of carbon emission and so forth. They’re leading by example, not in obedience to some lefty agenda, but to the command to tend the Garden in Genesis. Same with their condemnation of the violence in Gaza and their no-questions-asked welcome to the Spanish speaking stranger in Texas or California. Their task is basically to apply the gospel counsels by the best light they’ve got. If the light is flickering, they might see things that aren’t there, but the basic intent is still the same.