A reader writes

Another odd moment at Mass that perhaps you would share your thoughts on:

This morning, my wife, oldest son and I attended 6:30 Mass at a local parish. The 1st reading from Acts is the gripping tale of the Apostles deciding not to impose Jewish law on pagan converts. The priest, who seems like a good guy, gave a homily that was, it seems to me, subtly evil. I want to be clear that I don’t think the priest himself is a bad guy, and that I have no reason to suspect anything but good intent, but that the result was not good.

He made the following statements:

– That the Apostles, faced with ‘emerging’ issues, changed the practice of the Church under the influence of the Spirit to better further the Work;
– Today, just as in 1st century Jerusalem, the Church has questions. The Church needs to respond to emerging issues, including questions of sexual orientation, divorce and remarriage, and who can be ordained ministers.
– After the manner of the Apostle’s Spirit-guided decisions in the first reading, the Church’s must be guided by the Spirit and not resort to merely imposing what was done in the past.

While this is certainly the gist of his homily, what I’m not capturing is the careful way he avoided most third rails and worded his statements in non-inflammatory ways, and stopped short of recommending any particular course of action. He is a Jesuit, after all. The overall effect was soothing and reasonable-sounding.

I was left trying hard not to let this trouble me, and to find charitable ways to understand it. After all, I go to Mass in the morning to steel myself with a shot of Jesus for the day ahead, not to load up on fuel for steaming my brain. But it won’t work – the intellectual dishonesty, or, more charitably, muddleheadedness required to take this position overwhelms.

Or am I crazy or too touchy? How do you deal with such situations?

A basic rule of thumb is to never attribute to malice what can be sufficiently explained by some less evil cause. It’s very easy to pass from the proposition “Doctrine develops” to the subtle temptation “Doctrine needs to develop the way I’d like to see it develop” to “Here’s is what God is about to do.” The Church is full of people fiercely loyal to the teachings of the Third Vatican Council. Most of them wouldn’t know a real doctrinal development from a heresy if their lives depended on it (and not all of them are progressive dissenters, by the by. Some of them are Reactionary Dissenters who intensely resent the Church’s move away from their own presumptions about how She should develop her teaching concerning say, religious liberty or The Jewish Menace or whatnot. They wanted to see more, not less, Jew hatred and are mad at the Church for repudiating it.)

Concerning the things you mentioned, there *is* leeway for fiddling about with the fine points of prudential judgements, but not much. When it comes to sexual orientation, for instance, the Church waits upon developments in human knowledge to speak about say, what the causes of same sex orientation might be (we still scarcely have a clue). Likewise, with divorce and remarriage there is fuzziness about how to gauge when a true marriage has occurred, hence all the fuss about marriage tribunals and annullments. And, as is obvious, the bishops’ prudential judgements about who may and may not be ordained has contributed in no small way to the current straits the Church is in as gay men who should never have been ordained did their thang with the 80% of the victims of abuse.

That said, while the current policy (wisely) aims to weed same-sex attracted men out of the candidacy for the priesthood, it is by no means a matter of dogma that such men can never be priests. If it were, then the ordinations of gay men would be invalid, which the Church does not hold. Also, as a matter of prudential judgement, a case could be made that chaste, celibate, faithful same sex attracted men might well be ordained precisely as a witness to the possibility of a lifestyle of chaste and faithful celibacy. Nothing in the Church’s tradition utter forbids this that I can see.

That said, I will sell you the Brooklyn Bridge if any of that is what was intended by your homilist. Odds are it was a typical sermon in the “Let’s chuck the Tradition if it gets in the way of what our Sacred Groins demand” variety.

The thing continually overlooked by analyses like your priest’s is that the *whole reason* for the Council of Jerusalem is that the Church realized she was not free to just chuck the past if it got in the way of The Revolution. That’s because the Church is not a revolution: it is the fulfillment and completion of what God intended from the beginning. It was Marcion, not the Catholic Church, who regarded the New Testament as a revolt against the Old. In the Catholic account, the reason Gentiles don’t need to keep the law of Moses is not because Moses is old and therefore outdated, but because Abraham is older than Moses and it is his faith, not Moses’ ceremonial requirements that saves.

Indeed, to call for the Church to allow divorce and remarriage is like calling for the Church to start circumcising people again. Jesus insists that divorce is a provision for hard hearts and that “from the beginning it was not so”. Once again, he points us, not to a Revolution but to a Return–to Eden. The notion that development of doctrine means Revolution Against the Past is a stunningly clueless idea. In fact, development of doctrine means understanding more clearly what was meant from the start. That can be full of paradox, not least because reverence for Tradition does not mean reverence for traditionalism. Tradition, said Jaroslav Pelikan, is the living faith of the dead, while traditionalism is the dead faith of the living. Merely worshipping something because it is old is not reverence for Tradition. After all, sin is old, but we are not called to reverence it. For this reason, we have a Magisterium who job is, among other things, to help us distingush real Tradition from old sin.

Case in point: Bob Sungenis’ ongoing descent into anti-semitic nuttery in defiance of his former bishop and of the obvious teaching of Nostra Aetate. Just the other day, he chose to, once again, disgrace the name of Holy Church by regurgitating some old piece of filth about the Grand Jewish Plot to Destroy the Church from some utterly unverified document he pumped out of some source like Stormfront.org. (You gotta love a Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion knockoff quoting the Sinister Jewish Elders in 1936(!) saying, “We are the supreme Masters of Peace and War.” How incredibly devious of these Supreme Masters to oversee the mass slaughter of themselves just six years later. An incredibly subtle piece of work, those Learned Elders are!)

My point is this: Jew hating is old. That doesn’t make it part of the Tradition. But guys like Sungenis and various other cranks think it does, and so in a wrong-headed effort to be “traditional” they labor to fan these ancient flames with their wicked, reckless and stupid publication of filthy rumors like this. Precisely what the Magisterial teaching of the Church is supposed to do is steer us away from crediting this bilge and toward a grownup and sensible engagement with Jews in a spirit of love and respect. We are to avoid such things as this article as “foreign to the mind of Christ”. Why? Because the commandement we have from the beginning is “Love one another.” That doesn’t mean “Pretend we are all saying the same thing.” But it does mean “love”, not “spread baseless and silly rumors from anti-semitic crap you read on the web.”

All this means that the Magisterium is in the unenviable position of being constantly accused of being too progressive for the Reactionaries and too conservative for the Progressives. It is simultaneously the Nest of Evil Judaized Pseudo-Catholics for the Maurice Pinays of the world and also the Nest of Evil Anti-Semitic Conspirators for the James Carrolls of the world.