Vox Nova’s Id

Vox Nova’s Id 2014-12-31T15:21:27-07:00

After months and months of saying, “We’re not partisan. We are merely Catholic.” The partisans over at Vox Nova finally have erupted in a (frequently hilarious) new blog called The Catholic Fascist. Proving yet again that Chesterton knew what he was talking about when he said that the revolutionary knows what is wrong better than he knows what is right, the lefties at Vox Nova offer some hilarious skewers of the right wing Catholic blogosphere at its most absurd, and in the process make it clear that, yeah, the Vox Novans don’t really give a crap about abortion, don’t much care about the Church’s teaching on homosexual practice, and would be quite happy to ordain women.

They have a bit of a go at me for pointing that out, as you’d expect. And, not surprisingly, it sounds rather like the torture defenders, (“Thankfully, though, we have pure and wholly consistent Catholics like Mark Shea — true Saints in our midst! — to help show us what “puffed up” Catholics (1 Cor 4:6, 8:1, 13:4) who turn down no food at the cafeteria look like.”) Evidently, they haven’t figured out that pointing to the Church’s consistent teaching is not the same as *keeping* the Church’s teaching (something I’m not so hot at). Oh, and the ingenious fat joke! Stop! You’re killing me you witty, witty guys! [Update: “Richard Hedges” writes to tell me, “Wanted to let you know that what you perceived to be a “fat joke” was not intended that way at all. That isn’t the kind of thing we would post. In fact, someone made a comment that to me sounded like that kind of a joke and we promptly deleted it.” Fair enough. Glad to hear they aren’t that adolescent. Probably it was just my exceptional purity that caused me to misread them. We saints are *so* sensitive to sin, doncha know.]

At any rate, it reads like a sort of nine day wonder blog. Arturo Vasquez seems to think it’s the bee’s knees, but you can only go on indulging the fantasy that everybody you don’t happen to agree with is a racist for so long before you get tedious and shrill and unfunny. We’ll see how long it goes before it peters out. I am glad that all that pent-up contempt for actual church teaching about abortion, women’s ordination and homosexual practice, so long dammed up behind a wall of pretense at the Debate Club at Auschwitz, is finally finding release. I’m particularly amused to see that, in their pettiness and inability to forget the smallest slight, they have managed to make the absurd claim that Zippy (one of the most stalwart opponents of the Catholic Torture Defenders and all forms of consequentialism) is a favorite with the Catholic Fascist crowd.

His true crime: dubbing Vox Nova the “Debate Club at Auschwitz” for their transparent desire to downplay the seriousness of abortion and lobby for their favorite leftisms. It’s that kind of ideological distortion that will soon make the joke at Catholic Fascist go stale and leave it a sort of gossip circle where Vox Novans can continually go and register their mere contempt for whatever does not comport with their own little ideological camp–just like their right wing twins in the Mirror Universe.

Too bad really, because some of their satire is wicked funny and can only be outdone by the unconscious self-parody of some of the crazier voices in the right wing blogosphere. For instance, is this rant about those who regard the nuking of Hiroshima as a war crime from the Catholic Fascist or from an actual right wing Catholic blogger?:

Indeed so many of these sorts have no problem engaging in the most uncharitable, unethical, irrational, and unCatholic of behaviour towards those who do not tip the biretta, bow three times, and incense uncritically their pro-offered proof texts from various and sundry church sources, etc. That unquestionably involves objectively grave matter on their parts and when you further consider that (i) they are not coerced to do so and (ii) the knowledge of these people (even so-called “big time apologists”) is far from being even vincible most of the time but instead is what would be called “crass ignorance”**, this does not bode well for them. For essentially, most “apologists” who approach these things are arguably guilty of mortal sin. (Particularly those who ignorantly attempt to brand what happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki as “war crimes” via shoddy methodology and the sort of Monday morning quarterbacking that if they had a conscience on these matter should make them ashamed of themselves.)

Hint. Gotta love the well-ordered priorities: Oppose nuclear mass murder of civilians and get accused of mortal sin.

That sort of thing begs for satire. But satire without regard for what the Tradition actually teaches will soon be trained on the gospel if you are an ideologue who holds the Church’s teaching in contempt when it happens to threaten your ideological commitments. And without regard for the Tradition, you can also wind up just saying anything in order to score points and lashing out at anybody with the wrong perceived tribal affiliations. So, for instance, Jimmy Akin (you know, the guy who was just denouncing Hiroshima as a war crime) is perceived as a “Catholic Fascist” because his political orientation is basically conservative. He gets lampooned in the comboxes of the Catholic Fascist as “Jammy Bacon”. But the sentiment attributed to him is this:

“The “Orthodox” should really be called the UNorthodox because there denial of the fileoque has serious rpercussions. also many of them have ties to iraq and syrai”

Har har. Boy, is that Jammy guy stoopid.

The thing is, Jimmy’s take is nothing like the triumphalist Catholic Know-Nothingism of the parody:

Filioque

One of the most-cited issues separating the two churches is the so-called filioque controversy. This term is Latin for “and the Son,” and it refers to the clause in the Nicene Creed that says the Holy Spirit proceeds “from the Father and the Son.”

“And the Son” isn’t in the original Greek version of the Creed. It was inserted later by Western Christians and eventually authorized by the pope. Orthodox often criticize this on various grounds:
–Including the word makes the Creed inaccurate.
–The Creed is inviolable and cannot be changed.
–The pope doesn’t have the authority to change the Creed.
–If the Creed is to be changed, it should be done in union with the East (meaning specifically the Orthodox).

The last point seemed arguable. Perhaps, for the sake of Christian unity, the Nicene Creed shouldn’t have been changed until such time as unity with the Orthodox was restored. But the inclusion of the filioque in Latin versions of the Creed is a historical fact, and the question of whether it was prudent to add it in that way did not tell me anything about whether the Catholic Church had the authority to do it. The Catholic Church does not claim that its pastors will use their teaching authority in the most prudent manner but only that they are protected from error when they use its full measure.

The criticism of the filioque clause based on the authority of the pope also didn’t help me, as papal authority was a separate issue that I had to work out.

The claim that the Creed was inviolable and can never validly be revised seemed implausible on its face. The Nicene Creed was created to fight heresies, and heretics didn’t stop inventing new ones after it was penned. Even if the Nicene Creed was sufficient to meet the theological challenges of its own day, changing circumstances might call for the creation of new creeds or even a revision of the Nicene Creed itself—for example, if heretics found an insidious way of misinterpreting some of its clauses.

Indeed, that’s how we got the Nicene Creed: It is a revision done in 381 by one ecumenical council (Constantinople I) of a previous creed written in 325 by another ecumenical council (Nicaea I). Heretics were misinterpreting the former creed’s clause concerning the Holy Spirit, so the fathers of Constantinople I revised it to prevent them from doing so.

It thus seemed that the Church’s magisterium has the authority to revise creeds of this nature. The question was whether it did so in the most prudent manner.

This still left me to consider whether the Holy Spirit does proceed “from the Father and the Son.” It might seem like a small matter, but it pertains to the inner life of God, and that makes it important.

I recognized the force of the Catholic arguments concerning the subject. Various Bible passages taken together suggest that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Son as well as the Father (cf. Matt. 10:20; John 15:26; Acts 2:33; Gal. 4:6).

Ultimately, though, I recognized that it was not up to me to decide this question; it was up to the Church. On a subject this far from human experience, my feeble mind could not be relied upon. I would have to rely on the Holy Spirit’s guidance of the Church, which put me back to considering which Church was Christ’s.

(Much more can be said on this subject, including the way it is possible to harmonize the Catholic and Orthodox positions on the matter, but this reflects what I could see at the time. For more information, see the Filioque tract online at www.catholic.com.)

Jimmy’s actual remarks on the Filioque do not, in the slightest, reflect what is being parodied. So the “satire” is pointless. It is what speakers of English refer to as a “cheap shot” made, not because Jimmy has said anything untoward about the Orthodox, but because the partisans behind the Catholic Fascist just want to score off perceived tribal enemies whether it makes sense or not.

Such behavior (especially behind the mask of pseudonymity) soon stops looking like wit and begins looking a lot like cowardice.

Okay. Cue Arturo writing under his pseudonym to accuse me of the crime of making a living as a Catholic writer. Duly noted. Next? How about a charge of racism? Original. I’ll probably read the blog for another week or so while it’s still funny. Then I reckon it will totally jump the shark.


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