Catholic and Enjoying It!
Yet another reason for the Greatest Catholics of All Time to wet themselves. He won’t say anything new, of course. Though he may well say something old in a new way that will surprise us. But he’s damned from the outset by the Arugula Principle of Heretic-Burning “Conservatism”. Permit me to explain.
Long ago, when Rod Dreher wrote Crunchy Cons, he remarked that he was going off to lunch to have something–I forget what… so we’ll say, arugula … and somebody at the offices at NRO remarked that his food sounded “liberal”.
That’s the Arugula Principle. Conservatism used to mean “the absence of ideology”. The refusal to politicize every damn little picky thing in the universe the way Marxists did. But now the Thing the Used to be Conservatism politicizes and polarizes every stupid thing in the universe, even stuff like Muppets and the Lego Movie. It is obsessed with the hunt for heretics and not the making of converts. And the poison has penetrated deep into the minds of “faithful conservative Catholics” who increasingly evaluate Church teaching not by “Is it true?” or “Is it in accord with the Tradition?” but “Is this liberal-sounding, like arugula?” That’s why Reactionaries could pore over a beautiful piece of work like Evangelii Gaudium, completely and totally ignore the central point (our mission to make converts and disciples of all nations to this beautiful Faith Christ has given us) and instead spend *all* their time whining and complaining that the pope had noted that one (1) of the obstacles to our work as evangelists is a “self-absorbed promethean neo-pelagianism” that turns the Church into Fortress Katolicus instead of the missionary enterprise it must be. Result: self-absorbed promethean neo-pelagians hunkered down in Reactionary bunkers all over St. Blogs and refused to come out, cursing the pope for failing to recognized their greatness and for leaving the Fortress to bring in more worthless riff-raff and “neo-cat vampires” as one of the Greatest Catholics of All Time so colorfully put it.
Well, words like “ecology” suffer from exactly the same aroma of heresy as “arugula”. The Greatest Catholics of All Time don’t need to know what he will say. It is sufficient to know that he is talking about, ew, ecology. Only Liberals care about that (insert obligatory brief caveat about something something Genesis and something something “nature is important but don’t make a thing of it” before returning to the attack). The simple fact is, for the Greatest Catholics of All Time, Francis will be talking about things that are ritually impure. He needs to “stick to the essentials”. And for the Greatest Catholics of All Time the “essentials” are twofold:
1. The Church’s teaching as equal to and co-terminous with Liturgy Wars (with the EF existing in order to provide a basis for dismissing the 99% of the Church who attend the OF as “neo-Catholics”) and
2. Morality as consisting solely of “having the correct views on abortion (except for children we want to abort in wars or if they threaten a GOP shot at the Presidency), euthanasia (except for prisoners we want to mercy kill with capital punishment), embryonic stem cell research (except when a Republican favors it), gay “marriage”, and human cloning.
Francis, in conceiving of Catholic teaching as, you know, Catholic, goes way beyond such Minimum Daily Adult Requirement approaches to the the Church’s social doctrine and actually advocates the whole of Catholic teaching, including the bits that are beyond the narrow confines of acceptable discourse in the circles of the Thing that Used to be Conservatism. Which makes him a very bad Catholic according to the Greatest Catholics of All Time. So God has chosen them to stop him by complaining in comboxes and panicking on blogs about his “cold dead eyes”.
It makes for, so to speak, a bad environment.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In