I think there are (at least) two problems with my post yesterday about thrones — two problems arising from my mistakes. One of those problems requires some clarification, which I’ll try to provide here. And it requires an apology, which I will provide here.
The other highlights what seems to be a deeper contradiction in my thinking, and that will take another post to sort out or, at least, to try to articulate more clearly.*
Here I want to try to clarify what my visceral antipathy to the idea of thrones muddied up in that earlier post.
Vorjack was reminded by that post of a great story from John Rogers that expresses the core of my complaint better than I did myself. It’s a story from Rogers’ days working in a New York restaurant, and you should read the whole glorious thing either at Unreasonable Faith or back at Kung Fu Monkey, because John is a terrific storyteller and it’s a terrific story.
It involves a big night at the restaurant — a visit from a big-spending Saudi prince and his entourage. Such a visit promised to be a lucrative occasion for the restaurant, but that’s not how it turned out. The prince, being a prince, thought he had the princely right to get handsy and abusive with the servers (we say “ser-vers” in America, rather than “ser-vants,” because we don’t like thrones — although this distinction isn’t nearly as stark or as substantive as it ought to be).
The owner, Paul, sided with his workers rather than with the money:
A bunch of us followed Paul out as he crossed onto the patio. He nodded to the Saudi. “Yeah. I gotta ask you to leave.”
Objections arose. Paul shook his head. “She works for me. I don’t allow that for any guest. Now I gotta ask you a second time, please leave. Meal’s on the house.”
The Saudi’s lackey starts to yell: “You can’t talk to him like this! This man is Prince –”
Paul cuts him off with a whistle, a New York cab whistle. Sets his shoulders and says:
“This is America, which makes you the prince of absolutely [frakking] nobody.”
Paul displays the same impulse, the same gut-level objection, that shaped my previous post. But Paul also clarifies something I confused — that this objection should be focused on the matter of jurisdiction.
That’s the core of my complaint, too, so I shouldn’t have focused, as I did, on the existence of cathedra and cathedrals. I should have focused, instead, on the actual substance of my complaint, which has to do with the desire of some of those who reign from those thrones to speak ex cathedra on matters over which they have no claim to jurisdiction. A throne in Saudi Arabia does not qualify one to rule as a sovereign over a restaurant in New York City. And a throne symbolizing that one is a prince of the church does not qualify one to rule as a sovereign over a nation’s health care system, or over everyone’s right to marry, or over the Girl Scouts.
My complaint, in other words, isn’t really about the thrones. It’s about some of the asses that rest on them and the shenanigans they’ve been up to lately in pretending that their reign extends far beyond where they can make any legitimate claim to jurisdiction.
By blurring those distinctions, as several commenters have patiently pointed out, I was insulting Catholics, Episcopalians and the members of all the various high-church traditions with cathedrals. That was wrong of me, and rude of me. I apologize.
I was also chastened by reading this post by Chaplain Mike summarizing the history of American anti-Catholicism from Mark A. Noll and Carolyn Nystrom’s Is the Reformation Over? My post could easily be read as being too close for comfort to some of that ugliness. That’s not a good place to be, and I’m sorry about that.
Let me try to amend for that by clarifying here that it is not the existence of cathedra that upsets me, but rather the idea that such thrones bestow an authority that extends beyond the cathedral.
This is what is happening right now in very concrete ways. The princes of the church are asserting their right to a sovereign reign over not just their church, but over every affiliated institution — over any school, university, charity or hospital, no matter how little of the funding for those institutions comes from the church. And not just over Catholic hospitals, but over every employee of a Catholic hospital, and every patient of a Catholic hospital. They are also asserting a right to reign over institutions wholly unrelated to their realm — from civil marriage to the Girl Scouts.
My response to that ought to be directed to the princes of the church themselves — toward the individual men, not to the office of bishop or the symbols of that office.
And that response echoes Paul’s: This is America, and outside of your church that makes you the bishop of absolutely nobody.
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* I’m not sure if this is exactly the best way to put it, but that contradiction involves the question of why, if I am a Baptist, I am not also an anarchist. If I’m going to get all Niebuhrian when it comes to politics, rejecting anarchy as overly simplistic and naive about power in that realm, then how can I justify turning around and embracing it as acceptable in the ecclesiastic realm? That would seem to suggest I’m wrong about one or the other. We’ll see if I can suss out which — or if that’s necessarily the case — in a future post.
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