Hello, I Must Be Going

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHihA1jfohE

I refuse to link to them.

The recent Synod-inspired doctrinal (some would label them merely pastoral) controversies between certain self-proclaimed, super-credentialed, academic Catholic elites, several of whom have displayed an astonishingly high tolerance for censorship, and others, mostly in the blogosphere, who have both called them out and have returned rapid, if not always accurate, fire.

Clergy against clergy, blogger against blogger, columnist against everyone else, it has been both an instructive exercise as well as a deeply disturbing one.

Instructive because it has helped to define, clarify, and highlight the split – it would be hyperbolic to call it a schism – over the hot-bed issues of divorce, re-marriage, reconciliation, and basic family structure.

Disturbing because much of it has been fomented with a surprising lack of charity.

My recent return to the Church makes me neither naïve about its tumultuous history, nor unserious about its future difficulties.

Sometimes, it is only by our grasping that history and reflecting upon those difficulties that the Church can avoid long-term, devastating, and otherwise inevitable failure.

Ours is a universal Church.

The original mega-Church if you will.

As such, the voices are always loud and many, the controversies always deep and incessant.

Every society, every culture, every generation seeks to impress upon the Church its own character, its own unique flavor.

I suppose that that’s the natural order of things, a way in which we seek to press our advantage.

But controversy that leads to an open and sincere discussion on the path towards guided discernment can actually be a great source of comfort, and an excellent resource for further theological education.

It is, in any event, unavoidable.

But it needn’t be, it shouldn’t be, mean-spirited, rashly raised, or ever spoken in anger, one against another.

When we tolerate wholesale personal abuse, the dark prince of this world will surely find a way to wedge his foot into the very door that we ourselves have willingly pried open.

Yes, the gates of hell shall not prevail; of that we have been eternally assured.

But we should never underestimate the power of our constant invitations for it to try.

As for me, this may well be my last word on this decidedly uncomfortable topic.

So, yes, Groucho speaks for me when he famously belted out: