Catholic Sensibility

Rod Dreher's obituary raises the ire of my friend Fr Jeff Keyes at The New Gasparian. "As a Pastor, it is my responsibility to advise parishioners that they should not accept at face value any news they receive from commercial media." As a liberal and in general I'd have to agree. But it has been fascinating to see media types miss the mark badly on the Catholic issues. I expect widespread ignorance of things Catholic, even from Catholics, so I don't find Dreher's poor aim to be so grating. He betrays a conservative American provincialism that's so far off the radar screen it's sitting in a horse-drawn carriage. Take a closer look at it. A few years back, I was drinking coffee at a cafe in Vatican City with an American friend, complaining about the pope and his puzzling inaction on several fronts. My friend, who is older than I, said, "Look, you don't know what it was like before. I was in high school during the last years of Paul VI's reign. The church was falling apart. We figured we were the last generation. Then John Paul II happened." So there's something to be said for perspective. If you're Chicken Tridentine Little, I suppose. Dreher is still upset about the sex abuse and cover-up scandals and gives our deceased pope failing marks for so-called "bad bishops." A lot of Catholics are still ticked off, so he's got company. One might think good Catholics can steer their prime energies elsewhere after three or four years, but that's another topic. Dreher could consider there's more to being a pope than running the Church as your own private army. Tradition is more than how Reagan or Eisenhower did it. There's more to ecclesiology than dealing with bishops as regional managers who depend on the bottom line to keep their jobs and cushy lifestyles. The Vatican has seen the sex abuse crisis as the responsibility of those close to the problem. Bishops. Seminary heads. The Vatican probably considers it a moral failing, not an institutional corruption. Frankly, I don't think Rome could have contributed a whole lot to the resolution of the scandal. New bishops are distrusted almost as much as old ones. The bishops themselves are the ones who must look within and try their best to restore their lost credibility as teachers and pastors. I think the Vatican has underestimated the scope and gravity of the problem, but they have only their own insitutional failings to blame, not a single man who was the product of the insititution. I guess I could agree John Paul II could have been more heroic in addressing the faults of the institution, but I think the target should have been the curia, not the bishops. American concerns are not Catholic concerns. We have most of the nuclear weapons in the world, but only a fraction of the Catholics. Even if the Vatican congregations listen when wealthy American correspondents complain about this week's piece of sky landing on their heads, most don't consider it any more than an annoyance in the face of the bigger problems of the world. Rich Americans complaining their kid was catechetically robbed by Sister Mary Butterfly? The secular and religious inroads against Catholicism on whole continents are far more alarming than the problems of SUV-driving neocon yuppies. If you consider the pope never wrote an opera or played ice hockey, then yes, you could say his legacy is incomplete. If you think setting aside what centuries of tradition say about the role of the bishop, you're entitled to your narrow opinion. What Rod's really writing about is "If I Were Pope." And I can take (and leave) his essay on those grounds. I don't think Fr Jeff has much to worry about. We can all muse about the ideal pope and consider ourselves in the chair of Peter. That dream will go as far as it should. Then when the real one is selected, we can wait for the first new piece of sky to fall on a Steubenville-stickered SUV. Then watch the new dissatisfaction sprout. My keep-it-in-perspective recommendation: the Serenity Prayer.