It\u2019s not hard to understand why people are so excited about Pope Francis. Since his sensational interview last week, many have said that with his personal warmth and determination to put doctrine in the background, Francis is just the man to bring a lot of fallen-away Catholics back into the church.<\/p>\n
Maybe. But I\u2019m an ex-Catholic whose decision to leave the Catholic Church is not challenged by Francis\u2019 words but rather confirmed.<\/p>\n
Just over two decades ago, when I began the process to enter the Roman Catholic Church as an adult convert, I chose to receive instruction at a university parish, figuring that the quality of teaching would be more rigorous. After three months of guided meditations and endless God is love lectures, I dropped out.<\/p>\n
I agreed that God is love, but that didn\u2019t tell me what He would expect of me if I became a Catholic. Besides, I had spent four years dancing around the possibility of returning to the Christianity of my youth. When I made my first steps back to churchgoing as an adult, I found plenty of good people who told me God is love but who never challenged me to change my life.<\/p>\n
What needed changing? Lots. My own brokenness was plain to me, and I was ready to turn from my destructive sins and become a new person. The one thing I didn\u2019t want to do was surrender my sexual liberty, which was my birthright as a young American male. I knew, though, that without fully giving over my will to God, any conversion would be precarious. By then, I was all too wary of my evasions. To convert provisionally \u2014 that is, provided that the Church didn\u2019t hassle me about my sex life \u2014 would really be about seeking the psychological comforts of religion without making sacrifices.<\/p>\n
What I was told, in effect, in that university Catholic parish was that God loved me just as I was \u2014 true \u2014 but that I didn\u2019t need to do anything else. It dawned on me one day that at the end of this process, all of us in the class would end up as Catholics but have no idea what the Catholic Church taught. I bolted, and a year later, I was received into the church in another parish.<\/p>\n
If you know about the Catholic Church only from reading the papers, you are in for a shock once you come inside. The image of American Catholicism shown by the media is of a church preoccupied with sex and abortion. It\u2019s not remotely true. I was a faithful Mass-going Catholic for 13 years, attending a number of parishes in five cities in different parts of the country. I could count on one hand the number of homilies I heard that addressed abortion or sexuality in any way. Rather, the homilies were wholly therapeutic, almost always some saccharine variation of God is love.<\/p>\n
Well, yes, He is, but Sunday School simplicities get you only so far. Classical Catholic theology dwells on the paradox of God\u2019s love and God\u2019s justice. As Dante shows in the Divine Comedy , God\u2019s love is God\u2019s justice poured out on those who reject Him. In the Gospels, Jesus offers compassion to sinners rejected by religious rigorists, but he also tells them to reform their lives, to \u201cgo forth and sin no more.\u201d<\/p>\n
Was I frustrated because the priests wouldn\u2019t preach God\u2019s judgment instead of God\u2019s mercy? By no means. I was frustrated because they wouldn\u2019t preach God\u2019s judgment at all, which is to say, they preached Christ without the Cross. I knew the depths of the sins from which I was being delivered, and it felt wrong to treat His amazing grace like it was a common courtesy. As the reggae song says, \u201cEverybody wants to get to heaven, but nobody wants to die.\u201d<\/p>\n
In his recent book about Anglicanism, Our Church , the English philosopher Roger Scruton says the greatest problem in the modern world is the \u201closs of the habit of repentance.\u201d Broadly speaking, there seemed to me to be no particular interest in the American Catholic church in repentance, because there was no particular interest in the reality of sin. The stereotypical idea of the Catholic Church as a sin-obsessed, legalistic hothouse surely came from somewhere. But for Catholics like me, born in the late 1960s, this cramped and miserable picture of the church may as well have come from antiquity.<\/p>\n
The contemporary era of global Catholicism began in 1959, when the newly elected Pope John XXIII sought to \u201copen the windows\u201d of the fusty old Church to the modern world by calling the Second Vatican Council. Three years later, in his opening address to the council, the charismatic and avuncular pope called for \u201ca new enthusiasm, a new joy and serenity of mind in the unreserved acceptance by all of the entire Christian faith,\u201d without compromising on doctrine. A fierce spirit of the age blasted through those newly-opened windows, scouring nearly everything in its path. The coming decades would see a collapse in Catholic catechesis and Catholic discipline. The so-called \u201cspirit of Vatican II\u201d \u2014 a perversion of the Council\u2019s actual teaching \u2014 justified many subsequent outrages.<\/p>\n
In 2002, when the clerical-sex-abuse scandal broke nationwide, the full extent of the rot within the church became manifest. All that post-Vatican II happy talk and non-judgmentalism had been a facade concealing what then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger \u2014 later Pope Benedict XVI \u2014 would call the \u201cfilth\u201d in the church. Many American bishops deployed the priceless Christian language of love and forgiveness in an effort to cover their own foul nakedness in a cloak of cheap grace.<\/p>\n
During that excruciating period a decade ago, rage at what I and other journalists uncovered about the church\u2019s corruption pried my ability to believe in Catholic Christianity out of me, like torturers ripping fingernails out with pliers. It wasn\u2019t the crimes that did it as much as the bishops\u2019 unwillingness to repent and the Vatican\u2019s disinterest in holding them to account. If the church\u2019s hierarchy cannot commit itself credibly to justice and mercy to the victims of its own clergy and bishops, I thought, do they really believe in the doctrines they teach?<\/p>\n
All this put the moral unseriousness of the American church in a certain light. As the scandal raged, one Ash Wednesday, I attended Mass at my comfortable suburban parish and heard the priest deliver a sermon describing Lent as a time when we should all come to love ourselves more.<\/p>\n
If I had to pinpoint a single moment at which I ceased to be a Roman Catholic, it would have been that one. I fought for two more years to hold on, thinking that having the syllogisms from my catechism straight in my head would help me stand firm. But it was useless. By then I was a father, and I did not want to raise my children in a church where sentimentality and self-satisfaction were the point of the Christian life. It wasn\u2019t safe to raise my children in this church, I thought \u2014 not because they would be at risk of predators but because the entire ethos of the American church, like the ethos of the decadent post-Christian society in which it lives, is not that we should die to ourselves so that we can live in Christ, as the New Testament demands, but that we should learn to love ourselves more.<\/p>\n
Flannery O\u2019Connor, one of my Catholic heroes, famously said, \u201cPush back against the age as hard as it pushes against you. What people don\u2019t realize is how much religion costs. They think faith is a big electric blanket, when of course it is the cross.\u201d American Catholicism was not pushing back against the hostile age at all. Rather, it had become a pushover. God is love was not a proclamation that liberated us captives from our sin and despair but rather a bromide and a platitude that allowed us to believe that and to behave as if our lust, greed, malice and so forth \u2014 sins that I struggled with every day \u2014 weren\u2019t to be despised and cast out but rather shellacked by a river of treacle.<\/p>\n
I finally broke. Losing my Catholic faith was the most painful thing that ever happened to me. Today, as much as I admire Pope Francis and understand the enthusiasm among Catholics for him, his interview [in 2013] makes me realize that the good, if incomplete, work that John Paul II and Benedict XVI did to restore the church after the violence of the revolution stands to be undone. Though I agree with nearly everything the Pope said last week in his interview and cheer inwardly when he chastises rigorist knotheads who would deny the healing medicine of the church to anyone, I fear his merciful words will be received not as love but license. The \u201cspirit of Pope Francis\u201d will replace the \u201cspirit of Vatican II\u201d as the rationalization people will use to ignore the difficult teachings of the faith. If so, this Pope will turn out to be like his predecessor John XXIII: a dear man, but a tragic figure.<\/p>\n
In his interview, the Pope used a metaphor for the church that is often employed by Eastern Orthodox Christianity: he called it a \u201cfield hospital\u201d where the walking wounded can receive treatment. He\u2019s right, but it\u2019s important to discern the nature of the cure on offer. Anesthesia is a kind of medicine that masks pain, but it\u2019s not the kind of medicine that heals the underlying sickness.<\/p>\n
There is, of course, no such thing as the perfect church, but in Orthodoxy, which radically resists the moralistic therapeutic deism that characterizes so much American Christianity, I found a soul-healing balance. In my Russian Orthodox country mission parish this past Sunday, the priest preached about love, joy, repentance and forgiveness \u2014 in all its dimensions. Addressing parents in the congregation, he exhorted us to be merciful, kind and forgiving toward our children. But he also warned against thinking of love as giving our children what they want as opposed to what they need.<\/p>\n
\u201cGiving them what they want may make it easier for us,\u201d he said, \u201cbut we must love our children enough to teach them the hard lessons and compel them toward the good.\u201d<\/p>\n
True, that. And I cherish this pastor because he loves his people enough to teach us the hard lessons, and to compel us past mediocrity and toward the good. Catholic priests of the same mind and orientation as my Orthodox pastor \u2014 and I know many of them \u2014 are telling me that the Holy Father, by signaling to his American flock that God is love and the rest doesn\u2019t really matter, just made their mission a lot more difficult. But that is no longer my problem.<\/p>\n
*<\/p>\n
[Original illustration at this number was moved to HolwickID #13582]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It\u2019s not hard to understand why people are so excited about Pope Francis. Since his sensational interview last week, many have said that with his personal warmth and determination to put doctrine in the background, Francis is just the man to bring a lot of fallen-away Catholics back into the church. Maybe. But I\u2019m an […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[395,392,391,388,394,393,389,387,390],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7748"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7748"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7748\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7748"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7748"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7748"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}