I’m Still Not Going Back to the Roman Catholic Church

  @roddreher – 30/9/13

“Pope Francis only confirms my decision to leave. “

“In Orthodoxy, which radically resists the moralistic therapeutic deism that  characterizes so much American Christianity, I found a soul-healing balance”

Read more: http://ideas.time.com/2013/09/29/im-still-not-going-back-to-the-catholic-church/#ixzz2gL9wsxT9

It’s 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’m an ex-Catholic whose decision to leave the Catholic Church is  not challenged by Francis’s words, but rather confirmed.

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.

I agreed that God is love, but that didn’t 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.

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’t 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 — that is, provided that the Church didn’t  hassle me about my sex life — would really be about seeking the psychological  comforts of religion without making sacrifices.

What I was told, in effect, in that university Catholic parish was that God  loved me just as I was — true — but that I didn’t 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.

If you only know about the Catholic Church 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’s 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.

Well, yes, He is, but Sunday School simplicities only get you so far.  Classical Catholic theology dwells on the paradox of God’s love and God’s  justice. As Dante shows in the Divine Comedy, God’s love is God’s  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 “go forth and sin no more.”

Was I frustrated because the priests wouldn’t preach God’s judgment instead  of God’s mercy? By no means. I was frustrated because they wouldn’t preach God’s  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. Like the reggae  song says, “Everybody wants to get to heaven, but nobody wants to die.”

In his recent book about Anglicanism, Our Church, the English  philosopher Roger Scruton says the greatest problem in the modern world is the  “loss of the habit of repentance.” 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.

The contemporary era of global Catholicism began in 1959, when the newly  elected Pope John XXIII sought to “open the windows” 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 “a new enthusiasm, a new joy and serenity of mind in the unreserved  acceptance by all of the entire Christian faith,” 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 “spirit of Vatican  II” — a perversion of the Council’s actual teaching — justified many subsequent  outrages.

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 façade concealing what then-Cardinal  Joseph Ratzinger — later Pope Benedict XVI — would call the “filth” 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.

During that excruciating period a decade ago, rage at what I and other  journalists uncovered about the church’s corruption pried my ability to believe  in Catholic Christianity out of me, like torturers ripping fingernails out with  pliers. It wasn’t the crimes that did it as much as the bishops’ unwillingness  to repent, and the Vatican’s disinterest in holding them to account. If the  church’s 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?

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.

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 did not want  to raise my children in a church where sentimentality and self-satisfaction were  the point of the Christian life. It wasn’t safe to raise my children in this  church, I thought — 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.

Flannery O’Connor, one of my Catholic heroes, famously said, “Push back  against the age as hard as it pushes against you. What people don’t realize is  how much religion costs. They think faith is a big electric blanket, when of  course it is the cross.” 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 – sins that I struggled with every day —  weren’t to be despised and cast out, but rather shellacked by a river of  treacle.

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 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 “spirit of Pope Francis” will replace the “spirit of  Vatican II” 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.

In his interview, the pope used a metaphor for the Church that is often  employed by Eastern Orthodox Christianity: he called it a “field hospital” where  the walking wounded can receive treatment. He’s right, but it’s important to  discern the nature of the cure on offer. Anesthesia is a kind of medicine that  masks the pain, but it’s not the kind of medicine that heals the underlying  sickness.

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 – 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.

“Giving them what they want may make it easier for us,” he said, “but we must  love our children enough to teach them the hard lessons, and compel them toward  the good.”

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 –  and I know many of them – are telling me that the Holy Father, by signaling to  his American flock that God is love, and the rest doesn’t really matter,  just made their mission a lot more difficult. But that is no longer my  problem.

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