The Dirty Papist

A little while ago I was reading an article Mark Shea had written for a local newspaper. The article was mainly a clarification of the CDF's clarification of the pope's recent document about the Catholic understanding of what a church is. As is often the case, the readers' comments were as interesting as the article itself, if not in a terribly worthy sense.

My personal favorite was where one person said 'Yes, you politely point out that the pope is just clarifying how Catholicism understands Christianity differently from Protestants, but I have to disagree that there's nothing to be upset about; really it was just just a diplomatic covering for the pope's actual words, that other churches are defective.'

If I'd read the article and comments early enough that I thought the person who left that comment might still be around to read the followup, I would have pointed out that his so-called disagreement was still agreeing with the principle. Mark spelled out the differences between groups as "adding to or subtracting from" the deposit of faith. If subtracting truth or adding something artificial doesn't constitute a defect, I don't know what does, and if he's going to come out in public and criticize someone for making a public and concrete criticism of groups that criticize Rome for being defective, as well, then I'm not sure what his understanding of debate or dialog really is.

A few others took some cheap shots at priestly celibacy, not cheap in the sense of underhanded or unfair so much as cheap in the sense of "religion is almost beneath my contempt but I'll attack it anyway as long as I can use pithy sound bites from other contratheists as a crutch." To wit: "the Marian doctrines of the immaculate conception and the virgin birth are based on a mistranslation of the Hebrew word almah, which means "young girl," for the Greek work parthenos, which means "virgin" as we currently understand that term. From this comes two millennia of sermons about sexual continence, which has caused unbelievable amounts of human suffering."

Parthenos fits under the umbrella of almah, may have even been its defining criterion, so the orthodox interpretation would hardly be implausible, even if the Apostles who knew Jesus and Mary--who would have spoken Greek and Aramaic and at least been literate in Hebrew--hadn't been around to clarify this point for the communities that had only the words spoken by the Apostles and disciples and the earliest written sources to rely on. Still, "unbelievable amounts of human suffering" stemming from advocacy for not having libertine sex? Really? As a microcosm, are we really suffering less in these past 30 years than we did before the sexual revolution? Sure doesn't look like it to me; I'd probably take "sadder but wiser" over "ignorance is bliss," too, but then you can't say "well, they just covered it up and oppressed people more before the sixties," and I wouldn't really say we're wiser for our sadness, just less hopeful. Trading naivete for despair isn't exactly a sage's choice.


I'll wrap up with just a few unrelated points that arose from discussion of Mark's article, since writing overly long and broad posts rather than pithy and self-contained ones seems to be more my thing.

• Adulthood nowadays seems to be defined as the point where a person becomes capable of making informed decisions. Maybe not with fully developed faculties, but I suppose that since adults make mistakes we shouldn't prevent children from making mistakes, and only enable them to make informed mistakes. Once upon a time, adulthood was defined by the ability to restrain one's impulses. Did anyone ever try to justify "Never mind the disciplines you were taught; if it feels good, just go for it," or did we just slide into it because it was easier?



• It does seem a little sad that theists argue that without a Lawgiver they would be violent heathens, to which most atheists object; yet it is usually these same atheists who argue for an arbitrary or natural law that pretty closely coincides with the mores of western civilization. The Catholic will recognize this as the Natural Law that it is; no atheist I've met so far has bothered to explain how the values he holds that coincide with Christendom's but do not seem to have been well-recognized in other societies are merely coincidental.



• "The god of the OT is a genocidal, misogynistic monster."

  
  I'll grant you that YHWH was stern, even harsh with the Israelites. To write Him off as a monster, though, requires that you skip over all the passages where people try to dialog with Him; not simply the places where He says "leave none of them alive, lest one of your men comes to worship their idols," which perhaps only makes sense to a theist in the first place, but the places where he relents from the strictest punishment they knowingly incurred, as soon as they asked for mercy. Doesn't exactly sound like something you'd expect from Baal or Pazuzu, is it? Wiping out pagan peoples wasn't common in the Old Testament, even between Egypt and the Promised Land, and it was always prophylactic; when punishments did come, they were always slow in being delivered and were never without warning. If the best criticism you can levy is "genocidal, misogynistic monster," then you really lack the perspective necessary to judge how a god-figure, Abrahamic or pagan, figures into human society.

Eh, I won't go over any of the rest. They're lame comments dripping with ignorance of history like "Rome would tortue you for being a heliocentrist if it could" and American provincialism like "Never mind Pol Pot and Stalin, it's Torquemada and Law who really brought war and suffering to the world whilst trying to hide behind the First Amendment." Yes, I know I'm splicing some thoughts together; they're not really any smarter in their original and less compact forms.