The Culture of Clericalism Remains

If you wonder whether the Roman Catholic Church has learned anything in the wake of the three waves of the sex abuse crisis, this report of the reaction to the death of Bernard Cardinal Law, whose persistent reassignment of accused priests and stonewalling forced his resignation as Archbishop of Boston, suggests that the culture that enabled abuse remains in place:

Make no mistake: There is a political battle underway in Catholicism today over child sexual abuse,” a veteran Vatican watcher, John L. Allen Jr., recently wrote in Crux, a website that specializes in the Vatican and Catholic Church. “And its outcome is uncertain.”

It is sometimes not clear which camp Pope Francis is in.

For many critics, Pope Francis has not made good on his early promise to remove the deep stain of child sex abuse from the church. A proposed tribunal to try bishops was scrapped. In June, Francis granted a leave of absence to Cardinal George Pell, the highest-ranking Roman Catholic prelate to be formally charged with sexual offenses, so that he could defend himself in Australia.

In September, the Vatican recalled Msgr. Carlo Alberto Capella, a high-ranking priest working as a diplomat in the Holy See’s embassy in Washington, after American authorities sought to strip his immunity and potentially charge him with possession of child pornography. The Vatican drew criticism for protecting its own by whisking the priest away, but said he would face investigation and perhaps trial in Vatican City. So far, no charges have been filed.

And this month, the three-year terms of members of the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors expired without any news of renewed terms or appointments, prompting The National Catholic Reporter to declare in an editorial: “That Francis has allowed this lapse to occur is worrisome.” The commission’s only abuse survivors had already left in frustration. Greg Burke, the Vatican spokesman, said, “The pope is working on it and will name members as soon as he can.”

***

At the conclusion of a funeral Mass for Cardinal Law on Thursday afternoon in St. Peter’s Basilica, Francis will preside over the Final Commendation and Farewell of the Funeral Liturgy.

Ultimately, he will be buried in the small chapel between the wooden confessionals, adorned with the relics of saints and a centuries-old crucifix. Cardinal Law renovated the place himself several years ago, and supporters like Monsignor Di Ciocco believe he deserves such a place of honor.

“It wasn’t that he was a pedophile,” said Monsignor Di Ciocco. “He found himself having to manage a difficult situation. It’s not that he himself behaved badly.

“In my times, there was a different instruction. If something happened in a family, it was the role of the father of a family to hide it. Now it is all about the media and saying sorry. It was natural that he defended his children, the priests. We can’t criticize what happened then with the mentality of today. It’s not fair.”

The Monsignor's remarks are very reminiscent of those of Cardinal Dario Castrillon Hoyos in a 2001 letterbacking French Bishop Pierre Pican’s decision not to denounce a priest who was later sentenced to 18 years in jail for repeated rape of a boy and sexual assaults on 10 others:

“I congratulate you for not denouncing a priest to the civil administration,” Castrillon Hoyos said. “You have acted well and I am pleased to have a colleague in the episcopate who, in the eyes of history and of all other bishops in the world, preferred prison to denouncing his son and priest.”

In it [the letter], the cardinal said relations between bishops and priests were not simply professional but had “very special links of spiritual paternity.” Bishops therefore had no obligation to testify against “a direct relative,” he stated.

I keep hoping for the day when Command and Coercion is out of date, irrelevant.

That date is not, alas, today.

Clinging to the Wreckage

The Investigative Grand Jury Report regarding the Diocese of Altoona-Johnson, released on March 2016, unearthed yet another series of sexual abuse cases covered up by the Catholic Church's hierarchy, reminiscent of that found to have occurred on the Diocese of Philadelphia, as detailed in a 2011 Grand Jury report. Unsurprisingly, the state legislature is considering abrogating the criminal statute of limitation and extending the civil statute of limitations.

The Archdiocese of Philadelphia, led by Archbishop Charles Caput, has responded with the expected level of penitence, the t is to say, none at all; rather, Caput has led his clergy in a scorched earth PR blitz including ostracizing Catholic legislators who have voted for the legislation:

Ken Gavin, a spokesman for Chaput, confirmed that archdiocesan pastors this weekend in "many instances" shared with worshipers how certain lawmakers had voted on the bill.

"The bill is public and the voting records are public," Gavin said in an email Wednesday. "There's nothing wrong with sharing that information. Obviously, parishioners are very concerned about this legislation. For those constituents to contact elected officials to voice such concern is a very normal thing."

The push from the pews was not new or unexpected from Chaput. He used the same approach as bishop of Denver to help defeat a similar bill a decade ago. Other dioceses subsequently replicated the approach when statute of limitations reform took hold in their state capitals.

But some on the receiving end said they believed the effort went beyond simply educating the congregation.

Still, Rep. James R. Santora, another Delaware County Republican, said even stalwart church supporters like him were finding themselves under attack and unhappy about it.

"I believe everyone that voted for the bill is being targeted," he said, including himself in that list but declining to say how he had been targeted.

To Santora, the naming of lawmakers inside churches and in parish bulletins smacked of "electioneering." He questioned the propriety of the church telling worshipers, as he saw it, that they were not worthy of votes come November.

I'm not going to get into the legalities of this. Not really what I care about tonight. What I cannot believe is the same old playbook, the same old rationalization, and, most of all, the same old sense of their own rectitude, even against unassailable evidence, flaunted by the clergy.

As a deacon, I meet many clergy from many denominations, and have been enriched by those encounters, including those with many wonderful Roman Catholic clergy. But a devotion to an ages-old system of clericalism threatens to engulf all the good they do--and yet they cling to it, seemingly unconscious of the fact that they do so.

The Cardinal's Ghost: On Reactions to Pope Framcis's Amoris Laetitia

Pope Francis's Apostolic Exhortation Amoris Laetitia is, quite frankly, not a radical document by any stretch of the imagination. It reaffirms traditional Roman Catholic teachings regarding marriage, but adds that the Gospel imperatives of love and mercy should be deployed to assist those who are confronted with the often agonizing dilemmas of broken relationships. As summarized by James R. Martin, SJ:

Pope Francis’s groundbreaking new document “Amoris Laetitia” (“The Joy of Love”) asks the church to meet people where they are, to consider the complexities of people’s lives and to respect people’s consciences when it comes to moral decisions. The apostolic exhortation is mainly a document that reflects on family life and encourages families. But it is also the pope’s reminder that the church should avoid simply judging people and imposing rules on them without considering their struggles.

Using insights from the Synod of Bishops on the Family and from bishops’ conferences from around the world, Pope Francis affirms church teaching on family life and marriage, but strongly emphasizes the role of personal conscience and pastoral discernment. He urges the church to appreciate the context of people’s lives when helping them make good decisions. The goal is to help families—in fact, everyone—experience God’s love and know that they are welcome members of the church. All this may require what the pope calls “new pastoral methods” (199).

Details to follow, as pastoral methods are developed.

Additionally, the Pope affirms that

“Individual conscience needs to be better incorporated into the church’s practice in certain situations which do not objectively embody our understanding of marriage” (303). That is, the traditional belief that individual conscience is the final arbiter of the moral life has been forgotten here. The church has been “called to form consciences, not to replace them” (37). Yes, it is true, the Pope says, that a conscience needs to be formed by church teaching. But conscience does more than to judge what does or does not agree with church teaching. Conscience can also recognize with “a certain moral security” what God is asking (303). Pastors, therefore, need to help people not simply follow rules, but to practice “discernment,” a word that implies prayerful decision making (304).

Regrettably, this has already led traditionalists to denounce Pope Francis's alleged "cowardice and hubris" or to claim that the Exhortation "carries a distinctive late-Marxist odor — a sense that the church’s leadership is a little like the Soviet nomenklatura, bound to ideological precepts that they’re no longer confident can really, truly work."

But it's a third traditionalist reaction that really grabbed me; that of Rod Dreher, who converted to Catholicism as an adult, and subsequently left that communion to join the the Eastern Orthodox Church. Dreher explains his discomfort at the Catholic Church's moving closer to the position of his own denomination:

I have been an Orthodox Christian for ten years, and I have come to appreciate better the Orthodox approach to matters like contraception and divorce. In fact, I think Orthodoxy has a more realistic and merciful approach — and in the case of communion after divorce, Pope Francis’s recent teaching is closer to the Orthodox understanding. So why does Pope Francis’s teaching worry me on behalf of my Catholic friends?

A couple of reasons come to mind. First, Orthodoxy and Catholicism have fundamentally different approaches to understanding how marriage is understood in the sacramental economy.

****

More important, at least to me, is that the Pope is loosening a teaching that is rarely proclaimed in the first place. I can see that I was too legalistic as a Catholic, and certainly the experience of suffering helped me to understand more fully that the law was made for man, not man for the law. This is why I sympathize with Francis’s pastoral instincts in Amoris Laetitia. That said, I know perfectly well how most American Catholic parishes are going to interpret and implement this teaching: as an excuse to ignore the teaching in the first place (as if most of them needed an excuse). . . .I don’t believe that the Roman Catholic Church has never, ever changed its doctrine, and I know, it’s no longer my church, so not really my concern. But I live in this post-Christian culture too, and it bothers me a great deal to see any Christian church weaken its standards, precisely in the area of morality where the historic Christian teaching is the greatest sign of contradiction to the age.

Later, in response to a comment on the post, Dreher is more blunt, writing:

If Catholics do violence to their own tradition for the sake of arriving at a position on marriage I believe to be more correct, they may end up undermining themselves more than they help themselves. This is why I am not optimistic about reunification of the Eastern and Western churches. A lot of theological water has gone under the bridge since the Great Schism. Orthodox don’t believe in the Immaculate Conception of Mary, which is defined dogma of the Roman Catholic Church. The Roman church simply cannot toss that dogma over the side. If it did, I would say that Rome’s position had moved closer to the truth, but in so doing the Roman church would have done extreme damage to its own authority. This kind of thing is why even though I generally agree with Francis’s impulse to be more merciful to divorced and remarried Catholics on the matter of receiving communion, it’s a big deal, and not because conservatives want to be mean to the divorced and remarried. There’s a much deeper issue in play here.

(Emphasis added).

This approach is all too reminiscent of that of John Henry Newman's, as I sketched out in Command and Coercion:

yearning for divinely ordained hierarchical ordering was traced by Newman to the Apostolic Fathers, and translated easily into the Roman Catholic ecclesiology upon his conversion. In particular, Newman states that “[t]he Catholic Church claims, not only to judge infallibly on religious questions, but to animadvert on opinions in secular matters which bear upon religion, on matters of philosophy, of science, of literature, of history, and it demands our submission to her claim.” Newman acknowledges that in these claims, the Church is not speaking doctrinally, but “enforc[ing] measures of discipline,” and that “[i]t must of course be obeyed without a word, and perhaps in process of time will tacitly recede from its own injunctions.” He goes even further, saying that “in spite of all the that the most hostile critic may urge about the encroachments or severities of high ecclesiastics, . . . I think that the event has shown, after all, that they were in the right, and that those whom they were hard upon were mainly in the wrong,” and that one who speaks a truth, or seeks to reform an abuse, in defiance of authority “is just one of those persons whom the competent authority ought to silence.” Obedience to authority is a critical virtue for Newman; as he puts it “[t]he Church must denounce rebellion as of all possible evils the greatest.”

After Newman’s conversion, he republished his essay on Anglicanism, The Via Media, including in the preface to the revised edition defenses of the Catholic Church’s behavior countering his own previous indictment against it. These defenses, formed in reaction to witnessing what he saw as the Church of England’s sphere of sovereignty invaded by the state, sound notes that resonate in the defenses made by the Church and its apologists in the context of the sex abuse crisis.

Especially germane to that context is the defense of what Newman called the “regal function” of the Church, its ability to secure the obedience he deemed so critical to faith. Newman analogizes the roles of the Church to those of Christ:

These offices, which specially belong to Him as Mediator, are commonly considered to be three; He is Prophet, Priest, and King; and after His pattern, and in human measure, Holy Church has a triple office too; not the Prophetical alone and in isolation, as these Lectures [comprising volume 1 of The Via Media] virtually teach, but three offices, which are indivisible, though diverse, viz. teaching, rule, and sacred ministry.

Newman continues to explain that:

Christianity, then, is at once a philosophy, a political power, and a religious rite: as a religion, it is Holy; as a philosophy, it is Apostolic; as a political power, it is imperial, that is, One and Catholic. As a religion, its special centre of action is pastor and flock; as a philosophy, the Schools; as a rule, the Papacy and its Curia. . . .
Truth is the guiding principle of theology and theological inquiries; devotion and edification, of worship; and of government, expedience. The instrument of theology is reasoning; of worship, our emotional nature; of rule, command and coercion.

At various times, and in different situations, these functions of the Church must yield to the imperatives of the other functions. As an example of truth yielding to cohesion, Newman gives as an example the social shock and dislocation of faith that could have resulted from the discoveries of Galileo, and explains why the suppression of the scientific truth served a higher purpose:
All I say is, that not all knowledge is suited to all minds; a proposition may be ever so true, yet at a particular time and place may be “temerarious, offensive to pious ears, and scandalous,” though not “heretical” nor “erroneous.”

From here, Newman then goes on to explain that the use of “command and coercion,” as with suppression of information, can extend into other areas:

Apostolicity of doctrine and Sanctity of worship, as attributes of the Church, are differently circumstanced from her regal autocracy. . . . If the Church is to be regal, . . . she must be more than Holy and Apostolic; she must be Catholic. Hence it is that, first, she has ever from her beginning onwards had a hierarchy and a head, with a strict unity of polity, the claim of an exclusive divine authority and blessing, the trusteeship of the gospel gifts, and the exercise over her members of an absolute and almost despotic rule.

Notably, Newman insists that the Church must “protect the ignorant and the weak, to remove scandals.” Newman noted the respect for individual conscience, which marked the early church, including St. Augustine in his earlier writings, only to be replaced with a belief in forced conversion in Augustine’s later works. Finally, Newman reaches the culmination of this long train of reasoning:

Again: Acts simply unjustifiable, such as real betrayals of the truth on the part of Liberius and Honorius, become intelligible, and cease to be shocking, if we consider that those Popes felt themselves to be head rulers of Christendom and their first duty, as such, to be that of securing its peace, union and consolidation. . . . The principle . . . I conceive to be this,—that no act could be theologically an error, which was absolutely and undeniably necessary for the unity, sanctity, and peace of the Church; for falsehood never could be necessary for those blessings, and truth alone can be.(Blockquotes from Newman in italics; footnotes and citations omitted; all quotes from Apologia Pro Vita Sua or the Preface to the third edition of The Via Media)

As I note in Command and Coercion, I find Newman's willingness to subordinate the truth to clerical authority to be profoundly dangerous. Newman also explains and contextualizes the papal dread of scandal and the Church’s function to conceal facts which, although undeniably true, would erode the belief and trust of the faithful. Dreher hear follows Newman into very dangerous territory. And, with all respect, I think he’s wrong for the same reason Newman was: Christ taught that “the truth will set you free,” not the primacy of submission to authority. In fact, as Rudolph Bultmann's canvass of the New Testament shows, the numerous passages regarding freedom from the law in the NT strongly negate Newman's elevation of obedience to ecclesiastical authority to the supreme virtue. The NT leaves considerable scope for debate, as Bultmann also notes, to argue that the law, or at least the ethics undermining them, are not as simply dismissed as it may seem on the surface. I won't even get into Augustine's famous maxim, Love God and do what thou wilt--again, it's not as simple as it seems, and is in no way a carte blanche].

So the Newman/Dreher position is unbiblical, but, even worse, it infantilizes the laity, and encourages the hierarchy to cling to untenable positions out of fear. Newman’s teaching in favor of suppressio veri to avoid scandal, and preserve the Church’s authority, legitimizes the very behavior that drove Rod (and many others) out of the Church: covering up the sex abuse crisis to avoid scandal.

Crime and Scandal in Pennsylvania

This is extraordinary:

Three former leaders of a Franciscan religious order in Pennsylvania were charged with felonies on Tuesday for allowing a friar who was a known sexual predator to repeatedly work with children, including as a high school athletic trainer who massaged students naked, and pull some out of class for what a grand jury report called “private physical therapy sessions.”

Tuesday’s complaint was the first time members of a Roman Catholic religious order have been charged with aiding an abuser. While the church has faced thousands of lawsuits over sexual abuse by members of the clergy in the past decade, criminal prosecutions of the supervisors accused of covering up for abusers have been rare.

The complaint, filed by the state’s attorney general, Kathleen Kane, charged three leaders of the Franciscan Friars, Third Order Regulars — Giles A. Schinelli, 73, Robert J. D’Aversa, 69, and Anthony M. Criscitelli, 61 — with conspiracy to endanger children.

The three are accused of knowing about accusations of abuse against the friar, Brother Stephen Baker, but of not reporting him to the police or removing him from positions where he had access to children. In one, he was an athletic trainer for nearly a decade at a school where he regularly told students to undress for massages.

“They were more concerned with protecting the image of the order and more concerned with being in touch with lawyers than with the flock that they served,” Ms. Kane said at a news conference Tuesday.

Lawyers and victims groups said the prosecutions were a stark warning to the church that covering up abuse could lead to jail time.

“This is the missing piece,” said David Clohessy, the director of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests. “For years, there have been pledges of reform, but we still see the same deceitful practices because those who stay silent or lie to cover up have not been held accountable.”

Regrettably, I think Clohessy is right. The Church's hierarchy is so firmly embedded in the culture of clericalism and avoidance of scandal that only the erosion of the taboos against secular law deploying criminal sanctions may have an effect.

Back when Thomas Becket was vying for clerical immunity from secular law, his adversary Gilbert Foliot sought to establish a balance between the legitimate interests of Church and State. Becket's martyrdom brought his cause success, and that tradition of immunity and the dread of the Church's losing its ability to command loyalty (as rationalized ably by John Henry Newman in his defense of suppression of inconvenient truths by the Church) maintained the ethical and theological bases for a culture of cover-up. It needed, and still needs, to be sandblasted away.

How sad that it had to come to this.

"They've Summoned Up a Thundercloud": "Command and Coercion" in 2016

You know, I was really hoping my 2012 Command and Coercion: Clerical Immunity, Scandal, and the Sex Abuse Crisis in the Roman Catholic Church could become irrelevant to the news. But, as John Allen reports at Crux, my thesis remains depressingly relevant:

Given what a cancer the clerical sexual abuse scandals have been for the Catholic Church, one would imagine the Vatican would want new bishops to get a state-of-the-art presentation on best practices in terms of preventing such meltdowns in the future.

The Vatican has been running just such a training course since 2001 for newly appointed bishops around the world, and almost 30 percent of the Catholic prelates in the world today have taken it.

It’s more than a bit surprising, therefore, to discover that at least last year, the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors, the body created by Pope Francis to identify “best practices” in the fight against child abuse, was not involved in the training.

****

The presentation was entrusted to French Monsignor Tony Anatrella, a consulter to the Pontifical Council for the Family and the Pontifical Council for Health Care Workers, who’s based at the Collège des Bernardins in Paris. He’s a psychotherapist controversial for his views on homosexuality and “gender theory.”

Although his presentation was long on therapeutic analysis, Anatrella did a credible job of slogging through components of the Code of Canon Law governing clergy accused of sexual crime with a minor.

In other ways, however, his presentation seemed seriously wanting. For instance, Anatrella argued that bishops have no duty to report allegations to the police, which he says is up to victims and their families. It’s a legalistic take on a critical issue, one which has brought only trouble for the Church and its leaders. Why, one wonders, was it part of a training session?

Most basically, canonical procedures kick in only after abuse has been alleged. Presumably the goal ought to be to stop those crimes from happening, and in that regard it’s striking that Anatrella devoted just a few paragraphs to abuse prevention, using abstract language without concrete examples.

Let's not bury the lede: The instructor of the Vatican training course on sexual abuse is teaching bishops that "bishops have no duty to report allegations to the police, which he says is up to victims and their families."

From the Guardian:

A document that spells out how senior clergy members ought to deal with allegations of abuse, which was recently released by the Vatican, emphasised that, though they must be aware of local laws, bishops’ only duty was to address such allegations internally.

“According to the state of civil laws of each country where reporting is obligatory, it is not necessarily the duty of the bishop to report suspects to authorities, the police or state prosecutors in the moment when they are made aware of crimes or sinful deeds,” the training document states.

Even in the age of Pope Francis, it seems, the twin imperatives of "command and coercion"--a phrase I plucked from the writings of John Henry Newman, where they were used approvingly to describe the Church's duty to suppress even truthful information where necessary to maintain faith in the Church's authority--and of clerical independence from secular law, the dubious cause in which Thomas Becket died, and which was perpetuated in canon law to at least 1984, though there is reason to believe it remains substantially undisturbed, still hold sway.

So, clearly the scandal is far from over. Which means, damn it, that I can't leave it behind. You have to understand, writing the article had the exhilarating impetus of having stumbled across something that had not been, until I wrote about it, explored in legal historical writing. Just about all of the legal historians of clerical immunity--"benefit of clergy" as it is commonly called, through "benefit of the forum," or "privilegium fori" is more accurate, describe its rise and fall from the perspective of secular law's willingness to honor it, not the Church's insistence on it, and its use of canon law to enforce it. Even the great R.H. Helmholz and Leona C. Gabel tell the story that way. So, C&C was satisfying to write--I found a small piece of the puzzle of why good men could become complicit in terrible deeds.

But that's done. Now, if I pursue it further, it'll be working out the ramifications of the canon law process, and mostly a hard slog through the unpleasantness of violated lives and vows. But how can one let it go, when, the story continues, continues seemingly along the lines I wrote on?

So, I'm dusting off C & C, and additional research materials I received after its publication, and seeing if I can re-work it into a more expanded treatment.

How I wish it wasn't needed.

A Principled Disagreement

This entry is going to be a lot more pleasant to write (and, I hope, to read) than my last one on the same topic. I want to commend Ross Douthat for seriously upping his game in responding to Professor John W. Marten's critique and response of Douthat's "Letter to the Catholic Academy".

At a threshold level, gone is the sneering self-righteousness of Douthat's original columns on the subject. No more arrogantly denouncing those with whom he disagrees as heretics, and accusing the Pope of leading the conspiracy to destroy orthodoxy. Rather, Douthat begins on common ground, tries to fairly summarize Professor Martens's contentions, and gives his critic credit for sincerity and good faith. He just doesn't agree with him, and gives his reasons. This has the effect of making Douthat's argument much stronger--his claims are less extravagant, and his dropping of his hectoring tone is most helpful. (Indeed, Douthat sprinkles a little self-deprecating humor in the post, which I don't recall seeing in his writing before. It suits him, as does his more irenic tone.)

Now, in responding to Douthat's argument, I want to point out two things: 1) Although I was raised Catholic, and am sympathetic to Catholic sacramentalism and much theology, I'm an Episcopalian, albeit of the High Church variety. So discount for that. 2) The fact that I ultimately disagree with Douthat on the question of whether the Roman Catholic Church would fundamentally change by altering its position on the indissolubility of marriage does not mean I think his position is untenable. It means that I disagree with Douthat, just as he disagrees with Professor Martens.

As Douthat (fairly) summarizes Martens, he:

he advances two models for evaluating developments in Catholic doctrine — one drawn from the New Testament, from the Council of Jerusalem’s decision not to require Gentile converts to adhere to the full Mosaic codes (a case of legalism overcome, he implies, with clear relevance to current Catholic debates), and one drawn from the arguments of a certain Joseph Ratzinger (perhaps you’ve heard of him), who argued that a Catholic reading of the gospel message and the New Testament needed to distinguish the “core” elements from the “husk,” to determine what ideas were essential and which were more adaptable or dispensable when the times seemed to demand it.

I think that these two models are quite rich; I also think that neither one offers a strong justification for adopting the proposals on communion for the divorced and remarried tacitly supported by Pope Francis and debated rather hotly by Catholic scribblers. But the models do provide a context, at least, in which Professor Martens and I could have an argument from shared premises, even if we ultimately disagree.

However, he sees a greater divide between them in that Martens "largely leaves out what seems like the most traditionally Catholic criteria for determining what is and isn’t “fundamentalism,” what counts as “legalism” as opposed to just fidelity, and how and whether doctrine can develop, namely: What the church has already taught on the matter." (Douthat's emphasis.)

He writes:

Where matters are clearly unsettled, in other words, Martens is offering reasonable criteria to guide the church. But by only emphasizing those criteria, he seems to imply that no question is ever permanently settled, that one interpretation simply succeeds another as the church’s history unfolds.

Martens does not say this outright. The issue is one of omission: There is simply no sustained reference in his essay to the idea, running from Vincent of Lerins to John Henry Newman, that consistency of teaching and non-contradiction are important criteria for discerning when and whether doctrine can develop. Instead, the strong implication is that in every generation the Catholic Church is in roughly the same position as the nascent church of the 1st century, confronting crucial questions anew and reading the signs of the times afresh, and that the positions and teachings of the past are always up for revision when some combination of dialogue, prayer, experience and theological innovation suggests that the time has come to change.

Now, he's certainly getting Newman right here, but I think that he is unfair to Martens. Martens does not disparage continuity, nor does he start from "Year Zero." He offers a critique of the traditional position as it has been lived into that one may or may not find persuasive, but it doesn't assume that precedent has no weight.

One of Douthat's criticisms is Martens's reliance on Jesus's seeming belief that the End Times would come in the lifetimes of the disciples, and that "If Jesus based his moral teaching about marriage on his assumption that the eschaton would arrive in the 1st century A.D. — which it rather conspicuously did not — then surely that tells us something pretty important, not just about marriage and morals, but about whether we should believe that he was actually the messiah." (Douthat's emphasis.)

Douthat acknowledges that Christians can hold that position, but asks "can you be an orthodox Christian if you believe that Jesus’s teaching was shaped and stamped by all-too-human limitations? Can you be a Roman Catholic Christian?" For him, the answer is clearly no.

With respect (and I mean it), for a column that holds out Anglicanism as a negative model, Douthat reveals that he's not terribly well informed about what many Anglicans believe. Because Charles Gore's Dissertations on Subjects Concerning the Incarnation, building on his contribution to Lux Mundi addresses the question, and holds that Jesus's knowledge was circumscribed in many resects to that of people of his time, and that this was part of the kenosis--self-emptying--St. Paul describes in Phillipians Chapter 2. Gore's kenotic theology was key to his understanding of Christ, and Belief in Christ, volume 2 of Gore's emphatic defense of orthodoxy, The Reconstruction of Belief, is rooted in that kenotic Christology. Gore's view is far from unique, and many theologians have adopted it.

On the subject of marriage, I stand by my previously expressed views:

Douthat's claim that the allowing of divorced Catholics to reunion with the Church would strip the doctrine of the indissoluble nature of marriage of all content, and empty it doctrinally? As a threshold matter, this observation is made in ignorance of the boom in both numbers of annulments petitioned for and percentage granted after the enactment of the 1984 Code of Canon Law--according to Dr. Edward Peters, a first-rate scholar who deplores the trend, in 1996 95% of applications for annulments that reached tribunals were granted. Dr. Peters notes that, when you correct for those cases that never reach a tribunal, for one reason or another, 80% is the more globally correct figure. Dr. Peters notes that the grounds for annulments burgeoned in the 1983 Code promulgated under John Paul II in comparison to the 1917 Pio-Benedictine Code, which facilitated the expansion (which was, he notes, already under way.)

****

And Douthat's notion that the "reformers" are "effacing Jesus’ own words on the not-exactly-minor topics of marriage and sexuality" which "certainly looks more like a major reversal than an organic, doctrinally-deepening shift," is likewise counterfactual. Let's consult the Gospel According to St. Matthew, in the Douay-Rheims American version, a Roman Catholic translation, in which Jesus says: "And I say to you, that whosoever shall put away his wife, except it be for fornication, and shall marry another, committeth adultery: and he that shall marry her that is put away, committeth adultery." Jesus's teaching in Luke is stricter than that in Matthew, and he was, it is well understood, rebuking a tradition of allowing divorce for trivial reasons that left women vulnerable

I would also add that, as Douthat acknowledges, the Orthodox tradition both honors the teaching of Christ on marriage while allowing for divorce when a marriage is irreparably broken. This seems to me both merciful, and wise; the death of a relationship is a failure, but allowing this one failure to be the unforgivable one that cannot be forgiven and the sinner restored to community without inflicting more misery for life is to me hard to defend.

Finally, Douthat looks at the squabbles in Anglicanism over same-sex relationships, and shudders at the disorder. He notes that the Anglican muddle within unity has broken down. There's some truth in that, if you view Anglicanism as a denomination. But it isn't. The Anglican Communion is a Nineteenth Century creation, which allowed for the individual national churches that had their roots in the Church of England to come together and share. That may be cracking up; indeed, I think it likely is. But Anglicanism has had periods in which various national churches did not speak, or were not affiliated. It's a shame, and I don't rejoice in it, but Anglicanism is not a sect. It's a world view.

Looked at in that way, we are undergoing a time of walking apart, but I don't believe it's forever. Ultimately, truth wins, and error doesn't. If we remain calm and rooted in our faith, we will know what God is calling us to believe and how to apply that teaching. Ultimately, I suspect, both sides will have repenting and reconciliation to do.

I'm glad to read this post by Douthat. I think it's immeasurably better than his prior columns, and is worth engaging with.

The SoCon Inquisition

Yeah, I had to. Sorry. But, c'mon, Ross Douthat's pompously titled "Letter to the Catholic Academy"begs for it:

MY dear professors!
I read with interest your widely-publicized letter to my editors this week, in which you objected to my recent coverage of Roman Catholic controversies, complained that I was making unfounded accusations of heresy (both “subtly” and “openly”!), and deplored this newspaper’s willingness to let someone lacking theological credentials opine on debates within our church. I was appropriately impressed with the dozens of academic names who signed the letter on the Daily Theology site, and the distinguished institutions (Georgetown, Boston College, Villanova) represented on the list.

I have great respect for your vocation. Let me try to explain mine.

A columnist has two tasks: To explain and to provoke.

****

So in my columns, I’ve tried to cut through those obfuscations toward what seems like basic truth. There really is a high-stakes division, at the highest levels of the church, over whether to admit divorced and remarried Catholics to communion and what that change would mean. In this division, the pope clearly inclines toward the liberalizing view and has consistently maneuvered to advance it. At the recent synod, he was dealt a modest but genuine setback by conservatives.

And then to this description, I’ve added my own provoking view: Within the framework of Catholic tradition, the conservatives have by far the better of the argument.

First, because if the church admits the remarried to communion without an annulment — while also instituting an expedited, no-fault process for getting an annulment, as the pope is poised to do — the ancient Catholic teaching that marriage is “indissoluble” would become an empty signifier.

Second, because changing the church’s teaching on marriage in this way would unweave the larger Catholic view of sexuality, sin and the sacraments — severing confession’s relationship to communion, and giving cohabitation, same-sex unions and polygamy entirely reasonable claims to be accepted by the church.

Now this is, as you note, merely a columnist’s opinion. So I have listened carefully when credentialed theologians make the liberalizing case. What I have heard are three main claims. The first is that the changes being debated would be merely “pastoral” rather than “doctrinal,” and that so long as the church continues to say that marriage is indissoluble, nothing revolutionary will have transpired.

But this seems rather like claiming that China has not, in fact, undergone a market revolution because it’s still governed by self-described Marxists. No: In politics and religion alike, a doctrine emptied in practice is actually emptied, whatever official rhetoric suggests.

When this point is raised, reformers pivot to the idea that, well, maybe the proposed changes really are effectively doctrinal, but not every doctrinal issue is equally important, and anyway Catholic doctrine can develop over time.

But the development of doctrine is supposed to deepen church teaching, not reverse or contradict it. This distinction allows for many gray areas, admittedly. But effacing Jesus’ own words on the not-exactly-minor topics of marriage and sexuality certainly looks more like a major reversal than an organic, doctrinally-deepening shift.

****

So I must tell you, openly and not subtly, that this view sounds like heresy by any reasonable definition of the term.

Now it may be that today’s heretics are prophets, the church will indeed be revolutionized, and my objections will be ground under with the rest of conservative Catholicism. But if that happens, it will take hard grinding, not just soft words and academic rank-pulling. It will require a bitter civil war.

And so, my dear professors: Welcome to the battlefield.

Um, where to start? Well, let's begin with the substance, taking the high ground for once.

Douthat's claim that the allowing of divorced Catholics to reunion with the Church would strip the doctrine of the indissoluble nature of marriage of all content, and empty it doctrinally? As a threshold matter, this observation is made in ignorance of the boom in both numbers of annulments petitioned for and percentage granted after the enactment of the 1984 Code of Canon Law--according to Dr. Edward Peters, a first-rate scholar who deplores the trend, in 1996 95% of applications for annulments that reached tribunals were granted. Dr. Peters notes that, when you correct for those cases that never reach a tribunal, for one reason or another, 80% is the more globally correct figure. Dr. Peters notes that the grounds for annulments burgeoned in the 1983 Code promulgated under John Paul II in comparison to the 1917 Pio-Benedictine Code, which facilitated the expansion (which was, he notes, already under way.) Still, it seems fair to say that the "indissolubility of marriage" is not all too difficult to address in the Roman Catholic Church--good standing is a matter of using the Church's legal system, not that of secular society. (A familiar theme, no?)

And Douthat's notion that the "reformers" are "effacing Jesus’ own words on the not-exactly-minor topics of marriage and sexuality" which "certainly looks more like a major reversal than an organic, doctrinally-deepening shift," is likewise counterfactual. Let's consult the Gospel According to St. Matthew, in the Douay-Rheims American version, a Roman Catholic translation, in which Jesus says: "And I say to you, that whosoever shall put away his wife, except it be for fornication, and shall marry another, committeth adultery: and he that shall marry her that is put away, committeth adultery." Jesus's teaching in Luke is stricter tan that in Matthew, and he was, it is well understood, rebuking a tradition of allowing divorce for trivial reasons that left women vulnerable. My point is not to argue that the Roman Catholic Church has no grounds to argue that divorce is not a sin, a "missing of the mark," a failure of a commitment from which much was hoped. My point is that the Gospel's are not univocal on the subject, and that Douthat's blithe assumption that it is does not comport with either scripture or the practice of his own Church.

More to the point, the notion that unless a sin is unforgivable--that is, there is no path back to good standing within the community and reception of the sacraments--the prohibition is "emptied" of content is both spectacularly unscriptural and places marital breakdown as a sin worse than all other sins, absent any compelling justification.

To scripture first. Jesus says, in Matthew 12:31: "Therefore I say to you, every sin and blasphemy will be forgiven men, but the blasphemy against the Spirit will not be forgiven men. 32 Anyone who speaks a word against the Son of Man, it will be forgiven him; but whoever speaks against the Holy Spirit, it will not be forgiven him, either in this age or in the age to come." So, no, we have no scriptural warrant for declaring that marital breakdown is the unforgivable sin. Lots of other sinful behavior that cannot be undone is nonetheless absolved, and the offender reconciled--the Church's mercy can extend, should it choose, to the divorced, without changing the doctrine. Indeed, that's the basis for the Orthodox Church's teaching, in which remarriage after divorce is permitted. (In a rather bizarre bit of tribal over theological loyalty, here's Rod Dreher, himself a convert from Catholicism, cheering on Douthat, for vowing a civil war to prevent Dreher's former church from adapting the position of his current church. Even ecumenicism must fall before the great maxim of SoCons" Liberals must lose. Seriously--unless Dreher feels his new church is wrong on the issue, and is looking for somewhere else to go.)

I won't, having belabored the matter at such length, spend much time on the condescending tone--My dear professors," indeed. I will only allude briefly to the grandiosity--a "Letter to the Catholic Academy"--I hope he doesn't expect this to be read along with King's Letter from a Birmingham Jail, but I'm not taking any bets. No, what I'll point out is that this young Catholic convert only believes in papal authority--after all, it was the pope he named as the lead "plotter"--when he agrees with the decision at hand. He has no interest in a hierarchical church that isn't enforcing his, Ross Douthat's, personal vision of the faith. Which, effectively, boils down to a sexual purity code, with no room for mercy or the redemptive love of Christ. Note that Douthat at no time names what the heresy he deplores is--he cries "heresy" without identification of a doctrine denied, or of a creedal statement contradicted.

Douthat isn't a Catholic. He's a Puritan iconoclast, looking for a high-level heretic to hunt (and who higher than the Pope himself?), and, if he's really lucky, a witch to burn.

How perfect that his mewling little battle cry was published on Halloween.

Doubt that, Douthat

Really, this blog is not going to degenerate into one focused on a branch of the Church to which I no longer belong, but our friend Ross Douthat does keep making it hard to quit him:

It’s a very specific debate about whether conversion and repentance are necessary, not for community, but for communion: The reception of the eucharist, the body and blood of Christ, during the central act of Catholic worship, the sacrifice of the mass. And by claiming — or at least very strongly implying —that Jesus’s meals with sinners are the template for how the church should think about communion, Father Martin is effectively rejecting the entire sweep of our church’s tradition on this question.

This tradition is rooted in the gospels themselves, where the Last Supper is emphatically not a feeding of the five thousand moment or a meal with a tax collector: Those encounters are arguably prefigurations of the Last Supper, but the actual eucharist itself is instituted in an intimate encounter between Jesus and his closest followers, held in a private upstairs room far from the crowds and hangers-on.

The tradition is also rooted in the New Testament more broadly, and particularly in Saint Paul’s admonition that “a man must examine himself first, and then eat of that bread and drink of that cup; he is eating and drinking damnation to himself if he eats and drinks unworthily.” (Which doesn’t sound like a “community first, conversion second” admonition to me.)

And then it’s rooted in the ancient, millennia-spanning practice of the church itself, in which the idea that communion follows conversion is part of the chain of experience that binds the earliest Christians to their medieval and modern Catholic heirs.

So treating the eucharist as a form of outreach instead would represent a revolution, not a mere pastoral tweak, in the way the church thinks about that sacrament (and not only that one). That’s because there’s no clear way to confine Father Martin’s logic to the narrow cases at issue in this debate. If community precedes conversion in the reception of communion, why should only remarried Catholics (or gay Catholics, or polygamous Catholics) have the benefits of being welcomed at the altar? The same welcoming logic would surely apply to any unshriven sinner in need of conversion. And not just any sinner who happened to be baptized Catholic: If the template is Jesus’s meals with the unconverted, then it would apply to any human being, period, since who wouldn’t Jesus have dined with? Why should Protestants not be welcomed to communion? Why shouldn’t Jews? (We know Jesus liked to dine with Jews!) Why shouldn’t Muslims and Mormons, agnostics and atheists? If the eucharist is basically a form of food-based Christian fellowship, a means to outreach and welcome and hospitality rather than a sacred mystery for believers to approach with reverence and not a little fear, then forget the divorced and remarried; barring anyone from receiving makes no sense at all.

And indeed there are many Christian churches that take exactly this attitude toward communion. But they are also, not coincidentally, generally churches that don’t have Catholicism’s view of transsubstantiation, confession, or the sacramental economy writ large. They are always Protestant, frequently liberal, and emphatically not the Roman Catholic Church in which both myself and Father Martin were confirmed.

Long quote; sorry. But I don't want to be accused of taking him out of context.

A few points:

1. To Douthat's purity principle, pointing at the Last Supper, might I point out that one Judas Iscariot was present; indeed, he was singled out for special attention:

Now there was leaning on Jesus' bosom one of his disciples, whom Jesus loved.
Simon Peter therefore beckoned to him, that he should ask who it should be of whom he spake.
He then lying on Jesus' breast saith unto him, Lord, who is it? Jesus answered, He it is, to whom I shall give a sop, when I have dipped it. And when he had dipped the sop, he gave it to Judas Iscariot, the son of Simon.

So, clearly, only the pure in heart and converted should be allowed at our commemoration of the Last Supper. Don't get me wrong; I respect the right of the Roman Catholic Church to make whatever rules it holds to be required by God and the service of God. But this line of argumentation is distinctly poor--

2. But that's hardly surprising; Douthat argues like a high school debater. "[E]mphatically not the Roman Catholic Church in which both myself and Father Martin were confirmed," Ross? You were born in late 1979 and converted (and I'll assume confirmed) at 17. By my poor math, that means you've been a Catholic for about as long as South Park has been on the air. Your adherence to Roman Catholicism has just about tied the original run of Cats



See, sometimes change is better.

Kidding aside, My point is that this is a juvenile argument--you don't get to pull that O tempera, o mores routine based on an 18 year run.

3. He's also stone-cold ignorant about the liberal churches who do allow communion to all or to all the baptized: "there are many Christian churches that take exactly this attitude toward communion. But they are also, not coincidentally, generally churches that don’t have Catholicism’s view of transsubstantiation, confession, or the sacramental economy writ large. They are always Protestant, frequently liberal," and, as we covered earlier, not the Church he was confirmed in back in that distant era when Bill Clinton was serving his second term. Which doesn't explain his complete unfamiliarity with Anglo-Catholicism, in either its English or American forms. Short version: From its conservative, indeed reactionary, origins with John Henry Newman and the Tractarians, it had a second wave, the so-called "Second Oxford Movement", led by Charles Gore and the "Holy Party." Both variants flourish to this day, disagreeing quite often--though not always--on questions such as women's ordination and same sex marriage, while sharing a firm conviction to what Gore described as "sacramental religion." [A first rate book on the English context is N.P. Williams's Northern Catholicism (1933), and, for the American context, George DeMille's The Catholic Movement in the Episcopal Church (1941).] So, yes, many liberal protestants believe in Real Presence in the Eucharist, some in Transubstantiation, quite a few in confession, and plenty in the Atonement. (I mean, there's a whole chapter on the Atonement in Lux Mundi (1889), the founding text of liberal Anglo-Catholicism.It's by Arthur Lyttleton, and quite good.)

Oh--and that we share so precious a sacrament so widely is not because we do not value it, but because, in the words of a wise priest I know, it isn't ours to keep, but to give away. It's a vision captured in that most wonderful of hymns--which we sang at my ordination, "There's a Wideness in God's Mercy." We really believe these words:

More Catholic Than the Pope

Ah, Ross Douthat, you never disappoint:

THE Vatican always seems to have the secrets and intrigues of a Renaissance court — which, in a way, is what it still remains. The ostentatious humility of Pope Francis, his scoldings of high-ranking prelates, have changed this not at all; if anything, the pontiff’s ambitions have encouraged plotters and counterplotters to work with greater vigor.

And right now the chief plotter is the pope himself.

Francis’s purpose is simple: He favors the proposal, put forward by the church’s liberal cardinals, that would allow divorced and remarried Catholics to receive communion without having their first marriage declared null.

****

And yet his plan is not necessarily succeeding. There reportedly still isn’t anything like a majority for the proposal within the synod, which is probably why the organizers hedged their bets for a while about whether there would even be a final document. And the conservatives — African, Polish, American, Australian — have been less surprised than last fall, and quicker to draw public lines and try to box the pontiff in with private appeals.

The entire situation abounds with ironies. Aging progressives are seizing a moment they thought had slipped away, trying to outmaneuver younger conservatives who recently thought they owned the Catholic future. The African bishops are defending the faith of the European past against Germans and Italians weary of their own patrimony. A Jesuit pope is effectively at war with his own Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the erstwhile Inquisition — a situation that would make 16th century heads spin.

For a Catholic journalist, for any journalist, it’s a fascinating story, and speaking strictly as a journalist, I have no idea how it will end.

Speaking as a Catholic, I expect the plot to ultimately fail; where the pope and the historic faith seem to be in tension, my bet is on the faith.

Where do I begin?

Well, let's start here: Douthat, who was born in 1979, is not yet 36 (he will be in late November), converted to Catholicism at 17, i.e., in late 1996 or in 1997, and holds holds a BA from Harvard (admittedly magna cum laude). Now, I was a cradle Catholic, and was educated the Marianists at Chaminade High School and I hold a BA earned studying with the Jesuits at Fordham College, summa cum laude, in honoris causa. I was a Roman Catholic for nearly 30 years, so, with all respect to Douthat, I lived the life of an American Catholic far longer than he did, in a way he simply did not, and was educated in that tradition with a depth that he has not yet had a chance to be steeped in. I was a Roman Catholic, in other words, longer than he has lived since attaining the age of reason.

And I wouldn't have the arrogance to tell the Pope that I know what is "the faith" better than he did, let alone accuse him of "plotting" against it.

That was true when the pope was John Paul II, who, in closing many of the the windows opened by Vatican II (with the assistance of his successor, the future Benedict XVI), essentially made it impossible to remain a Roman Catholic without being substantially in dissent from the narrowed scope of freedom of conscience (as I saw and see it) under his Papacy. Unable to agree to the "musts" the Roman Catholic Church asked of me, I left, consistent with the future pope Benedict's depiction of those could not assent to the Church's requirements. Soon thereafterI discovered that I was better suited in the messier, but more small "c" catholic approach of Anglicanism--where self-perceived Protestants and catholics, liberals and conservatives, can gather around the Lord's Table together. It's not that I don't value my Roman Catholic upbringing and education--I do, very much, it made me who I am today. But the man that upbringing and education made is an Anglican, with a loving fondness for the Church that nurtured him--I am an Anglo-Cathoolic, because I keep the best of what I was given by the Church of my youth.

And I had and have too much respect to remain a member of that Church without accepting the discipline it demands as a precondition of membership.

We'll see what the Synod produces, and what Pope Francis does or does not do in the fulness of time. And maybe Francis will surprise us all and be a "bad" pope. I'd be surprised, frankly--I think, as I recently wrote, that political and theological liberals have to realize that Francis

was never our guy. And he's not the political conservative's guy, either. He's a good man, walking the Way by the light he has, one within the strictures and structures of the Roman Catholic Church. He's trying to do it in an irenic and community building way, one that damps down conflicts, and allows conversations to happen. And when that happens, the Holy Spirit has room to do wonderful things we can't predict

.

As to Douthat--he's a full of the convert's zeal, but, alas, without much humility to temper it.

Is the Pope Catholic? (Answer: Yes.)

Above, a melange of conservative pundits denouncing Pope Francis.

Meanwhile, this is harshing some liberals' mellow feelings toward Pope Francis:

Pope Francis met privately in Washington last week with Kim Davis, the county clerk in Kentucky who defied a court order to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, adding a new element to an American tour that saw Francis attract huge crowds and articulate left-leaning positions on poverty, immigration, the environment and inequality.

Vatican officials initially would not confirm that the meeting occurred, finally doing so on Wednesday afternoon, while refusing to discuss any details.

Ms. Davis, the clerk in Rowan County, Ky., has been at the center of a nationwide controversy over whether government employees and private businesses have a legal right to refuse to serve same-sex couples. She spent five days in jail for disobeying a federal court order to issue the licenses.

Kim Davis, the clerk for Rowan County in Kentucky, on her first day back to work after being released from jail earlier this month.Kentucky Clerk in Gay Marriage Dispute, Kim Davis, Joining G.O.P.SEPT. 25, 2015
Kim Davis, center, with her son, Nathan Davis, by her side, spoke on Monday outside the courthouse in Morehead,

On Tuesday night, her lawyer, Mathew D. Staver, said that Ms. Davis and her husband, Joe, were sneaked into the Vatican Embassy by car on Thursday afternoon. Francis gave her rosaries and told her to “stay strong,” the lawyer said. The couple met for about 15 minutes with the pope, who was accompanied by security guards, aides and photographers.

“I put my hand out and he reached and he grabbed it, and I hugged him and he hugged me,” Ms. Davis said Wednesday in an interview with ABC News. ‘Thank you for your courage.’”

To each side of this debate, I can only ask: What did you expect? Francis is not an American politician; he is the leader of the Roman Catholic Church, an ecclesial body that has strong, long-held views on subjects that do not fit the orthodoxy of either American political party, or of American polity in general.

As I acknowledged in a 2011 article about Anglo-Catholic theologian Charles Gore, Roman Catholic social teaching has been strongly pro-worker, critical of unfettered capitalism, and advocating for the poor since the late 19th Century when Pope Leo XIII issued Rerum Novarum 1 Encyclical on Capital and Labor (1891). Pope Benedict and John Paul II don't get credit for it, but they hewed to this line, too, and I've written elsewhere of the late Edward Cardinal Egan's impatience with dismissal of Catholic Social teaching by conservatives, as well as his pronounced distaste for America's Mideast exploits. It's true that Robert P. George shamefully sought to limit the bishops to "“making utter nuisances of themselves” about poverty and injustice, like the Old Testament prophets, as long as they did not advocate specific remedies," but what success he had there reflects poorly on him and the individual bishops who followed his lead. Neither John Paul II, Benedict, nor Francis backed away from the Church's social teaching.

Likewise, liberals need to take onboard that Francis is not one of us. I don't say that with dislike--I think Francis has been a success in changing the tone so that ecumenical dialogue is possible again, and so that disagreement need not poison relationships. But he has upheld the Church's traditional teaching on marriage, and I strongly suspect he will continue to do so. If he can--and this has not happened yet--convince the clergy and laity of the Roman Catholic Church to abate the hostility some--far from all--display toward their gay and lesbian brother and sisters, he will have again achieved something worth doing. because the status quo, with traditionalists and liberals locked into unproductive hostility gets in the way of the work of the Spirit. And that's where Francis is working. He's trying to turn down the temperature while remaining faithful to the truth as he sees it. That is, in itself, worth doing.

Look, if you believe in a Christianity that recognizes the love and ministry of those in same sex relationships, as an Episcopal Deacon, let me just say "The Episcopal Church welcomes you." As do several other churches. Pope Francis's traditionalism here isn't a surprise, or a betrayal. He was never our guy. And he's not the political conservative's guy, either. He's a good man, walking the Way by the light he has, one within the strictures and structures of the Roman Catholic Church. He's trying to do it in an irenic and community building way, one that damps down conflicts, and allows conversations to happen. And when that happens, the Holy Spirit has room to do wonderful things we can't predict.