Fri, 31 Jan 2014 | Cover | Page 07

Ecumenism’s Venn Diagram

Ecumenism, in its 'conservative' guise, has rendered the Church an irrational, narrow-minded, and backwards institution in the public eye. It has transformed a truly rational enterprise into a reactionary and petty religious sect that secularists should rightly treat with derision.

By Nate Metzger

Consider

three students in a logic class. Sally concludes that Socrates is mortal from 1) All men are mortal, and 2) Socrates is a man. Bill concludes that Socrates is mortal, but he presumes that 1) All Martians are mortal, and 2) Socrates is a Martian. Perhaps this student was led to believe in the alien nature of Socrates because of a show on ancient philosophy he caught on the History Channel. A third student, Beth, concludes that Socrates is mortal, but she believes that Socrates is a dog. Unlike Bill and Sally, Beth has never heard of Plato or any of the ancient philosophers. She does, however, have a dog named Socrates, so named by his friend, who gave her the dog when he left for Europe.

We should notice that all three students are working, prima facie, with a singular belief. It might only come out in conversation that they are reaching their seemingly ‘common’ conclusion from different starting points. "Wait, you think that Socrates is a dog? And you think he’s an alien?" We can imagine Sally’s exasperation.

As it turns out, while all three students are working with perfectly valid arguments, only Sally’s argument properly represents the historical reality of Plato’s Socrates. Bill's argument is valid but not sound, since the conclusion is reached from a faulty premise (thank you, History Channel, for making my job as a professor that much more difficult). Beth's argument is both valid and sound; however, she's talking about an entirely different thing altogether. You might say that Sally and Beth are talking past each other without initially realizing it. As for Bill, well, hopefully Sally and Beth can convince him to stop watching cable television.

It’s a silly thought experiment, to be sure, but it is my contention that these sorts of troubling alliances happen all too often. People seem quite willing to align for flimsiest of reasons. Many times, people think they are in accord when really they are committed to entirely different things altogether. But more scandalously, many alliances are reached knowing full well that the only thing in common is the conclusion, and that to keep the peace, premises must become taboo. If they actually attended to the differing, respective premises for the adopted, common conclusion, it would cause rifts and discomforts.

We might helpfully characterize the traditionalist position as one that eschews such easy alliances, knowing full well their superficiality. This is one reason that the traditionalist is wary of ecumenism. But it’s good to see why, in more detail.

The traditionalist sees ecumenical alliances both among liberal Catholics and among the neo-conservative variety. It's good to point out that both liberals and neo-conservatives are guilty of ecumenical tactics, since criticism of ecumenism has been usually focused on the liberal varieties exclusively. But this is unfair to liberals, for they are guilty merely of a certain sort of ecumenism. Moreover, the most egregious and dangerous form of ecumenism is committed by neoconservatives.

Let me explain. To begin, consider the prayers of the Mass of Paul VI. A major complaint of traditionalists is that these prayers are terribly generic in scope and scale. Not only do canonical prayers seem somewhat lightweight, but all of the changing prayers of the day in the New Mass seem more or less sanitized. It’s not that any of them are heretical; it’s that they offer praise and petitions that are suitable for most any denominational allegiance and worship. Moreover, as traditionalists are wont to insist, the generic nature of the prayers is not merely a result of the thoroughly sabotaging 1973 ICEL.

Things don’t seem too much better with the new, more faithful translations. "Oh God, you are nice, help us to be nice too," has been better rendered from the Latin as, "Oh God, who in Thy infinite being has given showings of Thy niceness, grant us the grace to also become nice." It’s prettier and meatier, to be sure. And I appreciate the more formal language. But we aren’t exactly reintroducing propitiatory sacrifice merely by offering a better translation of the original Latin. What does the prayer really say? Well, not much, as it turns out.

Thus, says the traditionalist, the problem of the prayers is that they don’t cut deep enough. A Methodist, a Baptist, and a Presbyterian, or any other permutation suitable for a joke setup, can make use of these prayers. Moreover, as many of the more easy-going Protestant denominations are wary of the supernatural, the demonic, and the angelic, references to these things are simply nowhere to be found in the New Mass. There is also scant reference to the wickedness of sin and the evil of this world. The prayers seem perfectly suited for the libertine—that is, liberals—that is, for folks who eschew dogma and difference, for those who are happy to reduce the Christian religion to the most basic and generic of concepts, for universalists, for mere 'seekers', and for the spiritual-butnot-religious. Und so weiter.

Thus, says the traditionalist, the prayers are faulty not because they are in error per se, but because they can be affirmed by people with entirely different doctrinal starting points, and they can be used by people who quite possibly believe things in total contrast to the Roman Catholic. Ecumenism in worship comes at the expense of depth of doctrine. We can share the same prayers only if we not only keep them generic, but if we affirm propositions that have been thoroughly stripped of any underlying premises.

Yet it would be unfair to stop here, whereby we create the impression that it is only ‘liberals’ that draw the ire of the trads. As it turns out, it's the neo-Catholics that are the primary promulgators of ecumenical shallowness. This can be seen if we first consider how unhappy neo-Catholics are, by and large, with traditionalist critiques of the new prayers. Traditionalists are called disobedient, mean, heretical, and even 'protestant', for rejecting the idea that there is some magical hermeneutic of continuity. While the neo-Catholic disagrees with the Libertine, he nevertheless sees it as mandatory that we not question what has been given to us by the extraordinary magisterium.

The traditionalist simply responds that, given how different the content of the new prayers is from the content of the old prayers, we must reject notions of ‘continuity’, since we can make sense of the required hermeneutic only if ‘continuity’ is understood in the most basic and uninteresting of ways. The hermeneutic of continuity, argues the traditionalist, is either screamingly false or trivially true. We can’t line up what simply can’t be lined up. It is as if the Church has given us a picture of a pipe and declared, ceci n’est pas une pipe. Traditionalists simply say ‘nope’ to this manifest contradiction. The neo-Catholic is hard pressed to square the circle, so the most usual response to the traditionalist is one reminiscent of Miracle Max from The Princess Bride: he sticks his fingers in his ears and screams, "I can't hear you I can’t hear you!"

So rather than show that the traditionalist is wrong in offering the ‘rupture’ thesis—which, of course, is impossible to do without extraordinary interpretive gymnastics-the neo-Catholic circumvents the issue entirely, and instead says that to challenge the extraordinary magisterium’s insistence on continuity is to declare oneself in rebellion with the Church Immemorial. As far as the neo-Catholic is concerned, the traditionalist is just like a Protestant, defying church authority willy-nilly.

Yet we should notice how utterly strange this accusation is. One of the main features of Protestantism, both historically and presently, is its commitment to nominalism and its avoidance, if not wholesale rejection, of scholastic metaphysics. Certainly, not all protestants are created equal, so I do not mean to accuse all protestant strands of this charge; but at the very least, we can point to certain popular evangelical or anticreedal strands of Protestantism en vogue, that are happy to consider their doctrinal and moral positions through appeals to scripture only. For many protestants, ‘sola scriptura' is not a polemical cry, but a metatheological foundation. Insofar as many evangelicals defy creeds and philosophy, they must see the bible as their sole guide. Thus, we can see neo-Catholics treating the extraordinary magisterium in the same way that a Baptist treats his bible: as the exclusive arbiter of truth.

But the Catholic has never thought of doctrine and dogma this way. For the Catholic, doctrine is rationally defensible. Catholic theology is parasitic on the nature of reality, and the Catholic believes in a God that is neither tyrannical nor wholly mysterious. God’s attributes can be known by analogy, and His creation is intelligible. To say that philosophy is the handmaiden of theology is not to say that philosophy must somehow 'fit' inside an arbitrary bubble of doctrine and dogma, but that the whole of the Catholic faith is amenable to rational investigation. The whole of it: not just its ‘philosophical’ aspect, but the whole of it.

When it comes to any teaching, or any dogma, a Catholic has the right to say to

C N P

Theneo-Catholicshavemadeoftheextraordinary magisterium what the Baptist has made of his good book: an arbitrary, exclusive, autocratic authority, answerable to nothing.