Cosmos-Liturgy-Sex

National Catholic Reporter’s vastly overestimated man on the scene, John Allen, Jr., has a new post up extolling the “heroic” talk that Daniel Finn recently gave to the CTSA, decrying its ghetto-ization into an enclave of liberal theology:

For Allen, Finn’s address was an important battle cry denouncing the polarization in Catholic discourse that has strewn apart the Catholic community in the United States. We have forgotten how to talk to each other, in Allen’s opinion. We no longer carry on conversations as adults and open up ourselves to different points of view. Liberals talk to liberals, conservatives to conservatives, traditionalists to traditionalists, etc. We have become a Church of self-enclosed islands, of ideologues, with no one lending a sympathetic ear to one’s ideological “other.”

Now, there is no doubt that Finn’s address was of some importance. After all, it is heartening to think that heretics might indeed be willing to open themselves up to the living voice of the Magisterium. But here is precisely the problem with Allen’s theologically naïve perspective: heresy is not a legitimate voice of diversity in the Church of God. Allen’s plaintive cry for dialogue suffers from the same fundamental problem that one finds with Cardinal Bernardin’s wretched “Common Ground Initiative”: heresy requires anathematization, not a sympathetic ear, not a pat on the back, not a “we’re all just taking shelter under the One, Big Canopy of the Church.”

There is absolutely no reason to listen to and carry out a dialogue with proponents of womyn priests, or gay marriage, or with those many CTSA biblical scholars who deny the Resurrection as a physical as well as symbolic reality. Indeed, to “dialogue” with such Cretins is to approve implicitly their heretical perspectives as legitimate theological positions. Irenaeus did not “dialogue” with the Gnostikoi, he renounced them vigorously. Athanasius did not sit down and have a beer and a pleasant talk on the divinity of Christ with the Arians, he violently rejected their heresy. Saint Maximus the Confessor pleaded vehemently and unwaveringly with the monoenergists/monothelites to renounce outright their heretical denials of Christ’s humanity, at the cost of his tongue and his life.

And, in fact, the heretics in the Church today are much less theologically subtle than the ancient Gnostikoi, Arians, monothelites (pick your ancient heresy, its proponents were inevitably more intellectually subtle than the cult of CTSA “theologians”). Indeed, if dialogue with heretics were a worthy pursuit, these ancient pseudo-theologians would be much more worthy partners in the conversation than those we have to deal with today.

No, we don’t need more dialogue. We need to call a spade a spade and a heretic a heretic.