Cosmos-Liturgy-Sex

So says Tim Padgett in a Time Magazine article entitled ” A Catholic’s Take on the Pope’s Trip.” This article is illustrative of a rationalist confusion over the proper relationship between faith and reason. In the article, Padgett summarizes his views of B16’s visit has having little effect in bringing U.S. Catholics around to accepting what he refers to as “retro dogma.”

This would be an extremely long post if I were to address each and every one of his contradictions in thought. He has many that he seems not to be aware of: his dogmatic dichotomy between the Catholic Church as an institution and the Christian religion; his ability to admire the Church’s teaching on how sexual intercourse should be entered into while rejecting its admonition that it is exclusive to complementary marriage, his apparent acceptance of the Church’s teaching about the Eucharist and its ability to confect it while rejecting its teaching authority.

The reason he is able to uncritically accept these contradictory views, it seems to me, begins with the common dissenter’s confusion about faith and reason. He suggests this much by his favorable reference to Robert McClory’s Faithful Dissenters, a contradiction in terms if there ever was one. Padgett applies McClory’s half-baked ideas to arrive at the conclusion that by rejecting Church teaching, U.S. Catholics are, in fact, being “good Catholics.” What does he mean by this and how is this related to the confusion to which I refer?

What he means is that he accepts what he thinks to be the Church’s teaching on the importance of reason in one’s faith life (though he does not explain what he accepts it). However, like most dissenters, he is confused about the structure of faith and the role of reason in faith. This allows him, when combined with sloppy history, to believe that dissenters within the Church have always used their reason to correct erroneous Church teachings. He trots out the dissenters’ favorite canard, slavery, to attempt to demonstrate this point. This, of course, is also conflated with the history of personal failings of members and leaders of the Church thereby confusing doctrinal purity with personal impeccability.

Thus, Padgett believes, individual dissenters have always been the vanguard against the Church going astray, permanently at least, in her beliefs. So now that U.S. Catholics are using their “reason” to come to their own views about such things as women’s ordination, homosexuality, contraception, sex outside of marriage, etc. (N.B. that as is usual, his list is heavily weighted with moral issues as these are most susceptible to fallen human caprice) U.S. Catholics are now filling the role of “good” Catholics from the past. Padgett thinks that this, along with the so-called “pedophile” tragedy has “made the laity’s self-reliant spirit irradicable.”

It is hard to believe that anyone who has honestly looked at the Catholic responses to such inveracity can still hold these views without some sort of emotional precommitment that requires such rationalization. Regardless, it is not coincidental that his views reflect a cacophony of Protestant nominalism, Enlightenment rationalism, modern radical individualism, and neo-modern nihilism (ala Nietzsche and Sarte by which one creates his own reality according to his will). This is, after all, the philosophical patrimony of modernism that subjugates our culture and ironically allows us to believe (or at least claim) that we are thinking when we are blindly following the proverbial pack with lemming-like abandon.

If Padgett were to realize that faith is not simply a direct fruit of reason, he might be more cautious about his self-appointment as the final arbiter of truth. Rather, appropriating a phenomenology of faith from the Church’s rich intellectual tradition would uncover for him at least three basic components. Christian faith firt requires some intellectual object for consideration. Thus, reason is brought into play.

However, the difference between Christian reason and rationalism is that faith is not the simple correspondence of proposition to the terminus of one’s rational process. Reason is employed to make reasonable one’s submitting himself in trust to the Proposer–that is, Jesus Christ Himself. In doing so, one must also submit in trust to His chosen Mediator of Truth–the Hierarchically structured Church which is the visible manifestation of His Mystical Body. Thus, the next step for Christian faith is that the Christian responds in trust to God’s initiating offer of Himself. Thus again, reason makes trust reasonable.

But trust is still not Christian faith. Faith must be supernaturalized. Faith is finally Christian when the Christian receives the theological virtue of faith, ordinarily by means of sacramental grace. This is faith through grace and it is where the rationalist often goes wrong. He rejects this gift of grace because he understands from his Protestant culture, that grace annihilates his fallen human nature and so what one knows by reason can now be overturned by faith. To the rationalist, this means, and rightly so, an annihilation of his authentic humanity. Unfortunately, the rationalist then rejects faith as anti-human.

The Liberal Protestant tradition simply segregates these two realms from one another. The modern, Catholic rationalist dissenter is less consistent. He accepts faith when it accords with his “reason” (read caprice) and rejects it other wise. Thus, he is not open in trust to the Truth of Christ and does not experience, and so cannot conceive of, faith as something more certain than reason alone.  Without this faith, this belief, he fails to understand her teaching–as St. Augustine’s sage insight tells us: “I believe that I may understand.”  The dissenter is then left to trade faith illumined reason mediated by the Church and kept pure by the Holy Spirit, for worldly wisdom which St. Paul reminds us is foolishness to God (1Cor 3:19).

However, the Christian tradition purified of this Protestant fideism (and other errors) understands that human nature is not radically corrupted but only wounded. Further, it understands that human nature is not opposed to grace. In fact, human nature is made for grace. Grace is a partaking in the divine nature (see 2 Pt 1:4). As St. Basil indicates in today’s Office of Readings, it gives us a likeness to God–divinizing us. Rather than damaging human nature, it heals fallen nature, it elevates nature, and it perfects nature.

Correcting himself on these points will be the first intellectual steps in Padgett’s becoming an authentically “good Catholic.” Perhaps he is now confused because he was initially poorly catechized by a dissenting Catholic. I do not know this but, unfortunately, that is not unlikely these days. However, dissenting faith cannot be sustained. One cannot have true communion with God while pursuing falsehoods that take one in the opposite direction from Truth Himself.

We can pray that the death of “liberal Catholicism” will open the way to the recognition that if one is to accept Christ, he must accept the Totus Christus–the Whole Christ. This includes His Mystical Body, the Church, constituted on earth with a hierarchical structure. At that point U.S. Catholics will indeed begin to know better.