Cosmos-Liturgy-Sex

John Allen has a new blog piece up concerning the recent lifting of the excommunications against the SSPX bishops.  I don’t think much of it. Allen tends to agitate me, and he has done so again with this most recent blog post. Still, a lot of Catholic bloggers seem to love John Allen, including the highly popular “Fr. Z,” who counts Allen among his personal friends, and who finds Allen’s piece on the SSPX “insightful.”

I have issues with Fr. Z’s take on several things, including his take on Allen, but I generally chalk up these issues to differences in personality. From what I have read of Fr. Z’s blog, I presume that  he is not particularly theologically minded, except in regard to ecclesial legal concerns pertaining to the rubrics of the liturgy. He seems to be more of a classicist or grammarian. I am more broadly philosophically minded. So, I can excuse whatever issues I may have with his take on things, including his reading of Allen’s work.

I can excuse Fr. Z , for instance, for saying of Allen that “he [Allen] writes more thoughtful and articulate things than most of what I read on the blogospher, web or comboxes these days.” Well, who has time to compose particularly thoughtful combox entries? And, moreover, who gets paid to do so? As for blog posts and websites, there is much out there that is more insightful than Allen. Though, perhaps we confuse pithy articulation for insight? It might be the occupational hazard of a classicist….

Be that as it may, Fr. Z runs a slick blog which I quite enjoy, that keeps up with the news and does not cause offense. Who could possibly impute malign will to his questionable interpretation of the phenomenon that is John Allen? Fr. Z is a good guy doing good work, even though one would probably not go to him seeking advice on issues in Christology or Trinitarian theology, or to find penetrating analyses, from the perspective of theological anthropology, of contemporary cultural issues.

But whether I can say of Allen himself that he is a good guy is another story entirely. Based on his work, I have my doubts. Again, he almost always leaves me agitated, and his recent blog piece on the SSPX is no exception. I should have avoided it, but the temptation was apparently too great. Mea culpa!

Anyway, Allen says something in this piece about the Holy Father’s Regensburg lecture and its aftermath, connecting it with the recent lifting of the excommunications on the SSPX bishops, that I find highly troubling. Prior to making this connection between Regensburg and the lifting of the excommunications, he makes some points about how the SSPX affair might have been better handled from the standpoint of public relations so as to have caused less public outcry. I think that there are holes in his assessment, which I will not go into here except to say that I do not think that he fully grasps why the Holy Father lifted the excommunications at this time. The excommunications were lifted, one suspects, not only to open up a dialogue with the SSPX-ers, or eventually to bring lost sheep back into full, sacramental unity with the Church for the sake of their souls. They were lifted, as well, for the good of the post-conciliar Church itself, to strengthen its own self-identity by reaffirming within it the rights of its Tradition! Be that as it may, here’s the quotation from Allen’s piece that most troubles me:

In short, the Vatican under Benedict XVI still has not learned the lessons of Regensburg. The terrible irony of these meltdowns [including, in Allen's opinion, the SSPX affair] is that they’re a boon for people hostile to the pope or the church, who can cluck about how “I told you so,” while they fall hardest on those most inclined to be sympathetic.

The Church has still not learned the lessons of Regensburg? Puh-leeze! Mr. Allen’s take on the Regensburg lecture and its aftermath is dreadfully superficial. The Regensburg lecture was a great oration, at a profound level of theological insight.

There is no way that the Regensburg lecture could have been otherwise packaged for mass consumption. It was intellectually subtle, and that is to its benefit, especially given the audience to whom it was being addressed. It is journalists, such as Allen, who twisted certain parts of it out of context or proportion, or who were sympathetic to those who did. Those Catholic journalists who defended the lecture for the truth of its content were the much more even-handed and responsible to their vocation. Those who, like Allen, expressed, above all else, a concern that the Pope should have been more PR-conscious about its presentation, failed to report on the lecture with the integrity required by their vocation as Catholic journalists.

Allen’s problem, seen in this blog post on the SSPX and Regensburg and in most of his NCR articles, is that his hermeneutical lens is sociological and not theological. Not only does he rarely evince the requisite theological competence to do his job, he does not even seem to think theologically at all.

His work is, thus, not of much service to the Church. Catholic journalists have a special vocation in regard to the conveyance of truth. They should not presume that it is their job to emulate their secular counterparts. This is especially so when they work for Catholic publications, or even pseudo-Catholic publications, as Allen does. The Church needs fewer superficial journalists who fret over whether our therapeutic culture is going to find this or that action or teaching of the Church offensive to its sensibilities. The Church’s teachings need to be boldly proclaimed, even by journalists. Allen does not help things in this regard. The pseudo-objectivity of his sociological perspective is a hindrance to his analyses.

Though, truth be told, perhaps we would be better off without journalists altogether. Hegel said that philosophers must read the daily papers in order to commune with the Zeitgeist. Foucalt said that philosophers must all become journalists now. Truly Catholic thinkers, on the other hand, must take a contrary attitude to this worship of the present moment. They have the responsibility to avoid the destruction of the intellectual life that attends journalistic culture. Indeed, I am not at all convinced that the discipline of journalism does not necessarily degrade the intellectual life, if only because it aids in the destruction of our attention spans.

In reading this latest piece by Allen, the fear lightly touches me that perhaps Pope Benedict might actually take the goadings of sociological reductionists in the Curia to heart, who think as Allen does, when in fact we need him to continue, as he did at Regensburg, to speak firmly (and here I use jargon with which Allen is familiar) “truth to power.”

To sum up this post by transposing it to another key: the Church has not flourished under the regime of post-conciliar Realpolitik, and there is no reason to make the dictates of Realpolitik normative, as Allen seems wont to do.