Catholicism for solipsists
25th July 2010
Rod Dreher puts the boot in.
Well, at least he admits it. What he’s saying is that he’s someone who identifies as a Catholic but who hates the things that define Catholicism. He goes on to say that he remains a Catholic because “the Gospel matters.” Well, it matters to Protestants too; they have the Gospel without Catholic claims for authority. What Pierce has done is become Protestant without leaving the Catholic Church. Except Protestants, at least in theory, recognize an authority outside of themselves, namely, Scripture. Not Charles Pierce.
Hey Charles — you’re not a Catholic! Man up and admit it. You are a Catholic by birth and cultural identification, but you have ceased to believe as Catholicism teaches. Why do you lack the courage to be what you are: a non-Catholic Christian? Catholicism is far more than a set of propositions, but it is at least a set of propositions to which one must assent to call oneself a Catholic. I am not a Catholic any longer, and I don’t call myself Catholic — even though I probably believe far more of what the Catholic Church teaches than Pierce does. If I called myself Catholic now, without qualifying it as “fallen-away”, I would be lying to myself. Look, I know it’s extremely painful to leave the Catholic Church. It was the most difficult thing I ever did in my life. But if one cannot believe, or one will not believe, why stay? I’m not talking about the Catholics who struggle with this or that aspect of the Church’s teaching. I was one of those Catholics too, and I suspect most Catholics are. That’s normal. I’m talking about people who stand there and say with pride, anger and defiance that they don’t believe this stuff anymore, but they want all the privileges of being able to call themselves Catholic.
The same criticism applies, mutatis mutandis, to the ‘gay marriage’ crowd. Marriage has a common traditional definition, around the world and in every human society, and that definition has never included people of only one gender. Why is that important? Because words have meanings, and if people can, like Carroll’s Humpty Dumpty, just make them mean whatever they want them to mean, then there is no means available to make distinctions between things that are different. Language is how we express thought, and if our language becomes corrupted, our thought becomes corrupted as well.