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I came across a screenshot of a tweet by Mike Lewis, proprietor of the papolatrist blog Where Peter Is and one of the most obnoxious commentators in the Catholic online space.
I won’t bore you with the pretext of objectivity here. I loathe the man’s opinions and the way he argues. He is impervious to reason. We have long-since blocked each other because our debates always devolved into indecorous fighting, until once I nuked him from orbit with such an unmitigated symphony of destruction that they still sing songs about it to this day.
But if I were to boil down the entire scathing rant to a single line, it was this:
“Historical Catholicism produced martyrs. Modern Catholicism produces lapsed Catholics and atheists.”
I should know, inasmuch as I myself am a product of Modern Catholicism.
Which brings me, rather circuitously, to the point of this post. Lewis is at it again, and if the man himself is of no real significance, his viewpoint here is very much operative in the dominant ideological strain within Catholicism, particularly among the episcopacy:
To contextualize, Lewis is speaking here of the abrupt and unjust firing of Dr. Ralph Martin, Dr. Eduardo Echeverria, and Dr. Edward Peters from Sacred Heart Major Seminary. The firing came on the orders of Edward Weisenburger, the new Archbishop of Detroit.
I don’t know much about the first two men, but Dr. Peters and I follow each other on X and have for years, and I find him to be a good and reasonable man, and one who has made canon law accessible and understandable to countless Catholics over the years. And to his credit, he’s not taking it lying down:
My Sacred Heart Major Seminary teaching contract was terminated by Abp. Weisenburger this week. I have retained counsel. Except to offer my prayers for those affected by this news and to ask for theirs in return, I have no further comment at this time. Prof. Edward Peters
In his honor, I made the meme that sits as the banner image atop this post. I made it specifically to counter those who engage in reckless obeisance to an episcopal and papal culture that routinely abuses the so-called Catholic requirement of “docility and obedience” to those in authority.
So let us return to Lewis, and his bizarre vision of Catholicism — one which has no roots in objective truth, but is as transitory as the ideological fashions of any given age. Well, as long as they don’t constitute a return to any previous forms of orthodoxy.
I’ve already written a response to Lewis, so I won’t re-invent the wheel here. I’ll merely quote myself from earlier today:
I cannot bring myself to understand this perspective.
Do you believe you are part of a divinely-inspired religion or not? Do you think an omniscient, omnipotent God changes with the times? Do you think the way he wants people to act and live and believe would evolve as fashions change?
"Doctrinal precepts deemed 'traditional' and absolutely unchanging" is pretty one of the only hallmarks you can look for to identify that a religion is something other than a man-made mythology. Men can't stop changing things. If a thing doesn't change over a long period of time, that means there's very likely something inhuman about it.
The fact that I came to believe that doctrinal teachings COULD change, that dogmas were not always true, is the thing that began breaking my faith down, allowing lesser objections and personal circumstances in my life to sweep the remains away. Lewis champions the very kind of religion that is quite obviously devoid of any and all divine guidance or protection -- the very sort of Catholicism that made me decide that none of this could really be what it claims after all.
And that is precisely why he and others like him are the worst and most destructive kinds of Catholics that exist.
My search for the truth about religion, and God, and the reason for our existence, and our ultimate end may be occurring these days from outside the confines of my lifelong religion, but it remains guided by an understanding that if God exists, if he is omniscient and omnipotent and omnibenevolent, then there are certain things logic dictates we should expect of any teaching about him. And when the stories we tell ourselves about God do not match these expectations — when they fall short, or seem to flagrantly contradict any reasonable interpretation about what such a God would do, or will, or demand, then we should interrogate them with ferocity in the hopes of shaking loose any accretion of man-made falsity.
For my part, I can't get over how much certain authoritative teachings have changed or been utterly abandoned, in a faith that is supposed to be immutable. I may hate the ugly teachings of the past, but if they can be reversed, why should anyone believe in any of it anyway?
Who do people worship? God or the zeitgeist? How can objective, ontological truth change with the age?
But in Lewis’s vision of God, we are in a constant state of evolution, our entire religious edifice having been built on inexplicably shifting sands. Reason demands that what God said was true in the year 30 must still be true in 2030.
Either God’s nature is unchanging and immutable, or he is not God. If he is always adapting to some new version of reality, he is something other than divine, something incapable of making demands on creatures who cannot possibly know which current and contradictory iteration of divine “truth” he wishes them to believe at any given time.
Which is likely why Lewis worships the papacy. His position is, though I know he specifically rejects this with all the formidable intellectual dishonesty and unselfawareness at his disposal, the spitting image of this spineless and unthinking dialogue from Rex Mottram from Brideshead Revisited:
“Yesterday I asked him whether Our Lord had more than one nature. He said: ‘Just as many as you say, Father.’ Then again I asked him: ‘Supposing the Pope looked up and saw a cloud and said ‘It’s going to rain’, would that be bound to happen?’ ‘Oh, yes, Father.’ ‘But supposing it didn’t?’ He thought a moment and said, “I suppose it would be sort of raining spiritually, only we were too sinful to see it.’”
This is obvious, undeniable nonsense.
The pope is no divine oracle. He’s very often not even a good man (depending on which office-holder we’re speaking of). There is no magic that makes him right about everything or even most things, no matter what the First Vatican Council preposterously tried to lead us to believe.
I have asked various interlocutors how exactly Papal Infallibility works. What the mechanism of action is. Is the free will of a pope somehow manipulated or curtailed by Divine intervention? Is he given supernatural access to certain knowledge he could not attain through reason or other conventional epistemological means? Or is this absurd dogma merely a tautological proposition: “A pope is infallible when he says something we already know is true, but does so in a formal way.”
It seems very much to me to be the latter. And if that’s the case, anyone can be infallible on certain topics. There’s no special charism in it.
And yet, even without this novel doctrine, the Church has rested heavily on her claims of unchanging, immutable teaching over her 20 centuries of existence. A kind of infallibility that is born from the weight of longstanding theological consensus. It’s an idea something like: “We have collectively always believed thus, and have taught that all men should similarly believe it, and the fact that this is so tells you why you should take it seriously as unalterably true.”
That kind of infallibility, the infallibility of a universal acceptance of divine and unchanging truth, seems to me to be a necessary hallmark of a religion that seeks to claim that it was founded by God himself as the exclusive path to salvation, and that it is therefore also guided by him so as not to fall into error, even unto the present day.
You can’t make grandiose claims about your founding and correctness without an evidentiary track record that backs it up. We all know how men change things over time. We have watched the American Constitution itself, and the interpretation of this founding document, change significantly over these past 250 years since our nation’s founding. A religion that evolved like this would be very evidently the work of men, not God, no matter how noble its character or mission.
I’m not here today to list all the things in Catholicism I see that have changed. Things that we were lead to believe could not change. That’s a whole post in itself. I’ve certainly touched on a number of them here over the years. But the point is, if Lewis is right about how Catholicism operates — if adherence to tradition and perennial teaching is bad, and being obsequious the tyranny of the current leadership is good — this would be a falsifying reality.
Again: God does not change. And so, in its essentials, any religion he founded could also not change — at least, not in any essential capacity. Discipline, governance, even rubrics and aesthetics and other accidental aspects could change. But not the core beliefs. The minute they do, you have every right to ask, “Well then, how could this be of God?”
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In my thinking, a normal Catholicism would be one where the “People of God” submit to and obey the Church and her successors precisely BECAUSE they hold to unchanging, timeless truths. It’s a false dichotomy to say one either should hold to “tradition” OR be in union with the Church. It needs to be BOTH AND. And yet, far too often, far too common, this is precisely what we see.
This is PRECISELY the dilemma that many traditionalist Catholics find themselves in. Obey their conscious about doctrine, morals or tradition, or stay in union with a Church which has abandoned (if not repudiated) the “old paths.” Not that I think even most trads are fully aware of the breadth or depth of Catholic teaching prior to the Council of Trent, because there is much ignorance among both the clergy and laity. But that’s a topic for another day.
As a former trad, but current Catholic struggling with and for my faith in the Byzantine East, I’d like to think my position outlined above is one of common sense, but reading comments such as you posted from Lewis, or from some trads who ultimately have a very low view of the Church and what it means to be in it, I’ve deduced my position probably isn’t all that common sense to most people today.
The Catholic Church, painting with a broad brush, today feels more like a gay man wanting to come out of the closet but dancing around the truth of whom he is knowing he’ll alienate his family or friends. So he keeps hanging onto old appearances while dropping hints. The Church bears little resemblance to the one I read in the pages of the Holy Fathers.
I've watched Dr. Eduardo Echeverria on Dr. Larry Chapp's site. He is a decent and completely reasonable person. I have never heard him say anything that was untrue or even inordinately critical, his views were sober, measured, tempered. The irony of this is that he was punished for adhering to basic truths that don't change, by a prelate who apparently wants them to change.
No, I'm not going to worship the Zeitgeist.