Thinking outside of the Guaranteed Catholic Box.

Kale Zelden offers a challenge to get out of the comfortable Catholic cul de sac we have constructed ourselves, and to go out and stretch the ol' cognitive framework.

As he points out, whatever it is we are doing now sure isn't working:

What does it mean to be convinced of the truths of the faith but completely flummoxed by the institution’s insanity, its debauchery, its insularity, its corruption, its mendacity, its fecklessness, its uselessness? How does one believe in the Church, but see no visible signs of institutional sanctity?

Those mechanisms and para-institutions that once shined a light seem equally broken. They have left mother Church ineffectual and compromised, and anyone inside is either unable or unwilling to chart a path out. How did we get here? Our Church’s inability to make sense is a natural byproduct of what she has had to do to guard the gift of her foundation. You must create “walls” of right-belief. The history of Church is the history of sorting out the details—think of Paul’s fight with Peter about the law, or Nicea, or the crisis of Arianism. This clarification process can inadvertently lead to a kind of stalled out insularity. This insularity hinders her ability to speak to people outside the walls, and now, sadly, inside too.

And here I am again, humiliated by the implosion of my once-beloved faith.

I honestly don’t remember the last time I’ve been proud of my Church, proud of my faith, proud of my fathers. I can’t remember the last time I’ve been able to say I’m proud to be Catholic.

Why? Because my Church is a wreck. My Church makes no sense.

We are at an existential crisis in both formal and lay Catholicism. We can go into the threads that weave a genealogy of decline and decay, plenty of time to sort out and apportion blame, but in essence, the Church as we experience it is totally broken. It doesn’t make sense, nor does it help us make sense of the world.

What we need is a software upgrade:

Ours is old, buggy, inept. It is a scandal.

Mind you, I’m not a Modernist, nor am I retro-traditionalist. Those that would prescribe poring over the Summa (again) are not serious about the crisis we find ourselves in. What worked in the 17th century, say, is not likely up to the task in the 21^st. Being steeped in the tradition is certainly important, and our heritage is certainly rich, but it will not suffice for our purposes.

In a recent 1P5 piece Brendan Buckley argues that we needed to seek out tradition in our current crisis. I am sympathetic, but only to a point. Merely seeking out tradition is not a method. Though I agree that we must cleave to our tradition, in order for us to develop a successful strategy to weather the coming storms and raise our families and not lose them, we will need to be more creative.

We must look to what some brave truth tellers in the culture are proclaiming and chewing on and theorizing, EVEN those that are not in our tribe. We cannot afford to ignore whole swaths of intellectual theorizing because most of the participants are not members of our tribe, or they are atheists, or they like Jung or Nietzsche too much, or some such tripe.

Zelden then goes on to offer a list of prominent public figures--not a one of them Catholic--who are having free-wheeling discussions on every topic imaginable. I have mixed feelings on a couple of the names, but getting out of our comfort zones is the whole idea. And he correctly points out the example of the Angelic Doctor, who sifted through pagan, Jewish and Muslim writers without going "ew." 

And I would just add another case I have been marveling at in my recent studies: reading the great neo-platonist philosopher Plotinus led Augustine back towards Christianity. And Augustine speaks kindly of Plotinus and his works no matter that they were pagan. I have even read that Plotinus was born Christian, but apostacized--but that might have been his student and editor, Porphyry. I'll have to find the citation.

In any event, as a wise man once said: Test everything, hold fast to what is good.