The rare worthwhile "open letter."

In my experience, most internet "Open Letters" are exercises in virtue signaling that range from failed fisks to snarkfests to passive-aggressive declarations of war.

This one, from Saint Corbinian's Bear to my friend Steve Skojec, is one of rare ones that are worthwhile.

If you compare the current realities we see around us with what Catholics are required to believe about the Catholic Church, you’re going to get a bad case of cognitive dissonance. The term comes from the book When Prophecy Fails, a case study about a Chicago UFO cult when the UFO failed to appear. It makes for fascinating reading.

Some resolve it by simply erasing Francis, as if that solved all the problems. I understand that, but without going further, will just say that’s not an answer that satisfies me, and for many reasons.

One reason is you can’t isolate what is going on in the West from what is happening in the Church. I take the Spenglerian view about that. That’s why I go off on seeming tangents about declining Total Fertility Rates and cognitive dissonance and Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death (“information/action ratio”). The Church is a Western institution. Yes, it’s Universal in essence, but it’s Western. As goes the West, so goes the Roman Catholic Church, and the West is circling the drain. The “men of the West” speech in Lord of the Rings would have a much smaller audience here and now.

You’re smart enough to see this, and honest enough to be bothered by it. 

There is no “solution.” There is no way to blog ourselves out of this, or come up with clever theories to dodge (one of) the problems, or even Winning with Latin! It is the time in which we live. Private revelations are that: they’re not meant to be universal solutions. The Church is wise in recognizing that different things appeal to different sorts of people, hence her rich and varied devotions.

* * *

In my opinion, Roman Catholics think too much. Of course they do. That’s our Thomistic-Aristotelian heritage. However, in the collision between that and the post-rational, post-Christian, post-print age, there are going to be many casualties. You know, St. Augustine had a touch of Neoplatonism. I don’t think he knew his Aristotle.

At this point, I'll cut off because I don't want to quote the whole thing. 

And you should give him the traffic yourself. It is filled with positive advice and insights, including the dangers of Catholic blogging in the Age of the Information Tsunami. 

And I think that plugging into the other matrices of Catholic thought is well-taken. St. Thomas is indispensable, but the Christian Platonist tradition of Augustine and Bonaventure is very helpful and considerably under-utilized by Catholics of a more traditional bent. A mystical correction to our linear minds can't be a bad thing.

Anyway, read the whole thing. It's insightful and helpful.