Alan Jacobs

[caption id=“attachment_15943” align=“aligncenter” width=“545”] original map here[/caption]

If the reading of adults is as inefficient as Professor Adler asserts – and I agree with him – it is because most of them are reading only in order to escape from their own thoughts or to be socially respectable. If they are to improve, the first thing to say to them is not — “You don’t read enough,” or “You read bad books,” but — “You read far too much. You haven’t the slightest idea what kind of a person you are or what you want to know, and it is no use your trying to read at all until you have, and are compelled to admit to the truth you discover is most disagreeable. To read the Iliad because Professor Adler tells you it is good is no better than reading the Saturday Evening Post because your neighbor reads it. No one can tell you how to become a civilized person. There is no ready-made answer because, to become civilized, you will have to be reborn.”

— W. H. Auden, review of Mortimer Adler's How To Read a Book (1941)

For me, the Kindle seems to be all works and no looks—the Oasis is a step forward only if you regard the visual language of day planners from the 1990s as an artistic high water mark for society.

— Khoi Vinh

I don’t code, and don’t have the technical chops to be genuinely geeky, but my habit of muttering “Priori Incantatem” to myself as I’m arrowing up through previous Terminal commands — I think that’s pretty geeky.

My thanks to Ross Douthat for taking the time to respond to my thoughts on Pope Francis’s recent Apostolic Exhortation. I’m just going to add a quick thought here that I hope will serve to sum up the dispute between us. Ross thinks that I don’t fully grasp  Catholic teaching about the indissolubility of marriage. I think I do understand Catholic teaching about the indissolubility of marriage, but do not agree that specific practices of church discipline — employing the Eucharist as the chief instrument of such discipline — necessarily follow from that teaching.

That said, after reading Ross’s reply and doing some further reading have a better understanding of why the Eucharist is the focus of discipline for Catholics. (Of course, on some level I’ve understood this for decades, but I am thinking my way more deeply into the logic.)

One final comment: I continue to find it curious that Catholic conservatives today want precisely the opposite kind of governance from the Church than they want from secular states. In secular politics they want decentralization, subsidiarity, local knowledge and discretion in preference to abstract laws applied from above; in Church governance they want canon law set by the Vatican and merely enforced at the local level. Now, to be sure, there’s no contradiction here; there is no reason why one must think that secular governance and Church governance should operate according to the same principles; but I still think it curious. Of course, it could also be said that American Catholic liberals have equally curious views, but in mirror image: they tend to approve of state centralization with universally binding dictates issued from Washington, while wanting the implementation of Catholic teaching to be left up to the discretion of local communities.

Basically, Catholics are weird, is what I’m saying.

Back from the Episcopal Diocese of Dallas clergy retreat, where I was privileged to be a speaker alongside the amazing Fleming Rutledge, I have a renewed appreciation and admiration for what these people do. Parish priests have a tough job! But I also met people engaged in refugee resettlement, hospital chaplaincies, hospice care, education from K through 12 — it’s hard work, and vital work, and churches around the country are doing it with virtually zero public recognition or appreciation. Moreover, despite the Episcopal Church’s general reputation for theological vacuity, I met  person after person with a genuine zeal for the Christian Gospel. It was an honor and a pleasure to be among them.

Now, after all that human interaction, this introvert needs to hole up in a room alone for three or four days. But I had a great time!

Here’s how undiscerning and weak-willed I am: I’m off for three days to speak to and consort with the gang of publicans and sinners otherwise known as the clergy of the Episcopal Diocese of Dallas. So if any of my Catholic friends were to respond to my recent barrage of posts — an extremely unlikely occurrence, if history is any guide — I won’t know until I get back, because I’m going offline. Blessings to you all!

In my recent post I asked, “So why the hostility from so many conservative Catholics? I am not certain, but from what I have heard over the years, I don’t think many conservative Catholics have much trust in the average parish priest, especially here in America. But then, they don’t seem to have much trust in bishops, taken as a class, either. And from these responses to Amoris Laetitia they clearly don’t trust the Pope. So I find myself wondering in whom, or in what, they do place their trust.”

Well, here’s something of an answer from Rusty Reno: canon law. “On the matter of the divorced and remarried, Francis turns the pastor into the arbiter of who can and cannot receive communion—a decision based on a priest’s judgment of the interior spiritual condition of an individual Catholic. Francis sets aside the objective clarity of canon law, something that gives the lay Catholic a place to stand and leverage against limitless clerical discretion.”

That’s helpful, and it certainly confirms my sense that for many conservative Catholics priests are simply not to be trusted. However, I also think it raises questions about whether canon law, or any law, can be so specific and detailed as to eliminate the need for judgment — whether the legislative branch of any law-governed organization, so to speak, can supplant the judicial branch. Won’t judgment always be needed? And in these matters isn’t such judgment always and necessarily, at least to some degree, meant to discern “the interior spiritual condition of an individual Catholic”? (Think of the confessional and the sacrament of Penance, in which priests don’t just read off a card but are expected to make discerning evaluations.) And even if canon law could replace prudential judgment, would that be any less “clerical” a mode of discipline, given that canon law is written and implemented by clerics?

Well, I guess my friend Michael Brendan Dougherty did not get my memo counseling charity towards Pope Francis, since his column is titled “The Cowardice and Hubris of Pope Francis." Here’s a representative passage:

Chapter 8 of this heralded document begins by describing the kind of person in an "irregular union" who might be considered for pastoral counseling back toward communion. It describes that person as someone possessed of "humility, discretion, and love for the Church." The question of whether this person has sincere sorrow for sin and a firm purpose to amend their life is side-stepped. Repentance and conversion? How old fashioned.

Now, there's the problem: this account of what Francis wrote is simply, flatly, incontestably false. Here's is the relevant passage from Amoris Laetitia (p. 231), which is a quotation from Relatis Finalio:

"Conversation with the priest, in the internal forum, contributes to the formation of a correct judgment on what hinders the possibility of a fuller participation in the life of the Church and on what steps can foster it and make it grow. Given that gradualness is not in the law itself (cf. Familiaris Consortio, 34), this discernment can never prescind from the Gospel demands of truth and charity, as proposed by the Church. For this discernment to happen, the following conditions must necessarily be present: humility, discretion and love for the Church and her teaching, in a sincere search for God’s will and a desire to make a more perfect response to it”. These attitudes are essential for avoiding the grave danger of misunderstandings, such as the notion that any priest can quickly grant “exceptions”, or that some people can obtain sacramental privileges in exchange for favours.

As is quite evident, this presents pretty much the opposite of the view that Michael attributes to Francis. It does not describe a person in an "irregular union" as simply having "humility, discretion and love for the Church and her teaching"; rather, it says that only if the priest discerns the presence of such commitment can there be even the possibility of reconciliation. The person concerned must know that his or her response to the call of the Church is imperfect, and must want to perfect it; otherwise the whole business of reconciliation is a non-starter.

I think the deeper question here is: Are there such people? — that is, people who have genuine love of the Church, and a genuine desire to live in grace, but are living in habitual sin? I would like to think so, because I believe that I am such a person. For instance, — I’ll keep short what could be a long list —I know, and have long known, that I have too many possessions, that I am too fond of my possessions, and that I should live more simply and give more to the poor. You could say that I am in an irregular union with American capitalism — indeed that is what you should say. I believe that my way of life, taken as a whole, is implicated in serious patterns of sinfulness, including patterns that Jesus singled out for frequent and harsh denunciation. And yet I also believe that I love God and wish to know Him, and love the Church and wish to serve it.

It is possible that I am mistaken about all this, and that when I go to Judgment the Lord will say to me, “Depart from me, I never knew you.” But if I do have what the Book of Common Prayer calls “a right understanding of myself,” then it would be inaccurate to describe me as a rebel against God’s grace, but rather a vessel of clay, breakable, porous, fragile — a poor thing, but God’s own.

And if this can be true of me, who has received much good instruction, much good training in God’s ways, then surely it can also be true of people who have been catechized quite thoroughly by a hyper-sexualized late capitalism that teaches (every day and in every possible way) the gospel of self-fulfillment, but who nevertheless vaguely discern that there may be more to this world than advertisers tell us, and that the Church holds the keys to a greater Kingdom. Those who, in this world, catch even a glimpse of a possibility that the narrow and difficult path is better than the broad welcoming highway need all the encouragement the Church can muster. For this is the nature of our God: “A bruised reed shall he not break, and the smoking flax shall he not quench: he shall bring forth judgment unto truth.”

I just came up with a new rule for writing today, one that I plan to adhere to for the rest of my life: If it infuriates you, don’t write about it.