Emily Stimpson replies to Rod Dreher
Emily's piece is titled "Why I'm never leaving the Catholic Church." Although she doesn't mention Rod Dreher by name, she links to the same TIME article which we did. Her response is excellent; excerpt:
In 2002, as one horror story after another emerged, I never once questioned the truth of my Catholic faith. I’d already done the questioning and found the answers. There was no going back. Once you see that two plus two equals four, you never ask yourself if it equals five.
Don’t get me wrong: As the scandals unfolded, I mourned for the children horrifically abused by sons and daughters of the Church. I still do. I also mourn for all the men and women who are still being cheated, who are still being hurt.
Today, far too many Catholics live as the culture tells them to live and think as the culture tells them to think. They wound others as others wound them. Likewise, in far too many places, the Church’s sons and daughters are helping them do that by continuing to proclaim the Milquetoast “Be Nice” Gospel I learned in school.
That doesn’t just make me sad; it makes me angry.
But it doesn’t make me want to leave the Church.
Rather, it makes me want to work harder to give others what I’ve been given. I want them to find the healing, peace, and joy that comes from knowing the truth, loving the truth, and living the truth.
I can’t do that, however, if I deny the truth. And that’s what leaving the Catholic Church would be—a denial of the truth.
Popes and priests come and go. So do good moments and bad in the life of the Church. If our faith rests in those people or is a product of one moment, it will be a faith without roots. It will never grow strong. It will never mature.
So Emily Stimpson decided to work harder instead of deciding to give up and leave. If she had left, she admits that it would be equivalent to denying the truth. So it might actually demand more work to constantly be writing article after article explaining why she left and keeping all her stories straight. It's sort of one of those paradoxes.
"To whom shall we go?" She's doing the right thing; may she be rewarded on Earth and in Heaven.
Nice essay by Ms. Stimpson. Of course, Dreher would merely move the goalposts to over by the cheerleaders (papal infallibility and contraception being his real stated issues), but what she says is worth hearing anyway.
ReplyDeleteThis post-Vatican II convert has a (non-rhetorical) question for the group, tho. I read things that blame much of the alleged softness of the Church and her priests in recent decades on Vatican II. But I wonder whether the true cause of this softness is not so much Vatican II but more so pressures and desires from the '60s culture at large, such that "Vatican II" is just the shorthand code word.
So my question: Are there particular tenets of Vatican II that are the cause of the "softness" problem (for lack of a better term)?
I don't think you can derive any softness from the documents themselves. Unfortunately many people said all the bad changes were mandated by V2 when they really were not.
DeleteSome trads have a problem with the sort of "separation of church and state" in one of the documents and the treatment of the Jews in the declaration "Nostra Aetate". My one friend -- who is not anti-semitic at all -- told me that he thought that the constitution for each nation on earth should recognize that the Roman Catholic church is the true church, and that somewhere V2 states explicitly that this is not necessary for people of good will.
To him this was a major step backward for the church. To me it seems like it probably represents the church learning from previous errors of letting the throne control the altar.