Tom on the Benedict Option

Over at Disputations, Tom's not in the mood to waste words on the Benedict Option.

If you ever come across the term "the Benedict Option," there's really only one thing you need to know about: It's nonsense.

More precisely, it's a meaningless term, a cypher. The thing it refers to is a non-thing. As such, it can mean anything. And a term that can mean anything isn't worth talking about.

I agree with this assessment entirely. And yet the correction of errors often requires the dealing with non-things patiently and tirelessly. For example, the monster under the bed is a non-thing, but some people require night after night of sleeping in their parents' bed because they are obsessed with that non-thing, until finally they figure out it doesn't exist. Also some people don't want to go to the basement without at least their big brother because there's something scary down there if you happen to be alone.

Those are two examples that come to mind immediately, and it hasn't escaped my notice that they pertain to very immature minds. This is probably accordant with the whole point; Tom goes on:

"The Benedict Option" was a cypher when Rod Dreher coined the term nine or ten years ago, a contentless label generated as a placeholder for the idea he hoped would follow from his feelings on reading the last paragraph of Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue.

Waiting, waiting, waiting for an "idea he hoped would follow from his feelings". Waiting not for Godot, not for Benedict.... merely waiting for an idea that never took any discernible shape....

Since then, Rod has written a lot about "the Benedict Option" without managing to define it in a way anyone who doesn't find what he writes convincing can comprehend. These days, although he still can't say what it is, he does insist it's hugely important to every Christian in America:

Again and again: these are not normal times. We can’t be about business as usual. The future of Christianity in America will be Benedictine — as in Benedict Option — or it won’t be at all.

That might give one pause.

The Pause it gives me is akin to the town council's pause after Corky St. Clair announces his dollar figure in Waiting for Guffman.



The Pause is more real than the non-thing that is the Benedict Option because it actually does something. It asks a single, one-word question:

"Seriously?"

Read the whole thing over at Tom's. He really does have a great blog, and I don't check it out nearly enough. I'll just leave you with one more line of his which could serve as a conclusion to any and every post we do on the Benedict Option:

My advice to anyone who might be interested in "new forms of community within which the moral life [can] be sustained" is to think about them without reference to Rod Dreher or "the Benedict Option."

Hear, hear.

Really Insightful Thoughts from Tom

Our friend Tom at Disputations has some great insights into the somewhat misguided reasons that some non-Catholics are "into" Pope Francis currently. Here are my favorite parts:

Of course, it's not only younger Evangelicals. Plenty of older Catholics think Pope Francis confirms them in their ignorance of liturgy and deprecation of tradition. And it's certainly better for Evangelicals to be favorably disposed toward the Pope than not.

This article, though, makes the reasons for the favorable disposition sound pretty shallow:

As Pope Francis accepts his role, a new generation of evangelicals accepts theirs. As young evangelicals have rejected the megachurch and the televangelist and embraced a more rugged, grassroots Christianity, these actions by the pope fit perfectly. He has refused to live in the massive papal quarters in Rome and has chosen to live in the guesthouse, instead. One of his first actions as pope was to cancel his newspaper subscription at his home in Buenos Aires.

They sound, in short, just like the superficial reasons so many Catholics give for their own favorable disposition.

One of our parish priests praised Pope Francis, not from the pulpit but in a private conversation, for "fundamentally changing the Papacy" within 48 hours of becoming Pope. There's a word for that kind of rhetoric: hysterical. And I like that priest; he doesn't generally say nutty things. I think one of the problems is that he is letting the news networks tell him how to view anything newsworthy with regard to the Catholic faith, e.g., the election of a Pope.

Yes, I get that you have to start somewhere. I am merely pointing out that if you start at "I understand what this guy is doing," then you are at great risk of remaining there. If Evangelicals like Pope Francis because he seems more like an Evangelical to them than other popes, then they are at great risk of either not really hearing how he is not like an Evangelical or of falling back to disinterest or worse when the honeymoon ends and he turns out to be Catholic. (I've already used the expression "the Spirit of Pope Francis" in connection with the disillusionment Catholics who speak wistfully of the Spirit of Vatican II will come to feel as this papacy continues. And, God help us, the Church is still recovering from a generation of young Catholics who knew which rules shouldn't exist.)

Sad, but true. People who see discontinuity between PEB16 and PF1 are headed for a huge disappointment down the road, I'm afraid.

Moreover, he refers several times to Pope Francis's humility as a feature that attracts. But it isn't his humility as such that attracts; otherwise every humble pope would be popular. Anyone who is unaware of Pope Emeritus Benedict's humility wasn't paying attention -- which, yes, is part of the point: Pope Francis's actions draw the attention of Evangelicals in a way Pope Benedict's did not. But the author doesn't merely like that Pope Francis exhibits humility, he likes that Pope Francis exhibits humility in a way that Evangelicals notice. He seems unaware that there are other ways of exhibiting humility, in particular that it can take just as much humility to follow a papal tradition as to break it, or that Christ-like character can be found in leadership styles Evangelicals might not wish for.

Emphasis mine. Truth is I'm trying really, really hard to like Pope Francis, and I don't dislike him; I don't find anything wrong with him. It's just that I really, really miss Pope Benedict. I guess I need to "leave some room for the Holy Spirit", right?