Liberal Catholic meets Conservative Catholic for the second time
A friend from high school recently emailed me after seeing my name on an alumni website. She remembered me being Catholic in High School and was writing to tell me she entered the Church this year. I was positively elated. We began an email dialogue in order to catch up after more than a decade of no contact.
I’d like to share some snippets from our emails, if for no other reason than she is very liberal and I am, as you know, conservative. I want to believe modern liberalism is compatible with the faith but I think it involves a suspension of disbelief that, in the final analysis, is contrary to the demands of faith itself. More on that unsupported premise later. Now, on to the emails.
I’ll call her “Ms. Often Wrong Silly Pants” to protect her true identity. But I jest! I will call her “Dianne.” Nope, I never liked that name. How about “Maria”? Maria is it! Ok, now on to the emails!
We had an uneasy exchange when it became clear to each other how we had opposing political views:
Maria: Well, we might not always agree, but I’m open to changing my mind.
Sal: There are plenty of left-leaning and right-leaning people who are Catholic, and they can and generally do disagree on issues, some of them moral and some prudential. I think the most important thing for a Catholic is to look at moral, political, cultural, and economic issues through the eyes of faith. Our faith and our traditiona should inform our whole world view. That’s all I would suggest as something to consider. It means many of your beliefs can stay the same, some you may have to re-evaluate. Some look at the past through the lense of the present, we Catholics have the proper perspective when we look at the past and present with respect to the Catholic tradition. I’m not asking you to change your mind wholesale, just consider these issues through the faith!
Just today she emailed me about the DNC:
Maria: Did you watch any of the Democratic Convention last night?
There were some really moving speeches! I love the themes of unity, truth,
trust, dignity, compassion, strength, wisdom, values, God, and LISTENING to
eachother! Powerful stuff! They really didn’t strike me as empty words
either, you could see that they believed in and knew (unlike Bush who always
seems to be reading his speeches for the first time) what they were saying,
how important it was, and how much it really meant. There was a sincerity
there that I’ve never seen in Bush, but maybe I’m just biased.
Sal: I didn’t watch any of the convention last night. Discussing political and moral issues I can do, watching politicians politick I can’t. It just puts me over the edge, especially in an election year. The debate in this country just isn’t honest any more. Politicians play to a crowd, appeal to emotion or appeal to the majority instead of appealing to fact or objective truth. Words just don’t have the meaning they used to anymore.
Let me tell you what I think about the rhetoric of our age. I don’t believe that the world is inevitably slouching toward a utopia. Aside from medical and technological advances, important as they are, the Western world has been in moral decline for some decades. For most in our generation and the generations that are following, knowledge simply has utility, it’s a means of getting a good job and being successful. Some of us still want to know for the sake of knowing, but mostly if one does have any immediate use for knowledge it’s a waste of time pursuing it. This attitude is very much like the Sophists of ancient Greece, the ones who Socrates fought against. They eventually brought him to trial for corrupting the youth of Athens. He was convicted and sentenced to death. I don’t see the tone of our society as much different than the Sophists. But we have the means of spreading this message farther and faster than ever before. It’s very contagious and poisonous, as this message it is often rabidly secular and aestheistic, hedonistic, and immoral. It’s rooted in subjectivism, which is philosophical the legacy of Kant and Hume, among others. The question is the same as Pontius Pilate asked Jesus, “What is truth?” (Nietzsche said that question was the only interesting thing in the Bible.) Pilate was standing before truth Himself and couldn’t see it. So these days, whenever anyone mentions truth it’s usually in the spirit of, “That may be true for you but it’s not true for me” which is not objective truth at all, but rather in the realm of subjective, and usually uninformed opinion. And all the other themes sound to me like platitudes rather than anything substantive. Maybe I am just jaded after all the anti-Catholicism I see in government and the media.
Ah, look at my pontificating. I can’t help it. But I don’t want to just say “You’re wrong about this, this, this, this, this, this, this and this.” She’s got to really search her new faith to see what about her political views should change. As I told her, some of these issues are purely prudential, some are moral. With the moral issues she should learn what the Church teaches and why.
I’ll post more sections of emails as they come! I welcome you’re comments and suggestions!