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Fr. James Martin is 100% serious and a true believer. He doesn't actually compromise on abortion, he just thinks gun control is an equivalently serious pro life issue. He's wrong about that, obviously. But he actually literally believes this. His response to criticism over closeness to democrats, because they support abortion, is not to try to write nuance into the abortion issue where none exists; it's 'both sides bad and democrats are the lesser of evils because XYZ'. Both he and his followers are Old, and the vision of the church he promotes is not generally very appealing to people who aren't already part of his bandwagon- either because of the liberalism or because of the Catholicism- but he is definitely a true believer Catholic. Progressive activist priests who aren't tend to leave the church.
Vigano is not actually part of the Catholic church. He has been excommunicated and no one disputes this, including Vigano himself. He has crossed lines that would have been associated with sedevacantism(a fringe phenomenon nobody likes, despite its popularity on DR twitter) prior to Vigano going on Alex Jones and is more or less associated with the SSPX resistance, a group kicked out of the SSPX for either being batshit crazy(the SSPX's story) and possibly child abusers(everyone else's story) or for criticizing the SSPX leadership for compromising with modernism(their story). The farthest-right segment of the church(which includes traditionalists, but also lots of people who think Vatican II/many associated things were ill-advised, but can't be fully reversed) is actually led by Cardinal Muller, whose red hat allows him to cause plenty of chaos if he so chooses. He has previously threatened to do so to veto the appointment of bishop Heiner Wilmer to the position of doctrinal chief and gotten away with it.
Pope Francis himself protects liberals and progressives as much so that he can play the two factions off of each other as out of ideological sympathies. He favors jesuits, who tend to be liberal, and fellow latin americans, who also tend liberal. But he seems to prefer moderates from both, and the college of cardinals retains a conservative plurality large enough to maintain a functional veto. Martin is a true believer in what he says, but he's very very careful about coloring inside the lines and not taken seriously as a threat due to the age of his followers(mostly old enough to have adult children who left the church over homosexuality, often their own, long enough ago for their parents to have accepted it as irreversible). Bishops are still promoted reasonably meritocratically, and simply due to the pool of seminary graduates ~20 years ago, are trending more conservative every year. Bright spots for the church in the first world are almost invariably driven by conservative leans and the natural alignment of the RCC is with the establishment right of whatever society it finds itself in(often in ostensibly non-political ways; the Catholic church will tend to drift into cultural and vaguely aesthetic/institutional alignment with the things establishment conservatives do. But also, the federalist society would not be so successful without Catholic schools, specifically. Trump's appointments trend really Catholic. The RCC is on the right for the forseeable future; becoming episcopalians 2.0 is simply not in the cards) and everyone knows it. There are(mostly older) progressive Catholics who find this confusing, and there are bubbles where progressive Catholicism dominates. But there's not a lot of doubt about the general direction. Are both sides willing to play dirty? Yes, they are. But it stays at a lower level. These are institutionalists who see gentlemanly behavior as very important; liberals know that setting a precedent for hardball will blow up in their faces and conservatives know that there's no real need to play hardball.
Tradcaths themselves mostly haven't. JPII may have been sympathetic and Benedict a frequent ally, but they were not our friends in the way Muller has reinvented himself as. Rather, the mainstream position among people whose opinions matter to SSPX and FSSP leadership(as an aside- the SSPX/FSSP split is overstated. They prefer to make a show about ignoring each other and most of the criticism is for realpolitik. Most FSSP priests recognize Lefebvre as a saint and most SSPX priests praise the orthodoxy of FSSP priests- all behind closed doors in both cases, of course) is to build parallel institutions which by merely existing create room in mainstream church institutions for sympathizers and fellow travelers to rise until they predominate, and this is viewed as a generational task by people who literally and unironically think in terms of generations, plural. And at least in the first world, this has delivered some results.
Explanations for pope Francis have centered around 'sometimes you get a bad pope(and he actually is bad at things other than doctrine)' and 'he lets liberal friends run amok but tends to refrain from endorsing their conclusions'. Traditional Catholics who actually matter simply do not think in terms of years or decades and so the current pope is viewed as a temporary and ineffectual roadblock.
Thanks. Reported as AAQC.
I know that OP brought up abortion, but I wasn’t thinking of abortion here: I was thinking of Martin’s approach to sexual sins, particularly homosexuality but also various kinds of cohabitation. He seems to prefer having a group of massgoers in unrepentant grave sin over the kind of call to repentance that would split them into a smaller group of repentant massgoers and a larger group that eschews the faith entirely. If that reading is correct, it’s hard to see how he isn’t at odds with the gospel.
I suppose that your understanding of Martin’s motives is much better informed than mine, which is largely limited to social media and reading him in quotation. But man, the pattern match is strong.
Interesting. I did not know this.
The contrast to the evangelical experience in twentieth-century America is really striking here. In the early twentieth century, evangelicals in many denominations realized that all of their institutions – seminaries, universities, missions boards, denominational leadership – had come to be controlled by modernists. They fought back, still not realizing how badly outgunned they were, and in all the big denominations they lost.
But of course we evangelicals aren’t permanently tied to any hierarchy, so they were free to build new institutions and leadership structures. In the middle of the century there was a renewed debate about how those ought to relate to the mainline churches, which still had some orthodox believers in them. In 1979, conservative Southern Baptists realized that modernists were beginning to gain control of their denomination and used the convention to begin their own march through the institutions. After his appointment to lead the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in 1993, theological conservative Al Mohler famously (and controversially) purged the faculty.
Different evangelical institutions have taken different stances over the years. Those that accommodate liberal theology in their ranks usually have an easier time dealing with secular institutions, and their leadership may be able to stave off mission drift for a generation or so. But those which play hardball with theological liberals have done a much better job staying on mission across generations. As evangelicals have come to realize that we live in negative world, the Southern Baptist approach has become more popular.
In the first draft of my reply to Sloot, I began to speculate that evangelicalism will become more theologically and politically conservative, and that it will at the same time shrink to become less politically relevant to the secular right’s interests. But of course I cannot say for sure.
A dear friend of mine is Roman Catholic, though by no means a traditionalist. It is remarkable to me just how many things her social environment within the RCC accepts as valid Catholic positions because of the lack of disciplinary boundary drawing from the hierarchy. It’s an ongoing source of temptation to her, made all the more subtle because she doesn’t recognize it.
Of course, I hope that you all come to your senses and convert tomorrow. Failing that, I hope you are right that theological liberalism in the Roman church is just a passing phase. But if the time to wait it out is measured in generations, then the cost must also be measured in generations.
The catholic community has some weird hang ups that I think are a part of the trauma of the reformation and the breakup of Christendom. In general there are only to real “do not cross” lines that really stick out. First, you have to be okay with invoking saints, and second, you have to accept the pope. The church may make frowny faces at other things, but as long as you’re good on those points, they’re not really going to get too mad.
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It may be that he is biding his time. I think there's merit to the idea that if one comes out too strongly against the sins which people are most embroiled in, you lose the opportunity to push them in a positive direction at all. But if you build up trust, it is sometimes possible to be there at the right moment when someone is ready to hear the hard truth that they need.
I have to grapple with this in my own life, when dealing with my sister. The details are different - her issue is that she has an extreme anger towards our parents based on a false memory of our childhood that she has convinced herself is true. But I face a very similar dilemma, because I know that if I push back too hard on her false ideas she will just get angry, cut me out of her life, and then she will have nobody left who cares for her and who might be able to help her. So I bide my time and grit my teeth through many rants about how awful our parents are, and gently push back on her ideas as much as I think I can get away with. All of this in the hope that one day she will be ready to hear the truth, and that God will grant me the wisdom to recognize this moment when I come to it.
I don't know him, but it seems to me that this Martin fellow could be operating under a similar goal. And if that's the case, I don't think he's at odds with the gospel. It doesn't mean that his approach is the right one - after all, you do have to pick a point to gently tell people "hey this really is a sin, you need to change". And it's very easy to rationalize yourself out of taking that step. But even if his approach isn't effective, that doesn't mean it's at odds with the gospel. If his heart is in the right place I would say he can be in accord with the gospel even if he might be better off using a different tactic to reach people.
Thanks. You’re right, of course. I am so used to public figures giving this sort of reasoning disingenuously that I don’t stop to consider whether one might be sincere.
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Thanks for the look into a community I'm almost completely in the dark on.
I did notice in my very leftist area there's been a Catholic revitalization that the elderly lib faction isn't entirely happy about, led by a conservative firebrand woman with 5 kids. But I don't get to hear anything about the actual institution aside from the difficulty of getting/sharing a local priest.
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