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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   4482 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for October 30, 2022

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Does anyone know any higher ups in the Catholic Church? Maybe, specifically in Louisiana?

Still-current ‘American Conservative’ (the publication) blogger and former trad-cath Rod Dreher, who has spent a career moralizing to others, has divorced his wife and converted to Orthodoxy. I think it’s only fair and right the Catholic Church excommunicate him for his divorce and heresy.

Just wanted to see if anyone can put in a call, get the ball rolling.

  • -15

Alright we don't technically have a rule against recruiting people here for political causes . . .

. . . but if you're going to do it, you gotta do it in a more neutral way. This feels like part waging-culture-war, part not-writing-like-everyone-is-reading, and part being uncharitable.

I'm not sure what you were planning to accomplish with this but this isn't the place for it.

I was just taking a shot at poor old Rod, but I’ll do that more plainly in the future. I was and am not expecting to accomplish anything.

I do appreciate the Mottizens that have provided info about the current specifics of excommunication in this thread.

Obviously it doesn't necessarily require the conclusion that Dreher is a hypocrite because he can't hold his marriage together, just like it doesn't make Jordan Peterson a hypocrite to get addicted to benzos, and Joe Biden might still know how to raise kids even though Hunter. Some people roll snake-eyes when they're picking a spouse or having a kid or born with the wrong addiction gene combination. The rain falls on the just and the unjust alike. "Behold, blessed is the one whom God reproves, therefore despise not the discipline of the Almighty. For he wounds, but he binds up, he shatters, but his hands heal."

But when people become famous for having a lot of thoughts on how everyone else ought to live, and point to all the bad things happening in your life as a result of your lack of discipline/religiosity/virtue, one might tend to look at how their lives are going and say: gee it seems like discipline/religiosity/virtue isn't getting you all that far is it?

I've been a Dreher reader for over a decade, I've found he has a lot of insight on many things and I think The Benedict Option and Live Not by Lies were important intellectual contributions to the discourse. But, part of traditional marriage and family life is keeping your wife happy and happily obedient, a man must have the patriarchal leadership and charisma (I mean that positively) to actually lead. If Dreher couldn't deliver on it, is that really a model that is scaleable to society? Or is it a non-workable model?

In the same way I don't think drug addiction makes you a bad person, but it's a strike against you, and it's certainly a big red asterisk on your advice about how to live your life. Having an addict kid that fucks his sister-in-law doesn't make you a bad person, but it makes me think maybe you should have some grace and not try to insert the government under your leadership into my family life.

is that really a model that is scaleable to society?

It's possible that one or more of their philosophies is a model that is only scaleable to society. Perhaps if you instead only implement it on a small scale, without nearly-omnipresent support for your preferred culture along with a high-trust and long-time-horizon view toward it, it becomes impossible to rely on the benefits of that culture, because external forces will eventually break whatever you've tried to build on it, which creates a vicious cycle when even your allies stop seeing benefits to that culture and trust and long-term outlook. But, if you could somehow manage to create a whole world where the vast majority of your fellows are on your side, then you wouldn't have to worry so much about you or your family falling to temptations that all your peers are also trying to help you avoid.

On the other hand, I can't help but notice that this explanation sounds like exactly the same bullshit that incorrigible Communists use to explain why their predecessors only trashed their half of the world (because we cruelly didn't give them the whole world to play with!). So even if it's true in some case(s) it probably still means the philosophy is unachievable, as well as unstable even if it could be temporarily achieved.

Hypocrisy is only problematic if the person claims that they themselves adhere perfectly to the moral guidelines. Promoting morality while also falling short of the ideal is not bad, and in fact it is better than the alternative of not promoting morality. This idea is found in the gospel, where Jesus’ first disciples all fall short of the ideal, and where a repentant sinner is seen as more just by God than an otherwise righteous man who looks down on others who fall short.

I agree. In cases where people call hypocrisy like this, I find this Tolstoy quote is helpful:

“Attack me, I do this myself, but attack me rather than the path I follow and which I point out to anyone who asks me where I think it lies. If I know the way home and am walking along it drunkenly, is it any less the right way because I am staggering from side to side! If it is not the right way, then show me another way; but if I stagger and lose the way, you must help me, you must keep me on the true path, just as I am ready to support you. Do not mislead me, do not be glad that I have got lost, do not shout out joyfully: ‘Look at him! He said he was going home, but there he is crawling into a bog!’ No, do not gloat, but give me your help and support.”

People don't get excommunicated anymore, except in the latae sententiae (automatic) way. Apostates are automatically excommunicated (can. 1364), so you can already consider Dreher excommunicated and move on with your life without trying to start a harassment campaign.

Him getting divorced isn't an excommunicable offense, it's possibly not even a sin as long as he doesn't get remarried.

Public, formal excommunications happen every once in a while, but not of individuals who have already declared themselves to be non-members in the Catholic church.

What happened to Rod and his wife? What a plot-twist!

He blogged about it, naturally. Ctrl+F "divorce" for the relevant bits. Here's one:

My wife filed for divorce in the spring, but you should know that I believe she did the right thing, ultimately, because continuing in this ferocious pain after ten years was destroying both of us. It is a relatively amicable split, one that even our priests had suggested was finally the right thing. But even relatively amicable splits are terrible, and I beg your prayers for us all.

There may be other divorce-relevant posts in his archive but since I'm not a regular reader of Dreher, I don't recall.

Rod does not want to discuss it and thanks you all for respecting his privacy.

The Chapo guys have baselessly speculated he’s running around Hungary with a group of male grad students for a reason.

Rod does not want to discuss it and thanks you all for respecting his privacy.

I do respect his privacy, but I also hope it will instill a little more humility in a man who has spent decades opining forcefully about the institution of marriage, particularly from the angle of who ought to be legally excluded from it.

One quote from him:

I never tire of quoting Pope Benedict XVI’s saying that the best arguments for the Church’s claims are not its propositions and syllogisms, but the art it produces, and its saints. I think this is the case for marriage too, at least in this decadent culture. People are not persuadable by reason, mostly because they do not share the premises on which the arguments are based. We have to accept that. They will live out the consequences of the ideas they have chosen to believe. The truth of the way Jones, as a believing Muslim, and I, as a believing traditional Christian, have chosen to live will be vindicated by our lives, and the lives of our families. That will be our witness; no other can persuade people in the grip of this madness. That’s the only reason I became a believing Christian. I had the arguments down pat in my head, but my heart refused to accept the consequences, until I had driven my life into a ditch.

As Philip Rieff taught us, people believe Truth is therapy; it’s what makes us feel good. That’s a powerful idea. It happens to be a lie. But it’s one that people are going to have to learn for themselves. They will start asking questions that the secular liberal Model cannot answer, but we can. There’s going to be a hell of a lot of suffering before the Great Re-Learning takes place. Trads like us, Jones, are going to have to be around to help the walking wounded, and to show them by our lives that there is a better way. We must be prepared to meet them with mercy, not judgment, because the way it went with them, it could have gone with us as well.

I do feel for him, and wish him well in spite of everything. Ironically, worry about divorce is one of the principal reasons I gave just a few days ago for marrying another man instead of gutting it out married to a woman. I hope those words can never be quoted back to me ironically. Dreher is right that mercy, not judgment, is ultimately the appropriate response to the wreckage of a marriage, and that after all of our preparation and resolve, it is ultimately grace (whether of god or of luck) that determines the outcome.

Damn.

Normally I'm a big fan of privacy, but Rod has made such a public spectacle of his personal takes on morality that one can't help but wonder.

Is Chapo any good any more? I briefly listened to it years back, but it seemed to be getting less and less fun and more and more tortured.

They’re very doomer, but still have enough yuks to keep me interested. Skip the most-recent episode (no. 675), in particular. They’re on tour, but still decided to still try and put out an episode, and it was a low-effort attempt guest hosted by an improv comedy duo that bombed. Not indicative of other recent efforts.

Yes.

Rod Dreher had been out of the church for years, and formal excommunications aren’t done on public apostates.

Rod Dreher converted to Eastern Orthodoxy in the early 2000's after years of reporting on the sex abuse crisis.

As a professed apostate Dreher is latae sententiae excommunicated.

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