the anti-social Church

At Secular Right, Heather Mac Donald has an excellent post criticizing the American Catholic hierarchy for failing to take New York Governor Andrew Cuomo's "public concubinage" seriously.

Secular Right bloggers have often argued, as Mac Donald does here, that religious faith can benefit society by providing a ground for the stigmatization of "anti-social behavior" that, writ large, leads to the "catastrophic breakdown of the family." Why, they ask, has the Church given up this good sort of authority almost to the point of mocking its value?

Her comments on the meeting between Cuomo and several "high-ranking bishops" should trouble anyone who counts himself a member of one of the first six groups in Throne and Altar's "taxonomy of the Right." (That the NYT is involved should obviously be taken into account. But caveats of this sort aren't as meaningful as they used to be.) Especially those who were already troubled by Archbishop Dolan's letter to Congress listing the US Bishops' "Legislative Principles and Priorities." (Most of the items with pastoral "teeth" -- in Mac Donald's sense, i.e., items which most pastors/bishops publicly discuss -- are basically liberal projects.) Here is Mac Donald on the meeting and, to use one of those pundit-words, its optics:

Lots of jolliness all around, obviously. Dolan joked that the best part of the fact that Cuomo rescheduled their meeting was that "[w]e got lunch out of it."

(How the once fearsome power of the Church has shrunk! King Phillip in Verdi's Don Carlo complains that the "throne must always bow to the altar." Now the altar creeps up to the throne and is grateful for a few table scraps.) [Dolan could have meant that there was nothing but lunch to get out of the meeting in the first place. At any rate, Dolan's role isn't the primary issue. Or the norms for receiving communion. - TS]

One of the core purposes of the "secular conservative" construct, in my view, is to show that traditional morality can be justified on secular grounds alone. Divine revelation is not needed to argue for obedience to the law and respect for the rights of others. More particularly, the married two-parent biological family can be shown to be superior to all other arrangements for raising children, based on evidence and on an understanding of the role of marriage in civilizing men and tying them to their children. You don't need to worship a supernatural deity to grasp that the rise in illegitimacy and single-parent households is the greatest problem facing American society, mitigated only by the country’s enormous affluence.

I suppose I should thank Archbishop Dolan for indirectly buttressing the argument behind secular conservatism. Not only is religious faith not required to justify traditional morality, religious leaders do not even have the backbone any more to stand up for traditional morality in the hard individual case, leavin' jes' us secular conservatives to stick our necks out. If, after centuries of accumulating scientific triumph in understanding the causal mechanisms of our world, we still must have relics, amulets, magical potions, and incantations, the one indisputable benefit that religion could provide would be fearlessness in stigmatizing anti-social behavior. Instead, we get an Archbishop who calls concern over a Catholic’s carnal sin a "tempest in a teapot" and who thanks God for cooling down said "tempest." To be sure, Cuomo has not fathered a child out of wedlock, but the depressing and sordid practice of Daddy imposing his "girlfriend" and Mommy imposing her "boyfriend" on the children of divorce is intimately related to the catastrophic breakdown of the family. With apologies to my pro-life friends, I would argue that the epidemic of unwed fertility, divorce, and serial cohabitation is far more consequential to society than abortion.

Dolan has shown the Church to be a follower rather than a leader of morality. Today, no one gets booted out of the country club for divorcing his wife or for living with his girlfriend. So he's darn well not going to be denied his communion wafer, either.

I am almost ashamed to quibble with her argument that "traditional morality can be justified on secular grounds alone." But, I think it is important to point out that secular justification (peer-reviewed studies, evolutionary psychology, etc.) cannot approximate, in this context, what I guess would now be called religious persuasion -- and not just because studies and the like don't have genuine authority. Obviously one doesn't need "to worship a supernatural deity to grasp that the rise in illegitimacy and single-parent households is the greatest problem facing American society." But if we enter an epoch in which the basic human understanding is that consciousness ends at death, "traditional morality" will have no material to work upon. WALL-E got the mass culture right and among the elite talk of the biological imperative will have annihilated the communion of saints. Beyond the end of history there can only be a transhuman morality. We will end up asking "what were we thinking?" and hanging replicas of Mulder's "I want to believe" poster on our walls. (The Creation of Adam instead of a UFO.)

The problem is that many within the American Catholic hierarchy and its bureaucracy no longer believe that existence in this world is, as Caleb Stegall puts it, a "tragedy of engagement on the edge of risk and ever-compromised necessities." That is, the tragic conflict of universalisms. The Word of God is characterized by contemporaneity, but "things come to pass." The burdens of order are heavy and the good does not always appear as the "pastoral." (As in, "we do not have traditional music in this parish because it is not pastoral enough.") Stegall went on to write:

While we are engaged with the crises and catastrophes, a serious, taxing and often debilitating business, we can always look at ourselves and our situation from an imagined eternity where it is, if not farcical, a tragic agon tempered by the comic finish of the marriage feast.