I have come to describe myself, if I must, as “on the Orthodox end of the Byzantine Catholic spectrum”; that is I come down on the side of the Orthodox in just about every controversy, and I am in love with Russian iconography and Slavonic church music. Aesthetically, there is nothing finer than Slavic Orthodoxy, a taste of heaven on earth.
What’s more, I have become increasingly disillusioned with the Catholic hierarchy as the extent of the abuse scandal becomes clearer. And the institutional Church has lost a great deal of credibility because of the annulment situation as well. Most publicly, the very visible Newt and Callista Gingrich offer testimony that one can wed one’s partner in adultery with the Church’s blessing. I know of other cases like this far from the public eye. If this doesn’t bother you, that any one of us may cheat on his or her spouse, divorce them, get an annulment, then marry the adulterous partner in the Church, well I really don’t know what to say.
I have heard some say that ”The Church has spoken, who are you to object?”
That’s right, sorry. I do recall Our Saviour saying “Thou art Peter and upon this Rock I will build my diocesan tribunal, and the gates of Hell shall not prevail against it.”
No, the tribunal is a human institution, far removed from the charism of infallibility that the Church possesses.
And I am not arguing with the annulment process in principle; I know a man who slept with one of the bridesmaids in his “wedding” the night before he “married” his spouse. Clearly no marriage took place that Saturday afternoon.
I am not even arguing that the declaration of nullity in Mr Gingrich’s first marriage is wrong. He married, right out of high school, one of his teachers, who was a good bit older. Sounds pretty likely that this was not a valid marriage to me. What I object to is that he married someone with whom he committed adultery, even if the marriage- his second- was by definition invalid.
Whatever the status objectively, it was still betrayal and deception. Just as the children of invalid unions are not illegitimate, so acts of infidelity in an invalid union are not blameless.
That so many can overlook this only deepens my sense of despair regarding the state of the faithful in this age.
But I remain Catholic. Why?
Exhibit A, on the state of interchurch relations among the Orthodox:
http://sainteliaschurch.blogspot.com/2011/05/patriarchate-of-jerusalem-has-severed.html
Exhibit B, on the situation in the OCA (Orthodox Church in America), which I think should be renamed the ”OTA”: ” Orthodox Train-wreck in America”:
http://www.ocanews.org/news/TheTruthAboutOCATruth4.30.11.html
Exhibit C, more on the same:
http://www.ocanews.org/news/ForcesBehindJonah5.1.11.html
This story is pretty fascinating, not least for the role played by Rod Dreher, the “crunchy con man” who as you may recall, left the Catholic Church for Orthodoxy a mere five years ago in disgust over the scandals. Now he is in cahoots with the wonderfully named Fr Fester, who is conspiring with a bishop deposed for, among other things, knowingly ordaining a convicted child molester? After Dreher -and/or pals – (anonymously) “outed” an alleged homosexual in the other camp of the controversy?
So, how do you like your new Church so far, Mr Dreher?
Exhibit D, on the crisis in the Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese in North America, where the tensions between the ethnics and converts (mostly zealous and contentious former evangelicals) have reached the boiling point:
http://directionstoorthodoxy.org/n/controversy_envelops_antiochian_church.html
In other words, it’s a mess.
Not that the Catholic Church isn’t also a mess, but better the mess you know…
If Orthodoxy possessed as much unity and order and fraternal charity as it does beauty I might be tempted.
With a nod to Phil Ochs, all I can say is, “Rod Dreher, find yourself another church to be part of.”
Was it you who predicted a few years ago, half in jest, that Mr. Dreher would convert to Islam?
I mean, really, only an American would take this kind of attitude into a new church that had received him.
Disappointing but expected.
The history of Christianity is a history of human imperfection and outright vice, part and parcel of our fallen humanity — this is not to excuse those who are culpable, but perhaps those seeking to escape the moral blemishes of one tradition by running to another, imagined “purer” and spotless manifestation of Christianity should reevaluate their expectations. The bar may be set to high.
No question on the beauty of the liturgy.
I am in the process of returning to the Catholic Church after nearly a decade spent in Orthodoxy.
I am not returning to the Catholic Church because of the scandals in Orthodoxy, because, uh, who in their right mind would go to Catholicism because of scandals somewhere else?
But part of my motivation for going to Orthodoxy was the perceived aesthetic and spiritual purity. It was ten years from my first encounter with Orthodoxy until I became Orthodox, and then 9 years in Orthodoxy. As time went on, I learned that in many Orthodox jurisdictions there is a cutting and pasting of the liturgy similar to, if not as drastic as, what is seen in some Eastern Rite Catholic churches. I also learned that the spirituality of the East is often paraded around by middle class Limbaugh or Ron Paul conservative suburbanites with Dobsonista socio-political agendas in the most grotesque of manners – as if eating boca burgers or vegan salads from the Whole Foods salad bar or shrimp sushi on fasting days is salvific asceticism. And then there were the scandals, of which I unfortunately got myself involved. In the end, if you have your eyes open at all, I think one will note that Orthodoxy, for all it talks about being a “spiritual hospital” is not making any higher percentage of people “well” than any other Christian group. It is run by and full of pathetic SOBs like pretty much everyone else is. What it does have to make it distinct is a propagation of rhetoric concerning how beautifully right it is and how pathetically and dismally wrong everyone else is. Such becomes more and more of a farce when you see the fruit of all the amazing “rightness.”
So I return to Catholicism, tail between my legs, having learned that aesthetics are nice but not all that (and compromised within most of American Orthodoxy when it is deemed expedient, just like pretty much everywhere else), and that I would rather have the mess of “here comes everybody” than the cult of “we have the pure phrenoma, screw you.”
Oh, and the annulment thing may be a joke for the rich and powerful, but for those of us without money or influence it still requires some level of irritation and demand for “proof” that at least requires some recognition that marriage might mean something after all. As for divorce and remarriage scandals, things are no better in Orthodoxy. In one of the most famous scandals in American Orthodoxy (the “Joseph Allen affair”) a priest’s wife dies, which as you know means he must then remain celibate to remain a priest according to Orthodox canons, but Joe Allen happens to be counseling the wife of a lesser clergyman in his parish. He counsels her to divorce her husband, engages in an affair with the woman during their counseling sessions, the husband protests and gets excommunicated by the priest (which is backed up by the priest’s good friend Met. Philip), and within a year the priest and the woman marry, and the priest is allowed to remain a priest by Met. Philip. That is among the more egregious stories of a disdain of marriage in Orthodoxy, but there are plenty more where that came from, I assure you.
It’s times like these I feel comfortable an Anglican.
Dude, you are comfortable as an Anglican? I suggest you pay more attention.
Basically, I’m a Sojourners-style Episcopalian (leaning a little more to the anarchist camp). And I’m clearly aware of the issues.
I grew up in a mish-mash of fundamentalist, evangelical circles, grew to love a more traditional approach to the faith, became Reformed, and then Catholic. But after some time, it was no longer a place my wife and I felt comfortable in due to what we percieved as over-conservatism in issues such as sexuality. We then attended a Disciples of Christ church that was very progressive, but we couldn’t stand the lack of tradition and aesthetic liturgy.
So what draws me today to Episcopalianism is the marriage of progressive theology with a traditional liturgy. A perfict fit.
The whole annulment thing used to bother me. From a theological point of view, I have to disagree with the post: even if the man slept with the whole local college cheerleading squad the night before, and got married the next day, he would still be married. Period. None of this subjective disposition crap where you just run around in circles chasing your own tail.
But then I realized that what bothers me is not annulments per se (marriages break up and cease to exist, that’s just reality), but the smugness that is caused by the whole annulment process in the Catholic Church. We can have our cake and eat it too, we can proclaim the sanctity of marriage from the housetops against all of those filthy homos and yet have adulterers marry their lovers and have it rubber stamped by the Church. Better to just get out of this whole hypocritical business altogether. If there is one thing Jesus disliked, it was religious hypocrisy, or rather, using religious observance to make yourself out to be better than others without any real moral effort. Mercy for me, but not for thee.
If people want to just shack up, let them shack up and deal with the consequences of their actions. Since the vast majority of annulments take place in the U.S., I have to believe that this is what the rest of the world does. It is time for American Catholics to start being adults about this question and stop playing fairy tale make believe about what a real marriage is like.
Senor: I must take issue with your contention that a man can validly wed when he has no intention of fidelity. Ditto if he has no intention of having children. Indeed, in principle I have no objection to the idea of annulments, it is just that when, as is the status quo in the US, the whole “psychological dispostion” thing is inserted, to the point that it looks like no one but a saint who is really good in bed can validly marry that it becomes problematic. And the canon against marrying a partner in infidelity should be revived.
I had thought that this was still observed in Orthodoxy, but the tale Mr White tells proves that it is not, that my suspicion that everywhere principles are stretched to give folks what they want is true.
Mm, not so sure about that. I mean, if that were the case, then most of the marriages throughout history would have been invalid. (And what constitutes the intention of having children? Not aborting them in the case of unforeseen pregnancy, or smashing their heads against a rock when they’re born. It doesn’t help that the Church won’t perform shot-gun weddings anymore. Doesn’t that make for a contradiction?) And that would just be a silly and self-refuting argument.
My wife has been doing a lot of genealogical work lately concerning her family. Her roots are firmly in southern Louisiana since the late eighteenth century, if not earlier. One story is that one of her great-great grandfathers told the wife to make an extra big supper on Sunday, because his OTHER family was coming over. He was such a family man that he had two: which one was the valid one, if any? Then, there was the case of one of my wife’s ancestors (at least we still think he was her ancestor) who decided that he would take a black concubine and give her a part of his land to live on, and once his white wife died, moved her into his quarters over the objections of his white children (he chased them away a gun point, the story goes, telling them to mind their own business). This sort of anecdote underlies the practice of plaçage in much of the Catholic world, where a white man might have a mixed race concubine and family PRIOR to starting his own decent white family that would inherit the family goods. Having a mistress even at the beginning of marriage was far more common than most people would admit nowadays, and the same took place in my own family.
The problem is that marriage at its origins is a societal and economic compact, and the reason you are tripping over yourself in your arguments is that you are getting it all twisted up in modern visions of marriage as an embodiment of ideal romantic love. No one believed that prior to 1900, or very few did. All of that St. Paul Ephesians’ stuff is idealized and has nothing to do with our modern ideas of “self-fulfillment”. Indeed, “good” Catholic women saw it as virtuous to tolerate their husband’s indiscretions to the end (like Catherine of Aragon, who, ironically, would have had her marriage annulled if Henry VIII brought his case before the current Vatican). A good Catholic man might still have a mistress, but he would “respect” his wife and care for his children, making sure they were educated in the precepts of Holy Mother Church. (Indeed, “respetar a mi mujer” became a euphemism in Mexico for not performing certain sexual acts with the mother of your children. That is what “putas” are for.)
I think the whole idea of “marrying my best friend” is what has been most toxic to marriage, as well as mixing the idealized love of Plato and the troubadours into what was ultimately the economic exchange between two families for the propagation of life and property. (Or I like Kant’s definition where he called marriage a bond between two people for the exclusive use of each others’ genitals. How romantic.) True, I married my “best friend”, but I have no illusions that this is common or necessary. People marry for all sorts of reasons, and it is best to actually study the history of what marriage has actually been like through the ages prior to offering broad generalizations as to what constitutes a marriage.
Hi, I ambled over hear on my lunch break. I have no dog in this fight. Reading a little of the OCA truth blog posting I thought to share my experiences in this area. I used to belong to a liberal mainline denomination – and heard a reporter for a major daily and a seminary professor plan on putting out a story giving the mainline protestant side. I heard some one from my “side” of an issue from a well known Catholic newspaper discuss her contacts with other well known columnists on how to “spin” things. (They would not use that term). I like a wimp said nothing so I am not being holier than thou. Still it left me kind of aghast – we all get into this weird group think.
Do you think that this is another example of not throwing away the Ring of Power? We do not trust the truth – so we need to spin it so as Dreher said “Perception becomes the reality”? Is that a reason church politics is so nauseating?
I have no dog in this fight, either. Both sides in the OCA dogfight make a good case.
Really, is it the secularist liberal homosexual cabal trying to depose a bishop who is intent on returning the Church to its mission?
Or is it a case of converts with a political agenda trying to lure the historically working class Church into supporting the Republican agenda?
Or is it the dastardly homos trying to hold unto power?
Or is it (see above)?
And so on, with multiple variations.
All I know is that is a mess, totally disedifying, confusing, and bewildering, given that this is a tiny church, a small percentage of the Orthodox in America,who total, all together, fewer than a million believers.
But thank God, I guess, if I can even begin to guess what He is doing; the vespers and liturgies I attend, generally OCA, are sublime, and this crap keeps me Catholic, which must be a good thing.
At the very least, I am in communion with a vast host of every stripe of human, which really hit me over 20 years ago when I visited St Peter’s in Rome…
Yeah it is slow going but I am learning to appreciate the “here comes everybody” approach. A theologian somewhere said to paraphrase: To trade the dusty, motheaten church for grander model, more breathtaking and of luminous members would not be worthy of Christ. Thanks for the thought provoking post.
My dear Senor: I am not tripping all over myself, nor am I enmeshed in modern visions, romantic ideals or Platonism. And I certainly do not think that “marriage has its origins as a societal and economic compact.”
What it is is a covenant, given by God that we may be fruitful and multiply and not be lonesome. It is more than that, of course, but that’s the basics. That is the Christian vision, the one both Churches profess and violate. And the whole history of human sinning does not change it one bit.
I have no idea of where you are coming from, but on such matters I am very traditional. I reserve my radicalism for political and economic matters….
Iosue (Western Confucian): I tried to leave a comment in your combox, but the process was daunting and I am afraid it did not register, but: a correction: Mr Dreher is, for the moment anyway, a communicant in the Orthodox Church in America, not the Antiochian Orthodox Church, which is where the converts and the ethnics are beating each other silly…
Thanks. Duly edited. And sorry for the commenting rigamarole.
Actually, I think that Dreher mentioned on some blog that he attends an Antiochian parish now that he lives in PA. Yā Rabbu rḥam.
For more perspectives on the situation in the OCA, you might like to check out these blogs – not for the faint of heart:
http://spartiongeometrias.blogspot.com/
http://www.monomakhos.com/category/michalopulos-blog/
http://02varvara.wordpress.com/
I had not heard that. Hoo boy, wonder what he will do there…
And thanks (?) for the links; I had seen them before. To add to the weirdness, note that the last blog is done by a Slavophile transsexual…
Last weekend I was in Michigan for a beloved aunt’s funeral. My mom really does not like Byzantine worship, so I attended her parish, which is a penance. I won’t go into a rant on the state of liturgy and aesthetics in general in the Latin Rite, but use your imagination. On the way out of town I stopped at the OCA parish just down the street from Mom’s and caught about half of the liturgy. Sublime; the iconostasis is by Fr Theodore Jurewicz, one of my favorite contemporary iconographers, the choir was wonderful, the liturgy pretty much perfect. I left sated, and wondering how in the world a Church whose worship can be so beautiful can be such a mess…
And it is a tiny Church; there are fewer than one million Orthodox Christians in the US, and the OCA is around what? 50,000 or so?
I appreciate how scandalized and hurt one can be over the abuses in the church led BY those in the church, and I agree the tribunal is not infallible about what marriages were invalid or valid (not say, like papal infallibility.) I have studied valid marriages a bit and have never understood that the intention to be faithful was (as crazy as it sounds) an absolute criteria for validity (though perhaps it should be ya know,if I were calling the shots! lol) Plus, the fact that the guy slept with someone else before the marriage could be, if we are playing devil’s advocate, a sowing the seed kinda jerkish mentality, or he could gave just fallen into sin.That alone,unless one knows more than indicated,does not indicate he had an intention to be NOT be faithful..even IF faithfulness intended were a requirement.
Just being a pain in the arse here..I also remember that Christ did not ensure that,when he came to earth, there would be a host of perfect fisherman that would be selected to leave the church to.And by perfect, I don’t just mean perfect as in,without imperfections.I mean,sinners, plain and simple.Both then and now,the holiness or lack thereof in the men or whole of men/persons that run the church does not affect objectively the reality of its primacy.But we all know that your message will only be as good as your example…because we are human, and see hypocrisy so quickly.We are all imperfect, and someone still has to preach the truth,even at the risk of being called a hypocrite, because if we all never preached the truth until we all had perfected it..then the truth would never be preached.:)
And no amount of sinning on the part of the people stands to nullify Christ’s promise to Peter,or his handing of the keys to him.Both churches are indeed a mess…but have not they always been? Sure at one point or another they could be said to be better off in this area or that area at a given time..but really there has always been scandal,bad men doing bad things,bad things being permitted by otherwise good men, and everything in between.
It is hard to bear the title of Catholic today,at least when you are Orthodox the general public leaves you the hell alone,because most don’t even know what an Orthodox is, they just figure its an ethnic thing,and at the risk of sounding “insensitive” or intolerant they don’t go there,because its about ethnicicity. But you say you re Catholic,you are certainly in for it.
I am so grateful we have what we do in the Eastern Catholic Church…we have the best of both sides (except for lack of prayer books,specific resources,etc.)
I often think of it as the masculine side of the church,the Roman Rite,gets a lot of flack for their “legalism”
but it is easier to be in the loving,motherly,less articulated lawmaker role that the East is (not having encountered the same of trials the West did, yet having their own certainly enough) than to be the overly detailed and “overly developed” Dad that must put his foot down.A family needs both father and mother,head and heart,and while I myself balk at some of the finer points that seem very exclusive in the Roman code, I am amazed at how right they are about moral and doctrinal matters.
Reason led me into the church after serious study of a lot of stuff I did not wanna hear. I was seriously considering becoming a Self Realization fellowship nun and moving to California after I go into the whole Christian/Hindu blend of Parmahansa Yogananda in my college days. I was raised in catholic schools, family not any religion, baptized in 4th grade catholic and went to catholic schools all my life.I did not see any transcendence in my church at all, and when a “friend” of mine introduced me to Eastern monasticism (not Christian) I was enthralled and easily hooked.
But my philosophic mind, (as my then Catholic convert friend,now husband enlightened me to the Catholic faith I was never taught before) had made it as far as to say that by reason alone- the Catholic faith answered everything,every question I had about metaphysical certitude since I was a child.
But I asked “Can i just be Catholic because I actually agree with 110% of what they teach (and I mean in depth study) but not submit to the Pope?”-i.e. in case they ever came up with something I “didnt like” I could then be free to reject it.)
My point being, even if I did not see a “need for the Papacy” I would be Catholic because I just cant,logically or otherwise, see where truth is in its entirety anywhere else. The theology is so sound, and in Orthodoxy (which I do love very much,save a few things) you see what happens when the Daddy church isnt there to sort out the rules and lay them down.
I know every Orthodox church is different,but thats precisely it.The Roman church is likely the largest (although historical reasons etc) because we are fallen beings and just cant be trusted to make our own rules without the “keys.” You have many Orthodox allowing officially, contraception,abortions in some cases,divorce (FAR more rampant than even the annulment problem.) I am just sayin’….you will have unorthodox catholic priests give permission for birth control…etc etc. but you will never have it be the official teaching of this church.
Fallen men were charged with implementing a perfect and infallible rule.But the rule is still right there to be had,plain and simple.Orthodoxy does not offer that.They have retained beautiful traditions liturgically, theologically speaking..but completely faltered on moral issues because there is no visible and respected head of their church.I know you you know this Daniel, I am just rambling.
I love the scholastic tradition and am blown away at the minds of the church and their ability to make such uberly-fine distinctions,etc. but as scholastic as I may be,I know that no one can exhaust the mysteries,though it fun to tinker with them.
I find myself in spirit an Eastern catholic, but mostly I am always floored at the beauty of the complimentarity of both Rites; mother/father, head/heart/introverted liturgy/extroverted liturgy,dome/spire LOL…so I just take from both Rites (and the others) the wonder they have to offer and bask in delight at these things that God has allowed to manifest in the physical world; the spiritual reality of the roles of a family,as in the Trinity itself.
I will say this on annulments: i used to get very angry at the amount and seeming casual manner in which everyone who wanted a divorce just got a “catholic one.”
But I got thinking,for what its worth, that knowing there are impediments to a valid marriage, many marriages, even if an annulment is not sought are likely invalid.
Through the tumult of the sexual revolution coupled with the crises in the church (chicken an egg here) a whole couple generations were not catechized about anything, including what marriage truly is and what constitutes one.I do believe there were many couples marrying that had impediments to a valid marriage simply because they had ideas about what they were doing that were not at all inline with the true sacramental character of matrimony.Worldly expectations were now infecting catholic youth, and the church in schools,marriage prep and pulpits were not giving any direction otherwise.Of course there are going to be by definition,more invalid marriages.
And of course,you are going to have many many people take advantage of this fact and seek annulments just because they can.half of annulment requests are denied,and that does tell me the tribunals are being somewhat discretionary.
But sure the numbers of annulments are going to rise from the early part of the century not just because people want divorces,but because people were not taught what they were getting into, the points were not made clear in this crazy time (as now,but its getting better)Marriages, IMHO, need to be made more difficult to enter into.
What more can you say than detraction, calumny and church gossip are bad?
I have come to describe myself, if I must, as “on the Orthodox end of the Byzantine Catholic spectrum”…
There’s what I call ‘high-church Byzantine Catholic’, which is exactly what Rome wants – externally just like the Orthodox but in the fold because you believe Rome on the scope of the Pope, the reason to remain Byzantine Catholic by choice. It exists mostly on the Internet and in a few parishes (like the little Russian Catholic parish in NYC I’ve been to several times). Then there’s ‘Orthodox in communion with Rome’, where somebody says he agrees with the Orthodox on everything but remains Byzantine Catholic, which doesn’t make sense. Basically an opinionated Protestant who happens to agree with the Orthodox. Again, mostly an Internet thing, and most such get fed up and convert, which, to be fair, makes more sense than converting to react to some scandal.
Well there certainly is a spectrum, ranging from alienated Western Catholics who are just seeking something better than Glory and Praise (they generally don’t last long) to, as you say, those who are Orthodox but just can’t summon the wherewithal to make the jump…
I am fortunate that my parish would appear Orthodox if you attended the Divine Liturgy, except that we pray for the pope. However, I am aware of parishes (especially in Pennsylvania) that have no iconostasis, have statues, stations of the cross, western art instead of icons, etc.
But even in my parish, with a superb choir that does all the great Slavic hymns, there is a lot to be desired. And few parishes have vespers instead of evening liturgy on Saturdays.Or matins before the Divine Liturgy (in my parish they pray the rosary; when I asked about it I was told that before there were any priests here somebody’s great grandma was instructed by a bishop in the old country to have the Rusyn community here pray the rosary together, which they have done for over 100 years now, so my purist instincts are stifled by history and tradition – and I never liked the rosary prayed aloud even when I was a Latin).
But then I have friends who attend the Greek Orthodox Church and they complain of hour long liturgies, no vespers, etc…
And I have visited Orthodox parishes with way worse icons than I have seen in Byzantine Catholic parishes (though sublime and wonderful iconography is also common, especially in churches built since the 60s).
Of course what I really desire is “the well-being of the holy churches of God and for the union of all” though I don’t see how that can happen any time soon…