On Facebook the other day someone posted an image of an apron with the slogan “I’d rather be roasting heretics”. I don’t really know the guy who posted this; he is a friend of a friend, and we have exchanged emails. He is prominent in distributist circles, and while I knew he was a pretty conservative kind of Catholic I had no idea that he would have thought this funny. Here is the image:
As you can see, this is the brainchild of New Oxford Review, which once, long ago, was a very fine journal. I subscribed for a good dozen years or so, through the eighties and beyond. Somewhere along the line they changed tone, and began emphasizing the negative and, as self-appointed arbiters of doctrine, began rooting out error, often finding it in the most unlikely places, such as perfectly orthodox theologians. It was tragicomic, watching the editors, obviously out of their league, wrestling with theological notions they clearly did not understand. In this endeavor they brought all the sophistication of a fundamentalist yahoo; in their literalism they failed to use the most basic tools of the theologian. And then they came up with this slogan, apparently a few years ago.
The NOR has, they say on their website, received some complaints about this line of merchandise (you can get it on tee shirts, bumper stickers, bibs(!), etc). Their response is pretty much that this is meant as a joke and if you object you have no sense of humor.
I’m sorry, if I have to explain to you that this is profoundly unfunny I don’t know what to say. Blessed John Paul II publicly repented for the Church’s complicity in violence and persecution. To any sane person, this is a dark stain on the history of the Church and a jarring instance of the institutional Church straying very far from the teaching and example of Christ.
A Catholic wearing a barbecue apron with the slogan “I’d rather be roasting heretics” is about as funny as a German wearing a tee-shirt that says “I’d rather be gassing Jews”, or a white American – I do not say “Southerner” because the phenomenon, while more common in the South, was not unique to it – sporting a bumper sticker that says “I’d rather be lynching niggers.”
The editors of NOR style themselves defenders and promoters of the Faith. That they do not see that anyone who does not share their outlook and temperament will react with disgust to this slogan, would be repulsed by this sort of Catholicism, reveals a density that is staggering indeed.
I agree with this. The NOR has forgotten the disticntion to be made between a “Horror of heresy” (which almost no-one feels any more more because of the relativisation of truth) and actually punishing heretics. So they think that a slogan like this shows they are on the “good” side – whereas it only shows extreme bad taste. A “horror of heresy” is a good thing, because it means we value the truth as we value Christ himself.
As a former contributing editor of NOR and still an occasional contributor, I must say that I think the ads are in poor taste and serve no useful purpose. In the next issue NOR will carry a letter of mine which sets forth my objections to them.
They glory in their shame.
What happened with Dale Vree? He had some of the finest writers in Christendom in his magazine. They either died (no fault of Dale’s, mind you) or were driven out. I wonder what Christopher Dawson, Sheldon Vanauken, and Walker Percy would think of NOR now.
One other question: does Peter Kreeft contribute to NOR anymore, or has he ceased his association with the magazine?
As somebody who used to write for them as well, I gave up on them after they decided to launch a brain-dead attack on Scott Hahn as somehow advocating for lesbian menage a trois, due to his noting that patristic literature sometimes spoke of the Holy Spirit as a sort of feminine principle in the Godhead. He was, of course, perfectly right and the Fathers who note this root their views in Proverbs * vision of the Woman Wisdom. But Dale would hear none of it and ginned up his readers to try, convict and execute Scott as some sort of New Age feminist radical arguing that the Incarnation was the fruit of a lesbian tryst. It was insane, and NOR lost me at that point. Scott, to his credit, basically bore it in silence and was philosophical and forgiving about it.
Obviously the people who invented this sticker would say they would like to “provoke”. – An interesting thing nowadays is, that in general provocation is thought as something good (such as in thought-provoking).
I don’t buy that. In general, people “provoke” only with things they have less a problem with as other people. Its the same thing as making jokes about the holocaust or using – of course only for “provocational” purposes – fascist imagery: If you provoke with eg a picture of a suffering jew in a concentration camp, you are less horrified about it than other people. You would not – as a provocation – poke fun at your horribly suffering father if you love him – in fact, if someone would to that and claims to be “thought-provoking” it might happen that you would hit him quite hard. So, if someone does not have a problem with roasting heretics because he would like to provoke he is not better than eg an atheist who provokes christians by mocking the suffering of martyrs.
Sometimes I think that some christians, albeit well-meaning, have forgotten that Christ ask us for perfection. For love, even for loving our enemies. They think the struggle down here on earth is simply something dualistic “us versus them” so that they have the freedom to think grimly about our enemies, to call them these names they call us (or analogues to that) and to “provoke” them in their way. But thats not what Jesus said.
Anyway, thanks for the article and sorry for my logorrhea.
God bless,
Phil
Very well put. I always say to my students: look, you can be as triumphalistic, sarcastic, and smug as you want in defending your faith, but just know that in doing so, you are being entirely self-defeating. Everybody will turn around and run in the other direction, no matter how correct you are. If that’s what you want, then be honest about it; but if you think this is somehow a strategy for spreading the faith, you are being completely fatuous.