Thursday, July 27, 2017

My Father Is Smarter Than Yours!

Regarding yesterday's post, my regular correspondent notes,
I am sympathetic to the importance you attach to a firm intellectual grounding in the Catholic faith but I am not sure that you want to get into a "My Fr is smarter than your Fr" contest with TEC. With about 37,000 priests, the US Catholic church is sure to count among them many more scholars and men of intellectual depth than TEC, with perhaps a third of that number. But it also has its share of dimbulbs, as anyone with a lifetime experience of Catholic preaching will assure you. Preaching that a TEC congregation, typically far better educated than the average Catholic congregation, would never put up with. And when Catholic parishioners complain that their pastor is preaching (possibly unintentional) heresy or starting to lose his marbles the bishop's response is complicated by the fact that he probably doesn't have anyone to replace that man with. TEC has woes galore but a clergy shortage is not among them.

The fairness or otherwise of the assessment of dossiers in the early days of AC is a troubling issue. The com boxes of various blogs have been full of complaints from mem who literally heard nothing, for years. Everyone in the ACCC had to submit all their documentation twice, as the first time it disappeared into the black hole you mentioned. "Sponsorship" played an unseemly role.

Naturally, I speak from a personal perspective. But here's an exercise: go to YouTube and enter "Episcopal homily", and then enter "Catholic homily". One of the top three Catholic ones that came up on my search was this one. I'm afraid you won't find anything like it in TEC. I did find one in a very nice Episcopal church where the rector droned in generalities -- it's likely a TEC homily won't wander far from generalities, except maybe to urge congregants to be welcoming and diverse.

Nor is this new. The most prominent TEC figures contemporary with Ven Fulton Sheen, for instance, were James Pike and Malcolm Boyd, followed by Paul Moore Jr. I'm afraid I just don't see a comparison. There are probably good reasons for this -- TEC has always been socially linked with exclusive Episcopal prep schools and the Ivy League -- Pike, to establish elite credentials, went to Yale for a doctor of laws, even though he'd received a perfectly good law degree from USC.

The problem is, and I can speak from experience here, that the quality of Ivy League and other elite education is mediocre and always has been -- F Scott Fitzgerald and Ferdinand Lundberg recognized this in the 1920s and 30s. One of the background issues relating to the 2016 US election and its aftermath is the threat President Trump and his supporters represent to this Ivy League-centered cultural dominance. It is no coincidence that Robert S Mueller III is an alumnus of Princeton, as well as a fellow alumnus of St Paul's School with Paul Moore Jr. Trump's business degree, though from Wharton, is derided routinely.

Even a somewhat tepid spokesman like Bp Barron has no contemporary TEC or other Anglican equivalent -- as far as I can see, it's never been in the cultural DNA. I just don't see an equivalent. Even if a Catholic priest might, as my correspondent puts it, be wandering unintentionally into heresy (although unintentional would not in fact be heretical), or losing his marbles, Catholics can drive half a dozen miles and find something better. This basically says to me that the whole Catholic bell curve, while it exists, is skewed to the right of the TEC curve.

And this goes to whether Anglicanorum coetibus is a good idea at all. It was never really accurate to call Anglicanism a "thinking man's religion", but there's currently no "thinking man" visible in any ordinariate who'll draw "thinking people" away from Anglicanism.