Ross Douthat On The Problem

A visitor very kindly sent me a copy of Ross Douthat's To Change the Church: Pope Francis and the Future of Catholicism. I've got to say I've been struggling with it. I don't normally read Douthat, and the first thing that strikes me is that if he were a better writer, he wouldn't be at the New York Times. On the other hand, good writing doesn't pay, so there you are. But in the midst of the namby-pamby, there's a passage that makes the issue surrounding Anglicanorum coetibus clearer:

The self-enclosure and embattlement also meant that conservatives were slow to grasp the scope of the sex abuse crisis (because they were slow to trust the media outlets that reported on it, and loath to criticize a hierarchy that they needed on their side),

Wait a moment. The LA Times treated Cardinal Mahony as a celebrity start to finish because he was a liberal. Same goes for Cardinal McCarrick back east. The liberal media assisted in many coverups, and Cardinals Law, Mahony, and McCarrick were never friends to conservatives. But that aside, Douthat continues,

and fatally slow to recognize the vipers and con men and false mystics in thier midst. ("It's such a pleasant surprise to find a fellow orthodox Catholic," Zimrak noted, that there's always a temptation "not to ask too many more questions -- for instance, about the person's qualifications, talent, or temperament.") A figure like Marcial Maciel, the Mexican-born founder of the Legionaries of Christ, who built one of the more apparently fruitful conservative religious orders only to be revealed as a bigamist, drug addict, and pedophile, could have seduced his way to power in any environment. But the embattled conservative-Catholic subculture's eagerness for Success Stories made it that much easier for him to flourish. (p 31)

I wasn't following Luke Reese until the story broke this past February, but others had been. My regular correspondent comments,

I thought this guy had problems the very first time I saw a family picture with his then-youngest daughter, a babe in arms, wearing a chapel veil But that's me. He was a big commenter on The Anglo-Catholic. Almost all of those guys went off the rails in one way or another.

If he was a regular at The Anglo-Catholic, I've got to figure that some of the original 2012 Hurd-Steenson clique, like Fr Bartus, greased the skids for him, MDiv or no -- and considering what we've come to learn of others like Fr Phillips, there was something of the con artist in the whole bunch. My regular correspondent commented further,

As I was looking at the weekly announcements on the St Thomas More, Scranton website it occurred to me that although I have followed this parish via Fr Bergman's newsletters etc for years, I do not know his wife's name off the top of my head and do not recall ever seeing a photograph of her or their (now nine) children. What a contrast to the Reeses, whose family photos have been on view since the days of The Anglo-Catholic and are all over the net. I am sure that the Bergman family is highly visible in the parish; maybe the females all wear chapel veils, but Fr Bergman does not seem to feel the need to brand himself to the wider world as the husband of a submissive stay-at-home mum with a large brood of home-schooled kids.

The picture is beginning to emerge of an approved OCSP style, including chapel veils, home schooling, many children, and stay-at-home moms. We see this most recently with Matt Whitehead, the instant ordinand from last May:

The Whitehead family is well-known and beloved at St. Luke’s: we see Matt serving as a member of the altar party at our regular Sunday Masses, while Kate manages the couple’s six children, who always cue up individually to put their coins in the collection plate.

But despite the cloying ostentation with the mom and six kids, he's a bit of a sneak. And to the OCSP, that's something to celebrate!

Looking at the comments on the Luke Reese posts at Mrs Fisher's blog (for instance, here), it appears that members of the Community of St. Joseph of Arimathea, the OCSP group at Most Holy Rosary parish, continue to support Reese and accuse those who think the Church should be done with the guy of spreading gossip, detraction, rash judgment, and so forth. I think this is unfortunate, but I think also that Ross Douthat starts to provide some insight into what's going on. Reese and his ilk are con artists. I think Fr Ripperger, certainly sympathetic to traditionalist Catholics, nevertheless often warns them against the sort of ostentatious "I'm a better Catholic than you" attitude we see with some frequency in the OCSP.