Then I poured myself a Vodka and cranberry juice and realized my error. Mother Russia and the other Moscow. Doug Wilson does seem like he would be a happy resident of FPR, though. Heard him tell men, in a sermon, to purposefully buy land with a high hill so as to facilitate home defense. Not sure which scripture got interpreted for that one, but it made sense to me at the time. (If you’re reading this, Doug, I’m a fan.)

I too love the hymns, the sacraments, the underlying rigor of centuries of theological thought, and I too feel confused and disheartened by shopping malls in all their variant forms. But that poignant sense of loss is not really what’s at stake, is it, for most of the people in real exile on this planet? They know they’re broken. Luck, or fate, or bad choices. It hardly matters which, but they know it. And so they go where they can go to pray a little and not be mocked or even noticed as they pray; where they sometimes can play the fool, cry out if necessary, think on a few big picture matters, get some free childcare, and maybe some free help with their taxes or a small-group connection that leads to a much needed job. It’s not much, but it’s something.

What are you offering, exactly? Is the wine in your sacrament that fine a vintage that it turns a soul to love and unfloods that beautiful stolen valley they once loved more than any place you’ve ever known in all your Wendell Berry–infused maunderings over the BBQ pit? I’m just asking.

All that glitters is not gold, even if such is used for the chalice and spoon in which are contained and presented what are said to have become the precious body and precious blood of Christ.

The American Church may in large part be a freak of nature, but Rome and Constantinople (or Moscow) are not natural beasts, either.

Briefly, it’s my view that decentralization/distributism in an American context must take account of the individual apart from top-down or structural forms of authority. Admittedly, there are deep tensions here, but I think historically they were resolved, or can be resolved, by communal forms of authority that go under-aritculated and draw strength of enforcement from cultural forms, bonds of identity, limits of agrarian struggle and scarcity, an under-stated and simple faith, common law rather than canon law traditions, etc.

These forms are summed up by what the jurist Fletcher Moulton called: “obedience to the unenforceable,” and they are the markers of most traditional protestant communities (of course with near infinite variations, I’m generalizing out of necessity) which were forged in and had a deep history in the struggle of individuals against the figure head of authority whether that head bore crown or mitre.

Think Old Jack from Berry’s stories, or Berry himself.

And the truth is, these forms existed under the “sacred canopy” of Rome before the onset of early modernity, and in my view still function in parish models of the church, and are highly functional in an American context, particularly, it seems, in urban settings. It was the rise of the modern nation state and mass technologies and ideologies of communication and authority that made unprecedented levels of command-and-control unity conceivable and possible, thereby rendering the old “catholic” unified-pluralist order based on local forms eradicable and thus unacceptable. That is to say, it could be refused and so it was.

Go figure.

Cheers!

“This alone may offend the aesthetic tastes of some, but it is the embrace of greed and the denial of solidarity and the rise of the atomized individual that really rubs many megachurch critics the wrong way. It is the glossy exterior of consumerism that seems to have infected these churches that really upsets our sense of what is proper and meaningful in Christianity. A sense that these things cheapen it somehow. (Ironically, it was the trappings of Catholicism which similarly aggravated the more puritanical amongst our ancestors, and for similar reasons I think….)”

Wow, I think E.D. is on to something here.

Christians shouldn’t be so unkind to each other.

As is made clear in “Dominus Iesus” among other writings, the Catholic Church does consider Protestants to be Christians. In that document, which reserves the term “churches” for Catholicism and Orthodoxy and refers to Protestant denominations as “ecclesial communities,” those ecclesial communities are referred to in the context of “divisions which exist among Christians.”

Two thoughts on that:
1. Protestantism cannot represent a division among Christians unless Protestants are Christians. So the Catholic Church sees Protestants as Christians.
2. If I were Protestant, I would probably find the whole “ecclesial communities” thing irritating, even if it is unavoidable within the logic of Catholic ecclesiology. Since I’m Catholic, I’ll just try to soften the blow by giving Caleb permission to call me a “Romanist” if it makes him feel better. His prose is so beautiful, it’s impossible to imagine getting mad at the guy, even if some of our ancestors did slaughter each other at the Boyne (hopefully they’re all long since in Heaven by now, laughing about the whole business).

A thought on “Krustianity”:
I value a solemn (preferably Latin) liturgy myself. But if megachurches are providing people (be they the wretched of the Earth or the Babbitts of Zenith) with a more welcoming, close-knit community, and a more visceral, concrete experience of the presence of Christ in their life, then I pray that the Holy Spirit sends us in the liturgical churches the humility and courage to learn from all that’s best in the megachurches. We Catholics spend far too much of our time being poorly catechized Sunday Christians who listen to a platitudinous homily about kindness, sing awful modern hymns, and then practically kill each other trying to be the first out of the parking lot so we can get home to our service of Mammon to have any grounds for lecturing Protestants about their churchmanship. Let’s take care of the beam in our own eye, and let Protestants worry about their splinters themselves.

Caleb: You said John’s distributism (with which I deeply sympathize) isn’t likely to be achieved here in America by “looking to Rome.” How can Catholic localists like me work best with people rooted in the Republic’s ancestral Protestant traditions to bring about a more local, more livable country for all of us? I also think that’s a discussion worth having, and I’d welcome your thoughts.

It also moves me to wonder what compromises a traditionalism rooted in Catholicism will have to make in a country so infused with the liberty-above-all ethic of Protestant populism in order to put forth a socio-political agenda that is both correct and plausible.

Or, how the devil do you reconcile git off my porch individualism with the sacramental view of order and authority put forth by “throne-and-altar” Catholics?

Do I sniff a defenestration of the Front Porch?