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Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

Humiliation, A Severe Mercy

Christianity, and how to be cured of triumphalism
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In the Q&A period of most of my Australian speeches, people wanted to know why I had left the Catholic Church. It’s a fair question, especially because many people who come to hear me speak don’t know my history with the Catholic Church, and are surprised to learn that I am not Catholic – especially given that I have written a book in praise of the Benedictine monks.

I am never satisfied with how I answer this question. I don’t want to discourage my Catholic listeners who are struggling with their faith, nor do I want to give false hope that their problems will be solved if they leave Catholicism. At the same time, I don’t want to give the impression that I have accepted Orthodox Christianity as a consolation prize, or that I am in any way dissatisfied as an Orthodox Christian. In fact, I am deeply grateful that God gave me new life as an Orthodox Christian. Part of that redemption required me to turn my back on the spiritual pride – manifested as triumphalism — that had a lot to do with my losing the Catholic faith. You can be a triumphalistic Orthodox Christian, or a triumphalistic Protestant if you like – and if you do, you will put your soul at risk. And because you take such pride in your faith, you won’t see it coming. I didn’t.

A sympathetic Catholic friend once told me that I’m too hard on myself, that if he had seen all the things I saw as a journalist in the first four years of the scandal, he might have abandoned the Catholic Church too. Maybe so. But I don’t want to be easier on myself about this, because I don’t ever want to forget the hard and painful lessons I learned about the danger of spiritual pride, and the importance of maintaining one’s vigilance against it. I can’t control the institutional church, but I can control how I react to it.

Still, I was surprised and even comforted in Brisbane the other night by a long dinner conversation with Melinda Tankard Reist, a brave Christian feminist who has taken on the pornography industry in her writing. She told me about the soul-searing things she has had to confront in her work – unspeakable things, violent things, that most of us can scarcely imagine. She looks into the eye of the devil, and doesn’t blink. It takes a personal toll, she said.

At some point, as I listened to Melinda’s stories, I realized that this was the first time since I left Catholicism in 2006 that I had spoken to someone whose inwardly shattering experiences writing about evil resonated personally with me. I was thinking, So you know what it’s like too. I’m so glad I found you.

Melinda is a Christian. Her faith consoles her. In my case, I had to see things a lot like what Melinda has had to see, but the Church was no help – it was the source of the agony. I wish I had been better prepared for it all – the courageous Father Tom Doyle warned me back in 2002 – but in all honesty, I don’t know how one ever really prepares for things like this. I tell audiences who ask about it that they should never, ever assume that because they have the arguments for the faith down pat, that their faith is solid. That was me, once upon a time. There is no substitute for deep prayer, and developing habits of the heart, mind, and body, that sediment the faith into one’s bones.

And for God’s sake, do not think that because you think and talk about Church things all the time, that you are also thinking and talking about Jesus Christ. I was way more into being Catholic than I was into being a follower of Christ. I didn’t realize that there was a difference; ideally, there ought not to have been a difference. One night, when we lived in Brooklyn, back in 2001 or so, we had another one of our long dinners with good Catholic friends, in which the men had gone on and on and on about the failures of the institutional Church. After we saw the last guests out, my wife turned to me and said, “We need to have a lot less talk about Peter around here, and a lot more talk about Jesus.”

I knew what she meant. But I didn’t realize how serious her warning was, until it was much too late.

These are the lessons I try to share with my listeners, and I emphasize that every single one of us Christians is susceptible to the same fall from grace that occurred to me. I was the kind of Catholic who enjoyed talking about how superior the Catholic faith was to all other forms of Christianity. And hey, if you really do believe in the truth claims of Catholicism, then the conclusion that Catholicism is superior to rival forms of Christianity is unavoidable, and not something to apologize for, certainly. But see, my problem was that I took pride in being Catholic, instead of seeing the Catholic faith as an unmerited gift. No Catholic priest taught me to be that way about my faith; it was something I took on of my own free will, and by hanging around in circles of other young believing men – men again! – who were inclined towards an intellectual Christian tribalism that I’ve also seen in a certain kind of young male Calvinist, and even some young male converts to Orthodoxy.

Last week, the Dallas police raided the local Catholic diocese’s offices after an investigator said that the bishop was not being forthcoming on investigations. In a follow-up story, the Dallas Morning News reported that some area Catholics, who have been receiving over 20 years of gut-punches from the local clergy’s sexual corruption, are worn out, and may have reached the end of the line with the Church. There was this defiant quote from the pastor of a parish raided by police last week. Its previous pastor stands accused of multiple molestation counts, and who is believed to have fled to his native Philippines to escape justice:

But the Rev. Martin Moreno told parishioners Sunday at the packed St. Cecilia Catholic Church that the raids shouldn’t shake their beliefs.

“If this news means you have to go, then leave already,” he said. “Those of us that remain will have true faith.”

What a pitiful thing to say to parishioners who have been exploited by one pastor, and who live in a diocese which has over and over and over failed to police its own clergy. From a Catholic point of view, it’s true: the truth of the Catholic faith doesn’t stand or fall on the integrity of its priests. But … damn. Lashing out like that to your people, who have had to endure so many lies from the bishops and the clergy, and taunting them if they are tempted to give it all up? It’s so cheap, so tawdry.

Then again, I would say that, wouldn’t I? I walked away. I walked away because I ceased to believe that Catholicism was the true faith, in that my salvation depended on being Catholic. I could see very clearly there at the end that my salvation probably depended on leaving the Catholic Church. Around the end of 2004 and early 2005, the only passionate feelings I had about the Christian faith were ones of rage, fear, and shame – shame that I was so weak in faith. When I read that quote above from the Dallas Catholic priest, I heard that voice, and that thought, going through my head over and over from 2004 until I finally stopped believing. The only thing that was holding me to Catholicism at the end was  fear that if I didn’t stay, I would not have true faith — that, and shame. Not love of Christ, love of His mother, love of the communion of saints, of the mass, or any of it. Just shame over my doubts. Eventually I quit feeling fear, and quit feeling shame, and that was the end of my Catholic faith.

It was a great grief for me, but also balm, because I discovered Jesus Christ in a new way. The turning point — an epiphany for me so strong that I remember where I was standing in my home when it manifested — was realizing that the truth that sets us free is not a proposition, but Jesus of Nazareth, the God-man. I must prefer nothing to Him. If, for whatever reasons having to do with my own brokenness and the brokenness of the Catholic Church, I could no longer reach Jesus as a Catholic, then I had to find some other way to do that.

I know this doesn’t make sense to Catholics. But it was true. I found Him through the Orthodox Church. How intensely I wish my conversion to Orthodoxy had been clean and neat! It was instead that of a drowning man who clung desperately to driftwood. But that was enough, and more than enough: it was everything. It took, however, the total humiliation of me, in my religious and intellectual pride, for me to be open to the grace of healing God was offering me through Orthodox Christianity. Could I have found that experience in Catholicism? Yes, I think so, though given what the Catholic Church has done to its liturgy and devotions, it would have been more difficult. And of course the scandal of clerical corruption and episcopal arrogance, and malfeasance, was an insuperable stumbling block for me. But that possibility was there.

I knew from bitter experience that I could get in the way of that grace in Orthodoxy if I didn’t change — that is, if I had looked in Orthodoxy to regenerate my own triumphalism, this time in a Byzantine key. I have tried not to do that. This is part of my frustration in communicating this experience to audiences. I am afraid of being interpreted as someone who apologizes for his Orthodoxy, or in any way regrets it. I have not yet figured out how to convey my love for Orthodoxy in a way that doesn’t sound like I’m lording it over others. I am still so ashamed by the memory of my Catholic triumphalism that I’d rather be taken as insufficiently enthusiastic than as an Orthodox chest-beater. Again, that Catholic triumphalism was not the Catholic Church’s fault; it was mine.

In my travels recently in Eastern Europe, I met a Russian Orthodox Christian who was also traveling. He told me how hard it is to be an ordinary believer back in Russia, because of the Church’s captivity to state power. He said that this is something that weighs heavily on the minds of many faithful Orthodox in his country. I told him that we American Orthodox are lucky, in a way, because our church is tiny, poor, and powerless. Even so, I added, I had to work to overcome my own disposition towards preoccupation with churchiness. Some Christians manage to balance engagement with the institutional church and its failings, and their own devotional life. I lack that grace. It’s useful to know that about oneself.

I want tradition-minded Christians of all kinds — Catholics, Evangelicals, Pentecostals, and Orthodox — to regard me as an ally. I want to be a real ally, even if I cannot affirm everything they affirm theologically. I’m not being sentimental or falsely ecumenical when I say that in the post-Christian world, we are all in this together. As important as it is to maintain substantive distinctions, as a practical matter, we have in common matters far more than what separates us. An Australian Catholic I met last week mentioned in conversation how moved he is by the faith of Australian Pentecostals, and how inspiring he finds them. I get that, and share his view. I don’t think I always would have gotten that.

Having been Orthodox now for 13 years — the same length of time I was Catholic — I can say that the biggest difference that losing my Catholicism made for me personally was that it created in me a fundamental disposition of gratitude. I wish I had not had to suffer the pains of that loss to reach this place, but I’m glad it all happened. Had I remained Catholic, I might have found my way here, but it’s far more likely that I would have become an embittered, angry monster, or an atheist. To be clear, if you want to know what God has done for me through Orthodoxy, I am happy to tell you. The other night in Sydney, I spoke with several converts to Orthodoxy, and we were sharing with each other what we have found in the faith. But unlike the arrogant man I was before the shipwreck of my Catholicism, I would share the good news with you as one beggar telling another where he found bread.

The whole time I was in Australia, I kept thanking God for the people I met, and what they were doing with their lives. In fact, that’s almost the only prayer I had, but I had it a lot — on planes, in hotel rooms, walking down the street, all the time. It was the same prayer I had in Slovakia a couple of weeks before. This is new to me. Once upon a time, I would have thought of someone like myself as child-like, and actually kind of embarrassing, because not intellectual enough, and not willing to argue about faith. What is it about some of us men that makes willingness to fight over something the only credible proof of one’s fidelity? Being cured of that was a severe mercy. Being able to say glory to God for all things, and to mean it (well, most of the time), is a gift that I was only able to receive after being smashed to bits.

In Australia, I discovered the poetry of the late Les Murray, the country’s greatest poet. He was a convert to Catholicism as a teenager, but not a triumphalist. Still, this little poem of his spoke to my heart. It is called “Distinguo”:

Prose is Protestant-agnostic,
story, explanation, significance,
but poetry is Catholic;
poetry is presence.

My Catholicism was about story, explanation, significance; my Orthodoxy is about presence. It is possible, in the Murray sense, to be a Protestant-agnostic Catholic — I was one — or a Protestant-agnostic Orthodox. It is also possible, using Murray’s framing, to be a Catholic Orthodox, or a Catholic Protestant, or even a Catholic agnostic. It’s about your disposition towards the world, I think, and towards God, the Giver.

Don’t get me wrong, I still believe that story, explanation, and significance is a necessary, undeniable part of the Christian faith — but first comes presence. Sometimes, we need to be knocked flat on our back to be able to see the wonder of the stars for the first time.

UPDATE: Just a quick note to say that a more practical reason why I don’t stand up and ballyhoo Orthodoxy is that I know my credibility was shot when I left Catholicism. I was never a practicing Protestant, so my conversion to Catholicism in my mid-twenties was credible in a way that my conversion to Orthodoxy after 13 years of Catholicism was not. If I had not been all-in as a Catholic, and in a highly public way, it might be different. But I flew high, and the wax melted on my wings, and I had a mighty fall. I washed ashore in Orthodoxy, and am beyond grateful to God for saving me from the sea. I salute others who fly, but I am bound to the earth, and satisfied with that fate.

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