In a follow-up to his much-read Sunday column, Ross Douthat explains at length why the Synod troubled him, why he’s not calling for schism, why’s he’s a Catholic, and why he will remain one even if the Pope has his way. Excerpts:

I am a Catholic for various contingent reasons (this is as true of converts as of anyone else), but on a conscious level it’s because I am a mostly-faithful Christian who is mostly convinced that Roman Catholicism is the expression of Christianity that has kept faith most fully with the early church and the words of Jesus of Nazareth himself. A point that Cardinal George Pell, recently of Sydney and now of the Roman curia, made in a talk this week — that the search for authority in Christianity began not with pre-emptive submission to an established hierarchy, but with early Christians who “wanted to know whether the teachings of their bishops and priests were in conformity with what Christ taught” — is crucial to my own understanding of the reasons to be Catholic: I believe in papal authority, the value of the papal office, because I think that office has played a demonstrable role in maintaining the faith’s continuity, coherence and fidelity across two thousand years of human history. It’s that role and that record, complicated and checkered as it is, that makes the doctrine of papal infallibility plausible to me, rather than the doctrine that controls my reading of the record, and indeed if you asked me to write a long defense of “infallibility” as a concept I’m sure I’d end up caveat-ing it a lot more heavily than some Catholics of fiercer orthodoxy: The language that I think the historical record supports is more likeimpressive continuity on the most important questions.

More:

When I suggested that church might have to “resist” the pope on these questions, I had in mind public argument and pressure, a more significant version of the pushback at the synod, rather than a beeline to the local SSPX chapel, and if Pope Francis were to make what I consider a kind of doctrinal backflip I wouldn’t be making that beeline myself; I’d remain an ordinary practicing Catholic, remain engaged in these debates (because I would still think my side’s view is closer to the original teaching of the faith), but my understanding of papal authority would be changed in ways that would inevitably change my underlying relationship to the church. And it’s that change, working itself out across enough people and enough time, that I think would make it hard for the church to escape the fissiparous fate of Anglicans and Methodists and Presbyterians and other churches that have explicitly divided on these kind of sex-and-marriage questions, why is part of why I raised the possibility of schism: Not (God help us) as a prescription but as a prediction, based on the unhappy experience of our fellow Christians, of where churches where authority is compromised or absent on these kind of debates tend to ultimately end up.

Ross quotes an old, pre-Catholic essay by Richard John Neuhaus:

… A priest in charge of ecumenical affairs for a large diocese explained to me … why John Paul and Cardinal Ratzinger constitute “a return to the Middle Ages.” In leisurely conversation he expatiated on what a “really renewed” church would look like. Women would be ordained, pastors would be elected, academic freedom would be absolute, and all questions would be democratically settled in church conventions with a majority of lay votes. Yes, he agreed, such a church would look pretty much like the Methodist or Presbyterian church down the street. But in what way would it be different, in what way would it still be the Roman Catholic Church? He seemed taken aback by my question. “Well, of course,” he responded, “there would still be the bishops, there would still be the pope, there would still be the sacraments and the other things that really matter.”

But why should these realities still be there after every reason for being there is gone? That they would still be there, he allowed somewhat defensively, is an article of faith. So it is that we witness at least some Roman Catholics dismantling the house piece by piece while confidently asserting that the house is indestructible. Curiously, this particular priest harshly criticized [John Paul II] because “he talks about the church as though it were an abstraction.” Yet the church this priest describes —decontextualized, dehistoricized, and deprived of all its thus and so-ness —will, he believes, forever remain the Roman Catholic Church in which he made his first Communion and his ordination vows.

Read the whole thing. There’s a lot there.

I had not read that Neuhaus piece before, and I’m glad to have been introduced to the thought. I’ve had so many conversations like that with Catholics, both as a Catholic and as an ex-Catholic. They all seem to believe that they can profess whatever they would like to, and still be Catholics in good standing. Not “bad Catholics” or “struggling Catholics” or anything short of the mark, but Catholics who have nothing to learn from the Church, and certainly nothing to change about themselves. It’s like First Lady Barbara Bush’s speech to the 1992 GOP Convention, in which she said, “However you define family, that’s what we mean by family values.” If however you define Catholic means Catholic, then the Catholic Church will dissolve.

One of the things that amazes me about Catholic Christianity is how deep and comprehensive it is. It is impossible to compartmentalize. The reasoning behind the Church’s economic teaching is intimately connected to the reasoning behind its teaching on sexual morality. If you tear one thing down, it is at least possible that you will pull out the link on which the entire structure of belief stands.

Does this matter to most Catholics? I don’t think so. I say that not to criticize, but to state what I believe is a sociological fact. Once, in the first year of my marriage, I brought to the confessional some struggles I was having with following the Church’s teaching on contraception. The priest said that my wife and I should be using the Pill. That shocked me. I believed then, and I believed every single day that I was a Catholic, that if the Church speaks on something so clearly, then we as Catholics have to accept it, and do our sincere best to live it out. All of us will fall short of living up to the fullness of Church teaching. Catholics who said, “This is hard, I struggle to believe (or do) it,” I understood. I was one of them! Catholics who said, “This is hard, therefore I don’t have to worry about it, because the Church has no right to tell me what to think or to do” — I didn’t get them at all. Still don’t.

I know that makes me a rigorist in the minds of many, but I don’t understand how Catholicism makes sense otherwise. In practice, many Catholics and their priests have the same understanding of orthopraxy as Orthodox Christians do: they live by the principle of economia. Here is a clear, concise explanation of the Orthodox conception of marriage, and how it differs theologically from the Catholic conception. The essay, by Bishop Athenagoras, references economia as a longstanding pastoral practice in the Orthodox Church (all the emphases below are in the original):

But now the question remains, what is “economia”? Well, according to the canon law of the Orthodox Church economia is “the suspension of the absolute and strict applications of canon and church regulations in the governing and the life of the Church, without subsequently compromising the dogmatic limitations. The application of economia only takes place through the official church authorities and is only applicable for a particular case.” This is allowed for exceptional and severe reasons, but creates no precedent. The Church, which continues to extend Christ’s redeeming work in the world, has on the basis of the Lord’s commandments, and of the apostles, determined a number of canons. Through these the Church helps the believers to come to salvation. But it should be noticed that these rules are not applied on a juridical basis, for the Church always holds in mind what the Lord Himself has said: “The Sabbath is made for man, and not man for the Sabbath” (Mark 2, 27).

A canon is a “rule” or “guide” for the service of worship, the sacraments, and the governing of the Church. There are canons determined by the apostles, the Church Fathers, the local, regional and the general or ecumenical councils. Only the bishop, as head of the local Church, enforces them. He can enforce them rigidly (“akrivia”), or flexibly (“economia”), but “precision” is the norm. Once the particular circumstance has past – that demanded a conceding and accommodating judgement – “akrivia” assumes once again her full force. It cannot be that the “economia”, which was necessary in a specific situation, should become an example and should be later be retained as the rule. The “economia” is for the Orthodox Church a notion that cannot be compared to “dispensation” in the Roman Catholic Church. Dispensation is an anticipated exception, which provides a juridical norm parallel to the official regulation.

Economia is based on Christ’s command to his apostles: “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive anyone his sins, they are forgiven” (John 20, 22-23). This is the case when the human marriage experience becomes impossible, due to the spiritual death of love. It is then that the Church – as the Body of Christ – with understanding and compassion and out of personal concern, can apply the “economia” “by accepting the divorce and not rejecting the sinful humanly weak believers, or depriving them from God’s mercy and further grace.” It is the precise goal of economia that the weak person not be irrevocably banned from the church communion, according to Christ’s example, who came, after all, to save the lost.

Economia is an approach to pastoring that I have observed, or heard of, many Catholic priests following, thought it wasn’t called that. Though it can obviously be abused and treated as a “get out of jail free” card by Orthodox believers who want to avoid amending their lives according to the teachings of the Church, I find it to be a sensible general principle, one that, when applied wisely, makes the Christian life livable.

In theory, I would like to see it brought into the Roman church, certainly on the matter of divorce and remarriage. In reality, I don’t know the Romans could do it without doing serious violence to the logic of their own tradition. I’m not a theologian, Catholic or otherwise; maybe it can be done. Many serious Catholic theologians don’t believe it can be done, or at least seriously doubt that it can be done. And if it is forced through, this will have implications for Catholics like Douthat:

So my dominant emotion isn’t anger right now: It’s a mix of dismay and determination, anxiety and hope, cycling back and forth depending on events. And if the change being bruited were to happen I’m quite sure that my main emotions would be rue and regret – rue that I had somewhat misjudged the church I joined eighteen years ago this spring, and regret that an institution that I believe to be divinely established notwithstanding all its human sins turned out to have a little less of the divine about it than I thought.

I get this. I’ve been through that myself, for different reasons. It’s a hard place to stand firm in. Faithful orthodox Catholics do this all the time; often I have heard Catholic friends say that if it weren’t for their rock-solid conviction that what the Roman church teaches about itself is true, it would be hard for them to stomach what they have to put up with week in and week out in their parish. In my own case, when I concluded that being in formal communion with the Roman see was not necessary to my salvation, everything collapsed under the pressure from the abuse scandal and more, and I was out the door to Orthodoxy (the only valid option).

I don’t know if my friend John Zmirak still considers himself a Traditionalist Catholic (N.B., this is not the same thing as a conservative/orthodox Catholic), but he wrote this in 2010 when he was one, and it makes an important point:

Here’s what we Trads have realized, that the merely orthodox haven’t: Inessential things have power, which is why we bother with them in the first place. In every revolution, the first thing you change is the flag. Once that has been replaced, in the public mind all bets are off – which is why the Commies and Nazis filled every available space with their Satanic banners. Imagine, for a moment, that a newly elected president replaced the Stars and Stripes with the Confederate battle flag. Or that he replaced our 50 stars with the flag of Mexico. Let’s say he got away with doing this, and wasn’t carried off by the Secret Service to an “undisclosed location.” What would that signify for his administration? If people accepted the change, what else would they be likely to accept?

It’s no accident that the incessant tinkerings with the liturgy came at the same time as the chaos surrounding the Church’s teaching on birth control. As Anne Roche Muggeridge pointed out in her indispensable history The Desolate City, the Church’s position on contraception was “under consideration” for almost a decade – which led pastors to tell troubled couples that they could follow their consciences. If the Church could change the Mass, ordinary Catholics concluded, the nuances of marital theology were surely up for grabs. No wonder that when Paul VI reluctantly issued Humanae Vitae, people felt betrayed. (It didn’t help when the Vatican refused to back a cardinal who tried to enforce the document, which made it seem like the pope was winking.)

The perception that the Church was in a constant state of doctrinal flux was confirmed by the reality that her most central, sacred mystery was being monkeyed with – almost every year. I remember being in grammar school when they told us, “The pope wants us to receive Communion in the hand now.” (He didn’t; it was an abuse that was forced on the Vatican through relentless disobedience until it became a local norm, but never mind.) Then, a few years later, “The pope wants us to stand for Communion.” A few more grades, and we heard, “The pope wants us to go to Confession face to face.” What had seemed a solid bulwark of formality and seriousness was suddenly shifting with every year’s hemlines – which is precisely what the heretics conspiring to change the Church’s teaching had in mind. That is why they pushed for these futile, pastorally destructive changes of “inessentials” – as a way of beating down resistance to changing essentials. And, in a worldly sense, they almost succeeded.

The campaign of dissenting priests, nuns, and (let’s be honest) bishops culminated, in America, with the Call to Action Conference, which its leading advocate John Francis Cardinal Dearden described in 1977 as “an assembly of the American Catholic community .” This gathering of 2,400 radical Catholic activists was composed of “people deeply involved with the life of the institutional Church and appointed by their bishops” (emphasis added). The Conference approved “progressive resolutions, ones calling for, among other things, the ordination of women and married men, female altar servers, and the right and responsibility of married couples to form their own consciences on the issue of artificial birth control.” This is the mess made by the bishops appointed by the author of Humanae Vitae, which his rightly beloved successor John Paul II spent much of his pontificate trying to clean up. What we Trads feel compelled to point out is that he couldn’t quite finish the job, and that the deformations of the Roman liturgy enacted by (you guessed it) appointees of Paul VI helped enable all these doctrinal abuses. They changed the flag.

Changing the Catholic Church’s teaching or practice (a distinction that may be without a meaningful difference) on marriage as Pope Francis and his team want to do is very far from “an inessential thing,” in Zmirak’s phrase, but it is at least changing the flag. This matters more than many people think.