It’s been over a week now, and certain people still haven’t
gotten over the spanking Maureen Mullarkey received for her
rather slanderous attack on Pope Francis. And a spanking it was; R. R.
Reno, the editor-in-chief of First Things,
not
only washed his hands of her post but offered his own rebuttal to it,
calling her criticisms and caricatures of Francis “overdrawn and ill-tempered”.
Oh, wait a minute — that’s not the spanking they’re not
over. Rather, they’re not over the
explosion from the Patheos blog, Catholic and Enjoying It, written by The
Blogger Whom I’m Damn Well Going to Name for Just This Once, Mark Shea.
You see, Shea
had just written the day before about the Catholic right’s pre-dismissal of
Francis’ yet-to-be-completed encyclical on climate change; and lo and behold,
out comes Mullarkey’s hit piece. (You could almost hear him yelling at the clay
pigeon launcher, “Pull!”) So he unloaded on Mullarkey, as well as her First Things combox followers, calling
it a “festival of crazy contempt for Francis” and a “revolting (in every sense)
smear job”.
Christopher
Ferrara at The Remnant promptly got upset on Mullarkey’s behalf, deploying
even more right-wing buzzwords and straw men, along with a healthy dollop of
radical-traditionalist contempt for “neo-Catholics”. (Apparently, Francis “kissed
the Koran” when he posed for that shot holding the anti-fracking T-shirt.) Nevertheless,
we might have been able to walk away from the shindy — certainly it doesn’t
appear Shea’s given the matter any further attention — had not my Catholic
Stand colleague Donald
R. McClarey weighed in with further acid, preceded with the biggest straw
man of them all:
“…[C]riticism of this Pope
is verboten in the eyes of some bloggers.”
The one thing you can say about cognitive biases is that
everybody else has them. Especially wishful thinking; it seems that 95% of the
blogosphere suffers from either wishful thinking or confirmation bias, while
the rest write about cats and favorite recipes. Cognitive biases are what keep people
linking questionable reports from dubious sources, reaffirming the Murphy’s Law
variant, “Bad data drives out good data.” Political rhetoric thrives off both
cognitive biases and accusations thereof.
Regardless, at the end of the day, the “cognitive bias” charge
is simply a variant of what C. S. Lewis called the “Bulverism”: the evasion of
logical analysis in favor of amateur psychoanalysis. We could argue that either
one side or the other, or both sides, are seeing what they want to see and
ignoring what they don’t, and it wouldn’t move the football any further down
the gridiron one way or another.
The football metaphor is a rather clumsy one when you’re
trying to express the idea of coming to a mutually-agreed resolution, of each
side trying to convince the other of their position. In this case, however, it’s
to be doubted whether either side is particularly interested in converting the
other to their side; both, in fact, seemingly strive to be offensive, because “Hey,
we’re telling the TRVTH, and if it gets your knickers in a twist, that’s your problem.” None of the parties
involved are really arguing their positions; they’re simply trading insults
back and forth.
Nevertheless, at no
point has Shea, or any other member of what Saint
Louis Catholic has charmingly termed “the Neo-Catholic Brute Squad”, said, implied, or in any other way given a
reasonable person to understand that Pope Francis is (or should be) beyond criticism.
Then why, one might ask, do Shea et alia fight back so hard at the Catholic right’s criticism?
Because the criticism isn’t correct or justified simply because the rad-trads
of the Catholic right are convinced of it. We denizens of the Catholic commentariat
don’t derive any benefit from the infallibility of the Church’s magisterium. If
Francis isn’t above criticism, neither is Ferrara, Steve Skojec, or Hilary
White. Neither is Mark Shea. Neither am I, for that matter.
The remarkable thing about freedom of speech is that not
only are Ferrara, Skojec, and their fellow travelers all free to spout their
opinions vis-à-vis the Pope whenever
they get an itch, Shea, Fr. Dwight Longenecker, Scott Eric Alt and I are all free
to tell them they’re full of beans … and vice versa. McClarey certainly has
been at this mug’s game long enough to know that, if you’re going to throw yourself
into the ring, you shouldn’t be surprised to get punched now and then.
Moreover, per Canon 212 §3, the
faithful have a right, sometimes a positive duty, to “manifest to the sacred
pastors their opinion on matters which pertain to the good of the Church and to
make their opinion known to the rest of the Christian faithful, without prejudice
to the integrity of faith and morals, with
reverence toward their pastors, and
attentive to … the dignity of
persons” [bold
type mine.—ASL]. The language radical traditionalists and Catholic
conservatives, such as Mullarkey and Ferrara, have used when speaking of the Pope and
various bishops can hardly be described as respectful,
let alone reverent; indeed, as John
Médaille has remarked, it’s hardly distinguishable from anti-Catholic rhetoric.
From
the very beginning of Francis’ pontificate, I was amused by the fact that
both the Catholic left and the radical traditionalists bought into the
mainstream media’s “progressive pope” narrative frame. But while the
left is slowly but surely becoming disillusioned, the right has doubled
down on it, all but openly calling the Pope a pinko commie (and, in fact,
Mullarkey did accuse il Papa of
holding a “marxisant variant” of a certain mindset, damning him with vague
terminology). I suspect it stems from Evangelii
Gaudium, in which Francis failed to stick to the free-trade gospel message,
and even (gasp!) dared to criticize capitalism. Echoing Dom Hélder Câmara,[1]
Francis
recently complained that he “can’t quote the teachings of Church fathers
from the first centuries without being accused of giving a Marxist homily.”
Postmodern analysis is crippled unless the thinker can
identify an appropriate pigeonhole in which he can stuff an opponent’s thoughts.
Nevertheless, the rad-trad right’s efforts to whip up a Vatican red scare is almost
anachronistic; one might just as well accuse Francis of being an agent for the
Austro-Hungarian Empire.
Is Francis an ideal pope? To be quite candid, no. Here
is a post I wrote on the matter; as an extra added bonus (as the
commercials say), here
is another post in which Mark Shea asks of the Pope, concerning the
appointment of Cdl. Godfried Danneels to the Synod on the Family, “Holy Dude, what were you thinking?” These are the only two freebies you get. However, I’m
sure if you look hard enough, you’ll find other examples of “neo-Catholics”
expressing frustration or dissatisfaction with the Pope.
The point was never to stifle criticism of Pope Francis. “Haters
gonna hate”, as the kids say; you might as well try to bail out the Mississippi
River with a teaspoon as stop Rorate Caeli from calling Francis a “disastrous”
pope. Sorry if we just don’t think your logic is as crystalline or your
evidence as substantive as you do; blame it on our cognitive biases.
But don’t insult the Pope and expect everyone to let it pass
unremarked. If you don’t like to be contradicted, go write about cats and your
favorite recipes.
[1] “When I give food to the
poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why they are poor, they call me a communist.”
