An Ecclesiological Contretemps: Edward Feser versus Rod Dreher

Start here with Dreher.  Feser's response to Dreher. Dreher's reply (scroll down). Feser again.

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Addendum 5/31. Dr. Vito Caiati, historian, comments (minor edits added by BV):

With regard to the exchange between Edward Feser and Rod Dreher on the latter’s rationale for leaving Roman Catholicism for Orthodoxy, which I too have been closely following, I have an observation that may be worthy of your notice.

While I believe that Feser exposes the non-rational and hence inadequate motivation for Dreher’s apostasy (and Skojec’s crise de foi), he advances an argument regarding the present theological and ecclesial crisis of the Catholic Church that is not at all cogent or convincing. This is evident [from the] the essential equivalence he draws between it and earlier disputes and conflicts in the Church’s distant history. He writes:

Skojec is scandalized by the fact that the confusion and heterodoxy fostered by Pope Francis’s many doctrinally problematic statements have not yet been remedied despite his having been in office for eight years.  This is quite ridiculous.  Eight years is nothing in terms of Church history.  The utter chaos introduced into the governance of the Church by Pope Stephen VI’s lunatic Cadaver Synod lasted for decades.  So did the chaos of the Great Western Schism.  Pope Honorius’s errors were not condemned until forty years after his death.  Further examples could easily be given.  Few people remember these events now, because things eventually worked themselves out so completely that they now look like blips.  If the world is still here centuries from now, Pope Francis’s chaotic reign will look the same way to Catholics of the future. 

Leaving aside the question of whether relevant “further examples [that] could easily be given,” is it in fact the case that the nature of the contemporary crisis in the Church is essentially of a kind with the three cited medieval crises? In other words, is something going on at the present moment, under the present pope, and more broadly in the decades that stretch back well into the last century that indicates some fundamental rupture with traditional Roman Catholic thought and practice? Are we indeed simply witnessing events that, like those of the past, will “look like blips” in time, or are we, undergoing a unique crisis that, in the words of historian Roberto Pertricci, “segna il tramonto di quell’imponente realtà storica definibile come ‘cattolicesimo romano’” [‘marks the sunset of that imposing historical reality that can be defined as Roman Catholicism’]?

The histories of the three medieval crises mentioned by Feser are highly [complicated?]and resistant to rapid summary. Suffice it to say, that two of these, the Cadaver Synod of 897 [and] Great Western Schism (1378-1417) were the offshoots of political and dynastic conflicts among orthodox members of the Catholic household of Europe. Neither involved questions of dogma or doctrine, and if the latter was troubling for papal power and prestige, encouraging the conciliarism of the 15^th century and the graver Protestant challenge of the 16^th, its more long-term [effects?] were not. The case of Pope Honorius I (625-38) involves a letter written in 635 by this early medieval pontiff to Sergius, the Patriarch of Constantinople, who successfully solicited Honorius’ support for the conciliatory position that he, following the Emperor Heraclitus, had adopted toward monothelitism to promote unity among his flock. Honorius was condemned by the Third Council of Constantinople (680-81) not for heresy but for allowing its propagation. Here, although the dispute was doctrinal in nature, touching on the Chalcedonian understanding of Christ’s two natures and two wills, we are dealing with an isolated, although fundamental doctrinal misjudgment, expressed in a letter that is otherwise orthodox, of a pope who was highly regarded during his reign and who manifested no other signs of heterodoxy.

I think that even this highly unsatisfactory summary of these distant events in the life of the Church is sufficient to set them apart from the events of our own time and particularly those under the present pope. There is no need to catalogue the questionable if not heretical statements and judgments of Bergoglio, all designed to encourage confusion and heterodoxy in the Church; his scandalous actions paying homage to pagan idols; his  protection and advancement of sexual predators and sodomites; his purges of orthodox prelates and laymen from important Vatican positions and commissions; his undermining of Church unity to the extent that the German Church is in actual, if not declared schism; his collaboration in the destruction of the loyal Catholic Church in China; his incessant attacks on orthodox Catholics; and his substitution of left wing politics for the Gospel. But more beyond the actions of this pope we have to take note of the systemic rot throughout so much of the Church that has made him and those of his ilk possible; everything from the protection of sexual predators, to the abandonment of Catholic teaching in the Church’s schools and universities, to the passivity of most bishops when confronted with heresy in the Church or public scandal (communion for those who advocate and advance abortion, for instance), and so on.  

What is going on now, right before our eyes will never become some historical “blip.” The magisterium, both ordinary and extraordinary, may still stand, but how long will this be the case if it is increasingly ignored, subverted, and questioned? If the words of the Pater Noster, which are clear in both Greek and Latin, can be altered at will to make them more theologically acceptable to the bien pensant, what is beyond the reach of “reform”? Thus, those who remain loyal to the Church should have no illusions about the uniquely destructive nature of this crisis. It is being advanced by dangerous “progressive” forces, increasingly aligned with the global Left, that have taken control of the leading institutions of the Church and whose objective is the eradication of the very core of traditional Roman Catholic thought and practice.