On his blog Inebriate Me, Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry speaks out on the subject of contemporary Americans having been “inoculated against traditional Christianity,” no doubt by godless secular types:
“I often see people wiping nostalgic tears from their eyes as they pine for the Good Old Days of the 1950s when all Catholic kids went to Good Catholic Schools and were Properly Catechized and could recite the Baltimore Catechism by heart.1 I always want to point out that those kids who were so well catechized in the ’50s were the ones who stopped attending Mass in droves in the ’70s, so maybe, just maybe, they hadn’t been catechized that well, and maybe, just maybe, knowing the difference between the Immaculate Conception and the Virgin Birth isn’t the summum bonum of catechesis, necessary though that is (if only to counter-troll Salon writers).” 2
Mr. Gobry, having dismissed the importance of catechesis, moves on to an even bigger target:
“I also cringe when I hear people talking of ‘defending traditional marriage.’ Even as a shorthand, it’s questionable. I reject the postmodern marriage culture and all its pomp and works, but I see little to defend in ‘traditional’ marriage. People talk about marriage being ‘under assault.’ Marriage was pretty thoroughly battered for several centuries of Christendom when arranged marriage was the norm and freely-chosen marriage the exception, even though the free consent of the spouses is a canonical dogmatic requirement of the sacrament. To be sure, there were many individual priests and prelates who did their best to fight this, and marriage in Christendom was sure as heck a lot better than marriage in, say, the Roman Empire, and this is to the credit of the Church, but on the whole, ‘traditional marriage’ has, at best, only a family resemblance with the Christian marriage that our Holy Tradition describes.”
In many ways, Gobry’s attitude is “a pox upon both your houses”: he’s not happy with secularists, but he’s not impressed by the record of his fellow Christians either. In this he reminds me of no one so much as Jacques Ellul, a prophetic (in the Biblical sense) French author and one of my all-time favorite cranks.3 I don’t mean to suggest that Gobry has earned or will earn a stature anywhere near Ellul’s, but he seems to be pursuing a very similar Christian inconoclasm. The following could have been written by Ellul:
“The post-Christian world has been inoculated against Christianity because, over 1500 years, we never managed to give it true Christianity. ‘Found difficult and left untried,’ indeed. And this is to our demerit. There are also many, many things over these 1500 years to be proud about, and Christendom, for all its flaws, was probably better than the alternatives. But now we’re reaping what we’re sowing. We created this generation of post-Christians whom we vaccinated against Christianity. Thankfully, viruses mutate and occasionally beat vaccines. In the meantime, if our aim is a fantasy of Christendom rather than Christ and His Cross, we are being idolaters."
I'm not sure that "probably better than the alternatives" is much of an endorsement. Mr. Gobry's point, however, is to distinguish between Christendom, Christianity, and following Jesus: a dilemma yet to be resolved for some 2000 years. I await Gobry's further insights with genuine interest.
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1on a personal note here, and for what it’s worth: I myself am the product of Catholic schooling from 1954 to 1962, and was the recipient of the eighth-grade Religion Prize at St. Michael School (Newark NY). I say this only to affirm Gobry’s point: being “properly catechized” isn’t the same as being genuinely Catholic (or Christian). It sure didn’t work for me.
2 http://www.patheos.com/blogs/inebriateme/2014/04/inoculated/
3 "Cranks," of course, is a subjective and in this case affectionate term. In addition to Jacques Ellul, my list of admirable cranks includes the Russian philosopher Lev Shestov, the science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick, and the British contrarian John Gray. Mr. Gobry has a ways to go, but he shows promise (e.g. his recent "thought experiment" about space aliens abolishing our public-school system) of eventually meriting inclusion.
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