I Guess I Have To Comment On Rod Dreher's Conversion
Posted by: tony on 10/16/2006 01:22 PM
Updated by: tony on 10/16/2006 03:33 PM
Expires: 11/16/2006 12:00 AM
It's like a car wreck. You know you shouldn't look, but you can't help it. It has been like this watching Rod Dreher's flight from the Catholic Church. He recently had a big announcement. It seems that last week he was "outed" as an Orthodox (big "O") convert. He preferred to pretend to be Roman Catholic for a couple more weeks, but one of his loyal readers saw fit to call the Orthodox parish and ask about Rod's affiliation.
I did not intend to make this [his conversion] public until the end of this month, to honor a personal and professional obligation that, the violation of which stood to hurt some innocent people.
...
But now I am forced to reveal all early. Why? Because a certain malicious reader, a perfect stranger and petty little Catholic Prufrock named Jonathan Carpenter, who is unhealthily preoccupied with me nearly to the point of cyberstalking, troubled himself to write a letter to a priest at my parish asking about my ecclesial affiliation -- and when he received his answer, undertook to publicize it.
So now you're out of the closet, Rod. Intentionally lying by omission is still a sin, and you might want to avail yourself of confession. Oh, you might say that your religion is none of anyone's business, but you have made it everyone's business.
Back in 2001, when I first started writing about the child sex-abuse scandal in the Church, Father Tom Doyle, the heroic priest who ruined his own career by speaking out for victims, warned me, "If you keep going down this path, you are going to go to places darker than you can imagine." I thought I understood what he meant, but I didn't. Even if I had, by then, I couldn't have stopped.
So Rod was assigned to investigate the very Church of which he was a member. He was given the job of turning over the rocks and writing about the slime he finds there. Seems like a dangerous thing to do to one's faith, and to do it intentionally seems extra foolhardy.
He continues with:
My in-box was filled with stories like these. I began to understand what Tom Doyle's warnings meant. Every day after work I'd head back home, feeling like a spiritual "walking wounded."
I tend to think this was self-inflicted wounding. Let's see... The biggest Christian denomination in the world, boasting over a Billion members. A huge hierarchy spanning the globe, and including every culture in the world. And his faith is pegged to a few leaders in a single archdiocese. These leaders are men. Sinful men. Heck, even the Pope has a confessor. So Rod pokes around looking for sinful leaders in the Catholic church, and get this... he finds them!
Stop the presses!!! Dog bites man!
Rod continues:
All this takes a toll. And yet, I kept going back to my catechism, and to the truth that none of this undermines the truth claims of the Catholic Church. The Eucharist is still the Eucharist, no matter how corrupt the clerics may be. That was a lifeline for me -- that, and the comfort and friendship of dear Catholic friends, especially good and decent priests, who, aside from actual victims and their families, were probably suffering more from this scandal than anybody else.
And that is what you're supposed to do. Rod's industry hates the Catholic Church. What amazes me is that Rod, as a faithful Catholic, continued to work for such an industry. I could no more see myself working for the "mainstream media" as I could see myself working in a whorehouse.
The [Orthodox] liturgy was breathtakingly beautiful. The preaching orthodox. And the people -- half of them Russian, most of the others converts -- could hardly have been kinder and more welcoming. As a new Episcopalian friend told me a couple of weeks ago after he visited St. Seraphim's, "There is life there."
This strikes me like a man who marries a woman, thinking that she has never kissed another man throughout her life. When he does some investigation and discovers that she kissed Bobby Smith in the first grade, he divorces her to find another woman more "pure". He finds another one and marries her.
What's going to happen when Rod's boss puts him on a story about sexual abuse in his new Orthodox diocese? Is he going to do the smart thing and refuse to do it, or is he going to take the case, and lose his new Orthodox faith?
He continues:
I can look back also and see that my own intellectual pride helped me build a weak foundation for my faith. When I converted to Catholicism in 1992 (I entered the Church formally in 1993), it was a sincere Christian conversion. But I also took on as my own all the cultural and intellectual trappings of the American Catholic right. I remember feeling so grateful for the privilege and gift of being Catholic, but there was a part of me that thought, "Yay! I'm on the A-Team now, the New York Yankees of Christianity. I'm on Father Neuhaus's team!" A short time back, an intellectual friend who is a Protestant told me that he almost became a Catholic, and would have except for the place where he was working at the time was filled with conservative intellectual Catholics who wouldn't shut up about the superiority of Catholicism. Their arrogance finally put him off the Church, and now he says he couldn't imagine converting. I swallowed hard when he told me that, because I can only imagine how I must have come off to people like him in my prideful heyday.
...
Well, I was a fool, and I set myself up for a big fall. A few weeks back, I mentioned to Julie on the way to St. Seraphim's one morning, "I'm now part of a small church that nobody's heard of, with zero cultural influence in America, and in a tiny parish that's materially poor. I think that's just where I need to be."
I have news for Rod. He hasn't changed. He's just as prideful about his "poverty" as he was about the "richness" of Catholicism. He's like the pharisee who wanders the streets in sackcloth and ashes, wailing and beating his breast, while surrepetitiously looking out of the corner of his eye to see who's watching.
I wish Rod the best on his journey as I would any brother in Christ. I understand his love for Orthodoxy, and I really wish he would just come out and say he converted because he loves Orthodoxy. There is no shame in going where you feel comfortable. I hope this is his home, and he can finally find peace. But I think he ought to re-think his profession, and if he doesn't, pray that he is not again put to the test.
When the Anglican church ordained a woman bishop, many Anglicans in their anger were looking to convert to Roman Catholicism. A wise priest said: "You should not convert because you're running away from Anglicanism, you should convert because you are running toward Roman Catholicism".
