"Dhimmitude" refers to the inferior, subjected status of Jews and Christian under Islamic rule. For example, we know that when Islam conquered Egypt the Christians had three options: convert, be killed, or pay large amounts of bribe (protection) money. Today's Coptic Egyptians are descendants of wealthy Christians who could pay. As worshipers of the God of Abraham, Jews and Christians are granted a status superior to pagans or atheists, but it is diminished.
I first heard the expression "Catholic Dhimmitude" from Patrick Dineen at the "Restoring our Nation" conference in Steubenville last weekend. A question had been raised about an essay by Michael Hanby in New Polity which argued that the "New Right," confident and aggressive in its battle with both the Cultural Left and the Neo-Liberalism of classic Republicanism, failed to adequately comprehend just how deeply corrupted our entire society is by politics as power, Baconian science as control, absolute individualism, rule by technology, and the demise of contemplation and reception of Creation in all its intelligibility, beauty and goodness. Dineen had not read the article but knows Hanby's thought: he did not engage it at its philosophical depth but argued that such profound negativity tends to discourage and inhibit Catholic engagement in the public realm and in effect cede, for example, the Republican Party to the Neo-Liberals (and I would add incoherent Trumpian rage).
Hanby and Dineen are both right. The corruption is as deep as Hanby sees. But Dineen rightly urges that we not be despairing and disengaged. Armed with Hanby's insight about the magnitude of the conflict, we go forth properly prepared for the fight.
History of Catholic Dhimmitude in the USA
We Catholic know the history of hatred of Catholicism and its subjected status in America. Our founders, many of them Masons, despised "papalism." We have learned from Hanby and his colleague D.L. Schindler that the American Founding was deeply Protestant and therefore averse to the contemplative, the Marian, the sacramental, the deeply communal nature of Christianity. From the founding, then, our nation was vulnerable to the idolatry of the Individual, technology, the pragmatic, and knowledge as control. An American Catholic might well admire so much of our founding and constitution but can hardly elevate it as "scripture" in the manner of Evangelicals from, say, Hillsdale College.
People still living may remember the "Irish need not apply" signs in our cities and the fact that Catholics were not welcome in the Ivy League,in prestigious WASP law firms, or in any elite circles.
The exception: the honeymoon period of the post war period, especially the 1950s. In this feel-good period of victory, world dominance, unity against Communism, religious revival, and a booming economy, mainline hegemonic Protestantism became good-natured, ecumenical and Catholic-friendly. Bishop Sheen and Thomas Merton became national celebrities...not to mention John Kennedy, Grace Kelly, Bing Crosby and others.
Catholic Dhimmitude Post-1965
Dramatically, elite WASP culture turned secular, sexually liberational, and culturally liberal in the late 1960s. Overnight, a new anti-Catholicism emerged across elite institutions of the Democratic Party, law, higher education, Hollywood, the media, and even the scientific community. As if a magic spell was cast over the West, without resistance, in the upper tiers of society, the affluent and powerful, sexuality became sterile and extrinsic, gender deconstructed, authority and tradition despised, science idolized, government and global capitalism malignantly inflated, subsidiary institutions of family-faith-locality diminished, nature mechanized, contemplation denigrated, and the isolated Individual stripped of all connection and protection. Real Catholicism became a pariah, an alternative counter-culture.
By a catastrophic coincidence, this explosion of Godlessness occurred at a moment when American Catholicism was vulnerable and without defense. By 1970, the critical mass of the urban, ethnic demographic had left their urban parishes for suburban life; were newly affluent; and assimilated to bourgeois consumerism, careerism, technologicism, safetyism, one-or-two-childism, and materialism.
The Vatican Council, ending in 1965, in its documents a profound and inspired renewal of our faith, was highjacked by the media and the elites and harnessed to a "Spirit of Vatican II" that was an assimilation to and capitulation to the new hegemony of the secular and liberational. The flourishing Catholicism of the 1950s...big families, large parishes, new schools and seminaries and colleges...was unveiled as lacking in spiritual, moral and intellectual depth as the Church plunged into chaos. A new polarized Church emerged: one side submissive to the new regime, the other in resistance. Here we see the new face of Catholic Dhimmitude.
Consider these expressions of it:
Democratic Party and the Union Movement. These had been deeply influenced by the confident Catholicism of the post-war decades, but turned anti-Catholic with a ferocity at the time of Roe. The "Great Generation" of Catholics who had survived the Depression, defeated Japanese and Nazis imperialism, opposed the Soviet Empire, rebuilt Europe, and created a surging national and global economy were...pathetically compliant, feeble, and subservient to the new regime.
Republican Party. In the next two decades, 1970-90, something like half of American Catholics migrated into the party of the Right. There were two major, but contradictory, streams involved here. Moral conservatives opposed to abortion and protective of traditional family life and religious freedom became a core constituency of a new coalition. But at the same time many newly affluent, suburban Catholics became defensive of their economic security and favored a neo-liberalism of reduced taxes, government and regulation. With Ronald Regan and the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989, the alleged "end of history," a new idolatry of "The Market" prevailed with a widespread amnesia of the Catholic social teaching that had earlier inflamed the union movement, civil rights and the war on poverty. The Catholic conscience compromised: in return for the crusade for unborn life, traditional sexual morality and religious freedom, toleration was extended to economic libertarianism with its own anti-Catholic animus. This was a subtle, largely self-righteous capitulation that was identified 40 years ago by D.L. Schindler in his critique of the neo-conservatism of Novak-Weigel-Neuhaus but only unveiled in all its inadequacy with the emergence of Donald Trump.
American Episcopacy. For over 50 years, since Humane Vitae, we have a Church in schism, although it is hidden. It is like a family that is in conflict but keep its fights hidden behind closed doors. So, we have two episcopacies! The one is people-pleasing, accommodating itself to prevalent bourgeois liberalism: avoiding and downplaying Catholic teaching on contraception, cohabitation, abortion, homosexual activity, the masculine priesthood and such. This is the cohort has been empowered by the papacy of Francis and includes disciples of McCarrick as well as Tobin, Cupich and others. On the other hand, we have the countercultural legacy, articulated firmly by John Paul and Benedict as well as brilliant minds like Cardinals O'Connor, George and Chaput. With such a divided episcopacy, the Church in America has been unable to confront surging Godlessness with a clear, firm message.
The strongest evidence of episcopal weakness is surely the spineless, thoughtless closing of the Churches and suspension of the sacraments in the pandemic of 2020. Even as huge gatherings of BLM crusaders were gathering in parks, our bishops closed huge Churches and suspended the sacraments in a cowardly, compliant submission to safetyism, bureaucracy and doubtful science. If they were so willing to suspend Sunday Eucharist, what is their credibility in this new Eucharistic revival they are attempting. If they are so safety obsessing, why should the laity go out of their way for Sunday mass? This was, in my mind, the most despicable expression of Catholic dhimmitude and inferiority.
Catholic Universities. Father Ted Hesburg of Notre Dame is exemplary of the inferiority complex that has pervaded Catholic higher education since 1970. He convened, in 1967, in the euphoria of the Council, the Land O'Lakes conference in which leadership of the Catholic Universities declared their independence of the Church. As they did that, Notre Dame was being funded by the elite WASP foundations (Ford, Rockefeller) to run pro-contraception summer conferences. The premier Catholic school capitulated to the "population bomb" panic of the time and disparaged the traditional Catholic viewpoint that was subsequently reaffirmed by Pope Paul VI.
This misguided emulation of the Ivy League tradition, just as it was itself pivoting against its Christian roots, was an unfortunate reaction to the reality of Catholic intellectual inferiority. In 1955, the renown historian Father John Tracey Ellis had lamented the academic superficiality of American Catholicism. This had many causes: American pragmatism, bigotry, need to utilize resources for elementary and secondary education and others. But rather than digging deeper into Catholic tradition, Hesburg led the stampede into the darkness of now-secular post-Christianity or a Catholic Lite version of it. This movement in higher education accompanied the same trajectory in liberal politics.
Disengagement by Thick Catholicism. As in the Hanby-Dineen exchange noted above, a completely different temptation presents to deep, faithful, thoughtful Catholicism: such disgust and distress about the culture as to disengage entirely. This is understandably a vulnerability for traditionalists (home schooling, Latin Mass people) and the more intense renewal movements (especially the Neocatechumenal Way and versions of Charismatic Renewal), and of course the famous Benedict Option. Vigorous Catholic life is always a two-way movement of detachment from and engagement with the world. We have our cloisters, hermits, monasteries. But these involve a mystical, Mary/Martha communion with those in the dirty work of society: just as in today's first reading at mass,l Joshua's victory in battle was the result of the prayer of Moses-Aaron-Hur. And so an unbalanced negativity is itself a different kind of dhimmitude.
Catholic Magnanimity and Splendor
Magnanimity, meaning great-in-spirit, is underrated! It is the opposite of arrogant superiority and triumphalism. It assumes a humility about the self as limited, finite, sinful, and in need of God's grace. But it is confident, hopeful, joyous and exultant as possessed by and in service to the Mystery of Christ and his kingdom, his Church. It is unbound from defensiveness, fear, and self-consciousness. It is bold, ambitious, ferocious and fearless. It is Aragon, Mufassa, Katniss, Obi-Wan Kenobi! It exults in the generosity, serendipity, and eventfulness of the Gospel.
Consider these expressions of Catholic Splendor:
Legacy which we inherited: the magnificent parish and school system; the network of hospitals, orphanages, and agencies that have served the sick and marginalized; engagement with unions, local politics, a range of intermediate organizations, civil rights and initiatives to relieve poverty.
Prolife Movement, including the reversal of Roe, was largely a Catholic thing. It remained defiant in the face of the disgusted mainstream as well as disdain from Catholic progressivism.
Renewal Movements, robust and exuberant, have been without embarrassment in witnessing to our Deposit of Faith. Noteworthy, among others, is the New York Encounter, hosted annually by the Communion and Liberation Movement, which radiates a positivity and confidence in sophisticated, cosmopolitan Manhattan.
Supreme Court of our country is now with a Catholic majority: six of the nine are Catholic, and one was raised Catholic but now Episcopalian. This is not to imply that every opinion reflects Catholic teaching. But Amy Comey Barret is a particularly promising Judge. She is staunch Catholic, charismatic, highly qualified, and unapologetic about her faith. She is an icon of Catholic magnanimity and splendor, in her public and private life.
New Right is in part a restoration of an integral Catholic politics: conserving of our moral fabric and yet protective of the poor and working classes, in resistance to both the neoliberalism of the right and the cultural liberalism of the progressive elite.
Conclusion
The ferocious anti-Catholic animus of our elites and the broader culture is deepening and spreading in a toxic contagion. We are, more than ever, an outlier, an exception, a counterculture. We are not, however, to be submissive, fearful, embarrassed, discouraged or hopeless. We are ourselves, despite our personal and even communal failings, possessed by and in the service of the Truth Incarnate, of Beauty-Goodness-Truth incarnate and triumphant. We will not accept dhimmitude! We will exult in our mission, our identity and our destiny!
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