Other Catholic bloggers are speaking of Robert P. George’s Monday piece in First Things,
Danger and Opportunity: A Plea to Catholics. I was put on the trail by a visit to Sherry Weddell’s post at Intentional Disciples.

I agree that there are some good things being said in this essay, particularly about Sherry’s passion, discipleship of an intentional quality. But I’m not ready to give a pass to some of the weaknesses and blind spots in the piece.

Like many bishops, the FT essayist gets it wrong nearly off the bat:

The danger is that large numbers of Catholics will, as a result of clergy sex scandals and the large, highly publicized cash awards and settlements following in their train, lose confidence in the reliability of the Church as a teacher of truth, particularly in the moral domain.

The danger is not from pathologically misbehaving clergy. We’ve always had them. They were whispered about, joked about long before Cardinal Law’s mismanagement brought the crisis to a modern showdown in 2002. Catholics have long acknowledged their abuse at the hands of priests and religious. The image of tough-disciplined, knuckle-rapping sisters is almost a cliche. Alcoholic priests, mistreated orphans, 16th century popes: the Church is chock full of infamous characters and abused victims. What makes 2002 so different from the Borgia popes, their mistresses, and other goings-on?

What made 2002 so “dangerous” is that the link was made between sex abusers and your garden variety of Catholic bishop. So many bishops were under a cloud of suspicion. And most of them remain in the gray. And the danger continues as we move into scrutinizing the late JPII bishops (here and here) who seem just as clueless as to how to behave.

It strikes me as similar to the crisis faced by Rome in the first half of the 16th century. This was the crisis which built St Peter’s Basilica, but at the cost of Christian unity in Western Europe. Popes and bishops were accurately painted with the insignia of public sinners. The Roman solution? Circle the wagons, sort of a renaissance version of SCGS.

Sherry favored this passage:

What is in need of transformation is not the teaching of the Church but the human mind and heart to which these teachings are addressed. Christianity is a religion of transformation. No one is literally born into it; even infants at baptism are converted to it. There is not a Catholic on the planet or in the history of the Church who is not a convert.

There is also not a living Catholic who is not still in a process of conversion. Nobody has the full picture, not while their heart pumps in their chest.

I would expect a professor to boil down the experience of catechesis, morality, and the Magisterium into a simple formula. Those who can teach, teach. Those who can’t, listen and obey. How well those in the latter category cooperate in obedience and with assent of will determines their orthodoxy in this life, and their presumed salvific state in the next.

The opportunity of present-day Catholicism is sort of an exciting one. I think it to be so. By a combination of cultural factors, to which some Christians have contributed, we no longer live in a society that will take its leadership for granted. Priests, parents, presidents, public officials, police officers: nobody gets a free pass. It’s like everybody has become a Missourian: show me, they cry. Show me your moral authority. Is it an in-your-face challenge? Or is it a plea for somebody to show some authentic leadership?

I wonder how much it is the latter. Why am I optimistic? Look at the evidence: young people latch on to religious movements like LifeTeen or the Youth Day phenomenon. In my church circles, serving the needy has never been more popular. While some people may have whispers about JPII, hardly anybody has a bad word for Mother Teresa. I suspect it is because her single-minded discipleship in care of the poor is part of the authentic leadership people–even non-Catholics and non-Christians–so desperately crave.

Robert George claims it is the role of the bishop to fearlessly take the lead on the sex-and-life issues of abortion and embryonic stem cell exploitation. Such a promising start to another opinion piece that turns into the same ol’ anti-abortion manifesto.

I find myself critical of the methods and expressions of the mainstream Catholic pro-life movement, but not because I disagree with the stance. In some cases, pandering to emotionalism twists the message to something so off-putting to supporters, I wonder why any fence-sitter would even consider the possibility. In other words, we have a loss of credibility.

Ditto for bishops trying to make headway. Thanks to many misfortunes, they lack credibility–and it’s not just the stronger pro-life voices. Their critics are not just the VOTF “heretics,” but some of the True Believers themselves.

Where is this essay leading?  I’m past eight hundred words and all I’ve done so far is criticize those poor FT chaps and taken my customary swings at a few bishops. I agree we live in an era of particular danger and opportunity. George is right on that.

But I think he’s foolish to frame the situation in terms of abortion and ESCR. The dangers and opportunities are far wider than these issues.  Hopefully I’ll get around to a more thorough discussion on this tomorrow.