Brian Hamilton

The Catholic Emphasis

There is a Catholic emphasis on orthodoxy, on speaking of God rightly and, more, praising God rightly. This emphasis is indispensably primary; we really cannot hope to get humans right or creation right or ourselves right if we haven’t paid sufficient heed to the God who is our source and end. I do not know the tradition well enough to say to what extent or where this emphasis has overcome an emphasis on concrete works of charity, but I at least feel that lack strongly here. I am drawn towards the subordination of doctrine to ethics, towards Rorty’s prioritization of fighting humiliation—for doctrinal debates have so often fueled violence that contradicts them, and it seems so unnecessary, in the heat of the moment, when someone or something is being destroyed, to ask about that person’s ontology or anthropology.

I do think that pretending we have no need of a conceptual framework is naive. I believe, as so many have recently insisted, that the question is not whether justice but whose justice. But do we not rightly recoil when the question so much becomes whose that it no longer does justice? Then it’s nobody’s justice. A friend recently responded to my comment that good liturgy breeds good ethics with the retort, “you mean except in the Catholic Church?”—meaning that the Catholic Church is so wrapped up in ‘orthodoxy’ that it has lost the resources to criticize a power-hungry patriarchy, or the lasting consequences of an ever-present racism, or the vexing questions of gender that have been brought forward by the sexual upheaval of American society. I’ll be the first to say that the Catholic Church has some powerful ideas that could address these questions; it has spent enormous amounts of time considering questions of gender and sexuality, for example. But it rests too easily with them. It imagines that its deep resources are correctly implemented, that answering a question in principle answers all the questions on the ground, that there are no new questions, that the truths it knows should be apparent. This is indeed a certain kind of arrogance, and a certain kind of anti-intellectualism, and a certain lack of understanding of counter-positions that are actually answering different questions.

23 December 2006 |
tags: Roman Catholic