A Reader Objects to my Discussion of Prudential Judgment

Last updated on: May 6, 2019 at 12:31 am by Mark Shea

A Reader Objects to my Discussion of Prudential Judgment 2019-04-25T15:48:47-07:00 Mark Shea

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

He quotes this passage from my recent piece on Prudence and Climate Change:

And whenever the Church says things we dislike–be it about unjust war, torture, gun violence, a living wage, the death penalty, birth control, transgenderism, climate change or anything else–we can simply ignore it or dedicate large reserves of our time and energy to fighting the Church.

And to rationalize all this, we appeal to “prudential judgment”, which we re-define to mean “those aspects of Church teaching we decide whether or not to obey.”

But that’s not what “prudential judgment” means. Rather, it means “judging how best, not whether, to obey the Church’s guidance.”

and then says:

For some reasons you left out of your laundry list, “the best way to deal with priests who sexually molest children.”

If the Church was massively wrong in that area of “prudential judgment,” then why should one trust the Church in, say, gun violence? Is protecting children more complicated than determining whether greater or lesser gun control can reduce gun violence?

When John Paul 2 allowed Bernard Law to resign and was given a plum job at the Vatican and allowed to vote in future papal elections (!!!!) I called on JP2 to reverse his decision and, if not, resign. Was I “fighting the Church”?

I don’t know if you caught this when I wrote it, but it seem apropos here:

One of the weirdly consoling things about being Catholic is that we have lots of experience of lousy shepherds. Indeed, even our very best shepherds have had their spectacular failures, starting with Peter and the gutless apostles. And, like Judas, not all have been well-meaning failures. Some have been right SOBs. The Church, like all human things, has had periods of sin and dissolution and periods of quite spectacular reform. This is part of believing in the Incarnation: that God will allow us the freedom to sin–even mortally–but that he will somehow also call out the best in us and raise up real saints out of this weak flesh and blood.

I’ve never been one of those people who wring their hands and fantasize about a Golden Age or utter the ridiculous lament, “Our bishops have lost their moral authority!” Our bishops lost their “moral authority” in the Garden of Gethsemane and never got it back. Part of the point of the Passion is that nobody has any moral authority except the One hanging on the Cross. When, raised from death, he asked Peter three times if he loved him, the point was not “Awesome job!” but “I forgive you. I give you your life back with mercy and I expect you, as the failure you are, to always remember that you are not to lord your ‘moral authority’ over anybody but to treat them with the mercy I am giving you today.”

Bishops are like math teachers, not moral exemplars. Some of them, by the grace of God, also turn out to be saints (and wield thereby a certain ‘moral authority’ because they are good men). But mostly what they do is pass along a set of truths they neither invented nor can change. They pass along a story just as math teachers pass along a set of facts about how 2+2=4. If they do their sums wrong or cheat on their taxes, they shall be judged by the Headmaster. But their failure does not in the slightest falsify what they are passing along.

So while I have been appalled by the sin and stupidity of bad shepherds, I have never for a moment found that a reason not to trust Jesus Christ. And insofar as my own competence in the Tradition permits me to check the work of a given shepherd, I don’t see why I need to simply reject them en masse as so many Catholics who announce themselves “fed up with it all” do. Tantrums are not reform.

The Church will heal again, as she has in the past, by fidelity to Jesus and his gospel and through the Same Old Thing: love of God, love of neighbor, the teaching of the apostles, creative orthodoxy, and stubbornly self-sacrificial orthopraxy that puts first the least of these (not the service of a bureaucratic machine).

Bishops have been wrong about various things over the centuries, starting with the apostles and Peter. Their wrongness has consisted in going back on the gospel, not on proclaiming things consonant with the Tradition. Peter, for instance, was wrong at Antioch (Gal 2) because he didn’t act according to what he himself proclaimed by the power of the Spirit in Act 15, that Gentiles were welcome in the Church.

A priest friend of mine once remarked that one of the weirdnesses of the Church is that when she meets in council and formulates her teaching, she is empowered by the Spirit in a unique way and therefore bishops in council (or Pope defining dogma) tend to speak beyond themselves. Because of this, they literally don’t know what they are talking about and, when the council ends and they go home, the implementation of their own teaching is often badly done because they are back to being the ordinary slobs we humans are. That’s what Peter showed at Antioch and that is what the bishops showed after Vatican II (and most other councils). That’s why it always takes a century to implement a council. The Church has to learn the implications of her own teaching.

For my money, the most stunning formulation of doctrine to come out of the Council was the electrifying development that man is “the only creature on earth which God willed for itself” (Gaudium et Spes 24). This development was, of course, a response to the monstrous economic, political, and social systems of the 20th century which attempted to make human being cogs in their systems and means to their ends, whether they be capitalist, communist, Nazi, libertarian, Objectivist, racial, corporate, miiitary-industrial or whatnot. It is a development that brings out a new dimension to the reality that the law is made for man, not man for the law, and that his dignity cannot be subordinated to any creature, including creatures of his own devising.

The bishops (including JPII) then went home and returned to the habit of thinking and acting as though man exists for the Church, not the Church for man. Consequently, they treated victims that way “for the good of the Church.” It was a classic institutional response, no different from any other human institution in protecting itself rather than living supernaturally, putting victims first (since they are the only creatures God wills for their own sake). It was a failure to think with the mind of Christ. Just like Peter at Antioch.

But it does not follow in the slightest that because some bishops failed here, therefore all all bishops should be presumed to be wrong about everything, or even that bishops who failed here are wrong about everything else.

Consider: Even custodians of the Tradition who were not, as the bishops are, gifted with apostolic authority were regarded by Jesus as teachers who should be heeded—even when they were guilty of a crime that dwarfed the sex abuse scandal: the murder of the Son of God:

“The scribes and the Pharisees sit on Moses’ seat; so practice and observe whatever they tell you, but not what they do; for they preach, but do not practice. (Matthew 23:2-3)

Jesus understood that what makes a teaching true or false is not the character of the teacher, but its rootedness in the Tradition. And precisely the reason the Church is given the grace of infallibility is not because bishops are awesome, but because they are sinners, fools, and crooks. It is the Spirit, not the bishops, who makes sure the Tradition is preserved and it is the Tradition that sits in judgment of the sin and blunders of bishops.

A lot of this comes down to common sense. It simply does not follow that because JPII erred in refusing to believe charges against Maciel or in treating Law lightly, therefore the death penalty must continue forever or climate change is a hoax or the NRA is sent by God. To say it out loud is to see the folly of such an approach. It partakes of the same folly as Libertarianism, which insists on a de facto anarchist approach to all governance since men are sinners.

Most of the Church’s moral guidance consists of prudential judgments which apply the tradition to real life situations. The Church will sometimes make a bad call. Bishops will even (as with the scandal) make corrupt calls. But it remains the case that when the Magisterium offers its guidance, it is foolish to simply blow that off and rely solely on oneself. The truth remains that Jesus tells the apostles and their successors, “He who listens to you listens to me.” That does not require us to think that everything they do and say is the Word of the Holy Spirit. But it does suggest that when a consensus of bishops is speaking to us about how to apply the tradition we should consider strong the possibility that it is worth paying attention to and when they speak in union with Peter, we should really pay attention. No. They are not typically speaking infallibly. Neither does my doctor. But my doctor still generally has more knowledge than I do about his field.

The chief difficulty I have with those who habitually fight the Church whenever she fails to accessorize their ideology and politics is that they tell me they are exercising “prudential judgment” without demonstrating an ounce of prudence and often without demonstrating even elementary familiarity with the Tradition. I can accept it when somebody tells me that their specialized knowledge of some field gives them pause about agreeing with a bishop when he holds forth on, say, farm subsidies. But if there is one thing that conservatives and libertarians over the past 20 years have abundantly demonstrated, it is a talent for being massively wrong about practically everything from war to torture to accusing Sandy Hook parents of murdering their own kids to racism to screwing people out of a living wage to, yes, climate change. Failure of the bishops to obey the Tradition when it comes to sexual abuse does not, in the slightest, constitute a justification for liberals to make open war on the Church’s sexual teaching, nor for conservatives to make open war on virtually everything else in her social doctrine.

Hope that clarifies where I stand.

As to your question: no, of course you were not “fighting the Church” in challenging JPII on sexual abuse. You were calling the bishops to live by the Tradition as Paul called Peter to do that.

But it does not follow in the slightest that everybody at war with everything the Magisterium teaches is Paul rebuking Peter or Catherine of Siena. There are extremely good arguments for the Church’s teaching about war, torture, a living wage, gun violence, capital punishment, white supremacy and all the rest of the stuff the Right Wing Noise Machine is battling the Church on tooth and nail–including Laudato Si. Making war on all that does not do a thing about helping the victims of child abuse other than use those victims as human shields for an agenda having nothing whatsoever to do with the gospel but having everything to do with Mammon and Mars.

Uncategorized

Mailbag

Previous Post

May 4, 2019

I think I need to repent and apologize

Next Post

May 7, 2019 When Priests Attack

Browse Our Archives

Select a Category Uncategorized

Select a Month May 2020 April 2020 March 2020 February 2020 January 2020 December 2019 November 2019 October 2019 September 2019 August 2019 July 2019 June 2019 May 2019 April 2019 March 2019 February 2019 January 2019 December 2018 November 2018 October 2018 September 2018 August 2018 July 2018 June 2018 May 2018 April 2018 March 2018 February 2018 January 2018 December 2017 November 2017 October 2017 September 2017 August 2017 July 2017 June 2017 May 2017 April 2017 March 2017 February 2017 January 2017 December 2016 November 2016 October 2016 September 2016 August 2016 July 2016 June 2016 May 2016 December 2015 November 2015 October 2015 September 2015 August 2015 July 2015 June 2015 May 2015 April 2015 March 2015 February 2015 January 2015 December 2014 November 2014 October 2014 September 2014 August 2014 July 2014 June 2014 May 2014 April 2014 March 2014 February 2014 January 2014 December 2013 November 2013 October 2013 September 2013 August 2013 July 2013 June 2013 May 2013 April 2013 March 2013 February 2013 January 2013 December 2012 November 2012 October 2012 September 2012 August 2012 July 2012 June 2012 May 2012 April 2012 March 2012 February 2012 January 2012 December 2011 November 2011 October 2011 September 2011 August 2011 July 2011 June 2011 May 2011 April 2011 March 2011 February 2011 January 2011 December 2010 November 2010 October 2010 September 2010 August 2010 July 2010 June 2010 May 2010 April 2010 March 2010 February 2010 January 2010 December 2009 November 2009 October 2009 September 2009 August 2009 July 2009 June 2009 May 2009 April 2009 March 2009 February 2009 January 2009 September 2006 June 2006 July 2005 April 2005 May 2002 April 2002 0000

TAKE THE

Religious Wisdom Quiz