Skojec and Dogma - Part 3 The Spilling

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JMJ

Note To The Reader: This is rather long ... I may pare it down later.

The Spilling

So, in his own words Mr. Skojec, in response to someone advocating for the ‘Fifth Marian Dogma’, wrote:

Catholicism needs less dogma, not more. Stop trying to make your personal theological hobby horses required for belief under pain of grave sin, do more to spread authentic belief while leaving room for questions and doubts

I think he had hinted at the core issue in his final words: “… leaving room for questions and doubts”.

I don’t think we need any “dogma” at all. You need teaching, sure. But the Church leaves herself no room to say, “Hey, we got that one pretty wrong which is why we’re changing this” and you wind up with faith-killing doctrinal “developments” that are clear 180s or they sweep the old ugly stuff under the rug.

He followed with the following points

It’s bothered me for a long time that we talk with such certainty about supernatural “truths” we cannot prove. I think a humble distancing from absolute certitude is the healthier attitude when attempting to describe the transcendent.

I’m defining dogma the way the church does: a revealed truth of faith or morals, taught infallibly by the Church’s Magisterium (teaching authority), rooted in Divine Revelation (Scripture and Tradition), and required for belief by all Catholics as necessary for salvation. … It’s the last part that gets me.

When you require someone to believe something under pain of damnation, what are they supposed to do if they struggle with that thing? What if they can’t simply make themself believe, but they’re doing their best to live a Christian life regardless? … It becomes an obstacle to communion. If you don’t accept a certain teaching, you’re technically a heretic. You can’t go to confession. You can’t receive communion. You’re on the outside looking in.

Maybe you’re trying to get there but your intellect won’t release its objections. But now you’re cut off from sanctifying grace, so you don’t even have that help. Obviously, the Church needs core teachings. But why is say, believing in papal infallibility or the immaculate conception as important as believing in the Trinity or the Incarnation? It gets hairy in the particulars. I’m specifically critiquing the “assent required for salvation” aspect of dogma. I don’t think you can make assent to unfalsifiable supernatural beliefs mandatory on pain of eternal torment. … I have a problem with the compulsory nature of these things. Acceptance of proposed truth shouldn’t come at the barrel of an eschatological gun.

At this point, Mr. Skojec dives into a long exposé of his thoughts some 4000 words long. I will try to pick out the salient points.

1. “Jesus didn’t come to implement rules and consequences. He came to save us from the consequences after we already broke the rules.”

2. He spent “the first 43 years of my life as a scrupulous slave to the rules, the rubrics, ... [with a] need to save others from breaking them. I was trying to protect everyone from God’s wrath because I lived in fear.”

3. Listening to a priest console some who had lost her non-practicing husband “… A God who will die for you on the cross is not the kind of God who is looking for a loophole to send you to hell on a technicality. He’s going to do everything he can to make sure you’re with him in heaven. He loves you more than you could ever love anything.” At hearing this “… something in me [Skojec] broke.”

4. “… since that day, I haven’t quite been the same. Because I realized that isn’t the God I ever believed in. I believed in the scary, wrathful God that I was taught to fear growing up, and who so many saints and priests warned about.”

5. “… there were way too many credible people in my life and in the Church saying that God is scary and you’d better follow the rules or he’s going to open up a can of whoop-ass on you, and I believed it. And it made my life miserable. … the more children I had, the less that idea of God made sense to me. Jesus told us to look at him as our father, but no father worth a damn wants anything but the best for his kids. He corrects frequently, encourages as often as possible, and punishes only when he feels he has no other choice. And even then, he hates to do it. Good fathers don’t want to cause their children pain.

6. “My conception of fatherhood was warped. My own dad was so angry and aloof and volatile with me that I was terrified of him. And then, every once in a while, he’d interject moments of love and generosity and humor that just made him totally confusing. I grew up to be way too much like him. It took me a long time to start to change.”

7. For Catholics, this kind of distinction tends to grate, because the Church makes such grandiose claims about her exclusive, divinely-granted authority to define truth. We therefore tend to equate Church teaching with absolute truth, and we consequently fear that when we question church teaching, we are actually questioning God himself.

8. The Church loves to push the virtues of docility and obedience, and while they certainly have their place in the virtuous life, they benefit the institution of the Church far more than God. We are no threat to God’s authority or power, but when we fail to bow and scrape before the temporal institution that speaks for him, the men who are in charge can get pretty angry. Just ask Joan of Arc and Galileo. But Joan of Arc and Galileo both proved that sometimes we get it right when the Church gets it wrong.

9. You can’t govern an institution like the Catholic Church without rules. You can’t have a religion without non-negotiable beliefs. But you also can’t expect everyone to be in lock step with either, all the time.

10. “The truth is like a lion; you don’t have to defend it. Let it loose; it will defend itself.” This quote is often misattributed to St. Augustine. ... While it’s observably the case that truth does not always prevail — people are very good at blinding themselves to truth when it suits their purposes — those who seek truth, who approach with humility, will find it, and know it when they do.

11. Its toying with ideas, in the main, has been confined to its clergy, and they have commonly reduced the business to a harmless play of technicalities—the awful concepts of Heaven and Hell brought down to the level of a dispute of doctors in long gowns, eager only to dazzle other doctors. Its greatest theologians remain unknown to ninety-nine per cent of its adherents. Rome, indeed, has not only preserved the original poetry in Christianity; it has also made capital additions to that poetry—for example, the poetry of the saints, of Mary, and of the liturgy itself. A solemn high Mass must be a thousand times as impressive, to a man with any genuine religious sense in him, as the most powerful sermon ever roared under the big top by a Presbyterian auctioneer of God. In the face of such overwhelming beauty it is not necessary to belabor the faithful with logic; they are better convinced by letting them alone.

12. Preaching is not an essential part of the Latin ceremonial. It was very little employed in the early Church, and I am convinced that good effects would flow from abandoning it today, or, at all events, reducing it to a few sentences, more or less formal. In the United States the Latin brethren have been seduced by the example of the Protestants, who commonly transform an act of worship into a puerile intellectual exercise; instead of approaching God in fear and wonder, these Protestants settle back in their pews, cross their legs, and listen to an ignoramus try to prove that he is a better theologian than the Pope. This folly the Romans now slide into. Their clergy begin to grow argumentative, doctrinaire, ridiculous. It is a pity.

13. A bishop in his robes, playing his part in the solemn ceremonial of the Mass, is a dignified spectacle, even though he may sweat freely; the same bishop, bawling against Darwin half an hour later, is seen to be simply an elderly Irishman with a bald head, the son of a respectable saloon-keeper in South Bend, Ind. Let the reverend fathers go back to Bach. If they keep on spoiling poetry and spouting ideas, the day will come when some extra-bombastic deacon will astound humanity and insult God by proposing to translate the liturgy into American, that all the faithful may be convinced by it.

There was much more but, as to the best of my ability I have tried to filter out the noise and focus on what precipitated the ‘fall’ of yet another celebrity Catholic.

P^3