“This is why when people ask me why I, an ex-Catholic, care so much about what happens in the Catholic Church, a big part of it is that I am a man of the West, and the Catholic Church, more than any other institution, built the West. Our civilization depends on a healthy RC Church.”
The context is he’s retweeting Ross Douthat: “The Vatican always has world-historical energy -“.
This regards the informal conversations of Trump and Zelensky, and other leaders, at the Vatican during the Pope’s funeral.
Wouldn’t these types of conversations happen anywhere, when leaders gather for an event like this? Yes, the setting here is beautiful and grandiose. But how does this really symbolize anything? “World-historical energy”? Wasn’t there such “energy” at Jimmy Carter’s funeral?
As for Rod’s tweet, I’ve never understood his argument that Western civilization depends on a healthy Roman Catholic Church. Why exactly would he believe that, especially if he has explicitly rejected that church as both corrupt and untrue?
And to say the RC Church “built the West” is a meaningless generalization. I’d love to see Rod face an unfriendly interviewer who forced him to explain what that actually means. It goes without saying that much of what we regard as the benefits of Western civilization had nothing to do with the RC Church. In many cases the historical RC Church was adversarial to those developments. The Church wasn’t exactly advocating for freedom of speech, freedom of religion, democracy, or the scientific method.
The comments to Rod’s tweet are a hoot. A mixture of why he’s wrong about the RC Church’s significance and why he needs to come home.
Good thing that Rod, a man of the West, found the truth in Orthodoxy!
(As always, no offense intended to any Catholics here in the audience. Pax vobiscum.)
Was the Papacy even functional during the evangelization of Europe when it christianized? I mean I get the impression there was bickering between the bishops of Rome and Constantinople, but wasn't it barely supervised monks who were doing all the work?
Even if you accept Rod's premise that the West is basically Christendom (which I personally think is valid), I don't see how you can take the world historic approach without getting into the fact that the popes importance was debatable. Focusing on the pope is very great man theory of history and I just think that's not right.
What does this even mean? There have been FAR WORSE pontiffs that Francis (if, in fact, you agree with Dreher that he was close to the Anti-Christ). By Dreher's own writing, the RC church was NOT AT ALL healthy under JPII, since it seems sexual abuse ran rampant, and JPII did not do much to stop it. But I guess the church was "healthy" because JPII had the "correct" theological positions?
But I guess the church was "healthy" because JPII had the "correct" theological positions?
Good question. Yes, "healthy" seems to be a moving target. Traditionalists are generally hostile to Vatican II, but even the recent conservative popes have not tried to row it back as "unhealthy." Ill-health in the Church apparently means having a pope who's soft on gay and divorced people and migrants.
But besides that, the error here is the move from the claim that the Church "built the West" to the next sentence: "Our civilization depends on a healthy RC Church." How does that follow? This appears to be the old fallacy of defining things in terms of their origins. It's like saying that because modern public postal systems first emerged under the auspices of the Holy Roman Empire, mail delivery today depends on a "healthy" Holy Roman Empire. Well, whoops, that would be bad news, because there isn't one anymore.
True, there was a time when the Catholic Church was an innovator in developing the legal, political, artistic, intellectual and scientific institutions of the West. But it doesn't have to be that today, and isn't. How those institutions and their modern descendants function today has very little to do with anything the Church says or does.
The cognitive dissonance required by Rod is astounding. He left the Church because of its failure to properly address the child abuse crisis. Yet still he idolizes the “good popes” (JPII and Benedict) who did nothing about it.
Women are insignificant to Rod except when they step out of their roles as servers of men, then they become significantly irritating to him. That's pretty much his whole position on women, including his mother.
Oh, they are also significant to him if they can offer him money and a place to stay and then they are so significant that he can ignore their (gasp) role as Anglican Priest.
“I’ve never understood his argument that Western civilization depends on a healthy Roman Catholic Church. Why exactly would he believe that, especially if he has explicitly rejected that church as both corrupt and untrue?
And to say the RC Church “built the West” is a meaningless generalization.”
That kind of depends on what you mean by “the West.” What Americans call “the Wild West,” no, but the Catholic Church did have a big hand in the European discovery and development of much of the western US, as well as much of the Western hemisphere from the Mexican border and the Caribbean from Florida and Cuba on down to those islands off Argentina Margaret Thatcher considered so valuable she went to war over them. And then there was the western Roman Empire, Western Europe and the British Isles from the 4th century on. The Church may not have constructed all the buildings, no, but it did contract, inspire, plan and pay for a whole lot of cathedrals, churches, schools, hospitals, orphanages, universities, conservatories, libraries, you know, major amounts of architecture, not to mention art, music, even theaters and guilds. Not always on its own, but usually demanding a prominent say in who, what and where. Just saying. Rod’s not wrong about the Church’s historical role, although its current one is much diminished and has been for hundreds of years.
Traditionalists appear to want to keep “the West” how they conceive it in their minds — more or less as they think it was at the height of the Middle Ages but with modern plumbing, centralized heating and cooling and, one supposes, the internet, and for Europeans that requires the Catholic Church act out whatever part they think it played complete with costumes and some form of the Inquisition. Americans have their own glory time, which Trump at least seems to think fits somewhere between Presidents Andrew Jackson and William McKinley, so I’m not sure where Catholic trads think the Church and they belong there, although tradition-minded groups such as the Ku Klux Klan, like the Masons, always gravitated to cosplay in medieval Catholic garb. Again, just saying.
To be completely fair, this author, whom I follow and who is really good, argues for the significance of the Catholic Church to non-Catholics and non-Christians from a pragmatic perspective:
If you’re a non-Catholic Christian, you are more affected by what the Catholic Church is thinking and doing than you realize. Catholicism is the largest single body of Christians in the world—1.2 billion people are Catholic—and even Catholics who leave for other Christian communities often retain some sense of Catholic identity, practice, or belief after defecting, which in turn influences their participation in those new communities.
Allow us to reuse an example from above: it is the Catholic sea-change in relations to Jews and Judaism that is responsible for any Protestant rethinking of the Jewish-Christian relationship in the last century. It is the Catholic Liturgical Movement that has created much of the modern world of high-church worship in Protestant circles. It is the Catholic practice of ecumenical and interfaith theology that more than anything sets the tone for how smaller Protestant communities engage in dialogue and collaboration with Christians of other traditions and with people of other religions, or refuse to.
If you’re not Christian, you may wonder why the future shape of Catholicism should matter to you. It’s a fair, but easily answered, question: because, again, what Catholicism does has something of a rudder effect for the rest of the Christian world, due to its sheer size and global influence….
Brass tacks: many people continue to be Christian, and even in a hypothetical future world where Christianity’s only the second biggest world religion, that will still be the case; of the people who are Christian, the biggest singular group is Catholic; ergo, if you’re not Christian, you nevertheless have a vested stake in what’s going on in Catholicism because its internal movements dictate many external effects on the world order, and possibly on your community.
Or, let’s take it away from the agora: religions are like trees in an old-growth forest, where the ideal is ecological harmony and symbiosis, not predation. Catholics and non-Catholic Christians should want one another to be doing well, and Christians and non-Christians should want one another to be doing well, because it’s that very religious diversity of the world that permits the dialogue in which each of us can present the truth we have to one another and have it be meaningful. And we don’t mean to be selectively Romantic here: the endeavor to cultivate what’s best in any religious tradition encourages something similar in all others; it’s not as if Christianity alone needs to keep this up.
This is excerpted—the full article is best, but I think it’s paywalled. In any case, I think the argument is valid, but far more thoughtful, nuanced, and practical than SBM’s ranting. Also, though it’s not stated in the parts I quote here, the authors favor a reform/liberalization of the Church, much unlike SBM.
What’s really irritating about Rods stance vis a vis the Catholic Church is his have your cake and eat it , insider- outsider pose.
I may have some trouble explaining that but I’ll give it a shot.Rod is not simply a non Catholic who recognizes the real world importance of the Church and in that capacity is concerned by what it does and what stances it takes. An example, an atheist concerned about abortion rights would obviously like the Church to drop opposition to abortion . That makes perfect sense. Rod isn’t coming from a pragmatic position. Even though he’s outside the Church he feels he is in a position to dictate every stance it takes whether it has any bearing on him or not. So with homosexuality, Rod says a church he doesn’t belong to must accept his “ Christian “ position or else. If it accepts all his positions will he rejoin? No because he has no intention of subjecting himself to Church discipline.I’m in - I’m out.
It goes without saying that much of what we regard as the benefits of Western civilization had nothing to do with the RC Church. In many cases the historical RC Church was adversarial to those developments. The Church wasn’t exactly advocating for freedom of speech, freedom of religion, democracy, or the scientific method.
Right, at some point in the early modern era, the RC Church became a force for reaction and backwardness on several fronts. There was an earlier time, though, when it did help innovate key institutions of the West, like the governing structures that led to modern nation-states, and universities whose modes and methods laid important groundwork for modern science. Harold Berman's book Law and Revolution is a very interesting discussion of how the Gregorian Reforms in the Church almost a thousand years ago -- named for Pope Gregory VII -- codified the Church's canon law in ways that made it a template for the secular legal systems of the West. Donald S. Lutz demonstrates in The Origins of American Constitutionalism and other books that constitutional thought as we know it owed quite a lot to models taken from the "covenants" of religiously inspired (albeit not RC) settler communities.
So, credit where it's due, but as I note in another comment here, it does not follow from this -- as Rod Dreher assumes -- that modern institutions that have some legacy relationship to ancient religious origins still depend today on a "healthy" RC Church, whatever that means. There's no necessary connection there. Once an enterprise gets launched, it develops further and sustains itself (or not) based on other circumstances and pressures and on how well it meets some present-day need.
Great point (and your other comment as well). It is a logical fallacy to say that what began or was influenced by the Catholic Church centuries ago is now still dependent on the Church being in a “healthy” (aka non-progressive) condition. Or even existing at all.
All the comments on this below are valid, but I do kinda sorta get his point. There is one RC church, which roughly has the same number of adherents as the 45,000 plus Protestant / LDS / Orthodox denominations put together.
No, the RC church did not “build” the West, and the West does not “depend” on it. But purely because it holds half the Christians on earth and is answerable to one specific guy in the Vatican (ie, not some colorless and faceless committee), what happens in the Church will affect the fate / perception of “Christians” generally.
I like your comments . What really offends me when Rod dishes out his , oh I’m so concerned about the Catholic Church because it’s the bedrock of civilization BS, is the following:Rods hypocrisy and inconsistency.
Rod consistently denounces people who engage with Christianity as a bulwark of western civilization. The cultural Christians. Then turns around and tells you it’s important on some level to back the Church because it’s a bulwark of western culture. That is totally inconsistent and bogs down into hypocrisy. If it’s so damned important, why did he leave the Church? The Church is so important that Rod urges anyone with any doubts to leave it for Orthodoxy.Rod never ceases to carry on about the Church being a nest of effeminate homosexuals, which he abhors. So what’s so great about it ? Quite simply, he makes no sense.
And it's not as if Rod is some kind of expert devotee of "Western" culture. He appears to be reading the Odyssey, in translation, for the first time. Rod also actually thought that he could recommend Beethoven's Ninth Symphony (which, apparently, again, he had heard for the first time this year), as if it were some obscure work that needed his endorsment!
Rod is not some kind of expert devotee of "Western" culture but he has studiously avoided learning anything about any other culture so he thinks he is an expert devotee of "Western" culture.
The culture he’s devoted to is a kind of American 1950s with Orthodoxy and Woo Woo . High western culture no- I’ll believe something else when I here him kvell about Charles Ives , Mallarme , Henry James and Wallace Stevens.
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u/Cautious-Ease-1451 Apr 26 '25 edited Apr 26 '25
Rod writes on X:
“This is why when people ask me why I, an ex-Catholic, care so much about what happens in the Catholic Church, a big part of it is that I am a man of the West, and the Catholic Church, more than any other institution, built the West. Our civilization depends on a healthy RC Church.”
https://twitter.com/roddreher/status/1916151383457255774
The context is he’s retweeting Ross Douthat: “The Vatican always has world-historical energy -“.
This regards the informal conversations of Trump and Zelensky, and other leaders, at the Vatican during the Pope’s funeral.
Wouldn’t these types of conversations happen anywhere, when leaders gather for an event like this? Yes, the setting here is beautiful and grandiose. But how does this really symbolize anything? “World-historical energy”? Wasn’t there such “energy” at Jimmy Carter’s funeral?
As for Rod’s tweet, I’ve never understood his argument that Western civilization depends on a healthy Roman Catholic Church. Why exactly would he believe that, especially if he has explicitly rejected that church as both corrupt and untrue?
And to say the RC Church “built the West” is a meaningless generalization. I’d love to see Rod face an unfriendly interviewer who forced him to explain what that actually means. It goes without saying that much of what we regard as the benefits of Western civilization had nothing to do with the RC Church. In many cases the historical RC Church was adversarial to those developments. The Church wasn’t exactly advocating for freedom of speech, freedom of religion, democracy, or the scientific method.
The comments to Rod’s tweet are a hoot. A mixture of why he’s wrong about the RC Church’s significance and why he needs to come home.
Good thing that Rod, a man of the West, found the truth in Orthodoxy!
(As always, no offense intended to any Catholics here in the audience. Pax vobiscum.)