Charles P. Pierce: A Catholic Anti-Catholic

Folks, there’s been some buzz lately about this piece by Charles P. Pierce of the Boston Globe, titled, What I believe. Other commentators have written their own critical pieces but I want to add my own. I want to zero in on a few of things Mr. Pierce says that capture the point he tries to make and the tone he assumes:

In the church of my youth, with the priests reciting incomprehensible Latin, their backs to the people, walled off by an altar rail and two millenniums’ worth of imperial design, the purple always came out at Advent and at Lent. It was the color of penance, we were told. And so it is, and penitence begins within, in one mind and one soul and in what the nuns used to call an informed conscience. That’s where my Catholicism is now. It is a penitential faith. That’s where you can look for it. It is possible, I have come to realize, that I’ve grown up to become an anti-Catholic Catholic.

…

As to the latter [the fundamentalist Christianity of the suburban mega-church and the Left Behind novels], I think I can say without equivocation that I simply don’t want what they call a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. At the moment, I have a personal doctor, a personal trainer, and a personal fencing coach, none of whom I see as much as I should. One thing I always liked about being Catholic is that, while we could be insufferably vaunting about being the One True Church –which was the basis for Walter’s joke, after all – we by and large didn’t proselytize that way, and once you learned anything about church history, you could dispose of the One True part pretty easily. (The Episcopal Church doesn’t count? The Book of Common Prayer doesn’t count? Really?) I do not need a personal Lord and Savior. Not in that sense, anyway. I’m happy sharing him with the rest of what the fathers at the Second Vatican Council called the “people of God.”

…

Which brings me to the most fundamental rule of my Catholicism – nobody gets to tell me that I’m not a Catholic. Those of my fellow Catholics who remain loyal to the institutional structure of the Church don’t get to do so. People who talk glibly of “cafeteria Catholicism” don’t get to do so. People who seek to coin Catholic doctrine into political advantage – be they left or right – don’t get to do so. No priest gets to do so, and no bishop, either, and that especially means the bishop of Rome himself. No pope can tell me I’m not a Catholic.

Mr. Pierce is the founding father and supreme pontiff of a “church of one.” The “Church of Pierce” if you will, which he identifies with a Catholic Church that exists nowhere except in his own aesthetic appreciations. Mr. Stanley Fish, writing for the New York Times on a different, but the related subject of the relationship between religion and the liberal state (please read his piece, Is Religion Special?) gets what Mr. Pierce woefully sidesteps:

The entire point of religion — at least of the theistic kind, Christianity, Judaism, Islam — is to affirm a fidelity to an authority and to a set of imperatives that exceed, and sometimes clash with, what is required by the state. The denial of religion’s claim to be special is the denial of religion as an ultimate discourse, and is, in effect, the denial of religion as religion; it becomes just one more point of view.

This is exactly the pitfall Mr. Pierce falls into. Catholicism for him is no longer an ultimate discourse. He has made clear he has rejected every source of authority that fails to meet his own subjective standards. Mr. Pierce’s Catholicism is not the Church founded by Jesus Christ, does not the Gospel, nor cares about the Sacraments. Mr. Pierce's Catholicism is the simple set of the numerous ethical, moral, and social choices he has amalgamated through the power of his individual reason to be the conditional guides of his conscience.

The position of moral autonomy Mr. Pierce has carved out for himself can no longer be said to be “Catholic” unless one empties the word “Catholic” of all meaning. In the world where meanings can mutate by whim we may be able to say that Mr. Pierce is “Catholic,” as well as the Dalai Lama, Buda, Stalin, and Mao. Or a tree, a rock, a bee, would also be Catholic in this imaginary world. But not in the real world.

Mr. Pierce is not Catholic. He hasn’t been one since Richard McBrien became one of his scholarly inspirations, since he fell for the specter of Constantine’s church, so in vogue today thanks to a bunch of pseudohistorians. Mr. Pierce may be content, even “purple” and “penitential” in his Church of Self, and I guess that’s a good thing as far as that goes. But a Catholic he ain’t. And I get to tell him so.

Let us, then, all pray for his return.