Saturday, March 18, 2006

Could it be they're afraid of being caught in the center?

Just a thought, and it's not necessarily a charitable one, about why people like the Wanderer staff, and the Catholic Answers people, and much of the new-ish EWTN crowd are so vocal, and are dropping so much chaff with respect to traditional Catholics ("radtrads," as the "neo-Caths" call them) during this important time when things might get sorted out with the SSPX.

Maybe, just maybe, they're insecure of their position. Right now, these people are sort of perceived to be in the forefront of orthodox, faithful Catholicism. Most of them-"professional Catholics"--actually make their living based on that status, which is not an inherently bad thing (after all, some laity has to do that sort of work, as there aren't enough clergy stepping up to the plate), but the livelihood issue does bring the instinct of self-preservation into the equation.


If the Holy Father would actually work out a solution to the Situation, and the majority of the SSPX priests and their faithful accepted it, then those professional Catholics would no longer be perceived as pressing the right flank in the battle for the Church. They would be lost somewhere in the center. The right flank would them be pressed by traditional clerics--not just SSPX, but other priests who've stayed in the background, in prudence, but would no longer feel so constrained once a structure was created that would offer them some protection from newfangled hierarchs.

This is an explanation that I have no basis for positing, but if it's so, it all makes sense. Nobody (who isn't trying to get elected to office in some whitebread suburb like Johnson County) wants to be floating about the center. I certainly would take no pride in being a centrist.

Anyways, it's just a hypothesis. If that's the motivation for the malicious way these "professional Catholics" are handing the traditionalist issue these days, then, somebody needs to convince them a role for them to play--even an expanded role--in evangelizing within the Church even under the reorientation that would inevitably take place in the years following a reconciliation.

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