What is the opposite of an encomium? No, that’s not a (lame) joke. Whatever it is, this (below) is it. For as Remy Wilkins asserts in Theopolis, “blunting the sword of your mouth benefits only the enemies of the kingdom,” and I intend to cut them down.
I’ve long detested the holier-than-thou, ad hominem attack style of author Tim Egan, perhaps because—at my weakest—there’s a whiff of it in my writing, too. The (alleged) hypocrite is his perennial target—read his biweekly opinion pieces in The New York Times—and perhaps I subconsciously fear/wish he’ll one day train his proverbial guns on me. Or perhaps because we are alums of the same university and share a hometown I see him as a kind of traitor, as a wayward brother. At any rate, we share little else. His politics mirror the predictable salad of leftist causes—vitriol for the traditional, skepticism of any virtue that challenges the religions of environmentalism and multiculturalism, and innumerable other -isms and anti-isms. He lives in Seattle.
Egan, promoting a new book, returned home this week to discuss it, and, though I couldn’t secure tickets to the event, I wrote an op-ed of my own—hence the brevity—hoping the local paper would publish it. They didn’t, so here it is.
Tim Egan is not alone in thinking “the Catholic Church is sick with sex.” The well-documented sacerdotal problem with pedophilia, systemic seminarian abuse, scandals and cover-ups; you catch the drift. It disgusts.
But his solution? More sex. “Celibacy should be optional,” he writes in a New York Times op-ed published last year. His logic? That’ll mitigate the temptations of perverts rife in the ranks of the cloth. What Egan doesn’t understand is that celibacy is to the priesthood what marriage is to the laity: a commitment to love of the highest order, only with Christ the bridegroom.
Deny yourself, He preached. It’s an order anathema to those of a culture of decadence and “self care” (“treat yourself,” “take it easy,” “just do it”) because it is a tall order. “To be priest” means to empty yourself of worldliness so that you can be filled with Christ, with the eternal, with Truth. Celibacy, then, says writer Patricia Snow, is a promise, “to live, in advance, the nuptial realities of heaven.”
Fidelity to God and His Kingdom—it was once a noble aim. And a costly one; preferable even, but realized by so few. An honor, in other words. A triumph over our enduring fallibility. Egan’s take, however, in reducing such a calling to an act of cheap grace, makes a mockery of human aspiration, and reveals the author’s search for “a faith” to be nothing more than the vicissitude of a muckraking dilettante.
In his new book he asks, “How can you believe in a savior whose message was peace and passive humility, when the professional promoters of that message were complicit in so much systematic horror?” That’s easy. Because He is the savior even of the most embryonic and ignorant seeker: the man who, in his quest for eternity, sees only his reflection at the center of history. The man who, consumed by darkness, confounds the morning with the light of Christ.
Image: Jones, David. Crucifixion. A Child’s Rosary Book. 1924.
Impolitic 