> I think many Catholics, including many bishops, to one degree or another buy into that narrative of the Church under siege and therefore were willing to uncritically accept claims about the memo that proved to be untrue.
This is really not at all an unreasonable default position to have in light of the historical persecution of the Church in the Anglo Protestant world - including the United States. As recently at the 1960s, JFK had to deny that he was taking orders from Rome. The Thomas Nast caricature of Catholicism has extremely deep roots in Anglo culture, and this memo actually fits pretty well within that tradition, at least at a high level - e.g., “secret Catholic societies undermining Our Democracy.” Given that history, I don’t think Bishops are at all wrong to default to suspicion. Anything else would be historically ignorant.
Thanks for sharing the outcome of this memo! Very helpful to read. Tangentially related: I feel if radical traditionalists were actually interested in tradition and the "root" of our faith, they would want to celebrate the Eucharist in Greek rather than Latin. I think digging deeper to that common language of Greek (the language of scripture) would be very beneficial ecumenically with the Eastern churches. I also think find it revealing that Catholics get offended by the idea that Catholicism can lead people to do violence, even though Catholicism is not a religion that promotes violence but have no problem believing that about Islam. And, to continue that line of thought, Catholics will often invoke "radical Islam's" subjugation of women as a strike against it, but are somehow blind to their own desire for a clerical, patriarchal ordering of the church, family, and society that supposedly honors women (and the Church!) as mothers but does not find in motherhood or womanhood any authority or power worth imitating or incarnating on a structural level.
Yes, if I expanded on the essay, I think the analogy with Islam is something I would want to explore. For example, this whole episode has to be seen against the background of how the FBI (and other agencies, like the NYPD) engaged in surveillance of the Muslim community in the US in the aftermath of 9/11, often in ways that did in fact reflect bias. So, the critics were not wrong to at the very least cast a suspicious eye toward the FBI in this case. But you raise a good question of whether those who were upset by what they believed the memo revealed would have been equally angered by the surveillance of Muslims. I wouldn't want to presume a double standard, but at least some in conservative media, for example, probably do have records that someone could go back and check.
> I think many Catholics, including many bishops, to one degree or another buy into that narrative of the Church under siege and therefore were willing to uncritically accept claims about the memo that proved to be untrue.
This is really not at all an unreasonable default position to have in light of the historical persecution of the Church in the Anglo Protestant world - including the United States. As recently at the 1960s, JFK had to deny that he was taking orders from Rome. The Thomas Nast caricature of Catholicism has extremely deep roots in Anglo culture, and this memo actually fits pretty well within that tradition, at least at a high level - e.g., “secret Catholic societies undermining Our Democracy.” Given that history, I don’t think Bishops are at all wrong to default to suspicion. Anything else would be historically ignorant.
Thanks for sharing the outcome of this memo! Very helpful to read. Tangentially related: I feel if radical traditionalists were actually interested in tradition and the "root" of our faith, they would want to celebrate the Eucharist in Greek rather than Latin. I think digging deeper to that common language of Greek (the language of scripture) would be very beneficial ecumenically with the Eastern churches. I also think find it revealing that Catholics get offended by the idea that Catholicism can lead people to do violence, even though Catholicism is not a religion that promotes violence but have no problem believing that about Islam. And, to continue that line of thought, Catholics will often invoke "radical Islam's" subjugation of women as a strike against it, but are somehow blind to their own desire for a clerical, patriarchal ordering of the church, family, and society that supposedly honors women (and the Church!) as mothers but does not find in motherhood or womanhood any authority or power worth imitating or incarnating on a structural level.
Yes, if I expanded on the essay, I think the analogy with Islam is something I would want to explore. For example, this whole episode has to be seen against the background of how the FBI (and other agencies, like the NYPD) engaged in surveillance of the Muslim community in the US in the aftermath of 9/11, often in ways that did in fact reflect bias. So, the critics were not wrong to at the very least cast a suspicious eye toward the FBI in this case. But you raise a good question of whether those who were upset by what they believed the memo revealed would have been equally angered by the surveillance of Muslims. I wouldn't want to presume a double standard, but at least some in conservative media, for example, probably do have records that someone could go back and check.