Father Baron on the "Sebelius and Dowd Heresies."

Concerning Dowd's statement that "This is America. We don't hunt heresies here. We welcome them," Father Baron writes:

The problem here is a fundamental confusion between inclusiveness in regard to people and inclusiveness in regard to ideas. The church is indeed all-embracing in the measure that it wants to gather all people to itself. The Bernini colonnade that reaches out like welcoming arms in front of St. Peter's Basilica in Rome is meant to carry precisely this symbolic valence. But the Church has never had such an attitude toward all ideologies and points of view. It has recognized, from the beginning, that certain doctrines are repugnant to its own essential nature, or contradictory to the revelation upon which the Church is constructed. This is precisely why, for the past two millennia, theologians, bishops, Popes, and councils have consistently and strenuously battled heresies concerning central Catholic dogmas. They have understood that the adoption of these errors would fatally compromise the integrity of the Church.

Truth be told, any community must, if it is to survive, have a similar "intolerance." The Abraham Lincoln Society would legitimately oppose the proposal that its members ignore Lincoln and concentrate on the study of Winston Churchill; the USGA would find repugnant the suggestion that Pebble Beach be turned into a collection of baseball diamonds; and the United States of America indeed aggressively excludes those committed to the eradication of fundamental American principles.

The Catholic Church is not a Voltairean debating society; it is a community that stands for some very definite things, which implies, necessarily, that it sets its back against very definite things. A church that simply "welcomed" heresies would, overnight, cease to be itself.

And:

We find another very common error in Secretary Sebelius's address to Georgetown. Deftly side-stepping the issue that has generated such controversy, the HHS demand that Catholic institutions provide insurance for procedures that Catholic morality finds objectionable. Sebelius cited John F. Kennedy's memorable 1960 address to Protestant ministers in Houston. Kennedy dreamed of an American "in which no religious body seeks to impose its will, either directly or indirectly, on the general populace." Over and again, from every quarter, one hears this call echoed today. But when you really think about it, you realize that it is so much nonsense.

What is so easily forgotten is that any law, any political movement, indeed any persuasive speech involves, in one way or another, the imposition of someone's will. In the mid-nineteenth century, William Lloyd Garrison and John Brown were certainly endeavoring to impose their wills regarding the abolition of slavery on the rest of the country. In 1862, with the publication of the Emancipation Proclamation, President Lincoln was most assuredly attempting to impose his will on many of his recalcitrant countrymen.

Publicly protesting Jim Crow laws, marching through the streets of Selma and Montgomery, speaking in the cadences of Isaiah and Amos on the steps of Lincoln's Memorial in Washington, Dr. Martin Luther King was certainly trying to impose his vision on an America that was by no means entirely ready for it. Indeed, just a year after the "I Have a Dream Speech," King was delighted with the passage of strict civil rights legislation, which gave teeth to the proposals that he had long been making.

Now in all the examples that I've given, explicit legal moves were motivated by solidly religious conviction. If you doubt me in regard to Lincoln, I would recommend a careful re-reading of his Second Inaugural Address.

Of course, Dowd and Sebelius are aggressive hypocrites. What they are really saying is that people we don't agree with have no right to their opinions or to seek to have their views adopted by the political system in the same way that WE do. As I've demonstrated repeatedly in this blog, liberals are innately intolerant and, therefore, zealously involved in the project of "heresy-hunting."

Heresy Hunting.

The Anchoress has a great post on Maureen Dowd's latest demonstration of arrested adolescence. You should read the whole thing, but this is the part that particularly caught my attention:

Dowd, emboldened by her chat with Cuomo, tries for her own smackdown, and to read it is to laugh until one’s sides hurt:

Absolute intolerance is always a sign of uncertainty and panic. Why do you have to hunt down everyone unless you’re weak? The church doesn’t seem to care if its members’ beliefs are based on faith or fear, conviction or coercion. But what is the quality of a belief that exists simply because it’s enforced?

The last part is simply banal sophistry — of course the church cares that its members beliefs are based on faith, but in a faith that is understood in its fullness; whether the church succeeds in teaching its fullness is a very valid question — if Dowd is an example, the answer must be “no” — but on the other hand, in order to be taught anything in its fullness, one must be willing to actually hear a lesson, and absorb it enough to repeat it back with some accuracy; that cannot be done if one is inclined to a kneejerk “la-la-la, I can’t year you” over its often subtle points. But it’s the first part of that quote that killed me: “Absolute intolerance is always a sign of uncertainty and panic. Why do you have to hunt down everyone, unless you’re weak?”

Gosh, Maureen, I agree with you! that intolerance is sign of weakness, and that hunting down part — that’s a question I’ve wondered myself. Since you’re so well connected, perhaps you could ask it for me? Ask Ms. Steinem and Ms. Fonda, please, why free speech should not be tolerated by some; ask some college groups why a free expression of opinion is so unendurable to them that they will steal newspapers rather than allow others to read it; ask this teacher why her students are not allowed to criticize “this” president.; ask Bev Perdue why “some” elections should be suspended; ask Eric Holder why governments should force churches to give up their right to define ministers or ministry; ask President Obama why churches should be coerced into betraying their own consciences; ask why churches must conform to the lights of mere men or face consequences. Ask the people who know everything how come they can’t “tolerate” hearing someone refer to their spouse as a “husband” or a “wife”.

The Anchoress studs her observation with all the narrow-minded heresy hunting that the Left engages in, and, yet, the Left is, apparently, oblivious to its own orthodoxy and heresy-hunting tendencies and inquisitions.

This is a piece with Cullen Murphy's thoroughly tendentious "God's Jury: The Inquisition and the Making of the Modern World." Murphy is Dowdish tribal Catholic who explicitly admits that the reason he was induced to write a book on the Inquisition was the fact that Pope John Paul II's had taken away the right of certain theologians to label their teaching as being "Catholic" because those teachings were not Catholic. Like Dowd, Murphy wants to read the Inquisition into modernity, but it's always the other guy's modernity that he finds the reverberations of the Inquisition.

In my book review - go here and give me a helpful vote if you haven't already - I wrote:

Another amusing bit of irony occurs when Murphy points out that notwithstanding the fact that Catholics in England were subjected to an Inquisition after Henry VIII, no Englishman could recognize anything that an Englishman might do as ever imaginably being considered an Inquisition. (p. 195.) But Murphy demonstrates that same mentality throughout the book! So, when he looks at bad special prosecutors harassing Presidents, he doesn't come up with Fitzpatrick's pursuit of information on the silly Plame affair that resulted in the conviction of "Scooter" Libby, instead he goes to Ken Starr and Bill Clinton. Since Clinton was disbarred for his actual perjury, but Fitzpatrick came nowhere near Bush, one might think that it would be Fitzpatrick who would get the "grand Inquisitor" label, but to anyone aware of conservative-liberal politics, Murphy's choice is not surprising. Nor is it surprising that every single example of "modernity looked at through the lens of the Inquisition" involves something done by the American Right that the American Left objects to. Like the Englishmen, who couldn't recognize "the Inquisition" in their own country, Murphy can't recognize "the Inquisition" when it is done by the Left, and for all his sighing about the "war on terror" and the Bush administration, he finds little time to mention Obama's use of drones to kill Americans as a "disturbing example" the Inquisition's "legacy to modernity."