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Sean SalaiSeptember 17, 2014
Mark P. Shea (photo provided)

Mark P. Shea is a Washington-based Catholic writer, blogger, and speaker. Raised as an agnostic pagan, he became a non-denominational Protestant Evangelical in 1979 before converting to Catholicism in 1987. In addition to a number of books and regular articles in Catholic periodicals, Mr. Shea is author of the "Catholic and Enjoying It!" blog at the Patheos Catholic portal, where he has been following the papacy of Francis. He is also an apologist for Catholic Answers.

On Aug. 18, I interviewed Mr. Shea by telephone about his blogosphere perspective on Pope Francis. The following transcript has been edited for content and length.

You were among the first Catholic bloggers and your blog continues to get a good amount of web traffic. How has blogging evolved or changed for you over the years?

I started blogging in 2002 for a number of reasons. One was that I was watching the priest abuse scandal unfold and was seeing a lot of people say both dumb and true things about the Catholic Church. I thought it was necessary to have more reasonably informed lay voices because priests weren’t able to speak for themselves at that time in a public square that automatically assumed them to be guilty. I was also interested because I saw people like Amy Welborn blogging and it occurred to me that her 30,000 web hits a month would have been a fairly respectable circulation for any print magazine. So I thought it would be a good way to get my voice out there. The final reason I started blogging is that I’m an extrovert trapped in an introvert’s job as a writer, and the internet is a very interactive form of writing that attracted me!

Blogging itself, in terms of the technology, hasn’t changed a lot. I started with Blogger when it was free and then I changed over to Patheos, which uses a Wordpress platform. A blog is basically your online diary about whatever you want to talk about right now. The things I talk about have evolved over time because the church and the culture have changed over the past decade. The subject has become much less the priest scandal that was the big thing when I started blogging. In some ways, it’s been surprising for me because the Catholics who form my audience were saying nine years ago: “O.K., Benedict XVI is pope now and the church is going to get straightened out because God’s Rottweiler is on the job.” None of that was going to actually happen, and I never thought it would, but that was the way the right end of the Catholic blogosphere was talking. Now we have Pope Francis and, regrettably, a not-insignificant portion of people in my corner of the blogosphere have decided that God has anointed them to defend the church from Francis. That astounds me and I have spent a fair amount of time reminding people that, you know, this guy is the pope and our task is to listen to him and learn from him rather than defend the church from him.

When I became a Catholic in 1987, I never dreamed that by 2014 I would be watching a considerable portion of the people who then considered themselves “the real Catholics” to be in varying levels of open revolt against the Holy Father. So as far as evolution in the blogosphere goes, that’s one of the main things I’ve seen. Sometimes the dissent I’ve seen is a quite reactionary loathing of the man. Obviously, I’m not talking about all Catholics on the right of the blogosphere, as I’m one of many who think the world of this pope, as I thought the world of John Paul II and Benedict XVI. He’s just a fantastic pope who I love as much as the previous two popes I’ve known in my life as a Catholic.  

Why do you blog?

I blog in order to teach about the faith. That’s what interests me. I want to talk about where I see the faith illuminating things that don’t get illuminated by the normal sort of culture war narratives we find in the media. For me as a layperson, that means really trying to think with the faith on issues where we normally don’t think the faith has much to say. For example, I was involved in a conversation the other day on Facebook about Gardasil, a newish vaccine against Human Papillomavirus (HPV) that some people are concerned about. What really struck me was that someone commenting on it, who is active in anti-euthanasia work, suggested it might be better to let the effects of the virus unfold as a way of making people be accountable for their sinful behavior. I found that breathtaking since HPV can cause things like cervical cancer, sterility and miscarriage. Think about that: A man active in anti-euthanasia work was saying that women should be allowed to die of cervical cancer in order to teach them a lesson about the sin of sexual impurity. One doubts he would call for cancelling the manufacture of insulin in order to punish the sin of gluttony with diabetes. It’s that kind of dumb stuff I’m trying to challenge in my blogging.

Do you consider blogging to be journalism?

Not really. I suppose it can be, but I think it’s typically a very derivative form of journalism at best. Usually what happens on the blogosphere is in response to what’s already been said in the media. On the other hand, we have to remember that it was a blog that brought down Dan Rather. Every form of information is available on the internet and some blogger discovered (from, I kid you not, a website entirely devoted to chronicling IBM Selectric typewriter fonts) that the font in a supposed letter about Bush allegedly dating from 1972 did not exist at that time and that the letter had actually been generated on a word processor. The hoax was exposed and it destroyed Dan Rather. So bloggers do and can keep media honest. But I would not consider myself a journalist. 

How has the Catholic blogosphere reacted to the papacy of Francis so far?

It really depends. As I suggested earlier, some on the right of the blogosphere are extremely nervous. Some on that side, like me, think very highly of him. But other blogs are utterly hysterical about him, displaying unhinged panic that in some cases leans toward sedevacantism because they just cannot cope with him. Others tend to be suspicious of everything he says. Then there are others who really see and appreciate what he’s trying to do. They see that he’s not his predecessors, but that he’s not saying or doing anything essentially different from his predecessors.

It seems to be his personality—the fact he’s not a high church Catholic—that is the biggest concern for some bloggers. Like me, he’s happy with just about any Mass and doesn’t have anything against the extraordinary form of the liturgy, but it’s pretty clear that the Latin Mass just isn’t a big interest for him. Also, he’s not exactly sanguine about the effects of the first world capitalist experiment on the developing world, and he has a lot to say about our debt to the poor. That makes a lot of people on the right nervous as well. And, of course, some on the left are upset with him for being just as Catholic on the Pelvic Issues as his predecessors and not coming through with a Charter of Sexual Freedom that some people imagined was just about to be promulgated after the America interview was misreported by the mainstream media last fall.

What’s fascinating to me is not how often the media misreports him, but how often a lot of people on the right accept that misreporting lock, stock, and barrel instead of correcting it—and then panic about it. So when Pope Francis said in the America interview that “the church’s pastoral ministry cannot be obsessed with the transmission of a disjointed multitude of doctrines to be imposed insistently,” he was saying our faith is not reducible to culture war issues like abortion and gay marriage. Our faith is not primarily a school of ethics, even though there’s obviously an ethical component. His point was that the real focus of our life as Catholics is Jesus Christ. If something beside Jesus is at the center (even something as important as the dignity of human life and the family) we are idolaters. What is more, without Jesus, nothing else makes sense, but is just this inchoate collection of moral preachments that people have no idea how to put together.

It’s very obvious that this was his point, but the New York Times and the rest of the mainstream media took him to mean "Abortion? That's so JPII and Benedict! Papa's got a brand new groove!" I get that. I don't expect a media that pored over Deus Caritas Est in search of any mention of sex (and came away stunned, disappointed, and baffled that it “did not mention abortion, homosexuality, contraception or divorce, issues that often divide Catholics”) to have the faintest idea what to make of Catholic teaching.

But I do expect Catholics to have a grasp of Catholic teaching. Again and again, I have encountered a scream from Catholic bloggers on the right who have just been wigging out, calling Francis a heretic and saying he’s abandoned the faith—and citing the New York Times and NPR as the cause of their panic. So I wrote a blog piece (the first of many on the same theme, alas) about the unexpected unity between the New York Times and the Francis haters on the right. I have been very consistently surprised to see this pattern continually playing out in the year since then. Every time he gives an interview, I think it’s obvious that his pastoral style is aimed at reaching ordinary people with ordinary language. It’s not absolutely precise language and it's all solid Catholic stuff since he's, you know, the pope. Yet you get people flipping out because it’s not an encyclical and he’s just trying to reach as broad an audience as possible.

On the bright side, it’s consoling for me to see in this reaction how little the blogosphere matters to the lives of ordinary Catholics in the pews. In real life outside of the blogosphere, the people I know love the guy, and all the panics and alarms that I run into online are either unknown or non-existent at the parish level. The average Catholic (and non-Catholic) people I talk to think the world of him.

What’s the best thing Pope Francis has done for the Catholic blogosphere?

I think he’s forcing a confrontation with the rest of Catholic social teaching. By that, I mean all of the incredible riches the church has to offer beyond the questions of abortion, euthanasia, gay marriage, human cloning and embryonic stem cell research—which in my neck of the blogosphere, started out as the five non-negotiables of orthodox Catholicism, but have mysteriously morphed into the only five things that matter to a lot of American Catholics. It has spawned a curious soteriology in some sectors that often boils down to a theory that can be fairly accurately summarized as "opposition to abortion taketh away the sins of the world." Francis has forced a reassessment of that reductionist view of Catholic social teaching and I think it’s all for the good.

Why does the Catholic blogosphere need this challenge?

Because we need to become more fully Catholic, but in the sense of personal conversion, not in the sense of purging the church of lukewarm believers. By that I mean helping people to become more fully Catholic, as Pope Francis has been trying to do. This challenge, to me, is what the Catholic blogosphere has most needed for a long time. I’m sure Francis is challenging some people on the left end of the blogosphere as well, but I don't hang out there all that much.

Francis isn’t interested in purging the church for the same reason St. Paul isn't interested in it. When St. Paul speaks to the Corinthians, he doesn’t tell this passel of screwed-up Christians who are sleeping with their stepmothers, getting drunk at Mass, taking each other to court, denying the Resurrection, and dissing him as a fake apostle that “you’re not real Catholics.” Instead, he insists that even the dopiest of the Corinthians are real Christians.

In short, instead of kicking people out, Paul cries “become what you are!” One of the mythic expectations inexplicably attending gentle and sweet Pope Benedict was the notion of a "Coming Benedictine Purge” where many Catholics on the right dreamed he was going to start kicking people out of the church. But that was never going to happen. And now, under this Pope, that has been confirmed beyond all doubt. What Francis wants is for all of us to accept each other with the all-embracing love of God—which is certainly a challenge for me, because the people he wants me to love and forgive are not people I would normally be eager to embrace.

For me, he’s challenged me to think and live in new ways, to ask myself new kinds of questions about how I spend my money and what I’m doing about the poor, weak and vulnerable around me. To be sure, that includes the very old and very young our culture of death wants to kill. But it increasingly includes others to whom I have been blinded in the past by the reduction of the five non-negotiables to the Only Five Things That Matter. How am I responding to Iraq? How am I responding to what’s happening at the border? What about families being destroyed by gross income inequality? Those are questions that would not have occurred to me 10 years ago because I considered everything other than the five non-negotiables to be matters of prudential judgment—and I took prudential judgment to mean "feel free to ignore the church if it threatens your political ideology in some way." But I’ve learned in the past 10 years that prudential judgment doesn’t mean I can just blow off anything from the church that isn’t prefaced by “Simon Peter says.” We’re called to be docile to the church so that unless we can give a really good reason why the church’s guidance is absolutely immoral, we should try to do what the church asks even on things which aren’t absolutely essential. We should try to obey the church and the mind of Christ as much as we possibly can. That’s the point of the story of the rich young man in the gospel. Marriage is another example. If a married person asks “what’s the least I can do for my spouse and still call it a valid marriage,” that marriage is already in trouble. Real love never asks “what’s the least I can get away with doing?” It always asks “what’s the most I can do?” That’s what Francis is asking us to consider. What’s the most I can do to love you, Lord Jesus? It’s not about doing the minimum daily requirement to live as selfishly as I can and still squeak into heaven.

What is your impression of Pope Francis?

I love the man. It’s almost inarticulate, but I have nothing but love for the guy. I think he’s the absolute real deal and I feel tremendous hope for the church. As I said before, I’ve loved every pope we’ve had, but I particularly have a soft spot for this man just as a human being apart from whatever he does as pope. I think the world of him. There are some people you just recognize as genuine people and I always respond really strongly to them. There’s no artifice about him and I really like that.

Has Pope Francis affected the way you blog?

He’s changed the subject matter a great deal. Partly he’s changed the way I blog because of the way other people react to him. In the blogosphere I take notice when someone panics about something Francis has said or done. Sometimes I have to blog just to say that what they’re panicking about is really not worth panicking about. Oftentimes, he says just what his predecessors said, but he seems to have a knack for making these things heard in a way people somehow didn’t hear before. Many people somehow found it easy to shut the last two popes out when they spoke about things they didn't want to hear. Francis is not avoidable like that. He continually challenges me to discuss things that I hitherto had not talked about.

You’re known as a Catholic apologist because of your writing at the Catholic Answers website and elsewhere. How has Francis influenced the way you do apologetics?

Other people call me that, but I don’t think of myself as an apologist. Catholic apologetics in our culture is often addressed to Protestant evangelicals, where a lot of people from a Protestant background like Scott Hahn, Jimmy Akin and Steve Ray try to explain to our former friends why we became Catholics. There is a huge wave of American converts who owe a debt to people like Karl Keating who reached out to us in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Francis hasn’t indicated any particular interest in this trend, but neither did John Paul or Benedict. It’s a strongly American Catholic thing. But Catholic Answers has made an impact around the world, as young Catholic lay evangelists from around the world often email me to say they’ve been downloading our stuff and using it in a variety of ways.

As far as I know, no pope, including this one, has ever undertaken to address this particular apologetics subculture. There is no Letter to the Apologists from the pope. Nor do I expect there to be or feel the need for one. I don’t expect Francis to have a particular impact on the apologetics subculture, other than being a shepherd and teacher we take as a model, and I’m O.K. with that. But I think what Pope Francis has done, at least for people like me who try to defend the faith, is give us a new opportunity to defend the pope from Catholics who fear him—and that’s a weird experience for me! I never thought I’d find myself in the ironic position of having to defend the pope from fellow Catholics who loved John Paul and Benedict. Right now, much of the apologetics writing I do is to support Pope Francis when he teaches things the church has always said, but which for some reason we haven’t really grasped until now, and which strike dark fears into the hearts of Catholics who, well, really ought to know better.

Do you have any hopes for the future?

I hope to get to heaven! But closer to home, I’m hopeful to continue my book series on the four pillars of the catechism, writing the final two volumes on the creed and sacraments. On other fronts, I’m helping Vocare in Washington with a 12-part series of lessons for parishes to help people sink their teeth into the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church. Catholic social teaching is still the church’s best-kept secret. So I’m looking forward to handling the first chapter as one of 12 different authors collaborating on the project. And, of course, I'm watching my granddaughters grow, the two greatest signs of hope for the future I know!

What do you hope people will take away from your blogging?

A better understanding of the faith and of the enormous freedom of mind we enjoy in the Catholic faith within an intensely ideological secular culture.  To me, ideology is another word for heresy, trying to cram God and the entire universe into a tiny All Explaining Theory of Everything—whether it’s economics, art, political power, science, or anything else. What the Catholic Church says is that we don’t know hardly anything, but we do know this: "We believe in one God, the Father, the almighty, creator of heaven and earth,” etc. Beyond that, it’s a big strange world and we’re open to letting all of the different intellectual disciplines do the things they do. Let the economists, artists, philosophers and scientists do what they like because none of what they truly discover will contradict the faith, since all truth is God's truth and the creator of nature is also the redeemer of nature. We can explore the world and give glory to God as we do it.

It amazes me that so many Catholics aren’t confident that what we discover in the sciences cannot contradict what is revealed by the Faith, but are constantly fearful that some new discovery is going to debunk everything we believe. Nothing’s going to bring the creed down in ruins. God’s there, he’s not going anywhere, and the gospels are still strong and true. I go to a Dominican parish and the Dominicans are particularly strong on the idea that natural revelation and supernatural revelation are completely compatible. That’s one of the reasons I call my blog “Catholic and Enjoying It.” God has given us the world to enjoy. This is the day the Lord has made, so let us be glad and rejoice in it!

Sean Salai, S.J., serves as contributing writer at America.

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Anne Chapman
9 years 6 months ago
One of the mythic expectations inexplicably attending gentle and sweet Pope Benedict was the notion of a "Coming Benedictine Purge” where many Catholics on the right dreamed he was going to start kicking people out of the churchNot really so mythic. During the 35 years Joseph Ratzinger was John Paul II's head of the CDF, and during the years of his own papacy, many, many theologians, priests, women religious were silenced, disciplined, stripped of their license to teach theology, stripped of their right to say mass (if priests), and a few were excommunicated. Several simply left the priesthood or religious life, effectively forced out by John Paul II/Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict, denied even the basic right to face their accusers. As we all know, Benedict also launched an insulting and demeaning "investigation" of the leadership of 80% of women's religious orders in the US, once that has sadly been continued under Francis. Some were silenced, forced out or disciplined because of their work on liberation theology. Some of those who so offended John Paul II and Benedict have now been redeemed by Pope Francis. Some were expelled/silenced etc because of rethinking the virgin birth etc. But the biggest sins of theologians/priests/religious (besides thinking and questioning) related to their openness to re-examining church teaching on homosexuality and on denying a sacrament to women simply due to their genes. Supporting women's ordination was a far worse sin to John Paul II/Ratzinger and Benedict than was molesting and raping children. Not a single bishop who protected priests who molested and/or raped children were silenced, disciplined, excommunicated. In fact, several of the worst offenders among bishops/cardinals as far as protecting priest/molesters went were rewarded with prestigious and powerful positions in Rome (such as Cardinal Law and Cardinal Levada, who, in his turn, became the CDF enforcer against theologians, priests, religious who defended the right of ALL members of the church to have access to all seven sacraments. But while bishops who protected rapists were never even disciplined, and some were rewarded, others, like Fr. Roy Bourgeois who refused to lie by recanting what he believes, were silenced and even, in Fr. Bourgeois's case, excommunicated. But, this was not enough for some on the Catholic right who eagerly awaited a thorough housecleaning of the "heretics". They were especially disappointed that Benedict did not excommuncate Hans Kung. Now that I've made that point, I will add that I enjoyed the interview. Since I don't "hang out" with the blogs on the Catholic right, I have not read the blog at Patheos. However, I will say that Mr. Shea comes across as far "nicer" than most of those on the Catholic right who blog. While I'm quite sure that I do not share his vision of Catholicism, that's OK. He does not seem to be among those who would gladly toss out any and all Catholics whose understanding of Catholicism is not exactly the same as their own. I will take a look at Mr. Shea's blog once I have more time.
Tim O'Leary
9 years 6 months ago
Anne - You just said "many, many theologians, priests, women religious were silenced, disciplined, stripped of their license to teach theology, stripped of their right to say mass (if priests), and a few were excommunicated." This is such a huge exaggeration that it reaches the mythic level. By the "many, many" do you mean thousands or just hundreds or, could it be 50? And, what does "silenced" mean in today's world. Hans Kung Fu is certainly not silent, sadly. Could you even name 35 that were silenced? It is this form of hyperbolic exaggeration that disproves your argument.
Anne Chapman
9 years 6 months ago
Yes - I can certainly name 35 who were silenced. And a few excommunicated, and several who left because of Rome's treatment and disrespect for them.
Tim O'Leary
9 years 6 months ago
Let's see your list, then, and see if they were the one's who severed their ties with the Church. Regarding Roy Bourgeois, he provocatively and publicly opposed definitively declared Church teaching, by conducting a mock mass where he pretended to ordain "womenpriests." As to his supposed silencing, here he is being celebrated in an academic conference last month: http://www.valdosta.edu/about/news/releases/2014/08/womens-and-gender-studies-hosts-father-roy-bourgeois-on-sept.-9.php. Please do not pad your list with those who walked away from the Church of their own accord. That was their choice. They excommunicated the Church from their lives.
Anne Chapman
9 years 6 months ago
I see Tim, you are the only one who gets to decide who qualifies? If some are drivenn out of the church by Rome's oppression, it is "padding the list" of those whom Rome has disciplined, silenced, or excommunicated. Not surprising - that way you can comfort yourself that the John Paul II/Ratzinger/Benedict years were not what they really were. The truth is not something you wish to see in this matter, as is true of so many others. Fr. Roy can be "celebrated" anywhere except in the church that he devoted more than 30 years of his life to. He was excommunicated because he refused to recant his belief that women are equal to men and that it is a sin to deny women a sacrament due to their genes. He was being asked to lie, to violate his conscience. Because he refused to recant, refused to lie about what he believes and say that "Of course, I am wrong, the church is right", he was excommunicated. Not a single bishop who protected men who were raping children has even been disciplined in any way whatsoever. Not even a mild handslap, and some were promoted to prestigious jobs in Rome (such as Levada and Law). It is clear that Rome considers treating women as equal to men in the church to be a far more serious "sin" than is protecting pedophiles. Some who left religious life (priests and nuns) did not leave the church. They did not "excommunicate" themselves. But they could no longer do the work they were doing for Christ because Rome had effectively imprisoned them in a type of "virtual" house arrest, a modern day variation on what the church did to Galileo, so they left official religious life. But this generation at least does not have to comply with Rome under threat of death as Galileo did. They could leave the priesthood, or they could leave religious life without worrying about the stake. Those who lost their license to teach theology in a Catholic dept. of theology could remain priests/sisters and continue to work, teach, to publish. So some stayed and some left. Since their first loyalty has to be to God and not to men, some cut their ties with their religious orders.
Tim O'Leary
9 years 6 months ago
Anne - Maybe, you should re-read your first comment. The mythical "many, many" who were "silenced" is now not thousands, or even hundreds. If you had found 35, even that would have been only one a year, and Pope Francis excommunicated Fr Greg Reynolds of Australia in his first year for a lesser offence than Fr. Roy (Fr. Greg didn't try to ordain womenpriests). In his second year, Pope Francis excommunicated the Mafia (I don't think they are under house arrest yet).
Chris Wickern
9 years 6 months ago
Anne, I personally think of Mr. Shea as one who is not "left" and he is not "right". If you must cubby- hole him into a political box, might I suggest "Catholic"?
Anne Chapman
9 years 6 months ago
In his own comments, Mr. Shea indicates that he is on the "right" - he said that he doesn't know much about the "left's" reaction to Francis because he doesn't "hang out" in the Catholic left's blogosphere. He is also an apologist for Catholic Answers, which is well-known for being on the Catholic "right". I am not talking about politics. I am talking about where he understands his place in the Catholic church to be and he is pretty clear about that. However, he is less judgmental of those on the "left" and he discusses how most of those on the Catholic "right" have "gone ballistic" (to use a popular term of the young) over Francis. And he notes, that these are the same people who told those on the "left" who dissented from Benedict and John Paul II that they should "leave" the church because they aren't Catholic, they are clearly really Protestants.
Chris Wickern
9 years 6 months ago
I find no where in this article or elsewhere where Mr. Shea describes himself as on the "right". As a matter of fact, most on the "right" consider Mr. Shea to be far "left."
Anne Chapman
9 years 6 months ago
Fascinating. It just demonstrates how very wide the schism in the US church has become. Do those on the right consider Mr. Shea to be "left" because he has not rejected Francis and Francis' insistence that the church balance out its focus, and practice what Jesus taught in the gospels about the social justice issues? He identifies himself with the "right" in the church - from the interview.....some on the right of the blogosphere are extremely nervous. Some on that side, like me, think very highly of him.I’m sure Francis is challenging some people on the left end of the blogosphere as well, but I don't hang out there all that much."....where a lot of people from a Protestant background like Scott Hahn, Jimmy Akin and Steve Ray try to explain to our former friends why we became Catholics.For those of us on the Catholic "left", Mr. Shea is on the "right". I did not even need to have him say so specifically, although he did. It was pretty clear. However, he is more open-minded than most on the Catholic "right" - not a flame-thrower - he doesn't seem to issue wholesale condemenations of all Catholics who aren't part of the "right", unlike most on that side of the blogosophere. So maybe his days are numbered with his previous reader base. I'm not talking politics here, but church - they are not always the same. Many who vote Republican also believe that women are equal to men and that this should be recognized in the church. As we know, among all Catholics ("left", middle, "right" and totally indifferent - maybe everyone except very far right), believe that the choice of family planning method should be left to the couple and that the church should recognize that a tiny group of celibate men do not have the same lived understanding of this sacrament as those who actually live it. There is nothing more "sinful" about using the pill or a condom than there is about stressing one's marriage by expressing marital love according to the readings of cervical mucus thickness and basal temperature. Mr. Shea is on the "right". He identifies with the right on issues in the church that are important to those on the left - for example, contraception coverage in insurance policies for women who are not Catholic, who are working for organizations run by Catholics (for profit and non-profit) whose mission is not religion but social services of some kind for those of all religions or none, or for-profit private companies. Since he advocates "docility" and "obedience" even when not thinking a church teaching makes sense, he would have to oppose treating women as fully equal members of the church, which requires that all be eligible for all seven sacraments, with none denied due to gender. Those on the Catholic right stress "docility" and "obedience" as does Mr. Shea. Those on the "left" stress primacy of conscience - a "properly" informed conscience does not mean coming to the same conclusion as the official church on all matters, and giving docile "obedience" to teachings that one believes to be morally wrong is a sin. Mr. Shea identifies with Scott Hahn and others as a former evangelical Christian - who are, as we all know from many studies, the most conservative christians in the country. And finally, there can be no question that someone who writes as a Catholic apologist on Catholic Answers could be anywhere close to being part of the "Catholic left" or even the Catholic "middle". Catholic Answers is so far right that it won't even permit comments by those on the Catholic "left" - bans anyone who does not fall into line with their extremely to the right, narrow version of Catholicism. They would never feature a writer from the Catholic left. However, since Mr. Shea has been open enough to Francis to hear what Francis is teaching, it may be that he will soon lose some of his writing jobs - he may be in danger of becoming anethema to those on the "right" - no longer a "real" Catholic.
Tim O'Leary
9 years 6 months ago
Anne - If Catholic Answers is "far right" and those pesky former evangelicals are even further to the right (you say they are the "most conservative"), where would you place the sedevacanists and those who criticize the last 5 popes for not being orthodox enough? maybe they are with the "many, many" who have been "silenced" so severely they make their living giving speeches and accepting awards (see link below)? As to your elevation of the "primacy of conscience" against the "Primacy of Peter," you are mixing up the role of conscience in interpreting the teaching of the Magisterium and applying it to one's personal situation, and the idea that a private conscience can overrule the Magisterium - on any doctrine (see, for example, your defense of Garry Will's rejection of the Eucharist and the whole priesthood - http://americamagazine.org/issue/culture/communion-waver#comment-58826). If you were trying to be consistent, you wouldn't be complaining about other Catholics following their consciences that lead them to be faithful to the Catechism. So, it seems you discount consciences that disagree with you.
Douglas Fang
9 years 6 months ago
This is something that I have been observing for quite a while. Under the previous popes, many of the “right” accused the “left” of being protestants/heretics and should leave the Church. Now, under this pope, they seem to become the protestants/heretics themselves. Is this wonderful? I strongly believe that this is the mysterious providence of God in order to teach us the lesson of humility. It reminds me of the story of the pharisee and the tax collector praying in the temple. After all, how can we accuse or question God for being and generous and merciful? Are you behaving like the vineyard workers that have worked for the whole day? I am truly glad and thankful to see someone like Mark, who considers himself as being on the right, has the courage to defend the current pope against other “righteous” bloggers.
Tim O'Leary
9 years 6 months ago
Douglas - It is no surprise to me that there are opponents of Pope Francis from the "right." All popes have opponents from both the right and the left, and Popes JPII and BXVI had their share (think of the sedevacanists, and those who opposed the prayer services at Assisi). I also think the "left" will end up more disappointed with Pope Francis than the "right." I think critics of the papacy on both the right and the left have more in common than you might think - they both have a narrow understanding of a living Magisterium, coupled with an excessive confidence in their own personal methodology of arriving at the truth. They both, in my opinion, misuse history (using their interpretation of past decisions to diminish the teachings of the current pope) and use their private "inspiration" to overrule or discount definitive teaching from the Magisterium. They are, in a sense, stuck in a fictitious past or future church of their own making.

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The 12 women whose feet were washed by Pope Francis included women from Italy, Bulgaria, Nigeria, Ukraine, Russia, Peru, Venezuela and Bosnia-Herzegovina.
"We, the members of the Society of Jesus, continue to be lifted up in prayer, in lament, in protest at the death and destruction that continue to reign in Gaza and other territories in Israel/Palestine, spilling over into the surrounding countries of the Middle East."
The Society of JesusMarch 28, 2024
A child wounded in an I.D.F. bombardment is brought to Al Aqsa hospital in Deir al Balah, Gaza Strip, on March 25. (AP Photo/Ismael abu dayyah)
While some children have been evacuated from conflict, more than 1.1 million children in Gaza and 3.7 million in Haiti have been left behind to face the rampaging adult world around them.
Kevin ClarkeMarch 28, 2024
Easter will not be postponed this year. It will not wait until the war is over. It is precisely now, in our darkest hour, that resurrection finds us.
Stephanie SaldañaMarch 28, 2024