“Development is just a self-fulfilling prophecy”

Here's an exchange I found interesting:

Arturo Vasquez Cites Eamon Duffy citing Newman:

“We have come to a climax of tyranny,” he wrote. “It is not good for a Pope to live 20 years…. He becomes a god, [and] has no one to contradict him”…

http://arturovasquez.wordpress.com/2010/12/16/for-a-truly-subversive-newman/

Arturo Vasquez:
I think [Catholicism] is the only religion in the modern Western world that merits the name, in that it tries to mix universality and systematic rigor with plurality and local manifestations of the supernatural. Do I think it works? No. But it is still a noble try. As I have written above, I am pessimistic to the point that I think the whole thing is on the verge of collapse, at least a major section of it.

Michael Liccione:
I’ve long thought that the attitude you share is an all-but-inevitable reaction to the scandal of particularity, which is really the difficulty, for many, of seeing the mutual inherence of the universal and the particular. There’s no way to “get it” from the outside; one has to live it from within the tradition, as you clearly recognize. Your own contribution is to point out that “the outside” is now “inside” the Church. I agree that such is the case for many individuals; but to conclude that’s it the case for the Catholic thing as such, one must assume that its intensional reality is reducible to its extensional reality. Only, it isn’t. And that fact lies at the core of the Catholic thing.

Arturo Vasquez:
Well, you can win an argument by addressing reality or you can do it by moving goal posts and saying you kicked the winning field goal that way. If there is something that I have concluded about Mike & friends’ argumentative style is that they tend to argue using the latter method. “Catholicism” will win as an institution because “Catholicism” is invincible. The antagonism is always outside of the Platonic definition of “Catholicism” floating in the ether. How things look in reality, well, your mind is playing tricks on you. Don’t pay any attention to that. God forbid we should argue that change exists in the very idea itself. Otherwise, the sky would fall, we would have to curl up in a fetal position in the corner, dogs will marry cats, etc.

A word about "intellectual converts"

I've been asked several times (and it's been pointed out to me from the other side) that, while there is a steady stream of people out of Roman Catholicism, there's also a small but vocal group of "really smart people" who are converting to Rome. How do we account for that?

Here's a post that I've found in several places. Arturo Vasquez is what you might call a real, life-long Roman Catholic. His bio says he is a native of Hollister, California, who spent five years in religious life as a seminarian and a monk. He has no trouble criticizing these "converts":

One common thread that I find in these English Catholic converts such as Baring, Chesterton, and to a much lesser extent, Waugh, is that they have some sort of nostalgia for something that they know nothing about. Or they are at the very least nostalgic for something that they feel is missing in their post-Victorian, rationalistic, dry lives. Newman probably is the one who started that mess, with his desire to find the pristine Apostolic church, only to suffer from afar the cronyism and realpolitik of the court of Pio Nono[the infallible pope Pius IX]. The protagonist in the Barring novel “finds his humanity” in the tumultuous melting pot of 19th century Russia, with all of its politicial and cultural anachronisms slamming full speed into the modern age. Chesterton’s schtick always seems to boil down to pointing out how “medieval superstition” is so much more rational than skeptical modernity. In other words, their message always seems to be a variation of: “Want to be a better modern? Try Catholicism.”

I have a couple of major objections to such a formula. One is that I don’t think it has the slightest clue as to what Catholicism and its culture actually are in any real historic sense. Perhaps here I am thinking most of the “peasant Catholicism” that I saw in my family growing up, or even the cultural Catholicism you saw in Italy. I don’t think such cultures can carry the ideological burden that they seem to place on it. Real life is a far cry from romanticist fantasy.

This meshes nicely with a comment about Chesterton that was floating around several months ago:

"In these books [his later Catholic non-fiction works] Chesterton becomes a Pangloss of the parish; anything Roman is right. It is hard to credit that even a convinced Catholic can feel equally strongly about St. Francis's intuitive mysticism and St. Thomas's pedantic religiosity, as Chesterton seems to. His writing suffers from conversion sickness. Converts tend to see the faith they were raised in as an exasperatingly makeshift and jury-rigged system: Anglican converts to Catholicism are relieved not to have to defend Henry VIII's divorces; Jewish converts to Christianity are relieved to get out from under the weight of all those strange Levitical laws on animal hooves. The newly adopted faith, they imagine, is a shining, perfectly balanced system, an intricately worked clock where the cosmos turns to tell the time and the cuckoo comes out singing every Sunday. An outsider sees the Church as a dreamy compound of incense and impossibility, and, overglamorizing its pretensions, underrates its adaptability. A Frenchman or an Italian, even a devout one, can see the Catholic Church as a normally bureaucratic human institution, the way patriotic Americans see the post office, recognizing the frailty and even the occasional psychosis of its employees without doubting its necessity or its ability to deliver the message. Chesterton writing about the Church is like someone who has just made his first trip to the post office. Look, it delivers letters for the tiny price of a stamp! You write an address on a label, and they will send it anywhere, literally anywhere you like, across a continent and an ocean, in any weather! The fact that the post office attracts timeservers, or has produced an occasional gun massacre, is only proof of the mystical enthusiasm that the post alone provides! Glorifying the postman beyond what the postman can bear is what you do only if you're new to mail."

Emphasis supplied. Of course, I'm sure that not all of the intellectual converts can be described this way.