A comment to my “Stupid” Post below by “Young Hip and Orthodox” whose email address is “wewill rockyourworld” has me meditating on the incidence of stupidity in the general population. Bear with me here I'm not calling anybody stupid.
I have expressed one of my underlying axioms to this blog: We are all material heretics. By that, I simply mean that none of us knows all there is about our Faith. To some extent, that is reflected in our imperfect understanding of the truths. Certainly all those who have Catholic blogs and who post comments on blogs fall into this category. I do believe that I’ve had an unparalleled Catholic education and I know a lot about my Faith. I can frequently recognize when something is said which contradicts the faith as I understand it and I’m pretty sure I understand that issue correctly. Nevertheless, I know I don’t know it all and a lot of other people understand our faith a lot better than I do. My simple goal is to improve my understanding of the faith. I probably can’t eliminate personal heresy entirely, I just try to keep it unintentional. That's the best most of us can do, I believe.
That would instill in me a sense of humility in approaching the Faith and in characterizing others’ understandings as deficient or unorthodox in any way. Even if I believe someone else’s formulation of the faith is incorrect, I always consider that it is I that could be mistaken. This sense of humility is often missing and certainly the “l-i-b-e-r-a-l” incident and the comment from YH&O both lack this quality. I can confidently say they are also both heterodox, in spite of both persons’ claim to orthodoxy, but that’s not my point.
My point is to consider another of my underlying axioms that doesn’t necessarily affect this blog but it does affect my professional career. Here it is:
All people are stupid.
I’m a lawyer. If stupidity vanished from humanity I would be out of work. Needless to say, my job prospects are secure. Now, by observing that all people are stupid, I’m not demeaning humanity. I am emphatically not saying that some people are stupid all the time or are inherently stupid. I’m saying something else: we all, at one time or another, do or say stupid things. Very few people are stupid all the time. Practically none of us can avoid stupidity our entire lives. The vast majority of us fall into the middle—we are stupid once in awhile. Some are stupid more frequently than others. Our goal is to reduce our stupidity factor as much as possible. Some of us take this on as a personal goal and strive to reduce our instances of stupidity. Others move on to other things, I guess.
In fact, I think that the greatest manifestation of Original Sin is stupidity, not pain during childbirth or evil. (I call that the “Theology of the Stupid.” (Now you know why I’m not papiabile) I know how to deal with genuinely evil people, who fortunately are rare. Dealing with stupidity is something else—it’s common, and people of good intentions often exhibit it. Often these people lead exemplary lives and usually exhibit good common sense and don’t lapse into stupidity on a regular basis. I think Mr. Riddle implies eactly this in his comment on my earlier post and I agree with him 100%. There’s a difference between a single event and a chronic condition.
Let’s take a look at the original post and some follow up at the offending website and YH&O’s comment. The post and comments complain that there are serious problems in our culture today. Fr. Sibley puts these problems under the rubric “modernism.” I personally think that term is too vague to be helpful, but I’m sure that he and I could list several very serious problems with modern society and agree on the causes. YH&O has listed some as well. I freely admit that I don’t agree with a lot listed by YH&O, and maybe not with everything listed by Fr. Sibley either, but that’s not the important thing. The important thing is that they and I have a lot in common. We are Catholics called to witness the Good news of the Gospel to the culture as a whole that does not want to hear about it! Furthemore, we mostly agree on what the problems in the culture are and what to do about them! Catholics (most of them, most of the time) witness to the same message. We might disagree on details of that message and we might disagree on the most effective means of witness, but we all agree that we are called to witness.
But, this method of witness is a disaster. Agnostic people who observe this gross violation of charity and humility will say, “I want no part of that or any religion that tolerates it.” Fellow Catholics who agree with the basic message are appalled and offended. The method of witness, not the message itself, is deliberately offensive, arrogant and heterodox. It’s wrong and it’s an instance of stupidity. We need to rethink how we attempt to evangelize. Let’s not be stupid about it.
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