How to be a post-modern Catholic

Easy.  You follow the post-modern way of declaring things to be yesterday’s truth. So Mark Shea is absolutely beaming at Pope Francis’s remarks about Trump. True, the media is now reframing the story and suggesting that perhaps Pope Francis didn’t really mean Trump is not a Christian.  Perhaps.  I’ll leave up my last post simply because the Pope’s reaction, no matter how you parse it, stands in stark contrast to his reaction to previous questions about abortion and homosexuality.

But Mark Shea built his ministry on attacking traditionalists and conservatives for, among other things, hoping that popes would swing in and call out this politician or that Catholic.  Combox Inquisitor I think is the term Mark used.  Those who even thought about questioning the spiritual character of an individual – like Stephen Colbert for instance – were immediately attacked as a radical traditionalist or fundamentalist.

So Mark’s reaction to the Pope doing what no previous pope should be expected to do?  This:

Note, Mark is not cheering the Pope on despite the fact that he may have called out Trump’s Christian identity.  He is doing it precisely because he believes, based on the headline and story, that the Pope did just that.  The very thing Mark spent years hammering, and so many of his readers joined in to condemn.  Now, the very thing that makes the Pope awesome, and more to the point, Catholics awesome for agreeing with him, is that thing Mark harshly condemned for so many years.

Post-modernism and Catholicism are as compatible as Kosher ham.  And it does no good to condemn the relativity of post-modernism if you go ahead and live it.  As I’ve said before, we’re not liberals.  It’s not what you say that matters.  It’s what you do.  And if you spend your ministry life condemning Catholics who hope the pope acts as der panzerpapa and calls out this or that politician, then when it finally happens your response should be sorrow.  It should not be elation.