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1/ Finished a book I've been pecking away at for months, Michael Gross's The War Against Catholicism: Liberalism and the Anti-Catholic Imagination in 19th c. Germany (see 22 Nov. post for cover art). Follow thread for thoughts meant to offend all.
2/ The case is made persuasively that the liberal project rightly sees the Catholic Church as its most obvious enemy. Gross is a good historian. So good, I wish he were writing more. But here's where the offense comes in...
3/ Catholics just can't be naive about the danger that liberalism poses, but they don't just hate us to hate us. They hated the RCC because they saw Catholicism as nearly irreconcilable with the project of nation building and specifically with the kind of productivity needed.
4/ As monasteries expanded and vocations rose after 1848, RCC presented a viable alternative to secularism. Monks were portrayed in liberal magazines as effeminate and unmanly, and women were chided for choosing the habit over having children and serving a husband.
5/ Like Claire Cage's work on celibacy in modern France, Gross's book highlights how serious a threat the Catholic clergy, both male and female, was to nation-building ideologies. To be Catholic was to be backwards.
6/ To be a Christian means in some sense to think about time differently. We have to let that sink in. And a robust theology of celibacy is probably at the heart, not at the fringes, of how Christians should witness to the gospel truth.
7/ As long as Catholic universities are getting rid of courses that belong to disciplines, I'd love to see all incoming students take one inter-disciplinary course on time, and another on space, and another on the body.
8/ The future of RCC in the Northern Hemisphere esp. depends on women. This has always been so, but more obvious now. RCC has a better message than secular liberalism for women. Instead of a shallow liberalism of rights, control, and body ownership,
9/ RCC can preach a deeper humanism of dependence, porousness, saturation, and sacramentality that outflanks modern understanding of time and space. But can't get there if RCC is ashamed of celibacy.
10/ Möhler was prophetic on this, in his 1828 celibacy articles, and Gross does much of the heavy lifting to fill in the picture. Okay, go watch Thrones like the rest of America now!
Addendum: by liberal I mean both economic and social. Both liberals and RCs in 19th c. Germany deemed Catholicism incompatible with modern economy and nation-state. One should be cautious about a too hasty marriage. Hence, "something to offend everyone," both left and right.
