Catholics need to stop ...

... making arguments like the one Mary Eberstadt has over at First Things.

In a piece that could rightfully be described as a screed Eberstadt manages to get basic facts wrong and completely misread history. But much, much, much worse than that she says this:

Although commentators quickly dubbed this unexpected overture a “gambit,” what it truly exhibits are the characteristics of a move known in chess as a “brilliancy,” an unforeseen bold stroke that stunningly transforms the game.

No, he did no such thing. His move was not strategic but pastoral. He saw sheep without a shepherd and he offered them a home.

More importantly, this is not a strategic game. The point of Christianity is not to be the dominant force in this world. It is not to see off opponents called Christianity lite.

Eberstadt's triumphalism continues with an assertion that it is traditional Christian moral teaching that divides the Orthodox winners from Chrsitian Lite losers. Would it be unkind to remind her that it is precisely in those jurisdictions where Catholicism held the most sway politically and culturally—e.g. Italy, France, parts of Germany and Quebec—where the birth rate is the lowest today. Below the replacement rate in fact. This suggests that supposedly pro-family Catholic teaching was not particularly pro-family in practice. It suggests that people "followed" Catholic sexual morality because it was imposed on them by the culture and politics and when that yoke was removed they ran free.

As Gregory the Great noted long ago, a Catholic Church without lots of children being born has no future. Yes indeed, Christianity Lite is floundering, but to take as a lesson from that that everything is hunky dory on our side of the tracks is delusional at best.

And, please, no educated person should ever write anything as ill-informed as the following:

In fact, in a fascinating development now visible in retrospect, the Anglican departure over divorce appears as the template for all subsequent exercises in Christianity Lite.

Please, Henry did not found Anglicanism. He created the mess that necessitated its founding but his search for divorce was not the founding principle of Anglicanism. This a fact so obvious even Eberstadt includes it in the very next sentence she writes (thus destroying her own argument):

For about two centuries, and despite its having been midwifed into existence by the divorcing Henry VIII, the Church of England held fast to the same principle of the indissolubility of marriage on which the rest of Christian tradition insisted.

I do wish writers like Eberstadt would step back a moment and consider the effects their writing will have on outsiders. Her smug, triumphalist writing will only appeal to people inside her camp, and her camp is a subset even of Catholics. Everyone else will be appalled.

The really sad truth is that there is a grain of truth at the heart of what Eberstadt says here; there is a point that should be made. Unfortunately it gets swamped by all the other nonsense she writes. And what is it? Check my next post.