They will know we are Christians by our love, even when we're kicking their teeth in.
By Nicholas Alexander Trandem, M.J.C.
The purpose of this section of Marching Orders is to try to set out the proper attitude that Traditionalists should take in dealing with other Catholics and the world at large.
I'd like to start with a few disclaimers.
- On the human interaction front, I'm somewhere between St. Simeon Stylites and the Unabomber. Therefore, the problems and suggestions in this series are not entirely based on criticisms of others – there's a healthy dose of self-loathing thrown in for good measure.
- Traditude is about tactics, not strategy. It's about the nitty-gritty in-your-face interaction we have with all these filthy wonderful human beings around us. It's about our actions and comportment, not our beliefs.
- Every Trad community has at least one person who turns non-Trads away from Traditional Catholicism by the way they interact with (read: confront) them. If you didn't immediately think of someone at your community while reading the previous sentence, it's probably you. However, this series isn't about pointing fingers, it's about trying to "raise everybody's game."
And now on with the show.
Put People before Principles.
The first problem attitude I'd like to deal with is an extremely common one in Trad circles. Whether it's a reaction to the relativist, polytheistic, liber[al|tarian] current in our society (and Church) – the ubiquitous “I'm okay, you're okay” attitude, or whether it's a consequence of many trads being very cerebral, or whether it's due to pure crankiness, there is a great temptation to put principles before people. Before we go any further, let me attempt to head off the angry comment that you're already writing in your head by explaining what I don't mean by the statement, “put people before principles.” I don't mean bow to human respect. I don't mean chuck out the Dogmas and discipline of the Church. I don't mean avoid all talk of the Dogmas and discipline of the Church, and I certainly don't mean “I'm okay, you're okay.”
What I mean is that we should always keep in mind that our interaction with other people will be Judged by our Blessed Lord on whether it is “good and acceptable in the sight of God our Saviour, Who will have all men to be saved, and to come to the knowledge of the truth.” [I Tim II:iii-iv] Time to fireproof the comments box again:
Hell no!
Okay, sorry for the bad pun. Having avoided the Balthasarite heresy on the left, let's go take a look at the other side of that spectrum for a good example of the attitude I'm railing against. Now, I have some Feeneyite friends, and although I accept that Baptism of Blood and Baptism of Desire are part of the Church's teachings, my views on salvation are still light-years closer to Fr. Feeney's than Cardinal Kasper's. That being said, I think a lot of the tactics that the Feeneyites use to promote the Dogma of Extra Ecclesia Nulla Salus are (besides being less-than-helpful in their [and our] professed mission to convert the world) perfect examples of putting the principle before the people. For example, showing up at a conference or fair or other public gathering with a big banner that says “Only Catholics are Saved” or “Non-Catholics go to Hell” or any other similar true-but-incredibly-blunt statement about EENS isn't going to convert too many people. Neither is running on to the football field shouting a similar message. Your average neo-cat, liberal catholic, prottie, or member of the general populace is going to react to this in a very predictable manner:
SHIELDS UP!
You may have the world's most persuasive argument for the necessity of conversion all ready to go, but it doesn't matter now. You've shut them off. They aren't listening. Everything you say now goes into the “loony” or “bigot” or “fanatic/terrorist/fruitier than Obama's Pastor” compartment in their head, soon to be forgotten and probably never to be internalized and examined rationally. What is needed is a more Thomistic approach, an approach where how we present our argument is determined by what will be most efficaciously received, rather than how we, in our oh-so-infinite wisdom, would like to deliver it. Don't shut people off or set off their defenses; engage them. Our Blessed Lord didn't start with the hard teachings. The Bread of Life discourse comes AFTER the loaves and fishes, and it starts out pretty non-controversial. Not “here's some bread, btw eat My Flesh” no, He leads up to the hard saying; He tries to make it as easy as possible to accept WITHOUT watering it down. He even explains Himself several different ways. He lets those who can't accept it walk away without some sort of "parting shot." Only at the last possible moment does He force the issue [lxviii], and then only with His Apostles, who as the first seminarians, needed to make an explicit choice to accept the Most Blessed Sacrament. This is the approach we should take as our model. Engage people on the level they are at, and then gradually try to raise their hearts and minds to the heavens.
I'd like to have a nice, neat chart here that would lay out the best tactics to use on people of certain personality types and backgrounds to explain certain doctrines, but that would, I think, be missing the point. The point isn't "people like x should always be approached like so," it's that people are persons. Persons are infinite and unique. Therefore, our approach needs must also be infinitely malleable (again, this is our approach that needs to be malleable, not our beliefs) and unique to each person. We need to, as Christ our Saviour commanded us this very day, "love one another." If we love the people we encounter, if we truly will what is best for them, if we see them as Christ sees them, we will moderate our infernal pride and keep our tongue in check and let the Holy Ghost guide us as we carefully lay the seeds that He will water.
When let our principles blind us to the people we interact with, the people our Blessed Lord has commanded us to Evangelize, the people He wants to save, we risk that our hearts will be hardened. We risk that our Faith will cease to be inflamed by the burning furnace of charity that is our Lord's Most Sacred Heart. We risk that our Faith will become simply an intellectual construct, a set of strictures that has no more salvific power than the sterile formulations of the modernists. We risk that in our pursuit of principles, we completely lose sight of people and become, like the modernists we are fighting, a monster (read to the end, the sucker-punch is in the last couple of paragraphs).
Posted on Maundy Thursday, a.D. MMVIII
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