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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   3604 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for October 30, 2022

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Does anyone know any higher ups in the Catholic Church? Maybe, specifically in Louisiana?

Still-current ‘American Conservative’ (the publication) blogger and former trad-cath Rod Dreher, who has spent a career moralizing to others, has divorced his wife and converted to Orthodoxy. I think it’s only fair and right the Catholic Church excommunicate him for his divorce and heresy.

Just wanted to see if anyone can put in a call, get the ball rolling.

  • -15

What happened to Rod and his wife? What a plot-twist!

He blogged about it, naturally. Ctrl+F "divorce" for the relevant bits. Here's one:

My wife filed for divorce in the spring, but you should know that I believe she did the right thing, ultimately, because continuing in this ferocious pain after ten years was destroying both of us. It is a relatively amicable split, one that even our priests had suggested was finally the right thing. But even relatively amicable splits are terrible, and I beg your prayers for us all.

There may be other divorce-relevant posts in his archive but since I'm not a regular reader of Dreher, I don't recall.

Rod does not want to discuss it and thanks you all for respecting his privacy.

The Chapo guys have baselessly speculated he’s running around Hungary with a group of male grad students for a reason.

Rod does not want to discuss it and thanks you all for respecting his privacy.

I do respect his privacy, but I also hope it will instill a little more humility in a man who has spent decades opining forcefully about the institution of marriage, particularly from the angle of who ought to be legally excluded from it.

One quote from him:

I never tire of quoting Pope Benedict XVI’s saying that the best arguments for the Church’s claims are not its propositions and syllogisms, but the art it produces, and its saints. I think this is the case for marriage too, at least in this decadent culture. People are not persuadable by reason, mostly because they do not share the premises on which the arguments are based. We have to accept that. They will live out the consequences of the ideas they have chosen to believe. The truth of the way Jones, as a believing Muslim, and I, as a believing traditional Christian, have chosen to live will be vindicated by our lives, and the lives of our families. That will be our witness; no other can persuade people in the grip of this madness. That’s the only reason I became a believing Christian. I had the arguments down pat in my head, but my heart refused to accept the consequences, until I had driven my life into a ditch.

As Philip Rieff taught us, people believe Truth is therapy; it’s what makes us feel good. That’s a powerful idea. It happens to be a lie. But it’s one that people are going to have to learn for themselves. They will start asking questions that the secular liberal Model cannot answer, but we can. There’s going to be a hell of a lot of suffering before the Great Re-Learning takes place. Trads like us, Jones, are going to have to be around to help the walking wounded, and to show them by our lives that there is a better way. We must be prepared to meet them with mercy, not judgment, because the way it went with them, it could have gone with us as well.

I do feel for him, and wish him well in spite of everything. Ironically, worry about divorce is one of the principal reasons I gave just a few days ago for marrying another man instead of gutting it out married to a woman. I hope those words can never be quoted back to me ironically. Dreher is right that mercy, not judgment, is ultimately the appropriate response to the wreckage of a marriage, and that after all of our preparation and resolve, it is ultimately grace (whether of god or of luck) that determines the outcome.

Damn.

Normally I'm a big fan of privacy, but Rod has made such a public spectacle of his personal takes on morality that one can't help but wonder.

Is Chapo any good any more? I briefly listened to it years back, but it seemed to be getting less and less fun and more and more tortured.

They’re very doomer, but still have enough yuks to keep me interested. Skip the most-recent episode (no. 675), in particular. They’re on tour, but still decided to still try and put out an episode, and it was a low-effort attempt guest hosted by an improv comedy duo that bombed. Not indicative of other recent efforts.

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