In festo fatuorum

I feel a certain affection for this day, having been a fool too often in my life.

I still sometimes surprise myself at my conservative responses. Although I have not read Sr Elizabeth Johnson's recently condemned book, I did read She Who Is, so I have some notion of her theological "shape."

She describes her formative influences as follows:

In the decades since then, my theological thought has been influenced, challenged, expanded, and prodded forward by successive encounters with other theological movements. Each has influenced my approach to different questions, in some cases very substantially. In chronological order, my intellectual autobiography includes the following:

• the documents of Vatican II, especially Gaudium et Spes;

• biblical scholarship flourishing since the council;

• American death of God theology;

• European Catholic theology, especially Rahner, Metz, and Schillebeeckx;

• European Protestant theology, especially Barth, Bonhoeffer, and Pannenberg, on whom I wrote my doctoral dissertation;

• Latin American liberation theology, enhanced by its expression in the South African context;

• feminist theology, with its diverse voices in womanist, mujerista, Asian-American, and third-world women's theologies;

• currently underway: encounters with comparative theology, ecological theology, and postmodern thought especially as mediated through feminist theory.

Is there anything trendy she not been influenced by?

When I was involved in the Church, which accounts for 20 years of my life, I was certainly not a conservative. But I hoped I was, in most respects*, in the classical and orthodox tradition. And when I realized that I could not be, I left.

Whether it's just my aging or a somewhat right perception, I experience the Western tradition in which I was raised to be under serious threat. Internally, so many of the decent impulses of that tradition have turned, well, pardon the dramatic metaphor, cancerous. There seems to be, within the progressive movement so powerful now in our culture, a suicidal drive masked by high-mindedness.
I am not inclined to open my culture's veins to placate its despisers.

It may be a lost cause. I watch the case of Western Europe, with its double metastasis of EU regulation and Muslim immigration. I watch Canada, always a more European culture than our Revolution-shaped Yankeeness, with its self-erasure to please aliens and its hideous human rights commissars. I may support American exceptionalism, but I do not think it a magic shield.

Anyway, whoever seems to me to be a bulwark or pillar of the West has my default support.

So even though I had to part ways with my Mother Church, I have not the slightest desire that she turn into the Episcopal Church, which has kowtowed to every progressive movement in sight and continues to be both moribund and increasingly irrelevant.

Liberals are often, at first blush, nicer people than conservatives. Until you challenge them. Then the amount of bile can be truly stunning. Not to say conservatives are always charming, but I find most of them care more about the survival of what I care about.

Sister Johnson is not one of them.

*The exception is obvious by now, I hope. But even there, I decided that the Church could not change to accomodate me. And later came to think that it shouldn't. At least not in the way I wanted it to.

PS. I checked out several sites that featured the story and allowed comments. The anti-bishop comments were that they were  1. old. 2. men 3. who had not handled the sex abuse issue well 4 who were all about control and 5. were narrow minded and old-fashioned. Impressive argumentation.