Found it

(Welcome Catholic Herald/Big Pulpit readers. Please see a post on the current situation from earlier in the week here. )

 

It wasn’t Mauriac or Bernanos. It was Peguy, of course. 

… it will never be known what acts of cowardice have been motivated by the fear of looking insufficiently progressive.

Keep this in your mind as you read commentary – of any kind, really.

Of course, one can replace “progressive” with any ideology that fits the particular moment, but I do think that “insufficiently progressive” has a broad truth to it. In the contemporary world, too, with our crazy pace of news and commentary, I think we can simply add “motivated by the fear of not virtue-signaling with my Hot Take.”

That’s a problem, too.

And please remember that Peguy was no conservative, even in the context of late 19th century France. He was a fascinating character. 

Amid various struggles for workers rights and relief efforts, Péguy became a socialist of sorts because he believed that true socialism sought real brotherhood and respect among men. He was young, and the world had not yet seen any socialist regimes. But he intuited the true spirit behind socialist movements when he came into contact with actual socialist practice. Péguy was by nature incapable of the kinds of lies and partisanship that make up most party politics. His verdict about such things is a phrase known to many people who have otherwise never heard of Péguy: Everything begins in mysticism (le mystique) and ends in politics. This formula summed up more than twenty years of political experience.

Péguy the socialist also became a supporter of Dreyfus, the French Jewish officer wrongly accused of spying for Germany. He started a journal, the Cahiers de la Quinzaine, to defend these and other just causes because he discovered at an international convention that the socialists practiced the same kind of partisan lying and injustice that he had associated with bourgeois conservatives. Journals like his were forbidden to criticize positions taken by the movement. The socialist mystique was betrayed by socialist politics.

For Péguy, the root of any mystique was remaining fidèle (faithful) to truth and justice despite party commitments. He would refuse to impose an orthodoxy even on writers for the Cahiers: A review only continues to have life if each issue annoys at least one-fifth of its readers. Justice lies in seeing that it is not always the same fifth. Without support from either right or left in a sharply ideological France, his fidelity led to a passion in a more Christ-like sense, persecution and gradual economic strangulation by established powers.

Another truth about human behavior that might help some of this click for you is this:

More people than you suspect are motivated to make more of their choices than you could imagine not so much by what they are for, but by what and whom they are against. 

Basically:

I am not sure what I believe, but Those People believe the Wrong Thing, so I must be against everything they say and do. 

In this post-Vatican II world of Church partisanship, this drives a great deal. It’s just another way of expressing the reflexive reliance on ad hominem that we see in reactions to events.

It’s pretty basic:

Asking: What did members of the hierarchy, including Pope Francis, know about the misdeeds of clerics and how were these misdeeds dealt with?

Is not attempting to cause a “rift” in the Church as this astonishing statement from Ave Maria University President Jim Towey recklessly claims. [Update – original statement has been removed. See below for another statement.] Can we put him and Archbishop Cupich in Remedial Logic 101?

Update: Another, follow-up statement from Jim Towey.