Confronting Theological and Ideological Tensions

Father Ron Rolheiser's recent column "On Carrying Ecclesial Tension" was carried in my local Catholic newspaper, The Catholic Review, as "Accepting tensions within the church." It struck a chord with me. The column took up the difficult question of how conservatives and liberals within the church ought to conceptualize their differences.

Before concluding that "we need to carry both, the conservative and the liberal understanding of things," Rolheiser anatomizes the conflict this way:

... if I'm a conservative, my sense will be that things are clear, but get confused because false freedom sets itself against truth and community. My itch will be to resolve tension and differences by appealing to authority, dogma, tradition, law, and rubrics, but without an equal appeal to the complexity of life and individual freedom.

Conversely, if I'm a liberal, my approach to understanding things will be to start from life's ambiguity rather than from its clarity. My worry will be that complexity and private conscience are not being sufficiently respected and my itch (suffered in the name of conscience, freedom, and the spirit) will be to resolve issues without an equal appeal to tradition, dogma, authority, and law.

To me, that's profound. In this corner, wearing red trunks, says Rolheiser, are tradition, authority, law, dogma, rubrics, community values etched in bedrock certainties ... and the generally conservative worldview which enshrines them all. In the other corner, wearing blue trunks, are complexity, private conscience, an itch for freedom which is potentially but not necessarily false, and a spirit of truth-seeking which begins, relativistically, by holding "life's ambiguity" up for inspection, and not with a statement of clear and certain absolutes.


Coincidentally, on the same page in The Catholic Review as Rolheiser's column is one by well-known conservative voice George Weigel, "How a nun built global TV empire," available online under a different title here. Weigel views the example of Mother Angelica, founder of the Eternal Word Television Network, through the lens of Raymond Arroyo's recent biography of her.

In something of an understatement Weigel says, "EWTN's style of Catholic piety may not be universally appreciated." Got that right, George! I for one would rather spend time viewing a test pattern than watching EWTN. Part of the reason is that, to me, the "extreme" reverence on view at ETWN patterns with what seems an outmoded view of women ... even if, though a woman, Mother Angelica has become something of a media mogul in her own inimitable "dumpling" way.

As Weigel puts it:

There’s ... food for thought here [in Mother Angelica's story] as Catholics of both sexes ponder the meaning of John Paul the Great’s [i.e., Pope John Paul II's] Catholic feminism. The most beloved figure in contemporary Catholicism was a woman — Blessed Mother Teresa of Calcutta. The most powerful and successful Catholic media mogul of our time is a woman — Mother Angelica. What does it mean for the future that neither Mother Teresa nor Mother Angelica had much use for “Catholic feminism” as it’s usually defined, and that both were completely devoted to John Paul II’s understanding of the unique dignity and vocation of women?

"The unique dignity and vocation of women": if that phrase means anything, it means a lot. It means that women are called to radically different lives than men are, and so they must be radically different. There must accordingly be an ontological, metaphysical distinction between how God "sees" men and how God "sees" women — since the Creator's "sight" establishes what things (and people) really are.

The people who insist that women and men have fundamentally different dignities and vocations are, in my analogy, the ones wearing the red trunks. The boxers in the blue trunks insist that there's no good reason why, for instance, women can't be priests.


Some days I wear blue trunks, and on other days my boxing trunks are red. I really can't decide about what women, if radically distinct from men, fundamentally are. Nor can I decide once and for all about whether there's anything basically wrong with (say) gay and lesbian love, or premarital sex, or masturbation, or birth control. These are among the many theologically hot-button issues which vex me.

At a much deeper level, I am truly torn between honoring complexity and kowtowing to certainty ... between extolling insouciant creativity and insisting on rigid order ... between wanting to move forward toward progressive desiderata and wishing to move backward to shore up old values, now crumbling like a levee in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.

I think my dedication of this blog to "solidarity" must be a way of externalizing and then trying to heal the inner tension in my own gut.


The one thing I can say with great certainty is that I want and need to understand these issues, these tensions, much more deeply than I do now.

Here, I'm taking my cue from something I have just read in Malcolm Gladwell's bestselling book Blink. It's a book about harnessing the "adaptive unconscious" to make spot-on-target snap judgments.

Gladwell shows that we each have a vast potential for looking at new information or a new situation which we feel called on to judge and within the blink of an eye intuiting what is most important, most telling about the situation. We derive therefrom what is very often a spot-on evaluation before we've even had time to clear our throats to say why.

And that's the funny thing about what Gladwell calls "thin-slicing," this ability to instantly detect the essence of something — what really counts about that something — without pausing for reflection. To wit, if we do pause to analyze, reflect, and try to say why we think what we do think, we're apt to mess up our thin-slicing. We're likely to screw up our spur-of-the-moment judgment-making capacity super-royally.

For, Gladwell shows, that capacity exists in our unconscious mind, and when we try to make its declarations conscious, they get garbled. Except — and here's the key thing — if we have studied with diligence and passion, for a very long time, the field of knowledge which provides the context for our snap judgments. Then and only then can we claim to be experts ... experts being folks whose vast store of "knowledge gives their first impressions resiliency" (p. 322, large-print edition). In other words, experts are people whose intense study of a field allows their conscious rationales to mirror and explain their unconscious snap judgments in that field.


More quotes from Gladwell on this subject include:

" ... it is really only experts who are able to reliably account for their reactions." (p. 310)

"... with experience we become expert at using our behavior and our training to interpret — and decode — what lies behind our snap judgments and first impresssions." (p. 316)

"This does not mean that when we are outside our areas of passion and expertise, our reactions are invariably wrong. It just means they are shallow. They are hard to explain and easily disrupted. They aren't grounded in real understanding." (p. 318)

This last quote points up the idea that even experts in field A are prone to shallow reactions in field B, an area they haven't studied intensively.

I suspect I'm in that very position of having shallow reactions with respect to the hot-button issues that confront my church and society today and divide conservatives and liberals. When one of these issues pops into view, I immediately climb into either my blue boxing trunks or my red boxing trunks, depending (I suppose) on how I'm feeling that day. But I admit that my gut reactions — whether they happen to be right or wrong — are shallow and easily disrupted. Next time the same issue comes up, you may well find me wearing a different set of trunks.


So I would say to Ron Rolheiser that we have to do more than simply accept the tensions within our church, and by extension within the larger society. We have to go deeper than that. We have to do what all experts do: tunnel through the "locked door" behind which Malcolm Gladwell says our adaptive unconscious carries out its functions. We must learn to justify our reflexes, not just to ourselves but to one another.

If we prefer (to take a quotidian analogy Gladwell employs) Coke to Pepsi, we must discover how the reasons for our judgments relate to objectively discernible aspects of the reality we are judging. We each have to get our reasoning mind and our adaptive unconscious singing from the same hymn book. Only then can we begin to have meaningful discussions amongst ourselves by means of which to heal the tensions we are dutifully accepting.