86 Chapter 6
ONE MODERN SILLINESS
more appropriate, or at least, less bothersome.
Therefore, one possible reason to re-write the Catechism may be
political, persuasive, ideological: in this way the Catechism's re-writers
can "appropriate" its "symbols" in order "to establish a sense of
identity and a world of meaning and value" -- an identity and a world
that will be supportive of, or at least untroubling to, the New Class. If
the middle box, "Catholicism," can not entirely vanish (since Man is
inevitably childish to some extent), at least it can be made no threat to
the grown-up world:
[Cause
] [Catholicism]
[Chance]
There is a name for subversive management of this kind, and it isn't
complimentary. Of course, besides 'believe,' one thing men seem to do
irresistibly is to name things. A variant of naming, name-calling, also
appears to be another irresistible compulsion. New Class Catholicism
has called traditional Catholicism some very dirty names: obscurantist,
fundamentalist, authoritarian, racist, sexist, to name only a few. Yet
New Class Catholicism can, at the very least, provably be called
intellectually and scientifically vacuous -- and by its own standards.
Further, there may be some other, very dirty, names that may possibly
describe it: accommodationist, collaborationist, traitor, Vichy, heretic.
It is worthwhile to discuss the names in this particular name-calling,
because it brings out an important distinction.
Keeping to one side the provable charge here made against New
Class Catholicism, of complete intellectual and scientific inanity, even
if both sets of sweeping charges were equally true, the one set made by
New Class Catholics, the other set levelled against them:
leveled by New Class Catholics:
leveled against:
"obscurantist"
"accommodationist"
"fundamentalist"
"collaborationist"
etc., these are not two sides of the same coin, two pots calling each
other black. There is no formal parallelism. One representation of the
paradigm we have been examining has particular point here:
[ "Faith" ]
"Reason"
N.B. This is an html-ized copy of a page from the pdf file, The Knucklehead's Guide to Covenantal Theology.