The new rules are killing us

In present-day Western society, emotional arguments prevail even when calmer thought shows them to be baseless or ill-founded. Calmer voices are drowned out or booed off the stage. Today the crowd is booing a senior churchman who has his own take on Catholicism's sex abuse scandal.

"The real scandal is that the Catholic church hasn’t distinguished itself from the rest of society. . ."   Society “forgets or covers up the fact that 80 per cent of cases of sexual assault in the church involved male youths not children,” [Cardinal Brandmüller] told Germany’s DPA news agency in an interview a few days ahead of his 90th birthday.

Click the link to see the firestorm of response, and to read the very obviously slanted story reporting the controversy.  This man who is an officer in the church sees the church's problem as one of cultural syncretism, stemming from worldly indifference within the church toward homosexual conduct. He sees the church's sex scandal as mostly homosexual in origin. Whether you agree with him or not, his is a responsibly held and well-reasoned view of the circumstances around the church's troubles. He supposes that if you think and act in a worldly manner, the world will stain you with its ills.

But people aren't allowed to say things like that! It might offend homosexuals! And apparently it does; they don't want to be linked to the church's problems even in the very indirect way Brandmüller points to; who would?

. . .The cardinal’s comments were swiftly condemned on social media and by leading German commentators.

“What a shameful way for the Catholic Church to relativise guilt and defame homosexuals. Disgraceful,” Ulf Poschardt, the editor of Welt newspaper, wrote on Twitter.

That is just today's example of the larger problem of people arguing from their emotions. The larger problem with the trend is that people who do so are not to be reasoned with. You even offend them by disagreeing with them. It has been made an article of faith by the secular media that the church scandal has nothing to do with homosexuality, and here this Cardinal has the presumption to differ. He is a heretic! Burn him!

I am afraid that a great many other Christian arguments have been seized upon and ruled out of order by the same emotionalism. Fingers firmly in ears, the worldly travel the road appointed. We need to understand that calumny is the new and fashionable form of argument and snideness is the new wit.

Let us avoid that mode of argument among ourselves, not least when we discuss church unity. It is easy to become heated when discussing past wrongs and present disputes, but let's try hard: This world ought not to be our model.