Interesting thing about this cycle of American Catholic scandal is it\u2019s flushing into the open all these Catholic subcultures that clearly thought they were a lot more central then they were
I meat at the extreme you\u2019ve got the ultra-cons using this moment to point out that \u201cfusionism\u201d and \u201cThe Catholic Moment\u201d fell thru (true) and thus the next step is integralism (haha wut)
But then you\u2019ve got the one-degree cons tearing their hair out cause the firewall of orthodoxy they thought they were hiding behind was rotten all along and even the \u201cgood ones\u201d are the same, only to realize Joe Pewsitter and certainly the broader media never made that distinction and it\u2019s already priced in to them
But THEN you\u2019ve got an American Catholic scene in general seizing on this Viganon \u201cbombshell\u201d, like This Changes Everything, clearly assuming that the Church can\u2019t bear being seen to do wrong by the American laity
Aaand I\u2019m not sure that\u2019s true, I think that a Pope from the Global South might actually be significant; America was the Catholic Future in the Vatican II \u201850s when the Church was pushed back to an Iberian authoritarian redoubt and needed allies even at the price of reimagining themselves as the white ethnic branch of Mainline Protestantism
America was still the Catholic Future when JPII matured that alliance, throwing World Youth Days in the shadow of the Cold War
But it\u2019s 2018 and I don\u2019t think America is still the Catholic Future and I don\u2019t think the loud & proud American Catholics have internalized that yet
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