Failing in Public

There are times in the public forum when its necessary to call someone on the carpet. This is one of those times.

I advise you to pull the full article and read it for yourself, but I'll give you the short version here. Rod Dreher seems to be having some trouble with reconciling the duty of a reporter to tell the public useful things with protecting the faith of believers. This individual had a personal crisis of faith, according to the article in question, and changed confessions after digging deep into the Catholic Church's various sex scandals. Now Dreher is an Orthodox Christian and has chosen to ignore scandals in his new confession. He has decided for his family that they need religion more than he needs to uncover corruption but hen asks us, his readers, if he is being prudent or cowardly.

Well, Rod, if you're reading, here's my reply; yes. If you're most important goal is to protect yourself and/or others from having their eyes opened to the realities of ecclesiastical practice, the blatant hypocrisies and deceptions of people who claim to draw moral and spiritual authority from some perfectly good and just being, then yes you are exercising prudence. That does not however absolve you of neglecting your duty as a journalist to tell your fellow human beings when the people they count on for leadership and/or guidance are abusing that trust. So, since you are abandoning your duty in order to spare yourself an unpleasant but hardly dangerous experience, I have to say you most certainly are being cowardly also.

Dreher quotes scripture, "You shall know truth, and the truth shall set you free." What he seems to not understand is that freedom (physical, mental or spiritual) makes no promise of comfort and often demands that you make changes that it also liberates you to achieve. He complains that the truth in this instance, "nearly Destroyed my Christian faith." In the first place I suspect that this is more a matter of his dependence on an external institution for his faith; in the second I would point out that the line about truth and freedom makes no mention of what exactly you are to be freed from/of when you "know truth."