Crunchy Schism

[E]ven if the Catholic church was [sic] run by psychopathic tyrants, that has nothing whatever to do with whether or not the Catholic faith is true.

In Orthodoxy and me, Rod Dreher credits Father Andrew Greeley with above idea, but spends the rest of the article discounting Fr. Greeley's "crucial point." Sorry, but the handling of the gay priest scandal and a bad experience with a hypocritical parish priest are not sufficient evidence of the falsity of the Catholicism, just as the "crunchiness" of the Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, as beautiful as it is, is not sufficient evidence for the truth of Orthodoxy. To be fair, Mr. Dreher hasn't yet converted, but these reasons seem insufficient for provoking the "Kierkegaardian dilemma" he speaks of. I've heard of Orthodox priests turning away prospective converts for suspecting them of being Russophiles, not lovers of Christ. What would an Orthodox priest say of Mr. Dreher?

That said, I understand Mr. Dreher's attraction to Eastern Orthodoxy. When I decided to leave Protestantism in 2002, the year the of the gay priest scandal broke, had there been an Orthodox parish in Pohang or even Ulsan, I would have likely swum the Bosphorus, not the Tiber. I had easily seen the truth of Apostolic Succession. While Papal Primacy was my last stumbling block, it was not long before I became an Ultramontane.

Both Tom Herron (in Rod Dreher: Ex Oriente Lux) and William Luse (in Catholic burnout) take on Mr. Dreher's reasoning.

The more I read, the less inclined I feel to read Mr. Dreher's book: Crunchy Cons : The New Conservative Counterculture and Its Return to Roots.

The book that is the subject of the post immediately below this one seems more to my taste: Look Homeward America : In Search of Reactionary Radicals.