What I saw at the Abbey of the Genesee and why it matters for the crisis in the Church.

This article by Larry Chapp is great (found via Michael Liccione).  It reminds me of an intellectual version of The Great Façade by Thomas Woods and Christopher Ferrera.  I am putting two bits from the article here but the whole thing is really worth reading and pondering:

"And so my larger point is that the bishops are/were not singularly evil men, but were rather the products of the ecclesiastical culture of their age.  And that culture is largely reflective of the culture that surrounds us.  But therein resides the true nature of the “winter” in which we find ourselves, and the true nature of the disease that afflicts us.   In short, at some point in her history the Church in North America and Europe ceased to be culture-forming and came to be, instead, formed by the culture. 

"My claim, therefore, is that the fundamental crisis in the Church today is not rooted, primarily, in sexual perversion.  It is rooted, rather, in the idolatry of worldly comfort, which I take to be the very essence of the bourgeois spirit.  It is an idolatry made respectable (and therefore unrecognized as idolatry) by the Church’s modern acceptance of the Enlightenment’s co-optation of the Kingdom of God by politics and economics.  This entails as well the de facto, practical atheism that ensues when God’s Transcendence comes to be viewed competitively over and against our worldly fulfillment.  In such a bourgeois regime, where Christianity has been tamed and has become just one more aid or help to our self-improvement in this life (Shmemann’s genius insight), the Kingdom of God has to be gutted of its true supernaturally transformative power and replaced with either the ridiculous Gospel of prosperity or the totalizing social/political Gospel of the Left.  And, as Schmemann further points out, our status as homo adorans, as primarily in our essence “worshipers of the true God”, is thus replaced by homo faber, or humanity viewed as a mere economic commodity, either as a producer or as a consumer, and as a forger of brave new worlds in the here and now."