Rejecting the Church's Teaching: A Guide for the Combox Troll

The Church's teaching can be a difficult obstacle to attaining your political or economic objectives. Fortunately it is ignored most of the time and easily disposed of in those few instances when it is being publicly proclaimed. Here are some tactics that may prove useful in dealing with these pests.

1. Set up a straw man. Do not attack papal encyclicals directly. This risks placing you in direct opposition to the Vicar of Christ. Instead attack secondary or local expressions of these. For example, attacking Evangelium Vitae directly would place you in direct opposition to a canonized saint. This would be uncomfortable at best. Concentrate your attentions on local bishops and bishops conferences as some Americans have done to such great effect with Cardinal Bernardin. Media and politicians have exploited the seamless garment concept for their own ends so why can't we? 

2. Set up your own hierarchy of issues. The classic technique for countering the seamless garment argument is to use it as a smokescreen. Those issues you favor are used to mask those issues you disagree with. By a careful ordering of the list you can easily ignore the bottom of the list. Just because the Church wants to serve you a banquet doesn't mean you can't pick out the dishes you like.

3. Exploit cause and effect. The killing of a baby in an abortion is a direct effect of an evil action and requires no great understanding. However, the death of a woman of a drug overdose upon release from prison or a young man suffering a mental breakdown at the back of a street car is murky at best. Most people are quite incapable of following the chain of causation and cannot separate societal responsibility from personal culpability.  In other words, the baby is innocent but the drug addict is personally at fault for their own demise. Keep it black and white and simple. Most people do not want to think deeply on these issues especially if it involves self reflection. 

4. Exploit the emotions, especially anger and resentment. Most people do not want to pick up their cross. They want to lash out and blame someone, anyone, for the pain and misfortune they have experienced. This reservoir of anger and resentment sits there just beneath the surface waiting to be tapped. Why not take advantage of it? Harnessing this anger and directing it at a target of your own choosing can be a very effective tactic. If you are careful you can come up smelling of roses while others do your dirty work.

5. Exploit people's greed and self interest. Most people are not billionaire capitalists but most people have some vested interest in the system. It may be a mutual fund or retirement plan. It may even be the Horatio Alger myth of rags to riches that motivates people. In any case people fear that any systemic change in society may cost them personally.

6. Appeal to patriotism or nationalism. What better way to counter a religious concept with than with a pseudo religious concept like patriotism? Cold war rhetoric can be used to great effect, especially epithets like communist, Marxist and fascist. Most people have only a vague notion about the real meaning of these terms but are conditioned to an almost instinctive response to them. You want the instinctive emotional reaction with little or no conscious thought behind it. It is enough that people react as though to some enemy. This is called demonization.

7. Exploit the Winnipeg Statement loophole. The reaction to Humanae Vitae contained in the Winnipeg Statement states

In accord with the accepted principles of moral theology, if these persons have tried sincerely but without success to pursue a line of conduct in keeping with the given directives, they may be safely assured that, whoever honestly chooses that course which seems right to him does so in good conscience.

This has been extensively used to promote dissent on the matter of birth control but a careful reading of it will reveal that the same rationale can be as easily applied to Quadragesimo Anno or Evangelii Gaudium as to Humanae Vitae. You might want to be careful with this one though. Just do it and don't bother publishing any high sounding statements about it. Such things have a way of biting you in the end.

8. Exploit the infallibility loophole. This is the notion that anything not proposed as infallible teaching is optional and can be safely ignored. Another variation of this is to call into question the pope's expertise in economics or political science. Americanists and other social modernists have been portraying the pope as some foreign potentate who has no real understanding of their society for well over a century. 

9. When all else fails, poison the well. Most people, however devout and blameless, have something you can latch on to. Find out what this mistake or error in judgement is and harp on it at every opportunity. Soon this seed of doubt will grow into a noxious weed, which will blot out any positive regard your opponent may have.

Unraveling the Seamless Garment

Human Life in some Documents of the Magisterium

A Consistent Ethic of Life: Continuing the Dialogue