Mark,
I like reading your material on CatholicExchange.com but every now and again I run into something jarring. When you replied to a protestant in the article “Is the Catholic Church a Christian Church?” you wrote: You can be Catholic if you are divorced. You can't receive communion if you divorced and remarried, because Jesus (remember him?) etc.” The parenthetical comment seems out of place and almost derogatory.
In another place you wrote to Rev. Chuck Moss: “Please feel free to write again. Only, could you not lard your email with giant quotes? They make the eyes glaze over. Give me your own thoughts.” If someone told me that my use of quotes made their eyes glaze, and that I was “larding” my emails with them — I would not write again. There are nicer ways to say the exact same thing.
I am not sure if these types of comments are meant to be humorous but I can see people not taking them that way. Again, I think you are doing a good job, but I felt I needed to bring this to your attention.
Luke Szymanski
Luke:
Thanks for your thoughts. As a general rule, I try to attune my replies to the spirit of the original email. If the correspondent is obviously pugnacious, I will sometimes be a bit pugnacious back. That may be a miscalculation on my part, but my intent is to say, “If you think that you are being intellectually rigorous, then please be aware that Catholics are capable of intellectual rigor as well.”
As to the comment about making eyes glaze, I was being perfectly honest as a reader. The email included a massive cut and paste of dry 17th century prose that was duller than dust. Typically such passages can be linked on the web without giant cut and paste jobs. Also, quite typically, they constitute a form of “hiding” from the people the correspondent is attacking. Such passages are hurled out like grenades because the correspondent doesn't really know how to think and so hopes that he can overwhelm you with verbiage from an Authority. It's the intellectual equivalent of a drive by shooting. My purpose in pointing that out is to challenge the correspondent to have the courage of his convictions, show his face, and actually face the people he is so casually sliming. I don't regret doing that at all.
Mark Shea
Senior Content Editor
Catholic Exchange
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