Chicken Little, Pollyanna, and Socrates Walk Into a Bar
The Collateral Damage of Polemics
By Lou Massett
Chicken Little walks into a bar and orders a drink. He hasn't finished his first sip before he's leaning across the counter to tell everyone within earshot that the sky is falling, has been falling for years, and that the bar itself will be next. Pollyanna walks in a moment later, orders a lemonade, and reassures the room that everything is fine — the sky is not falling; it never was; Chicken Little has always been dramatic; look at all the beautiful glassware behind the bar. Socrates walks in last, sits down, and asks a question no one wants to answer: how would either of you know?
I've been thinking about that bar a lot lately.
Last night, I had two conversations I had two back to back conversations that have given me some pause. I want to share them both, because between them they contain what I have come to believe is the central moral problem of the age we're in — including the age of the Church we're in.
• • •
The first was with a diocesan priest — I'll call him Fr. X — who reached out after reading Traddyland. He is serving in a progressive diocese. He liked much of what I had written in Traddyland: Memoir of a Radical Traditional Catholic, but he felt obliged to offer some perspective from his side of the aisle.
I do not know Fr. X well. I know only what he told me across a ninety-minute phone call. But nothing in what he said gave me reason to doubt his fidelity to the Church or his fitness for the ministry. He struck me as thoughtful, pious, and balanced — a man who had thought a great deal about his vocation and about the men who trained him for it.
What he described was this. From the beginning of his pursuit of a priestly vocation, he had encountered a steady, quiet prejudice — in the seminary, and later in his priestly duties — that he was convinced traced to his conservative worldview. Men who come up through this system, he told me, learn to keep their mouths shut. Not out of virtue. Out of self-preservation. Speaking honestly about the Faith, in certain quarters of the mainstream Church, is a career-limiting move.
I know something about that world through my friendship with the late Fr. James Kauffman of the Diocese of Richmond. I've heard the stories. I have some sense of the pressures a conservative priest inside the mainstream Church can face — the whispered warnings, the vetoed assignments, the sermon that ends the career.
Fr. X thought, I think fairly, that a memoir written from inside the SSPX might not fully account for the difficulties his side of the aisle carries. He is right that mine does not. And I am grateful he took the time to say so.
• • •
Why do I bring this up?
Because what Fr. X described is not a Catholic problem. It is the nature of institutions. Every institution that acquires power eventually acquires an agenda — and every institution with an agenda eventually disenfranchises the people who are not playing from the same sheet of music. The mechanism does not require malice. It requires only self-interest and time.
The most visible casualty of the mechanism is the truth.
You can see this most clearly right now in the American media.
For years, virtually every major outlet in the country reported that in the aftermath of the 2017 Charlottesville riots, President Trump had said there were "very fine" neo-Nazis and white supremacists. Politicians as senior as Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and Kamala Harris repeated the claim from every podium they could reach. It became a foundational stone of a political narrative.
The trouble is that it wasn't true. In the same interview in which Trump used the phrase "very fine people," he explicitly and by name condemned neo-Nazis and white supremacists — the transcript is not in dispute. But the claim survived for the better part of a decade before it began to erode in polite company. There is no excuse for that. It went on too long, was committed by too many people who knew better, and cost too many others their belief that any of the referees can be trusted.
None of this is confined to one side. There are plenty of right-of-center outlets and voices that manufacture the same kind of narrative in the other direction. The problem is not which side is guilty of it. The problem is how ordinary it has become to smash the truth on the anvil of the story we already wanted to tell.
• • •
If I had written this essay a year ago, I might have stopped there. Media bias. Institutional capture. The disenfranchised conservative in the pew, in the sacristy, at the ballot box. Cue the applause from the people I already agree with.
But then, last night, one of my dear friends from my time in St. Marys sat me down and did to me what Fr. X had done — only from the other side of the same aisle.
He told me he had read one of my recent articles on the SSPX's illicit episcopal consecrations. In that piece I had written, essentially, that the reason the SSPX continues to offer Mass is not from a genuine desire to minister to the faithful but from opposition to the mainstream Catholic Church.
He asked me to re-read what I had written.
I did.
He was right. What I had written was not fair. I had painted the entire Society — hundreds of priests, tens of thousands of faithful, half the parish of my childhood — with a brush wide enough to smear the innocent along with the guilty. It is not true that the SSPX offers Mass only out of opposition to Rome. Many of its priests are good men. Many of its faithful are people I love and would gladly kneel beside at a communion rail. I know this. I have always known it. And I wrote a sentence that read as though I did not.
I told him I would go back and correct it. I meant it, and I have.
• • •
I bring the two conversations together because they belong together.
The Catholic tradition of the just war has, at its heart, a doctrine of proportionality. When you go to war — even a war you have justly declared — the collateral damage must not exceed the good you are trying to protect. You cannot kill a thousand innocents to save ten. If you do, the war becomes unjust, however righteous the cause was when it started.
Polemics have their own doctrine of proportionality, and most of us are terrible at observing it.
When we go to war on an idea — media dishonesty, ecclesial infidelity, radical traditionalism, progressive drift, whatever the front happens to be — we tend to fight it the way Chicken Little would. The sky is falling. Every opponent is a co-conspirator. Every institution on the other side is beyond reform. Every priest who wears the wrong cassock, every reporter who works for the wrong network, every parishioner who prefers the wrong Mass is presumed to be in bad faith until proven otherwise. And along the way, we take out a lot of innocents.
Meanwhile Pollyanna keeps insisting from the other end of the bar that there is no problem to worry about — that the sky above her side is unblemished. And she is wrong too. In a different way, and for different reasons, but wrong. Chicken Little and Pollyanna are not opposites. They are two failures of the same virtue. Neither is willing to look at what is actually there.
Only Socrates was willing to look. And Socrates was killed by the polemicists on both sides.
• • •
Let me put a Catholic point on this.
We do not want to be Chicken Little — the radical traditionalist who behaves as though the sky is falling, and who, in his conviction that the Church has been lost, takes measures that undermine the unity Christ prayed for on the night before He died. The sky is not falling. The Church has weathered worse crises than the ones that terrify us, and she has done it without her sons anointing themselves as her rescuers over against her lawful shepherds.
We also do not want to be Pollyanna — the well-meaning Catholic who insists there are no real problems in the Church, that the abuse crises did not happen, that the confusions of the last sixty years are the invention of malcontents, that the ordinary faithful are not scandalized. They did happen. The faithful are scandalized. To pretend otherwise is a different kind of injury to the same Body.
We want to be Socrates. We want to walk out into the public forum — the parish hall, the diocesan newspaper, the family dinner table, the comment section, this essay — and discuss the issues that divide us dispassionately, charitably, and fairly, so that we might come to a deeper understanding of what is actually at stake and, in time, help repair what has been broken. That is the Catholic vocation of the polemicist, if there is one. It is not to win. It is to draw closer to what is true, together.
There are people in the Church who go to extremes on the left and on the right. On any given Sunday I could point you to both. They should not be permitted to dictate the terms of Catholic life to those who are still trying to live by the theological virtues — faith, hope, and charity — and who understand that those virtues call the baptized to unity under the Supreme Pontiff, whoever he may be, however difficult his pontificate may be to endure. The extremes have loud microphones. They do not have the last word.
• • •
I do not think there is a magic formula for staying out of the fight. I think our historical moment demands that people speak. But it is possible — it must be possible — to speak without becoming the thing we are speaking against. It is possible to name what is wrong in the mainstream Church without indicting every priest who serves there. It is possible to name what is wrong in the traditional movement without indicting every faithful family who kneels there. It is possible to name what is wrong in the media without concluding that everyone who reports for a living is a partisan. It is possible to see clearly and still be careful with people.
That is the collateral-damage clause of any war worth waging: to see clearly, and still be careful with people.
Fr. X reminded me that the mainstream Church has its faithful sons who are being silenced. My friend from St. Marys reminded me that the traditional movement has its faithful sons and daughters who are being smeared. Both were correcting me — for opposite errors — and both were right.
I am grateful to both of them.
• • •
If you find yourself, as I have, standing on some contested piece of ground in this Church or this country, and inclined toward a fight you believe is just, please take this as the small confession of a man who was recently and rightly corrected. The people on the other side are also God's children. Some of them are the ones telling the truth about you. And when the war is over — as every war eventually is — you will have to sit down at a bar with them, order a drink, and reckon with what your polemic cost the innocents on their side of the sky.
Chicken Little will still be arguing at the far end. Pollyanna will still be defending her lemonade. Socrates, if he is not already dead, will still be asking the question no one wants to answer.
I would rather sit with Socrates.
• • •
Fr. X, when we finished our conversation, texted me a line about the danger that all of us who seek holiness face:
“Pride gets more dangerous the farther we proceed in virtue.”
Socrates knew it. It was the whole burden of his life.
“I know,” he said, “that I do not know.”
Two thousand years later, these words inspire me to continue to seek the humility that has too often eluded me in my pursuit to do what is good. I pray all those who strive to do good steel themselves with Socrates mindset inordr to avoid sacrificing the truth at the altar of pride and vanity.