What Type of Catholic Commenter Are You?

Max Lindenman has prepared a guide to the different types of Catholic commenters on blogs.  You might fit snugly into one category. Or at one time or another you, as a commenter, may have fit into a few or even all of these categories.  

1) The Chief Mourner: For this nostalgic soul, spiritual perfection was realized in some Church figure of his/her youth. When that exemplar passed from the earth, the whole Church went to the dogs. To hear the chief mourner tell it, there's no point in even discussing the Church's problems, if Archbishop Sheen (Cardinal Bernardin, Dorothy Day, Pope John Paul II, Pope John XXIII) isn't around to solve them.

2) The Closet Sedevacantist: This master of reductive reasoning finds one explanation and one explanation only for every woe that plagues the Church. He blames the Second Vatican Council for clerical sex abuse, declining vocations, and even the designated hitter rule. (Pius XII would have fought to preserve the purity of our national pastime.) Since he prides himself on his docility to the Magisterium, he will, occasionally, observe a distinction between the conciliar decrees themselves and their subsequent application; but this is tokenism. In truth, he can't shut his ears to the idea that Good Pope John had been inspired by the Freemasons, the Devil, or both.

3) Casper the Friendly Ghost: The closet sedevacantist's natural counterpart and constant incubus, this person pines aloud for the Spirit of Vatican II. This Spirit, as he defines it, represented a boundless openness to change—aggiornamento without borders. In his gloomier moods, he writes of the spirit as though it were Sade's Justine—abused, betrayed, and violated at very turn. In his more buoyant moments, he writes as though it were out of commission but only temporarily, like Tinkerbell. If we all clap our hands and believe, Vatican III could be just around the corner.

4) The Heretic Hunter: If there's one thing this guardian of orthodoxy simply can't abide, it's dissent. An uber-ultramontanist, he could care less whether a particular teaching has been defined infallibly; if a pope scribbled it on a cocktail napkin, it's a nugget of pure truth. Disdaining subtlety as a fig leaf for the uncommitted, he rakes foes with broadsides like "The Catholic cafeteria is closed. Didn't you get the memo? CLOSED! From here on out, we only serve box lunches!" If all the people he banished to the Episcopal Church actually went, he'd single-handedly negate the Oxford Movement.

5) Dopus Dei: This tireless watchdog knows the Church is writhing in the steely grip of a personal prelature with 90,000 members. He has the goods, you see, because he's bestowed more clicks on the Opus Dei Awareness Network website than any member of Opus Dei, past or present. He'll tell you Opus has controlled the Curia ever since it bailed out the Vatican Bank. It also controls the Supreme Court through Chief Justice Scalia, and American Mideast policy through Erik Prince. Though he might spare a discouraging word or two for other ecclesial movements, like Focolare or Neo-Catechumenal Way, he finds them too mundane to bother about. Nobody combines "sinister," "authoritarian," "elitist," and "weird" like Don Escriva in his tight cilice and Phil Silvers glasses.

6) Fetus Frenzy: This pious and tenderhearted Catholic is the best friend the unborn will ever have—just ask her. She has a singular genius for turning any conversation into a rant against abortion. In fact, she's practiced this trick to the point where she can find a logical segue from any topic. For example, the weather: "A shame you were caught in a hail storm on the golf links. Multiply that sense of disorientation by infinity and you'll know how it feels to be vacuumed out of your mother's womb."

7) Seamless Garment: Meet Fetus Frenzy's arch-nemesis. This natural-born contrarian is a firm believer in a consistent ethic of life. He is a firm disbeliever in episcopal integrity. Until the bishops pull up their socks and start protesting the death penalty, Guantanamo, Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, urban poverty, rural poverty, and school bullying, they can go poop in their zucchetos when it comes to abortion. Warning: when this person writes "pro-life" in scare quotes, you know a storm's a-comin'.

8) "I'll pray for you [and the horse you rode in on]": This bubbling well of caritas has taken a creative approach to anger management. When feeling aggrieved, vexed, nettled, or just plain hacked off, he informs the source of his irritation that he will pray for him. Presumably, he will ask God to make his opponent as judicious and diplomatic as he is himself. Nevertheless, his tone makes you wonder whether he might also be ordering up a lightning bolt or a plague.

9) "Learn humility!" Like the tetchy prayer warrior profiled above, this cyber-skirmisher loves a good euphemism. His favorite rhetorical stealth warhead is "Learn humility," or, on stilts, "I seriously suggest you consider learning some humility!" Coming from him, it cam mean anything from "Girlfriend, please!" to "Go fulfill your Oedipal fantasies."

An exhaustive list would have to include the Mass Nazi—that arbiter of good liturgical taste, who's unshakably convinced God is a High Tory. But enough. If you're like me, you identify with at least half of these characters. (And your friend down the pew identifies with the other half.) On a bad day, all of them are all of us.

That's why I'd love to bring Emily Matchar on safari with me. That poor hipster needs to learn that the life of faith doesn't cure human neurosis. It just offers it a room with a view.