A Mother Is Not a Pretext

A few weeks ago I published "The Long Fast," an essay about my mother — about the thirty years she spent apart from the Eucharist, torn between fidelity to her husband and fidelity to the Church's teaching, and about the confessor who finally helped her find her way back to the altar. I wrote it because I believed her story said something true about mercy, about the burdens ordinary Catholics carry in silence, and about why Pope Francis's pastoral instincts in Amoris Laetitia matter.

This week, Austin Ruse used that essay as the occasion for a piece in Crisis Magazine attacking me, Pope Francis, and what he calls the Church of the "New Gaze." You can read it below — I would rather you see his words for yourself than take my characterization of them on faith. I won't pretend it didn't sting.

I have no objection to being disagreed with. I have written enough about Amoris Laetitia, about Vatican II, about the pastoral posture of this pontificate to expect pushback, and I welcome honest argument from those who see these questions differently. That is not what troubles me here.

What troubles me is watching my mother's private anguish — her love for my father, her love for the Church, the quiet suffering of a woman who is no longer here to speak for herself — conscripted as ammunition. Mr. Ruse wonders in print whether she even went to confession in all those years. He questions the sincerity of her devotion. He does this to a woman he never met, based on a few paragraphs I wrote in tribute to her, and he does it in service of an argument that has nothing to do with her and everything to do with his quarrel with me.

My mother was not a case study. She was not a rhetorical device to be turned against the Pope or the Council or her own son. She was a woman who wrestled honestly, for decades, with a real moral burden, and who found in the confessional not laxity but mercy rightly ordered to conscience. That she disclosed this so late in her life, and that I only shared it publicly after both my parents were gone, should have been read as an act of filial honor. It was received instead as an opening for an attack on her son.

There has been an added indignity since. Dr. Peter Kwasniewski reposted Mr. Ruse's piece on his Facebook page with an introduction of his own, telling his readers that I am "the Substack author who repeatedly and lengthily defends the Novus Ordo using AI-generated texts."

I will let that claim stand next to the two years of essays it purports to describe. Anyone who has followed this Substack from its early pieces on Louvain personalism through the Amoris Laetitia anniversary essay knows the voice, the recurring preoccupations, the arguments built and revised over time, the record of a single mind working through these questions in public. That record is there to be read and judged on its own terms.

What I will say is this: when an argument cannot be met on the merits, the fashion of our moment is to question whether its author is even real. It is a curious weapon for a theologian to reach for, and a telling one. It answers nothing I have written about Amoris Laetitia, nothing about the Council, nothing about the pastoral posture of this pontificate. It simply changes the subject from what I said to who supposedly said it. I would have welcomed a reply to the argument. I did not expect to have my authorship itself put on trial instead.

I hold no anger toward Mr. Ruse or Dr. Kwasniewski, only sadness — for the state of a discourse in which a mother's grief can be treated as an argument to be won, and for a moment in the Church when charity toward the dead apparently requires a disclaimer. I will go on writing about Pope Francis, about Amoris Laetitia, about the pastoral vision I believe is faithful to both doctrine and mercy. That conversation should continue. But my mother has been laid to rest, and she deserves to rest in peace, not to be exhumed as a prop in someone else's polemic.

Requiescat in pace.

Monsignor Arthur Holquin, S.T.L.

crisismagazine.com/opin…