I was intrigued when I first saw the headline of this U.S. Catholic article: “Transforming the quarter-life crisis.” I have many Catholic friends in their 20′s and 30′s who are in the process of discerning their vocation, career, etc, so the topic is of great personal interest to me.

I was very let down, however, by author Michael Sanem’s attempts to show what a Catholic young adult should learn from the witness of some of the most important Catholic saints in our tradition. I was particularly disappointed by his flawed characterization of Sts. Dominic, Thomas Aquinas, and Clare.

Regular readers know that I can be a bit, ahem, caustic in my treatment of arguments with which I disagree, and I have been very clear about how low an opinion I have of the publication U.S. Catholic in general. In responding to Michael’s article, however, I’m going to sincerely try to be a bit nicer. Michael is a student at Chicago’s Catholic Theological Union and I’m guessing that part of his historical ignorance and misinterpretation has been fed him in the classroom.

Michael’s article is marked by a “hermeneutics of suspicion”: like many liberal theologians, Michael equates everything bad with the institutional, hierarchical church, and therefore must claim that the church’s great saints were great because they opposed or operated outside of this institutional, hierarchical structure. To accomplish this goal, Michael is forced to twist the historical record.

St. Dominic came into contact with the Cathars and Albigensians, it is true, but he did not learn heterodoxy from them – he learned asceticism. Dominic may have “nearly” given up his theological studies at one point, but he ended up founding and dedicating his life to an order of brilliant theologians, preachers and confessors which has been a mainstay of orthodoxy for hundreds of years. The idea that Dominic took the side of the heretics against the pope is completely unfounded. In fact, Dominic travelled to Rome expressly to secure the permission of the current pope for the founding of the Dominican order. His personal dedication to out-preaching and “out-fervering” the heretics of his day is a big part of the reason why the Cathars and Albigensians are, well, history, and why the Dominican order is flourishing with young vocations today.

Michael tries to make the claim that St. Thomas Aquinas drew upon pagan and muslim sources for inspiration in his Catholic theology. Such a formulation is so over-simplifying as to be silly. St. Thomas used Muslim sources because they were the only people who had access to the writings of Aristotle at the time. St. Thomas then proceeded to write entire treatises against Islamic theology and philosophy, pointing out how the full understanding of theology in the Catholic Church was objectively superior, and is true. St. Thomas admired the wisdom of Aristotle and pagan philosophers, but always attributed their accomplishments to the revelation of Christ, who is wisdom. I doubt Michael shares St. Thomas’ clear-minded dedication to yes, finding the truth wherever it is to be found, but also – all importantly – harmonizing and synthesizing these individual truths within the unity of dogma proclaimed only by the Magisterium.

St. Clare, for her part, did strongly resist the efforts of successive popes to apply a more traditional rule on her order of nuns, but to call these efforts “papal condemnation” is, again, extremely over-simplistic. In any case, if the popes had it in for St. Clare the way Michael wants us to believe, why did a pope canonize St. Clare a mere two years after her death?! Would that liberal theologians who cite St. Clare actually shared half of St. Clare’s obedience to the successor of Peter.

Moving along, I doubt any of the saints Michael mentions would agree with him that “while the liturgy and the sacraments inspired their work, it was only brought to fruition outside the church walls.” Again, Michael attempts to create a dichotomy between the visible life of the Church (Mass, Sacraments, the Cloister, etc) and the work of the Church in the world. This is a constant temptation of liberal theologians. Michael would have us believe that “Dominic could embrace the lifestyle of heretics because he knew that God’s truth is not wholly contained within a rigid belief system.” Such a statement is awfully odd considering that St. Dominic employed (I use the verb loosely) elements of the heretics’ asceticism to encourage, well, widespread devotion to precisely the “rigid belief system” that Michael claims Catholic orthodoxy represents.

No wonder Michael wonders if St. Dominic would “pass the litmus test for orthodoxy in an increasingly paranoid Church.” Michael doesn’t understand what orthodoxy is, and he certainly doesn’t understand that St. Dominic dedicated his life to defending it against the heterodox theologians of his age.

In other words, each of the saints that Michael cites actually dedicated themselves to orthodoxy – this was the bedrock of their “quarter-life” crisis, the mainstay of their mid-life crisis and the fruit of their end-of-life crisis. Despite coming into contact with heretics who more closely followed the asceticism of Jesus Christ than the popes and bishops of his age, St. Dominic was obedient to the (at-times over-opulent) successors of Peter. Despite strong differences with the popes of her age, St. Clare sought to persuade them in love because she acknowledged that they spoke with the authority of Christ. Despite the advantages enjoyed by the Muslims in access to ancient pagan philosophers’ texts, St. Thomas used these same inherited texts to disprove and evangelize the Islamic philosophers who provided the texts to him in the first place.

By all means, my fellow young Catholics, be transformed by your quarter-life crisis, but be transformed in the right way. Don’t waste the quarter-life crisis as some are doing by missing the point of the saints.

Instead, follow the saints who followed the pope to Christ.