Weigel: The gentleman from Wisconsin teaches a lesson in Catholic social doctrine

There is snobbery, and then there is academic snobbery.

Snobbery is often instinctual and inadvertent, and if it’s cruel, it’s the cruelty of the unthinking. Academic snobbery is deliberately cutting, snarky, intended to wound, and usually clumsy in asserting its own superiority.

Snobbery was the immediate reaction of English historian Christopher Dawson’s mother to the news of her son’s impending conversion to Catholicism: Mrs. Dawson wasn’t bothered so much by questions of doctrine, she told her son, but by the sad fact that he’d “now be going to church with the [Irish] help.” Academic snobbery is the letter from more than 80 Georgetown faculty members delivered to Representative Paul Ryan (R., Wis.), prior to his delivering the university’s annual Whittington Lecture on April 26. In that letter, the Hoya pedagogues not-so-subtly suggested that Ryan was a Catholic ignoramus, presumed to instruct the congressman on the meaning of the Catholic social ethical principle of subsidiarity, and concluded on an arch note, redolent of tenured arrogance: “Along with this letter, we have included a copy of the Vatican’s Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, commissioned by John Paul II, to help deepen your understanding of Catholic social teaching.”

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