On Roast Pans and the Joy of Love

Ross Douthat’s concerns with Pope Francis’ recent statement on the family, which urged the church to be more hospitable to the divorced and to gays, reminded me of an apocryphal story regarding the proper way to prepare a beef tenderloin.

Once upon a time, several cousins and their families gathered in Dallas for one of those holiday gatherings by which the Uffman diaspora nourishes itself.

Tenderloin was the day’s entree. Two of the cousins and an in-law took kitchen duty. The in-law was appalled when he observed a cousin measuring and carving the roast exactly four inches from the end.

“Why would you waste that good meat?” he asked.

Whereupon my nephews looked at him as though he was nuts. “Always cut the first four inches off. That’s a family secret you need to pass on to your kids.”

When the in-law resisted further, the two explained. “Nobody ever came close to cooking a tenderloin like Granddaddy. He set the family standard. And he always cut off the first four inches. That’s the way we do it.”

When the rebel persisted, it became necessary to summon my brothers and their wives. They assured him that this was indeed the Uffman Way, though they each explained it differently. One compared it to removing the ends of cut flowers. Another suggested it was a matter of faithfulness: we were offering the first fruits of our roast to God. No one was quite sure why the practice began, but all agreed it was the only right and proper way to prepare tenderloin.

So they called Mom, who began to laugh. “Ha! Your father always cut off the first four inches because, when y’all were kids, a full roast wouldn’t fit in our roast pan.”

I remember that parable whenever I encounter a desk-pounding Chicken Little warning that our communal identity will be threatened if we depart from the sacralized communitarian truth.

Douthat, like many of both conservative and liberal bent, makes the mistake of confusing received wisdom with eternal truth. When we’ve discovered the good in the same place for a very long time, it’s easy to imagine its coordinates are singular and fixed.

Tradition is a good thing, but we must never forget that tradition is simply the healthy entrenchment of our accumulated hypotheses about the way the world is. A healthy skepticism grounded in humility is always in order.

In “The Joy of Love,” Pope Francis suggests that tenderloins prepared in emerging ways might also be tasty. For Douthat, such innovations threaten Catholic identity.

As for me, I think it’s time for all in angst over the papal letter to invest in a larger roast pan.

If you liked this, click the💚 below so other people will see this here on Medium.