Video Meliora, proboque; Deteriora sequor

But What Would We Have to Talk About?

Amy's tired of treating symptoms; she tells it like it is:

The crisis is not met by issuing statements about those second-tier issues [pro-abort politicians, the fondness of Catholics for the Left Behind books and The Da Vinci Code....]. The crisis is met head on by admitting that in the past forty years, Catholics have lost sight of Christ, that you can sit in a Catholic Mass and not have any strong sense, week after week, that this about the passionate love that Christ has for you and calls you to embrace and share and live. That's the crisis. Catholicism, in its American manifestation, is hardly about Christ. It's mostly about insititutional concerns: membership, money, leadership and public perception. And contrary to current wisdom, none of those things happen to be God.

True. The fact that there are American Catholic pro-choice politicians, for example, says nothing about abortion and everything about the state of American Catholicism. My idea of fighting current ills has moved from donating to the "National Right to Life" PAC to giving away copies of Scott Hahn's "Rome Sweet Home" - because the source of the problem has less to do with politics than with love - as exemplified by Hahn's commentary on John 6.

And last Sunday our priest said that we need to read the Gospels more often, explaining that otherwise "how will you get to know Christ?". How indeed.