Sigh
Watched Sixty Minutes from Sunday night and our friend Rev. Richard McBrien was front and center. So was a guy from the Catholic liberal America magazine ("Commonweal" got a mention too).
Oh it was artfully done. Nothing too outrageous. McBrien is so jocular he could sell ice to Eskimos. And 90% of Catholics don't know America from Crisis from Touchstone. And the scene where McBrien chides Morley Safer for being too pious is classic Sixty Minutes. The innocent reporter surprised by an insider. Well-done, at least as theatre.
The unmistakable sense in the segment called "The Priests of John Paul" was that these young priests for Pope John Paul are cultic and scary, and it featured a seminarian who, not surprisingly, was neither photogenic nor articulate. And the emphasis was how radical the Pope's (and these seminarian's) beliefs were, rather than how radical modernity's ideas are.
But could you imagine an alternate universe where Sixty Minutes does a story on the large numbers of homosexuals running the seminaries (known coloquially as the "lavendar mafia") and depicting them as cultic and scary to those in the pews? I certainly can't. No way.
Of course the story of Christianity in the world is that if you're doing it right you're going to be ridiculed. Or misrepresented. Or, heaven help us, worse.
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