Monday, January 29, 2007
ROD DREHER COMMENTS ON AN AMY WELBORN BLOG
Fascinating, red-hot thread over at Amy's, about Catholic schooling, kicked off by Alexandra Pelosi's comments in this SF Chronicle story:
Learning about that divide was a shock to the woman who spent her childhood in progressive Catholic schools. "We were taught just to accept people, that was just a given," Pelosi says. "I don't ever remember being told at Convent of the Sacred Heart that gay was wrong. They never even told us there was anything wrong with abortion. They were just choices.
"That's why it was weird when I'd go to these places and ... people would say, 'It's in the Bible.' And they fall back on the Bible for everything."
During Nancy Pelosi's speaker celebrations this month, as the Pelosi clan drove through the streets of Washington and Baltimore together, some protesters held up signs that read, "Pelosi Preys on Children" -- a reference to the speaker's pro-choice stand, which contradicts church doctrine.
"My mother, throughout her entire life, has been faithful to the church, even though the church has not been that faithful to her because of her politics. And I think that takes a lot of perseverance," she says. "And still, people protest her right to go to her own church."
Go read the long string of comments left by Amy's readers, all of them Catholics, and as far as I can tell all faithful to the Church -- and all of them very bitter about how their Catholic school experience destroyed (for a time) or threatened to destroy their Catholic faith. Note well: these aren't Catholics who are angry at the Church for being too strict; they are angry at the Church for not being the Church. It is an astonishing thread, really astonishing, because in it you can see pain and destruction caused by the Gramscian march through the institutions that the postconciliar Catholic left undertook. There is a whole world captured in those heartrending posts -- but also hope, too, because these people managed to endure and even triumph over their Catholic educations seemingly designed to turn them into ex-Catholics.
Continue reading...
Some commenters here are bothered by the fact that I no longer entirely trust the Church and trust even less the church in my area. Rod's blog describes why. I had to take my kid out of parochial school because the sex ed program was not Catholic and I believed was corrupting the youth. I put her in public school at the time because it was better than Catholic school on sex ed. and because I couldn't find an alternative Christian school that would teach my Catholic values and that I could also afford. The move to public was a move I have never regretted. It served her faith much better than the Catholic school did. I have good reason not to trust the local church.
