Wednesday, October 08, 2008
LOSING THE BATTLE
Catholic news is discouraging this morning.
There is the Catholics for Obama article in the Chicago Tribune, a story about Doug Kmiec's abandonment of the Catholic beliefs about abortion and the priest who refused him communion.
There is the story in The Evening Bulletin out of Philadelphia of Benedict inviting a Jewish rabbi to address 253 bishops at the Synod that is studying Scripture, as though we now need Jewish input in order to understand our own holy book after 2000 years of keeping our own counsel. If we got it wrong for 2000 years, what on earth would lead us to think we have suddenly got it right?
There is Duquesne University School of Law Catholic sell-out dean Nick Cafardi who claims to be staunchly anti-abortion, but who is supporting Barak Obama because he believes "anti-abortion activists have lost the abortion battle--permanently."
There is the Kansas City star article about Steve Roling's Center for Spirit at Work, an ecumenical conglomeration of faiths trying to bring some sort of transcendent value back to the workplace. Perhaps a noble ideal, but what is going to be left of denominational faith in the midst of this syncretism?
There is the teacher at a Catholic high school who subscribed to two child porn websites being sent to jail for 10 years and demonstrating that the adolescents are not safe in Catholic high schools despite all of the rhetoric about keeping our children safe.
There is the Catholic News Agency story about CCHD funding Obama's Alinsky-style community organization.
There is the story of the revolt of Philippine Catholics over contraception, indicating once again that H.V. is the source of the present disintegration of the Catholic Church.
There is the wave-blessing ecumenical ceremony led by two Catholic priests who have declared St. Anthony the "patron saint of ecology".
There is another round in the battle to prevent Catholic adoption agencies giving kids to homosexuals.
There is the disagreement with the bishop reported in the Toledo Blade over yet another closed church.
All of this comes on top of yesterday's exhausting struggle with my grandson who had decided not to drink his bottles or sleep and to cry all day until his mother came to pick him up, at which point he fell asleep on her shoulder. Now that she is back to school full-time she has little time to spend with him, and his grandparents are trying to fill in, with mixed results. Child care, she informed me, costs $1,000 a month, money she doesn't have. There is no economic option for her to stay home with him. She will have to work in order to pay the bills, and the doctorate that she has worked so hard to get is not going to bring the high-paying job one would expect. Their lifestyle is anything but a lavish one.
And then there were the debates last night, centered on the financial crisis, and leaving me wondering whether we have a solid economic future in retirement or whether our retirement plans are a house of cards in the process of falling down around us, aided in failure by the astounding cost of treatment for cancer.
I'm scheduled for chemotherapy this morning--round 6 and last of the current regimen that will conclude next week. Then the PET scan and a determination of where I'm headed next in this battle to the death with a killer.
Today, at least, it looks like time to quit this blogging effort to call the Church to account, since the battle at this particular moment appears to be lost. I've been here before and risen above it. Tomorrow might look brighter, or it might not. Ultimately Scripture must be served, and the Book of Revelation paints a less than rosy picture which may be forming in present reality.
I believe Obama will win the election. I believe he will take us to a place where there is no quarter left to Catholic Christians practicing a traditional faith. I believe, this morning, that the Church in America is near to disintegrating into something unrecognizable by those of us who knew the Church prior to Vatican II. So I'm discouraged, as I suspect all pre-Vatican II Catholics are discouraged, by the state of affairs in a Church we once called home.
