Sunday, April 22, 2012

I don’t think it means what you think it means

An open letter to my friends as you may want to comment on the Church’s recent report regarding women religious organizations and the LCWR

FAIR WARNING: Please read carefully before you comment. This post is my reflections on the Catholic Church with regard to the subject of individuals rushing to slam and skewer the report recently issued regarding the LCWR (Leadership Conference of Women Religious). I welcome all differences of opinion; however, they must be made with courtesy and respect. All ad-hominem attacks and viciousness will be immediately deleted. And I am the arbiter of what constitutes an attack, anything vicious, or anything worthy of deletion. You have been warned.

Here it goes …

First piece of advice to all – read the darned documents themselves! … … okay, let me back up a bit. The Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith (CDF) released its report, with the approval of Pope Benedict XVI, regarding its findings. And who or what was the subject of this report?

In 2008 the CDF announced, at the invitation to the US Bishops, visited a number of women religious orders, homes, and leadership organizations among them. The primary group – because of its scope and size – was the LCWR, who are an organization comprised of nearly 80% of women religious orders in the US.

And why the visitations and ultimate report? Simple! There was a significant concern that the LCWR – particularly its leadership – was opposing Church doctrine. Such opposition seemed to be more and more public in that the leadership was issuing what seemed to be policy statements or position papers; and they broke from the US Bishops by opposing them.

Now I return to my initial admonishment to read the actual report, rather than rely on the slanting editorials or opinion pieces offered up by the Huffington Post, NY Times, NPR, Fox News, or any outlet. Look … These groups are not in the business of learning and understanding Church doctrine. It’s not their business model. And let’s face it – all the news organizations are a business. Their goal is to sell subscriptions, or to convince you to buy the right kind of soap, and the like.

Archbishop Fulton Sheen was reported to have said, “There are only a handful of people who hate the Church. But there are many many people who hate what they think is the Church.” … meaning that the screeds spewed from their mouths and pens and word processors are nearly always attacking a Church that is mythical, imaginary, and utterly non-existent rather than the real, honest-to-goodness, actual Church.

And so my admonishment continues to be: read the documents themselves.

We live in a sound-bite culture … and this is completely borne out by all the short witticisms that show up as Facebook status updates. Brevity is the mother of wit … and I can definitely say that there is a lot of wit shoveled onto Facebook these days. A lot of wit, but not much of understanding (and I’m finding a serious decline in respect, but that’s a subject for a different post) nor of a desire to seek understanding. I am sure that this is a matter of ignorance – that of just not knowing. I can believe there are people out there somewhere who knowingly spew falsehoods. But those who copy and paste articles, or quippy quotes, and the like are doing so out of just not knowing.

If content is king, context is queen

The bigger challenge in all of this is to learn the context of things. If you want to know both WHAT and WHY the Church teaches what she does, for example, on artificial contraception then one must read and study the Catechism of the Catholic Church as well as the various encyclicals that deal with this subject … most notably Humanae Vitae.  If you want to know and understand why the Church teaches that the sacramental priesthood is reserved only for men, then you must read the various documents pertaining to that subject.

The Church has been around since the time of the apostles. She’s had a lot of time to ponder God’s Revelation through Jesus. She’s spent a great deal of effort thinking, reflecting, and developing her doctrine in light of that Revelation. And the astounding thing is that she’s written nearly all of it down. And, furthermore, this stuff is available to the ordinary slobs like you and me. Not only is the Church unafraid of her teachings and the reasons why; the Church wants all of us to have access to them.

The key is that the Church’s teaching is actually a continuum … it’s a continuity from the Apostles to this very day. If you want to truly, really, honestly want to learn and understand Church’s teaching then you’ll have quite a bit of reading to do.

Yet, read you must! Go to the source directly rather than rely on ‘the gospel according to The Huffington Post, or New York Times, or CNN, or Fox News’ …

Now go out and read the documents.

Thursday, April 19, 2012

Guys day

I live with one of those most interesting creatures known to human civilization: a teenager. With all of the trials and frustrations that are part of raising this young man to be a responsible, self-reliant, caring, inquisitive, etc. adult man there are also moments of absolute joy and wonder. And one such occasion of joy was when the guy asked if we could have a “guys day” . . . just the two of us to go out, see a movie or something. Of course I jumped at the chance!

So we set aside a recent Saturday for this unprecedented event and ventured out to the movies. We saw An Act of Valor . . . the teen is just shy of 17 years old, so I am comfortable taking him to see this.

This was something he wanted to see; and his mother is quite squeamish – he knew that she’d never make it through the movie at all.

And I was all to happy and eager to have this time with the boy.

Okay . . . so, not the best action movie – we’ve both seen better. But it certainly has reverence for the men and women who sacrifice so much for the rest of us, so we can go about our lives (and even blog about it).

After the movie we both wanted to extend our day together. “How about we go out for something to eat?” he asked.

“Sure! Have any place in mind? There’s a Buffalo Wild Wings nearby.”

“Wild Wings sounds great!”

And so we did. Several orders of hot wings later, along with some pretty awesome conversation, we finally made our way home. And there we regaled my wife about the events of the day, which was one more way for me to relish the time spent with my son.

And the best part of it all was that he, unsolicited, ended the day with, “I liked this. Let’s do it again soon.”

Soon can’t come soon enough for me!