Obama, Notre Dame and the Ghetto Catholic mentality

Notre Dame has invited President Obama to speak and the radical right wing of the Church is having a cow. How a Catholic University invite the President of the United States to address its commencement. A recent comment on this by Salon.com editor Joan Walsh, engendered a flurry of responses. http://www.salon.com/opinion/walsh/politics/2009/04/01/notre_dame_obama/

I am saddened by the number of her readers who described themselves as Ex-Catholics, even atheists. For all of its two millennia of folly, the fact is that the Catholic Church is still the most direct route back to the preacher who lived and died in the land between the seas, and taught us what love meant.

The Church has always been much bigger and more diverse an institution than the Vatican likes to admit. Umberto Eco's masterpiece, “The Name of the Rose,” was much more than a medieval mystery story. It was a snapshot of the ferment, and intellectual diversity, of the Church in the Middle Ages. That ferment and diversity persists.

It was also a paean of praise for St. Francis who single-handily staved off the reformation for two centuries. I remain a Catholic because the essential issue of the Reformation was salvation by faith alone. Luther was reacting to the scandal of the Church pedaling indulgences. He ignores St. Paul. I believe that love engenders faith and I am one with St. Paul: I can have faith so as to move mountains, but without love, I am nothing. Only I believe that literally: without love there is only oblivion.

I attended a Catholic High School and we had to spend a buck to get a black bound copy of the New Testament. More than fifty years later, I still have it, and refer to it. I once remarked to one of my sons and a friend of his that the trouble was nobody feared the judgment of God anymore and they laughed. But that was before I could explain what I meant by the judgment of God. It's all there in my little black book.

There is but one commandment, one truth and one existence. It is love. When we love, we play with eternal fire. If we don't love, we lapse into the hell of oblivion. I believe that. I also believe that it is the essence of a Catholic life.

The problem with Donahue, Opus Dei, the new Newman Society et al, is that there is no love in them. Only an intellectual self-indulgence pointing the way to oblivion.

The Catholic Thing to Do

Pope Benedict has done it gain. His tin ear and tin policies has led him to reinstate the Pius X Society, a collection of renegade Catholics with a history of Anti-Semitism who were excommunicated by Pope John Paul II (not exactly a cutting edge liberal himself).
I don't mean to downplay the impact of anti-Semitism of the Pius X Society’s recall to the bosom of the Church, but if Jews have a problem with this, so too I believe will many, many Catholics, especially those who actually read the Gospels.
The concept of a militant Church shedding members by the millions may be okay with Pope Benedict but I am not sure the Christ who commanded his disciples to teach all nations would agree.
While the actions of many Christians might make it hard to believe, the essence of the Christian message boils down to just one word: Love. The mark of any Christian is his or her understanding that love is he foundation of all, not just their faith but existence itself. In the halcyon days of John XXIII, we used to sing a song called: “You will know we are Christians by our love.” But singing it isn't enough, it must be lived.
In the jungles of Central America, many Catholics, including one Archbishop, several Jesuit priests and their house keepers, nuns and lay workers followed love to a martyrs grave. But because in their work they sometimes brushed shoulders with Marxists, their martyrdom is an embarrassment to the Vatican and unrecognized.
Instead, we find organizations founded by fascists like Opus Dei and the Pius X Society afforded honored places in the Vatican.
Some of reaction to Pope Benedict’s action have focused on the activities of saint in waiting Pius XII in the thirties in reaching a compromise with the Nazis. But if there is any more dramatic point that political expediency of the Vatican may not reflect the "Catholic" view, the simple fact is that of all the religious and demographic groups in Germany (excepting Marxists and Socialists) the most opposed to the Nazi's were the Catholics, Pius XII be damned.
There was a report on Sixty Minutes some years ago about righteous Gentiles (I believe it was Poland) who hid Jewish children during the Holocaust. If discovered by the Nazi's, the parents were forced to watch while their own children were hanged, and then their posterity destroyed, they were hanged.
One woman, who was a little girl at the time, was interviewed by CBS. "I asked my mother, 'Why are we doing this?' She replied ‘Because it's the Catholic thing to do.’"
I happen to be a vanishing relic of American demographics: a second generation German-American, all four of whose grandparents emigrated to the US before the turn of the last century. Unlike Pope Benedict, the members of my family did not serve in the Wehrmacht and one of my cousins is buried in the American Cemetery perched on the bluff above Omaha Beach. (See http://www.johnklotz.com/billy.htm)
God is love, John the Evangelist wrote. In the words and work of the Pius X Society, I see no love and no God. In so many ways, large numbers of Catholics do get the message. The scandal is that it is often despite of, not because of, the Vatican.
I remain a Catholic, it’s just the Roman part that is getting difficult.