Funny, the places you find yourself being quoted. Ted Landphair does a weekly radio segment on Voice of America called “American Life.” This week he looks at the suppression of Catholic parishes in Steubenville, Ohio, home of Franciscan University of Steubenville, my alma mater. He discusses the sad decline of the city and the decrease in population from the steel mill heyday.
He also quotes one of my blog posts from back in May on the closing of Immaculate Conception Parish and the Jesuit Urban Center in Boston. I think he slightly missed the context. The way he quoted me changed the sense a little, I think. See if you agree. Here’s what I wrote:
Do we want churches that are merely monuments to artistic expression and museums of our cultural history? Or should our parishes be places where families gather in community to worship the Lord as a body of believers that image the whole Church and Christ Himself?
And here’s what he wrote:
As the Boston Globe wrote about a constriction of churches in that city, “Each church closing means an irreparable loss of history, continuity, and culture.” And tears for the hard-working families who, in many cases, paid money they could barely afford to make their home churches elegant.
Some Steubenville Catholics have stoically accepted a viewpoint, recently stated by Dominico [sic] Bettinelli Jr., a former editor of Catholic World [sic]magazine, in response to the Boston situation. Churches are not meant to be “monuments of artistic expression,” he writes on his Web log, but rather, in his words, “places where families gather to worship the Lord as a body of believers.”
Life would be easier if you’d used the word “also” in the second question…
He failed to include “merely” in the first part of the quote. Had he not failed to do that, I think he would have captured your sense.