For the third Sunday in a row, a dissenting Catholic (female) opinion columnist weighs forth in a Boston newspaper on the Catholic Church is so backward and needs to get with it.
Beverly Beckham—who it is very interesting to note was a columnist for the Boston Herald until recently when she retired her column; so why wasn’t the column printed there?—gives us the now standard line that she is a real Catholic, one who was born into a Catholic family and did all those Catholic things that Catholics do growing up. Sorry. Beverly, but none of that makes you Catholic. What makes a person Catholic is faith, specifically adhering to the faith that is handed down.
Beckham relates that she loved the faith as a child, then left it for 17 years, and came back. The way she describes it, she didn’t come back because she was wrong to reject the Church’s teaches, but because she thought the Church had changed to become acceptable to her.
I forgave the church its trespasses because of him. I opened my eyes and saw that there were no longer just altar boys serving Mass. There were altar girls as well. I saw lay people reading. I saw Eucharistic ministers. I saw a community where there once had been a kingdom.
I turned a deaf ear to Rome’s dictates about premarital sex, divorce, artificial insemination, and contraception. Yes, the church was against these things, but when I returned, it was to a parish where there was no finger-pointing.
If I could pull out one paragraph from all the hand-wringing and angst and anger of all the dissenting Catholics out there, this would be the one. Right here you have the essence of the problem of the Church in the US. The practice of the faith of most Catholics is to ignore the messy stuff that Rome says, which is easy because their parish priests rarely talk about it anyway, and to celebrate all those new things that entertain them. Mass has become a show and now we can all play roles in it. What you don’t see is any real sense of our need for God or of his authority in our lives.
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