Church and Christ over Baum and pride

I seldom pay much attention to letters written to newspapers. After 30 years’ experience in journalism, I have realized that the vast majority of them are written by the vast minority of readers. Or to put it another way, a hard core of activists write a disproportionate number of letters to editors, sometimes even under fictitious names so as to have a greater chance of being published. They simply do not represent anything like the genuine readership of the newspaper in question.

I noticed this recently with the number of critical letters about my fellow columnist Fr. Raymond de Souza, some of them extremely nasty about the man because he dares to take a strong stand against people who have tried to introduce ideas and theology into the Church bordering on the heretical. Let me make it clear that de Souza doesn’t know I’m writing this column, and I have no idea what his response will be.

He is, however, one of the finest priests we have in Canada, a man of terrifying energy and talents who has combined his vocation as a priest with being one of the most impressive and important Catholic voices in North American media. Speak to young Catholics at Queen’s University, for example, and you will realize his achievements. Ask genuinely Catholic readers of The Register, the National Post or Convivium and you will appreciate how they no longer feel alone.

But let’s get to the primary point here. There are people out there, albeit a declining group, who have never forgiven the Church for returning to its Catholic orthodoxy. They yearn for a time when they marched in solidarity with various leftist groups, sat around in circles to collectively condemn the intransigence of that “Polish peasant” in the Vatican, and thought it clever to tell their students — extraordinary how many of them were teachers — that the New Democrats were more important than the new catechism.

Those days are over. Nobody read the Catholic New Times so it folded. No young men of vacuously liberal opinions want to be priests, so the new clergy are all orthodox. Students want the Church and Christ, not Baum and pride. Enormous damage was done by the abuse of Vatican II, and the detritus is still with us, but almost every move, every change, every appointment, is positive and delightfully, sparklingly, encouragingly Catholic.

Pictures tell long stories. Have a look at photographs of conferences calling for female ordination or shouts for “reform.” It’s like a pre-application photo from a Grecian Formula hair colouring commercial! The poor old souls can’t even liturgical dance any more because their artificial hips are acting up.

“Dear Sir, Michael Coren does not exhibit the spirit of the council or of Jesus the social democrat when he says such nasty things about his opponents, blah, blah.” Oh please write those letters, please throw me into the unacceptable legions of truth along with Fr. de Souza and the rest.

First, they implode on their own illogicality. They’re angry and critical because someone has been angry and critical. Second, they come not from a Catholic heart and a Christian consciousness.

We’re not playing games here, not talking about which party wins some irrelevant election. This is about where you spend eternity, where your soul will exist after death. There were Catholic priests and authors — and there are still a few left — who led people astray, who broke the family formed and Church-formed faith of vulnerable young and gullible older people, untied the divine rope that bound them to the Church founded by Christ and set them swimming and then drowning in a sea of ambivalence and finally rejection.

It is difficult not to use strong language about people who caused so much damage, usually because they thought more of their own opinions and needs than the historic truth of Roman Catholicism. If you are more offended (and I’m sick and tired of the professionally offended) by a hard if fair criticism than you are by the corruption of a generation of Catholics, fall to your knees and pray forgiveness.