Catholicism, holiness and spirituality

There's more to it than that...

My Google home page led me to this announcement of a series of new 'MetroCatholic' web sites, the first of which is DFW Catholic, for Dallas/Fort Worth area Catholics. I'm not in the DFW area, but the idea of Metro Catholic web sites sounds good to me.

The home page for DFW Catholic is pretty nice, but I think their categorization in the 'Build Your Faith' section is too narrow: Pro-Life, Catechesis, Vocations, and Research are the content areas. Well, I guess I really just find 'Pro-Life' too narrow to be such a high-level category. I suppose using 'Social Justice' as the category doesn't work for them for some reason? But 'Social Justice' captures not only Pro-Life (which is really 'Anti-Abortion' the way it's used here) but also social and economic life issues, too. Maybe Social Justice wrankles some people too much?

I am a Pro Life person in all three meanings of the phrase - against abortion, capital punishment and euthanasia; I even volunteer at a pregnancy counseling center. But I also believe the Church's message about social justice is too valuable to narrow down to a focus on abortion.

Anti-Catholicism and Anti-(whatever)

For quite a while now I've wanted to write about anti-Catholicism but just never got around to it. Then an article from the New York Times comes to my attention: Is Anti-Catholicism Dead?

The article describes a panel discussion held recently in New York; nothing really new to my ears but it provides some good background. Is anti-Catholicism dead? No, not even close, and probably never will be.

People have biases, stereotypes, prejudices, and simple misunderstandings about Catholicism, and also with various other groups of people. It's human nature and I don't see it going away any time soon. Life has become better for American Catholics, but prejudice is still out there, and probably closer than you think.

My inlaws were, and probably still are to a degree, anti-Catholic. Back in my small-town Kansas high school days, when my (future) father-in-law found out his daughter was casually dating a Catholic boy, well he was not pleased at all. But I thought I was a pretty good catch! Good grades, class president, headed to a good private college with a scholarship, school newspaper editor, voted most likely to succeed... I still impress myself! I would have been the perfect package had I been a Protestant fundamentalist/evangelical sort of guy. We've worked through all that now and I'm probably their favorite son-in-law (sorry Martin)... but prejudice is so deep-rooted in most folks that it may take generations for it to go away. After all, we're taught to be anti-whatever by our parents and our community.

So as I sit here talking about feeling the sting of anti-Catholicism, I'll admit that there is still a strain of 'anti-Evangelical' in my heart. It's there, and I'd be lying to say it wasn't. If we search our hearts, we're likely to find some sort of prejudice at some level; we all have work to do there. And it's tough work because it can be hard to forgive and difficult to swim upstream against our family's influence and our peers' influence. Awareness is a great first step, and then working to keep from messing our kids up with our own prejudice is a wonderful second step. It takes some conscious effort though, and a willingness to love our neighbor more than ourselves.

It ought to be fun!

My wife passed along a video to me via email today, and being a good little worker I waited until my work was done to take a look at it. The video is from Beliefnet, and is basically Fr Jim Martin, SJ being interviewed by Therese Borchard. It's fun to watch - and is a good reminder that being a Christian is supposed to be a happy, joyful thing. I like that!

Here's the link: http://blog.beliefnet.com/beyondblue/2008/07/video-laughing-with-the-saints.html