Sherry's Catholic Rant

We just got cable and high speed internet and I feel harrassed. There are now 400+ channels on two televisions that I have to watchdog, and three computers that need supervision. Ack.

So I'm tired, and after reading about how the Boston Catholic hospitals are going via a collaboration, allow for abortions and sterilizations, I'm feeling testy. http://www.americanpapist.com/2009/06/boston-archdiocese-affiliate-health.html

Fair warning.

How did we get to this point?

Because of Catholics like Kmiec and Sebelius and Kerry and Pelosi and Biden. Their error is compounded by their prominent status in public life. Their misstatements and willing complicitness in furthering the forces that favor abortion and its ugly relatives of birth control, sterilization and contraception that divorce the great power and beauty of sex from its purpose and nature bring whole families to nothingness and all without apparent culpability.

So I like the new Shepherd of Saint Louis. And he understands that denying communion is making whoever is denied face the reality of their own faulty moral living/moral reasoning to believe that they are in communion when they are not. It happens. We do fall into error, and correction is how we find our way back. Love requires that sometimes we be firm, especially when the matters are of moral significance. If you wish to experience the Eucharist, be in communion with your whole heart and not just the part that wants what it wants, the comfort of the bread of Jesus' words, without the requirement that they be applied to one's actual life, the body. It is correction, not bullying.

Intimidation is the tactic of the enemy, who wants us at each other, who wants us denying Christ in each other in all things. We may create a society that feeds the hungry, cures the sick, cares for the orphans and shepherds the Earth. But all of these acts shall be dust if they are not the reflection of love, of Christ. If you've ever met a bitter teacher or a burnt out nurse, you understand how what once was a joy and a beauty and a gift, has become a distorted awful shadow of its former self. This is what we head towards when we think that the service trumps the motive, or the motive trumps the service.

The former leads to jaded cynics who perform the acts without heart, and the later to fanatics who despair and either forfiet their values or dwell steeped in perpetual self righteous anger. We are Catholics, it is not random that our most Blessed Sacrament is the Eucharist, and that all our sacraments focus on furthering the Communion of the soul to its Creator.

Given the recent events, the media has suggested that pro-lifers tone down the rhetoric. That we should use fair minded words.

So tell me, if we go out to the desert and whisper into a muffled room that has no outside access, "Abortion is wrong." would that be okay or is that too inflamatory? Because we wouldn't want to be intimidating. What about that "Silence=Death" slogan that was real popular a few years back, didn't you guys mean that? Isn't that still true? And so pro-life causes are linked to the awfulness of the murder of a man who committed awful acts, and we are equally censured for praying outside of places where these acts occurr, or for daring to speak our opinion in the political arena. You can be Catholic, just don't act like one or talk like one. How then do we witness?

Do we witness by imitating our esteemed academia? Like Notre Dame? or Georgetown?

Catholic Universities and politicians never asks the less faithful to understand the other side, arguably, what should be, their own side. No other faith as practiced by it's argued intelligencia seems determined to give all manner of deference to everyone else except, those in their own church who follow the Church's prescribed teachings. We too, are not in communion as we ought to be. There is a broken quality to our fellowship in the Church. I guess these broken elements, these must be where the nail prints are in the Body of Christ. We see the holes. We cannot help but wince.

The fact is we all need our Savior, and He is Christ, and none other.

I don't remember Jesus saying, "Blessed are the open minded or Blessed are the reasonable. Rationality above all, is key."

Catholics are not Vulcans.

We're supposed to love beyond reason. We're supposed to surrender all to Christ. We're supposed to use our minds and our bodies and our hearts to reflect God's love to others, by our modesty, by our humility, by our passion, by our charity, by our kindness, by our clarity, by our truthfulness, by our good counsel, by our good actions and by our whole way of relating to others in all things.

That's not reasonable. That's Radical.

And it was so frightening that the Romans threw those who believed it to the lions for entertainment. It is so frightening, it was persecuted in Russia and is outlawed in China. The radical concept that God wants communion with us, goes in the face of a State that seeks to define all members within it by their contributions, status and fidelity and seeks to be all things in God's stead. We all know, relationships require something of us, and the ultimate relationship requires all from us. Communion.

Pray for all of us in this damnable mess, only the healing power of Christ via the Eucharist, only His Mercy can make us whole and holy.

We now return you to your more reasonable and funnier blog. This has been a Sherry Catholic Rant.