Although I subscribe to over a half-dozen Catholic periodicals, U.S.
Catholic is not one of them. I
have often seen the magazine in our parish magazine rack, but I had never read
it until, one day last fall, I picked up the October 2001 issue and decided to
read through it to see what I could learn.
It is a slick, attractively designed magazine with well-proportioned
illustrations, ads and side-bars. A
quick glance at its table of contents reveals timely topics of interest to many
Catholics. For example, this issue
contains a cover story on Catholics and the Internet, a feature on ways to
improve religious education, an op/ed piece on Catholic racism in Chicago, an
interview with the authors of The Complete
Idiot’s Guide to Understanding Catholicism, reviews of recent films, and a
meditation on a Gospel text. The ad
for a “Bible Diary” inside the front cover strikes a warm chord of upbeat
personal, spiritual relevance.
One of the first things I look for in a Catholic periodical is
“slant.” Where does it stand in
relation to the Church? What are its editorial biases?
What expectations does it make about its readers’ perspectives?
These are important questions to ask in a Catholic world that is sharply
polarized over issues of Church authority, women’s ordination, contraception,
abortion, pre-marital cohabitation, homosexuality, divorce and remarriage, etc.
Some periodicals aim to support and clarify Church teaching.
Others are devoted to a revisionist agenda of some kind.
These differences are not always overt, but no periodical is without an
editorial perspective. There is no
“point of view from nowhere.” Discerning
the slant of a periodical helps one see where the writers are “coming from”
and to interpret and understand what they are really saying.
Letters to the editor are a good source for discerning “slant.”
In this issue, the letters begin on p. 7 with a headline featuring the
first letter: “Catholics need facts to vote their faith.”
One sentence from the letter is excerpted and highlighted in the center
of the page: “If Catholics do not vote their faith, it’s probably because
social justice aspects of their faith have not been articulated as clearly as
the abortion issue has.” This is
telling. First, it implies that
abortion is not a social justice issue and that Catholics concerned with
abortion are not voting their faith, both fallacious assumptions.
The letter calls for church leaders “willing to take on hard questions
such as war, poverty, hunger, the death penalty, and injustices committed by our
country around the world, instead of merely encouraging personal piety and
feel-good religion.” This misleadingly suggests that Catholics concerned with
pro-life issues aren’t “taking on the hard questions” but are “merely
encouraging personal piety and feel-good religion.”
Also telling is the fact that the editor considered this letter important
enough to highlight, which could signal an endorsement of its perspective,
although we shouldn’t jump to that conclusion from a single letter.
The second letter defends the effectiveness of the 1983 pastoral letter
on peace by the U.S. Catholic bishops, citing a survey by Andrew Greeley against
critics. The third links Pax
Christi USA with individuals such as Philip Berrigan and organizations such as
the School of the Americas Watch, etc. All
of these individuals and organizations “lean left” on social and religious
issues.
The fourth letter responds to an article in a previous issue (“What do
you get out of Mass?”), noting that the “priest-presider is not the lone
‘celebrant’ of the Eucharist,” but that the “entire assembly has
gathered to celebrate the Eucharist.” The
well-intended point that we will “get something out of the Mass” when we see
ourselves as “celebrants” alongside the priest, nevertheless entertains a
confusion of the roles of priest and laity that is common among
“left-leaning” Catholics.
The fifth letter responds to some readers’ remarks about
“post-Vatican II changes,” declaring: “Yes, the Mass is in English now,
and the priest faces the congregation—let’s get over it, please.”
While this impatience with pre-Vatican II sensibilities does not
necessarily signal “editorial slant,” the accumulation of letters with a
“progressive” tilt is evident.
An exception is the sixth letter by Charles Zuneffi (pp. 8-9), which
takes issue with an earlier article by Kathleen Chesto (“This is not your
father’s religion”), on why young people are dropping out of church.
Zuneffi, a 22-year-old Catholic, says he only started attending church
after his grandmother asked him to start driving her to her old inner-city
parish, where the interior was 19th-century Gothic, not 1980s suburban, and the
Mass was in Latin, not English. “I
loved it,” he writes. “The
chants and the organ, and all the rituals that Chesto scoffs at as
old-fashioned, really appealed to me.” He
blames Chesto’s generation for sinking attendance: “In an attempt to make
religion fit your views of soft, contemporary suburban culture, you took away an
important element that attracts young people to religion—the idea of
mysticism, sacredness, something higher.”
Zuneffi’s letter may represent a token “minority viewpoint,”
confirming that the prevailing editorial viewpoint, represented by the Chesto
article, tilt’s left. At any
rate, this hypothesis is consistent with the data thus far.
The pattern throughout the letters is consistent—a focus on social
needs and social action as the heart of what is important about Christian faith,
along with a downplaying (if not outright dismissal) of traditional concerns
about personal piety and Church teachings.
Pages 10-11 (“Signs of the Times”) offer brief news items.
In addition to some polling data on American philanthropy, p. 10 carries
a side-bar with a series of quotations. A
Belgian Jesuit calls for religions to become vehicles of peace and “stop being
battlefields of spiritual arrogance” (suggesting, perhaps, that we ought to be
modest enough to admit that our beliefs are no “truer” than anyone
else’s). Other quotations are
from Stephen Carter on commercialism; the Pope on “globalization”; Jim
Wallis (the leftist Anabaptist editor of Sojourners
magazine) on the poor; and Mata Amritandandamayi (a Hindu leader “who hugs and
blesses follower after follower for up to 18 straight hours”) on happiness.
Another article discusses the case for the beatification of the Venerable
Matt Talbot, a former alcoholic, and the hope that the Vatican might loosen its
requirement for a physical miracle, since “the alcoholic community really
needs a saint.” Another discusses Catholic college students who “got a
chance to put Catholic social teaching to work in the National Interfaith
Committee for Worker Justice’s Catholic Social Teaching Summer Internship.”
A side-bar on p. 11 addresses “Good News” (Le Moyne College’s new
environment-friendly geothermal heat pumps), and “Bad News” (an Oregon
billboard identifying the pope with the Antichrist).
The rest of the page is devoted to an article, “A different kind of
obedience,” on Benedictine Sister Christine Vladimiroff, prioress of the Mount
St. Benedict Monastery in Erie, Pennsylvania, who “has become something of a
hero” for her refusal to deliver a Vatican directive to Benedictine Sister
Joan Chittister, forbidding her to attend and speak at the Women’s Ordination
Worldwide conference in Dublin.
By this time the editorial tilt of the magazine is obvious.
It celebrates dissent where Rome won’t bend the rules to meet the needs
of those judged (by the light of the dominant liberal culture) to be
“marginalized,” whether the needs are those of recovering alcoholics who
“need” their saint, or women socialized by feminist sub-cultures to believe
they “need” to be priests to find fulfillment.
Renée LaReau’s cover-story, “Net Gains: How the Internet is changing
the church” (pp.12-17) offers a useful introduction to the Internet.
There is not much that betrays a slant here, except for her remarks on
the Internet as a “democratic” medium that “levels the traditional
hierarchies.” She quotes from a
book entitled Compassion, noting how
the traditional way of regarding priests, nuns, monks and hermits as a spiritual
elite “divides the People of God into ‘ordinary’ and ‘special
Christians,’ not leading to togetherness but separation” (p. 16).
While this affirms a deep Catholic truth about the “common priesthood
of the faithful” (CCC, 1591), it also plays into the hands of those who, like
Protestants, seek to deny the unique authority embodied in the Church as
Magisterium.
The editor, Mary Lynn
Hendrickson, weighs in with a personal anecdote on the bottom of p. 14 about
“ultraconservative” and “mean-spirited” Catholicism on the web.
She describes dropping in on a Catholic Web site and getting
“slammed” and called “anti-family” for offering her opinion on the use
of artificial contraception (one may thus infer her dissident view).
She quotes Yahoo’s Theology and Religion discussion leader, John
Switzer, who suggests that “conservative Catholics” are more outspoken on
the Internet “because the main body of Catholics takes it for granted that the
changes in Vatican II were inevitable and it’s inevitable that these changes
will continue and develop. It’s a
moving locomotive that cannot be stopped and that, I believe, is moving under
the direction of the Holy Spirit.” This suggests that “changes” of the kind protested by
“conservative Catholics”— changes presumably including the widespread
acceptance of artificial contraception, pre-marital cohabitation, homosexuality,
divorce and remarriage, etc.—are approved by Vatican II and the Holy Spirit,
an assumption as ludicrous as it is ignorant.
“Ultimately, we’re all cafeteria Catholics and we’re all
progressives,” Switzer continues, “because none of us can know the mind of
Christ perfectly and none of us can hold the faith in a manner that exactly
mirror’s God’s glory. A 2-ounce
bottle cannot contain the ocean.” While
magnanimously appealing to humility in the face of our human finitude, this
suggests the further (erroneous) inference that all opinions are relative, and
no views—even those of the Church—can be expected to give us true knowledge
of “the mind of Christ.” It is
doubly significant that Hendrickson, the magazine’s editor, highlights these views in her own column.
The “Editor’s Suggestions of Useful Web Sites” on p. 17 includes a
number of informative listings under “Study and Reading,” “Church,”
“Social Justice,” “Catholic News,” “Prayer & Spirituality,” and
the like. But alongside these, she
includes the categories of “Liberal Catholicism” and “Conservative
Catholicism.” This has the effect
of legitimating her listing of Web sites on “Women’s Ordination
Conference,” “Call To Action,” and “Radical Catholic Page” (even
though such groups have been explicitly censured by Rome), by placing them
alongside “Conservative” listings, such as “New Advent,” “Peter’s
Net,” and “EWTN” (all known for their doctrinal substance and fidelity to
Rome). The strategy is as ingenious
as it is disingenuous—unless it stems from simple invincible ignorance; which,
given the state of Catholic catechesis and publications today, is not
unthinkable.
Next follows a reader survey on Catholic Web use, which carries a listing
of favorite religious Web sites that betray a predictable correlation between
reader’s preferences and the magazine’s slant.
Along with the obligatory US Conference of Catholic Bishops and Vatican
Web sites, the top five unsurprisingly include the U.S.
Catholic Web site, St. Anthony Messenger Press and Franciscan Communications
<www.americancatholic.org>, and the Jesuit site, “Sacred Space.”
Probably the most revealing article in the magazine is “Power to the
People of God” (pp. 24-28), an interview with Mary Faulkner and Bob O’Gorman,
authors of The Complete Idiot’s guide to
Understanding Catholicism. The
authors are very up-beat, sincere individuals, interested in “empowering”
laity with a sense of their own “spirituality.”
“There’s been a real awakening of spirituality in the past 20
years,” declares O’Gorman; “people are getting in touch with the movement
of the spirit within them.” Faulkner
chimes in: “Much of the spirituality today is a raw, unprocessed power. Maybe this raw energy is ‘breaking out’ because it’s
been boxed up too long. You can’t
keep the spirit in a box. The more
you try to control the spirit, the more it is going to insist on being free.
The challenge today isn’t to the people—they’re doing just
fine—the challenge is to church leadership to recognize this outbreaking and
ask ‘How can we help this become more of what you want it to be?’”
(Why does this remind me of the movie, “Wag the Dog”?)
In effect, Rome is being asked to submit to the “magisterium” of the
popular “spirit” (whatever that means); whereas the Apostle John warns us to
“test” and “discern” the spirits to see if they are of God.
The problem, suggests O’Gorman, lies in the limits imposed upon
spirituality by the Church. “There
was a time in the church’s history when it was very accepting of different
spiritualities,” he ways. “You
had a Benedictine spirituality and a Franciscan spirituality and a Dominican
spirituality and a Jesuit spirituality. But
there came a point where this stopped happening.
We didn’t embrace a Lutheran or a Calvinist spirituality.” As appealing as O’Gorman’s fluid, free-form embrace of
“spirituality” may be, he fails to note that spiritualities are rooted in
doctrine and, therefore, not all (for example, a Lutheran spirituality that
separates works of obedience from faith, or a Calvinist spirituality that denies
free will) are compatible with the Catholic Faith.
Contradicting one of the most basic dogmas of Church teaching, O’Gorman
declares: “We wanted to be able to talk about the fallibility of the church
because, for instance, the church in its relationship to women has been in grave
sin.” In the first place, this
confuses the categories of peccability (sinfulness) and fallibility
(erroneousness). In the second
place, it assumes that the Church’s refusal to ordain women is a matter of
“sin” for which the Church must “repent,” whereas Pope John Paul II
recently issued a formal statement declaring this tradition irreformable: “I
declare that the Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly
ordination on women and that this judgment is to be definitively held by all the
Church’s faithful” (Ordinatio
Sacerdotalis, 1994). Third, and
most fundamentally, it assumes that the Church can err in her teaching, which
may be a Protestant doctrine but is most assuredly not a Catholic one.
A recurring theme in this interview is empowerment of the laity, an issue
capable of proper and improper interpretation.
Vatican II intended to empower laity with a renewed sense of the
“common priesthood of the faithful,” a sense of an immediate personal
relationship to God that could be fostered through prayer, Bible study, and a
sense of vocation to sanctify one’s daily life in the world through prayerful
service to God and neighbor. But
O’Gorman stresses his belief that “in many ways the Second Vatican Council
fell short on several issues, and one of the issues that it did not really deal
with was the power of the people over their own religion.”
He sees the basic problem as Church authority.
Faulkner adds that women “want less hierarchy and greater access to
ordination.” Again, she says:
“Right now, the only way church leaders are going to let women into positions
of power is if they think they have to. Sooner
or later the numbers will speak.” Clearly,
this represents a politicized, de-sacralized view of ecclesiology— “doctrine
by popular vote,” if you will—a purely democratized view of Church
authority. Authority is not
delegated by God, but voted into office by the people.
Beliefs of Catholics are not “revealed” on this view, but
“generated” by social needs. “The
church is not some unsolved mystery you have to leave in the hands of the
hierarchy,” says O’Gorman. “This
is our religion. And we hope the
book will open people up to move from ‘pray, pay, and obey’ stature to
‘This is my church. I have
responsibility here. I have
spiritual power here.’” The decisive question to ask, of course, is: What
kind of spiritual power? By whose
standards? By what authority?
An excerpt from their book (from the chapter on abuses in Church history)
is printed on p. 28 under the title, “What was the Inquisition?”
Predictably, it digs up details about the Malleus
Maleficarum (the Hammer of Witches),
a misogynist document referenced during trials of witches.
Further, it effectively identifies the office of Cardinal Ratzinger with
that of the Grand Inquisitor by stating: “A genetic remnant of the
Inquisition, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, exists in the
church today. While it no longer
employs the threat of prison, thumbscrews, or other overt physical tortures to
safeguard authentic Catholic teaching, it does conduct theological
investigations and hands out sanctions such as the silencing of Catholic
teachers under its authority.” This heavy-handed use of connotative communication, at the
expense of short-changing their readers on clarifying information, plays into
the hands of media “spin” masters and the uninformed masses under their
influence.
The next article in the magazine, on p. 29, is devoted to global warming,
a fashionably “progressive” topic that speaks for itself.
I needn’t comment.
Pages 30-35 are devoted to an article by Bill Huebsch, “5 ways to take
the dread out of religious ed”—a timely and important subject.
Huebsch imagines a “typical” class scenario, in which a teacher
dutifully plows through the lesson in her five-pound “teacher’s edition”
CCD textbook, replete with comprehensive treatment of Catholic doctrine on the
day’s subject: the “fall from grace” (his quotation marks) in the Garden
of Eden. He imagines a precocious
student stumping her teacher with the paleontological “facts”—death didn’t come into the world through sin; the dinosaurs died; death had been around for millions of years
before humans—and questions like: “And if Jesus saved us from this, then why
do people still die?” Huebsch’s
point seems to be that this is a “new day” that calls for major revision in
how (if not what) we teach our children. Today’s
students, he declares, have “more information available in one visit to the
Internet than was available in an entire lifetime to an adult in the 17th
century.” This suggests
that the traditional content of Catholic doctrine is no longer quite tenable and
needs revision in light of scientific knowledge (Huebsch seems to have little
sense that “science” itself is highly provisional and based on unverifiable
assumptions).
On a more practical level, Huebsch observes that many children don’t
seem to enjoy their religion classes,
and sometimes even dread them.
He offers some helpful suggestions about the need to involve parents
in the process of their children’s religions education: “a children’s
religious education program that isn’t situated within a community of
well-informed adults won’t work,” he writes.
The five suggestions he offers for taking the “dread” out of
religious ed include: (1) calling them “disciples” instead of
“students,” (2) having a sponsor for everyone, (3) getting rid of the
classrooms, (4) having people speak in their own words, and (5) raising the
status of Baptism. Some of these are more substantial and helpful than others;
and some are potentially problematic. For
example, under #4, Huebsch states that the biblical story of the fall from grace
is told “in figurative language” (which problematically suggests
that it is “fiction”), and proposes the need for “a new language in which
to talk about these ancient truths—one that doesn’t violate [youngsters’]
paleontological sensitivities.” Huebsch
repeatedly calls for ways of speaking about eternal truths “in a language that
fits our culture.” This is fine,
as long as these truths aren’t denatured, as they too often are, in the
process of translation. Too often
the Gospel message (“Jesus died for our sins that we may have life”) is
watered down into trite truisms like “let’s be kind to each other so nobody
feels left out,” which really are
numbingly banal and dreadfully boring.
Pages 36-40 are devoted to a fascinating article on Benedictine monks in
Minnesota who have teamed up with calligraphers at a scriptorum in Wales to
create the first Bible to be written and illustrated entirely by hand in more
than 500 years— the “Saint John’s Bible.”
Beyond the many intriguing details of the project are several facets that
betray a decided slant. In 1998 the
university and abbey agreed on the project on the condition that the new Bible
be “contemporary, ecumenical, multicultural, and prophetic.”
This means, in their words, that the art must “appeal to people of
faith the world over,” there must be “more emphasis in the illustrations on
women in general than in earlier Bibles,” and the New Revised Standard Version
must be used because of it’s “contemporary translation, gender-inclusive
language, and wide use by Catholics and Protestants.”
The fact is ignored that Rome forbids the liturgical use of the NRSV
because its gender-inclusive language goes beyond “translation” to
tendentious theological “interpretation,” de-naturing the traditional
biblical conceptions of God.
An ebullient celebration of modern scientific and technological advances
pervades the project’s participants. Donald
Jackson, the chief calligrapher of the project, incorporates modern touches,
such as twining strands of DNA, into his illuminations of the biblical
manuscript. “Think of the
scientific and technological changes that have occurred since the Bible was last
handwritten and illuminated,” he marvels. “No one knew then about evolution,
DNA, space flight, or black holes. Certainly
no one could imagine viewing an earthrise from the moon.
They thought the world was flat.”
Here Jackson echoes the pervasive modern condescension toward (and
ignorance of) the medieval world, an irony underscored by the fact that St.
Thomas Aquinas clearly declares in the opening pages of his Summa Theologiae that the world is round! It is a modern myth that the medievals entertained the
ignorant belief that the earth was flat—a myth that reinforces our confidence
in our own modern “progressiveness,” the kind of myth that is all too
eagerly embraced by revisionist Catholics who like to see Vatican II as
justifying a break with an ignorant past and inviting a revisioning of the
Faith, a “New Catholicism” and “New Church.”
Pages 41-43 are devoted to a reflection on the biblical story of the ten
lepers. The moral of the story is that we, as recipients of grace, ought to
respond in gratitude. Still, it is
interesting that the author compares the lepers to the “poor, the mentally
ill, the disenfranchised, the ghettoed minorities,” echoing the dominant
liberal culture’s feel-good message of “inclusiveness.”
In the minds of many, fear of discrimination leads to an undiscriminating
embrace of all lifestyles and values,
including those, for example, of sexually active gays, lesbians, and same-sex
partnerships, all under the umbrella of celebrating “diversity” and
“difference.”
On p. 48 is an article on Jim Keady (“Sole man”), whose refusal to
wear Nike shoes because of unjust wages paid to Nike workers in third-world
sweatshops, cost him his dream job as assistant soccer coach at St. John’s
University in Long Island. The adjacent page sports a picture of Keady with a list of
facts about him, including “Something most people don’t know about me: I’m
a registered Republican. (I
haven’t gotten around to changing it.)”
Social justice issues of this kind have a direct, visceral appeal to
Catholics who share U.S. Catholic’s
slant. The problems are morally
compelling and uncomplicated by controversies of metaphysics and Church
authority in the way that the issues of abortion and contraception are.
Page 50 is devoted to an article against “the bane of racism.”
It exhorts us to avoid thinking of people in terms of “us” and
“them.” The “biggest tool at
our disposal is the Eucharist,” writes author Tom McGrath.
“Where do people become family? Around
the table.” What does McGrath
mean? “I’m not talking about
simply holding the precious feeling of Jesus, sweet and pure, privately in our
hearts, but, once fed, acting on the reality that our Christ resides in
everybody.” Again, there is a
profound truth here, as well as a hazard. The
truth is that Christ does reside in our neighbor (“Lord, when did we see you
hungry?”). The hazard is that the
neighbor can come to replace Christ, as in the secularized mainline churches of
liberal Protestantism, which reduced the message of Christ’s salvation to the
“Social Gospel” of helping the poor and oppressed.
The balance is struck by those who do both— who proclaim Christ’s
forgiveness of sins through His Church’s ministry and offer the cup of water in His name to the thirsty.
The danger to those who share U.S.
Catholic’s slant is that “peace and justice” issues will eclipse the
full meaning of Christ’s Gospel.
The magazine’s back cover announces: “U.S.
Catholic magazine is proud to honor Diana L. Hayes with the 2001 U.S.
Catholic Award for furthering the cause of women in the church.”
Above the announcement is a quote from Hayes: “It is time for black
Catholic women to regain their voices.... That
voice has been silenced.” Beneath
a photograph of Hayes, she is described as associate professor of theology at
Georgetown University and a leading Catholic proponent of “womanist
theology.” What is that? She says it’s about “building up the entire community,”
which also means opposing oppression. She
is celebrated for having “called on the church to repudiate its complicity in
the oppressions of race, gender, and class and to honor and contribute to the
liberation of all people.” She is
quoted as declaring: “It is difficult to be an active, involved, faith-filled
woman in the church today without constantly feeling that you’re being
limited, restricted, gagged, and bound . . .”
Here the U.S. Catholic displays its full colors. The Church is an “oppressor” of the poor, of minorities,
and (especially) of women. So says
Hayes. And U.S. Catholic is proud to honor her with an award for pointing this
out. What does this mean?
What is the target of this animosity?
Apparently it’s not that the Catholic Church today has a larger
worldwide network for helping the poor than the United Nations; or that it was
one of the chief historical opponents of the slave trade, through societies such
as the Jesuits and individuals such as Bartolomé de las Casas; or that it has
been at the forefront of the battle to defend the rights of women and children
at the UN conferences on the family held in Cairo and Beijing in recent years.
No, apparently the target is what the secularized world regards as
“oppressive” about the Church—its tradition of an exclusively male
priesthood, its prohibition of artificial contraception, same-sex marriages, its
authority structure, etc.
All of this is very telling. It
tells us not only that U.S. Catholic
magazine has a definite slant, but that its slant is decisively infected by the
mind of the dominant secularized American culture.
Whatever the editors and readership of U.S.
Catholic may wish, this is not the mind of the Church, nor is it the mind of
Christ. It is the mind of an
apostate, de-sacralized, secularized America.
It is the mind of powers and principalities inimical to the mind of
Christ. This is not to say that
everything printed in U.S. Catholic
magazine is anti-Catholic. It
isn’t. As I pointed out, there
were some positive, informative and edifying articles and features in this
issue, such as those calling for helping the oppressed, or suggesting that
parents get involved in their children’s’ religious education.
Yet the editorial slant and the readership’s overarching frame of
reference is thoroughly secularized.
What have I learned from reading this issue of U.S.
Catholic? That historic
Catholic teaching is oppressive, ignorant, arrogant, and outmoded at best; that
its chants and rituals, its distinction between clergy and laity, its all-male
priesthood are residual vestiges of an insufferably authoritarian, patriarchal
past; that apologists for orthodoxy are by definition “mean-spirited”; that
the Church is fallible and can err; that its biblical doctrines of original sin
must be “demythologized” and translated into a contemporary idiom compatible
with the reigning dogmas of public opinion that pass for “science”; that
Catholics who are pro-life and opposed to artificial contraception aren’t to
be taken seriously; that the heart of the Catholic Faith has to do with meeting
social “needs” (such as the needs of some women to be ordained), celebrating
diversity (such as “womanist theology” and nonwestern religions), and
defending the environment (by opposing global warming, using geothermal heat
pumps, etc.), and, above all, following the democratic “spirit” of the
laity.
If I ever read U.S. Catholic again, it won’t be to find out the Catholic Church’s perspective on this or that issue, since it’s editorial slant is decisively dissident and its Catholicism is consistently confused. Rather, it will be to take the pulse of a large group of American Catholics and check the degree to which it continues to suffer from the value vertigo afflicting most liberally secularized Americans today.
Copyright ©
2002 Philip Blosser. All rights reserved.
A previous version of this article was published under
the title of “What
I Learned from U.S. Catholic Magazine,”
by
This
Rock (May/June 2002), 32-37.