This editorial by Michael McGough in the Los Angeles Times is a combination of fatuousness, pre-fab journalistic banality, and expected superficiality all rolled up in one, complete with de rigueur hat tips to superliberals Richard McBrien and Andrew Greeley. But it does make one good point: The eviscerated Catholicism of most American Catholics — whether professing to be “liberal” or “conservative” — is weak in the face of threats from outside.
Referencing the 1950 book which later gave us a mawkish, Americanist movie, McGough narrates the devolution of his own family’s Catholicism:
I made my first Communion nine years after “The Cardinal” was published, and the Mass was in Latin. Twelve years after that, my youngest sister made her first Communion and the Mass was in English. Sixteen years after that, when she accompanied her Lutheran husband to Sunday Eucharist at his childhood church, she felt right at home. And the revolving church door swings both ways: When two of my nephews who were baptized in the Lutheran church began attending their mother’s childhood Catholic parish, the adjustment was equally easy. We’re all psalm singers [Protestants] now.
Catholics are different than Protestants, doctrinally different, that is — and, yes, we’re supposed to be morally different as well, inasmuch as only in the true Church do we have God’s authentic morals revealed to men (e.g. divorce, birth control, obedience to lawful ecclesiastical authority, as well as all manifold moral implications inherent in our doctrines regarding the sacrament of Penance). When Catholics make the effort to show that “we’re just like everyone else — good Americans,” the salt loses its savor. It’s spiritually tasteless like everything else out there. We can be good Americans without losing our savor, by vigorously living, asserting, and treasuring what makes us citizens of the City of God and loving our Republic so much that we want our fellow Americans to belong to that same City.
But that’s intolerant, isn’t it?
