Quote of the Day

[This] is the big message I'm getting from Loyalist Catholics: We don’t care how the hierarchy hurts, harms, denigrates, lives hypocritically, or spends our money as long as they talk our talk. The kind of talk that puts a public spotlight on the sins of others, while ignoring the discrete sins of loyalists. The kind of talk that essentially says to a priest, you can be sexually active as long as you attack abortion and gay marriage and make sure we don’t have to LOOK at what you actually do with your own life. The kind of talk that tells gays they can be gay as long as they don’t claim to be gay. The kind of talk that Sarah Palin gets away with about teenage virginity and a parent’s duty to teach that while her own family demonstrates it doesn’t work. This is the same kind of posturing that dares to pay Maggie Gallagher of NOM to be the face of traditional marriage when her own sexual history is far from traditional.

. . . I’ve written before that I really don’t have any trouble with conservative religious rituals. If those kinds of practices stoke one’s spiritual engines that’s fine by me. What I really have a problem with is when one’s Eucharistic Adoration blinds them to the level of corruption in the Institution and makes them de facto enablers of that corruption. I get really frustrated when loyalty to the theology of the Trenten church is used to excuse the fact the adherents of that theology don’t walk their talk. It makes for a very shallow hypocritical and magical approach to Catholicism that Jesus never taught. Jesus was not impressed with those who knew the rules, but only applied them as full time exercises to others, while they themselves substituted occasional ritual practice as sufficient for their own walk. He called them ‘whitened sepulchers.’

– Colleen Kochivar-Baker
“More ‘Astonishment’ from the Vatican and It’s Bankers”
Enlightened Catholicism
October 24, 2010