“Fundamentalism sets you up to lose your faith over things that a mature Catholic would barely notice,” says Oswald Sobrino in his Catholic Analysis blog review of Michael Rose’s 1998 book, Darwin the Protestant Fundamentalist (Princeton), which discusses Darwin’s loss of religious faith.

If you have jettisoned Tradition and have the isolated text of the Bible only, as is common among fundamentalist Protestants, you tend to buckle when your literalism is undermined.

Catholic tradition, on the other hand, provides centuries of sophisticated biblical commentary by great (and possible the greatest) minds in the West among the Fathers and Doctors of the Church, such as Augustine and Aquinas. Such commentary and analysis can immunize knowledgeable Catholics from such shocks.

I am reminded of the non-believer I met at U. of Iowa in my ordination summer, 1963, at the Writers’ Workshop, who had noodled American religion and concluded that Catholics had a “cosmic” religion, as opposed to the narrow-scoped fundamentalist Protestant.

Taking that further, I’d say mainline Protestants have sought “cosmic” reality but without Catholic tradition such as Sobrino alludes to, which I do believe is its trump card in religious argumentation such as it is in our day.

Sun-Times, encouraging comment on its breakaway Episcopal church in West Chicago story — here carefully noted but not yet commented on — received and ran this wholly predictable blast at “hypcrisy”:

”We’re a close family,” said Catherine Clark, 66, of Batavia [one of the breakaways].

“Anyone can come here — black, white, gay, straight — and be loved.”

This statement contravenes this congregation’s split from the gay-friendly Episcopal Church, wouldn’t you say? Maybe it’s some of that “hate the sin, love the sinner” [nonsense].

Bob

Well Bob, wherever you are, while defending to the death your right to call something nonsense when you yourself are espousing nonsense, I must disagree.

You can’t be serious about rejecting the idea of hating sin, right?  I mean, would you decide you can love ax-murder, or wouldn’t you rather try to love the ax-wielder while hating ax-murder?  The latter, I’m sure.

Now, if you reject sodomy in all its parts, why can’t you love the poor, misdirected sodomist?

No, Bob, whatever the failing, the hypocrisy for the Christian would be to love sin along with the sinner or, heaven forbid, hate both.  The Christian can’t do either, being unwilling to identify people ineradicably with what they do.

Right?

16th after Pentecost at my old-style mass today.  It led Father G. to talk about being humble unto death by crucifixion, as Jesus was: “Everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted.”

G. delivers without humor or self-deprecation or self-building or irony or handly allusions to the day’s headlines or accepted practices.  It’s straight homiletics, unadorned and not too long and fitting for the solemnity of the occasion.

He goes into tradition, even to questionable stuff such as St. Helen, mother of Emperor Constantine, finding the true cross in the 4th century.  So what if questionable?  It’s not a history lesson but a homily.  You repeat myths for their inspirational value.

In any case, it beats the pedestrian nonsense you hear in most mainstream RC pulpits, delivered too often in cutespeak by holy salesmen.  That’s my church-related thought for the day.

Found in a sports-lover’s blog:

Can we please never talk about how dominant Bowman is going to be again?

Dude, everyone can have a crap[py] game.

See Malcolm Kelley vs. Boise St.

Bowman is very good. Just not tonight.

Aw shucks.

Oh my.  Just caught the Jesuit Father James Martin on with Stephen Colbert discussing Mother Teresa’s dark night of the soul, and Martin is good!  Perfect, I’d say. 

“Dark night” as such never comes up, but there is repeated parrying by Martin of Colbert’s repeated reference to Mother T’s “not believing in God,” in view of recent stories based on her just published letters. 

“Not feeling his presence” was the gist of Martin’s reply, made with perfect good humor.  Look here for it.

More bad news about Rev. Donald McGuire, the Jesuit, with the provincial, Ed Schmidt, sounding without a clue in this Sun-Times piece by its alert religion writer:

He’s been convicted twice, jailed twice — but his order lets him wear the collar, won’t say if he’ll be kicked out

Moreover, mum’s the word on whether the province has gone to Rome about him to get him literally defrocked.

Big image problem here in his nephew going after him as lawyer for the latest accuser. 

“It’s time we took [the collar] away,” said Kevin McGuire, the priest’s nephew and a lawyer for “John Doe 116,” who’s suing the priest and the Jesuits.

Schmidt, however,

“can’t find anything in the Jesuits’ rules” permitting him to ask Donald McGuire to stop dressing as a priest.

A helpless giant, apparently.

My, how they talk in New York, and this is not Murdoch’s Post:

The politics of Iraq, tilting strongly against the war for two years, will likely move back toward the center now, thanks to the impressive testimony of our top commander and to the outrageous attacks on him by some Democrats and their party’s wackadoo wing.

Can we imagine anything this pointed, this clear, this non-Dem-party commentary at Chi Trib and Sun-Times?

Yes, at Chi Trib, which has catholic taste for its op-ed page.  But not at S-T, where some mythical left-wing blue-collar audience waits eagerly for editorials that call for boycotting BP, etc.

The web head, “Petraeus brings the facts, but some Dems can’t handle the truth,” is apt. 

Neither of Chicago’s biggest papers show much interest in what Gen. Petraeus said in the last two days.  Their interest lies in Dems’ responses — it’s their party, is it not? — and Moveon-dot-org talking points.  Tom Frisbie, more leftist than I’d realized, has a cartoon for S-T likening Petraeus to Gen. Westmoreland in the Viet Nam war.  He really believes that stuff, apparently.  Tsk, tsk.

Chi Trib yesterday in hard copy — and it’s hard copy we are talking about here, not web sites — featured the general and the ambassador, Ryan Crocker, about equally.  It reminded me of the old joke about the diocesan newspaper headline, “Tornado in Oklahoma: No Catholics Killed.”