{"id":7186,"date":"2004-06-08T07:38:57","date_gmt":"2004-06-08T07:38:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2004\/06\/what_happens.html"},"modified":"2004-06-08T07:38:57","modified_gmt":"2004-06-08T07:38:57","slug":"what_happens","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/06\/what_happens.html","title":{"rendered":"What happens.."},"content":{"rendered":"

Is that when I’m away from blogging for a time, it gets hard for me to get back into it, especially newsy blogging. So don’t come here lookin’ for that any time soon. I’m still not into the groove. Go to Mark, HMS, and Dom, especially for such – but you already knew that, I’m sure. <\/p>\n

I did a slew of radio over the past couple of days – KDKA in Pittsburgh, a Dallas station, and, of course the Monday HMS<\/a> gig. Talked about De-Coding<\/a> for over three hours during that period. My ear hurt. <\/p>\n

These sessions were notable, however, in that I finally got some listener calls that weren’t defending DVC and preaching the gospel of inscrutability, which has been the norm up to this point.<\/p>\n

What I mean by that is that a great many people, including those who define themselves as “Catholic” or “Christian” will announce to me that you really can’t know anything certain about Jesus, that all the gospels are merely a reflection of certain individual’s or church’s views and that all we can really say is that Jesus told us to love one another. Probably.<\/p>\n

So therefore the contentions of DVC, or anyone else for that matter, are as interesting or as useful as the Gospels because all of the texts are of equal value and one’s choice of a preferred text is, in the end, a political matter.<\/p>\n

I feel like going to Denver when the bishops get there and just screaming at them to get their acts together and get a grasp on the reality of the assumptions their flocks are operating out of. But then, I gather I’m not the only one.<\/p>\n

Russell Shaw with an open letter to America’s Bishops<\/a><\/p>\n

\nFarsighted people have understood the implications of assimilation for a long time. Back in 1916 George Santayana published an article in The New Republic with the provocative title, \u201cThe Alleged Catholic Danger.\u201d Not to worry, he assured liberals who then were fretting over the rise in Catholic numbers and political influence (very much as Samuel Huntington fretted in Foreign Policy a few months ago over Hispanic immigration in the United States)\u2014there was no danger from that source. American secular values could be counted on to act as a \u201csolvent\u201d that would undo the distinctiveness of Catholics.<\/p>\n

Santayana was a bright man. Currently we\u2019re watching the symbolic culmination of the solvent process as an unblushingly pro-abortion Catholic politician seeks the presidency on the ticket of one of the two major parties. This scenario has been a nightmare for some of us ever since the Cuomo years. Now the nightmare is real. <\/p>\n

I hope Senator John Kerry\u2019s candidacy will have a large place in your deliberations in Denver. You need to frame a response to its challenge\u2014to you and to the Church\u2014well before November. When I told a politically sophisticated friend that some bishops take the view that although pro-choice Catholic politicians shouldn\u2019t receive Communion, no effort should be made to prevent them, on the assumption that they\u2019re in good faith, he replied: \u201cIf any bishop thinks Senator Kerry is in good faith on this matter, he\u2019s the only person in the country who does.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Is that when I’m away from blogging for a time, it gets hard for me to get back into it, especially newsy blogging. So don’t come here lookin’ for that any time soon. I’m still not into the groove. Go to Mark, HMS, and Dom, especially for such – but you already knew that, I’m…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7186","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nWhat happens.. - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/06\/what_happens.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"What happens.. - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Is that when I’m away from blogging for a time, it gets hard for me to get back into it, especially newsy blogging. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7186","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7186"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7186\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7186"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7186"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7186"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}