A Lesson on American Catholicism by Archbishop Chaput: Listen Up, McNally.

Some Catholics are confused, because they have loopy priests who believe that they are Phil Donahue, or Louis Farrakhan. The poor folks at Ascension Parish in Oak Park are ministered by a fatuous goof, who wants to be somebody by proving that he does not believe in the religion that he was ordained to support. Father McNally of Ascension Parish is calling for the ordination of women -trendy, edgy, almost . . .dare I say it . . .Unitarian. Tres Hip!

This goof needs a trip to the Cardinal's woodshed, but he'll get a pass.

Ascension parishioners are crowding the pews at Father Tony Brankin's St. Odilo's in Berwyn.

Goofballs in stiff collars need to be schooled or shown the door. Imagine a teacher of English foregoing the text of Shakespeare's Othello for a graphic novel (Comic book)? Oh, that's right! Evanston Schools approved the further dumbing down of our kids.

Well, at least Denver's Bishop Chaput is in the game -read this history lesson about Catholics in America from Lair of the Catholic Caveman:

The archbishop noted the influences of the United States’ Protestant and Enlightenment roots. Catholics were largely absent from the American founding and have “always been strangers in a strange land.”

He also recalled the influence of the Roman Empire on early American colonists, saying that despite Rome’s flaws the Roman virtues of piety, austerity, courage, justice and self-mastery were “revered” by the American Founders.

“As with Rome, the fruits of American power now surround us,” he said. “But success has always its cost in personal and national illusions. As a people, we seem to become more foreign to our origins every year.”

A healthy civic life depends on “permanent virtues” rooted in God and not self-developed “values,” he continued.

Citing St. Augustine, C.S. Lewis and the political philosophers Leszek Kolakowski and J.L. Talmon, Archbishop Chaput warned that the self-evident truths spoken of in the Declaration of Independence are “not at all self-evident to the modern intellectual world.” Democracy, too, can become totalitarian.

“Unbelief – whether deliberate and ideological, or lazy and pragmatic – is the state religion of the modern world,” he commented. “The fruit of that orthodoxy is a compression and destruction of the human spirit, and a society without higher purpose. This is the logic of the choices that America is already making. But they can be unmade. And they can be redeemed.”

Well done Bishop! Click my post title for more.